Yeats's Poetic Codes

Y E ATS ’ S P O E T I C C O D E S

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Yeats’s Poetic Codes NICHOLAS GRENE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Nicholas Grene 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Grene, Nicholas. Yeats’s poetic codes / Nicholas Grene. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–923477–6 1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Literary style. I. Title. PR5908.S8G74 2008 821’.8—dc22 2008006025 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923477–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Eleanor, again

Acknowledgements Permission to quote from copyright material in this book is gratefully acknowledged as follows: A. P. Watt on behalf of Grainne Yeats for the published writing of W. B. Yeats (excluding the USA); Simon and Schuster for the USA (detailed copyright declarations for individual volumes in the text); Oxford University Press for an unpublished passage from John Kelly (ed.), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats; Faber & Faber for the lines from ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ taken from Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems. An earlier version of some of the material in Chapter 1 first appeared as the essay ‘Yeats and Dates’ in Nicholas Allen and Eve Patten (eds), That Country Never Found: Essays and Poems for Terence Brown, published by Four Courts Press, and is reproduced by permission of the editors and publisher. I gratefully acknowledge the hospitality of Dartmouth College, where I spent a term in 2004 and had the opportunity of teaching a course on Yeats’s poems, and a term’s leave of absence from Trinity College, Dublin, in 2005 during which the writing of this book was started. I had the opportunity of trying out many of the ideas subsequently incorporated into Chapters 1–4 in lectures at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, and I thank successive Directors of the School, Ron Schuchard, George Watson, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Patrick Crotty, for having invited me. I have benefited enormously in many ways from my visits to Sligo, and I pay particular tribute to John Kavanagh, whose friendship and support there has been much appreciated. I am very grateful to Lucy McDiarmid, who not only offered judicious criticism of a draft of Chapter 5, but gave me one of the starting points for my Conclusion. As always, conversations with her are a splendid continuing education. I owe a huge debt of gratitude for the encouragement and help of two friends, Adrian Frazier and Antoinette Quinn, both of whom read the whole book in manuscript. It has been substantially improved by their editorial suggestions; for what they were unable to improve I have only myself to blame. I have gained a great deal from having Terence Brown, Gerald Dawe, and Brendan Kennelly as long-term colleagues with a shared interest in

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Yeats. At Oxford University Press, Andrew McNeillie and Jacqueline Baker have been both highly efficient and warmly encouraging, a rare enough combination in publishing. This book is dedicated, as my first book was in 1975, to my wife Eleanor with my dearest love.

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Contents List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction

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1. Dates

5

2. This and That, Here and There

30

3. Dream

53

4. Place Names

76

5. Beasts and Birds

104

6. Tense and Mood

135

7. Voices

163

8. Bitter/Sweet

194

Conclusion: But Half

220

Bibliography

227

Index of Poems

233

General Index

238

List of Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited texts. A CL I CL II

CL III CL IV E&I Ex Foster I

Foster II GYL

JS & D L Mem Myth UP I

W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955) W. B. Yeats, Collected Letters: I. 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly with Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) W. B. Yeats, Collected Letters: II. 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) W. B. Yeats, Collected Letters: III. 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) W. B. Yeats, Collected Letters: IV. 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961) W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962) R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I. The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. II. The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) Always Your Friend: The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938, ed. Anna McBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992) W. B. Yeats, John Sherman and Dhoya (Dublin: Lilliput, 1990) The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972) W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959) W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, I, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970)

List of Abbreviations UP II

V VP VPl

xi

W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, II, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976) W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1937; 2nd edn, London: Macmillan, 1962) W. B. Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957) W. B. Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966)

‘All I know is what the words know’ Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Introduction ‘I sometimes think we could try to codify the laws that govern the complexities of Yeats’s poetry.’1 I came across this comment by Richard Ellmann in his essay ‘Yeats without Analogue’ well after embarking on Yeats’s Poetic Codes, having already chosen its title.2 While my book is experimental and exploratory and therefore attempts nothing so comprehensive as a codification of laws, it has been undertaken in the spirit of his remark. Ellman in 1964 was one of the leading figures in the first generation of Yeats scholarship. His books, The Man and the Masks and The Identity of Yeats, had been landmarks events in the elucidation of Yeats’s life and thought. In this essay he wrote in reaction against the work that he and others had pioneered: ‘Yeats is in some present peril everywhere of being swallowed up by the great whale of literary history.’3 Yeats needed to be rescued from his learned expositors (Ellmann himself included) who placed the poetry in the context of literary antecedents, Blake or Mallarme´, visual sources, Michaelangelo or Greek classical sculpture, or even his own occult beliefs systematized in A Vision. It was to Yeats’s poetry itself that we should return and ‘the seethings, the agitations of his mind, which he learned to control and direct’.4 In the more than forty years since Ellmann wrote ‘Yeats without Analogue’, there has been a second and a third generation of Yeatsian scholarship. We are now immensely better placed to understand Yeats’s writing because of the heroic editorial work that has resulted in the monumental, ongoing Collected Letters, the superb Cornell Yeats series reproducing the manuscript materials for each individual volume, and 1 Richard Ellmann, ‘Yeats without Analogue’, Kenyon Review, 26:1 (1964), 30–47 [46]. 2 I am grateful to Denis Donoghue for bringing the essay to my attention. 3 Ellmann, ‘Yeats without Analogue’, 30. 4 Ibid. 44.

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Introduction

the year-by-year contributions of the dedicated journals Yeats Annual and Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies. There have been many specialist studies including the patient illumination of Yeats’s occult beliefs by George Mills Harper and his colleagues. Attempting a reading of Yeats’s poems in 2007, one is awed, all but crushed by the sheer weight of available documentation, interpretation, and exegesis. Yet for that very reason, a reaction like that of Ellmann in 1964 may be even more in order. Yeats studies in the past decade in particular have been dominated by biography. The two volumes of R. F. Foster’s indispensable life of the poet appeared in 1997 and 2003, Terence Brown’s fine critical biography in 1999. Ann Saddlemyer’s 2002 Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats necessarily encompassed the husband as well as the wife; W. J. Mc Cormack with Blood Kindred in 2005 challenged previous views of Yeats’s political ideas and actions. And if that was not enough, two popular lives appeared within the same period.5 This biographical work has been supported by other forms of contextual research, to the point where the interpretation of the poems as poems has all but disappeared from view. Two recent books, intended primarily for the help of student readers, may be taken as symptomatic. Michael Faherty’s The Poetry of W. B. Yeats supplies a reader’s guide to the ‘essential criticism’.6 It gives clear and helpful accounts of biographical work on Yeats, on the debates over Yeats and revivalism, on Yeats and modernism, and Yeats and nationalism. But it has nothing to say about the form, style, or technique of Yeats’s poetry as a subject in itself. Similarly the authoritative Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats contains only one essay devoted to a particular phase of Yeats’s poetic art.7 A further very substantial two-volume collection on Yeats in Context is in preparation, to which I myself have been invited to contribute.8 5 Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) and Stephen Coote, W. B. Yeats: A Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997). 6 Michael Faherty (ed.), The Poetry of W. B. Yeats: A Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 7 Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8 Yeats in Context, edited by David Holdeman and Ben Levitas, will be published by Cambridge University Press.

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This book seeks to shift the focus back from contexts to texts, from the poet’s life to the work of the poems. I am not attempting here any sort of time-warp return to a New Critical insistence on the words on the page alone. Yeats cannot be read without reference to his contexts, and I hope I will be able to show throughout this book how much I have learned from biographical scholarship and modern historicizing interpretation. This is not, in fact, a formalist study in that it has little to say about the genre or stylistic technique of individual poems or indeed of the collections that Yeats took so much care to shape.9 The aim of the book, rather, is to map out the experience of reading Yeats’s poems in a new way by concentrating on what I am calling his poetic codes. These are the codes of practice developed to create the poems and situate them in relation to the poet, the reader, and their implied worlds. Such codes include the reference points of dates that Yeats used to locate his poems within both the temporal framework of history and the space of the Collected Poems. Place names have an equivalent doubleness, embedding the poetry in Sligo or Galway, while at the same time creating their own quite independent associations of sound and meaning. Yeats’s distinctive rhetorical usage of ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, together with his deployment of grammatical tense and mood, represent other directional markers. Yeats is a mannered writer with certain favoured words that reappear frequently throughout the canon; the conceptual implications of ‘dream’, ‘bitter’, and ‘sweet’ must be unpacked in their shifting valencies. Other recurrent images, such as the birds and beasts of the natural world, move in and out of symbolic or figurative significance. Yeats, one of the great masters of the dramatic lyric, speaks through assumed personae or in ventriloqual versions of his own divided self. We need to be aware of the range of such voices, where they are coming from and to whom they are addressed. The strategy of the book is to build up cumulatively through the analysis of these poetic codes a sense not so much of the meaning of Yeats’s poems, but of how they mean what they mean. I have restricted my reading of Yeats’s poetic codes to the Collected Poems, even though many of the plays in verse, and the choral lyrics of 9 The formal construction of Yeats’s poems has been studied in depth by Helen Vendler in Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), which was published after this book was already in press.

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Introduction

the plays in particular, might have afforded other illustrations. (The Shadowy Waters, of course, exists both as a play and as a dramatic poem, and I have dealt with it in this latter form.) But, apart from the sheer extended scale of the task if I had included the plays, I wanted to concentrate on the varying register of the poetic voice rather than the distributed voices intended for the stage. I have tried throughout duly to acknowledge my debts to the great body of Yeats scholarship and the specialist knowledge on which I have been so dependent. Still, the primary ‘research’ for this book has been the multiple re-reading of the poetry. For each chapter I read again the entire Collected Poems with an eye to the particular poetic code with which I was then concerned. As a consequence, preparing this book has given me greater pleasure than anything else I have ever written. It has stimulated my interest in poems I had neglected, and allowed me to come at familiar poems from unexpected angles. My hope is that this idiosyncratic method of reading the poetry will give to others who care about Yeats some of the enhanced understanding and enjoyment that it has given to me.

1 Dates The text of ‘Easter 1916’ begins and ends with a date.1 The title names as the poem’s subject the transformative event of modern Irish history. It is the response of the national poet W. B. Yeats to the Rising, as it emerges into historical signiWcance for his country. The date at the foot of the poem, September 25, 1916, simultaneously provides a perspective on the time of its composition. It has been written in the year of the event itself, but not in immediate reaction; this commemorative poem is a considered meditation on the Rising, taking months to complete. Or so the dates would make it appear. The dating, however, can be seen to have meanings other than the historical. In calling his poem ‘Easter 1916’, rather than as it might be ‘April 1916’, Yeats is very obviously drawing on the associations intended by the rebels in choosing their time for the Rising, the suggestions implicit in the word ‘Rising’ itself. The rebellion is a resurrection, a re-birth of the nation: the germ of the poem was the phrase ‘terrible beauty has been born again’ (L 613, my italics). What is more, it has been argued by Helen Vendler that there is a numerological element in the very structure of the poem itself: Yeats chose to inscribe into the poem the historic date of the Easter Rising—the twenty-fourth day of the fourth month of 1916 (24/4/16)—by making stanzas of sixteen lines (nos 1 and 3) alternate with stanzas of twenty-four lines (nos. 2 and 4); all stanzas are assembled from four-line units.2

And even the date of composition may have signiWcance beyond the merely contingent. Terence Brown suggests that the eVect of the date of composition in this context ‘is uncanny’: 1 The title is given as ‘Easter, 1916’ in all printings of the poem (with the exception of its publication in The Dial in November 1920) up to the 1950 Collected Poems where the comma is removed and it becomes the somewhat less date-like ‘Easter 1916’; the date of composition, ‘September 25, 1916’, appeared in the Wrst private printing of the poem by Clement Shorter and was retained in all subsequent collections. 2 Helen Vendler, ‘The Later Poetry’, in Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80.

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Dates

for the precision of the date (25 September 1916) highlights how time has run on in the days and months since that fateful 24 April, to which the poem is a kind of monument, composed for future reading. It collapses back into the daily order of time from a period of Wve months when time has been experienced on another dimension. The twenty-Wfth of September seems the day after 24 April, which has been brooded upon in arrested, sacral time.3

Whether we accept these interpretations of symbolic signiWcance, ‘Easter 1916’, with its dates at top and bottom, has two sorts of history written into its text: the history of the event on which it reXects and the history of its own composition. Both of these sorts of history are built into the construction of the Collected Poems. In whatever edition the reader encounters it, the collected Yeats is set out in sections that appear to represent his successive volumes of poems with their dates of publication. Of course, that appearance is deceptive; Yeats did not publish a book called Crossways in 1889, nor yet one entitled The Rose in 1893. These were in fact a selection respectively of the lyrics originally published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892—not 1893), as Yeats re-named and reordered them in his Wrst canonical collection Poems (1895).4 But as well as representing, however misleadingly, a dated sequence of Yeats’s published volumes, the Collected Poems brings out the historical span of the poet’s writing career. From The Wanderings of Oisin in 1889 to Last Poems in 1939 is an exact half century, perfectly bisected by 1914, the invisible event of the Great War on which Yeats famously refused to write, refused even to acknowledge as a Wt subject for poetry. Posed almost symmetrically on either side of that imagined midpoint in 1914 are the dated poems ‘September 1913’ and ‘Easter 1916’. One presents itself as a sort of conclusion to the Wrst phase of Yeats’s life as a writer, the ringing declaration ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’ the death knell of his own aspirations for a cultural revival led by himself and his friends. ‘Easter 1916’, with its ‘terrible beauty’, stands by contrast for the miraculous renewal of meaning, a new if distressing epoch. Needless to say, this neatly historical view of the Collected Poems is only available to readers as a posthumous pattern. Yeats could not have 3 Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 234. 4 There are other oddities of dating: the volume of poems In the Seven Woods was published in 1903; in the Collected Poems this section is unaccountably given the date 1904.

Dates

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Wgured on dying in January 1939, a mere matter of weeks after the Wftieth anniversary of his Wrst volume of poetry, nor could he have foretold that the Second World War was to come in the year of his death.5 Although he had begun ordering the volume that he planned to call Last Poems, the section in the Collected Poems with that title was not the volume he envisaged, but an arrangement devised by Mrs Yeats and the publishers.6 Yet Yeats himself was aware, even as he was writing ‘Easter 1916’ of the way it talked back to ‘September 1913’. The idea of those two poems as matched swivel points in the half-century of his writing life is not entirely a retrospective projection. With Yeats’s passion for historical periodization and his meticulous concern for the detailed presentation of his texts, we cannot assume that any dates within his canon are merely adventitious matter of record. One illustration from his prose work may be taken to illustrate the point. From 1908 on Yeats made use of a notebook, eventually edited by Denis Donoghue as ‘Journal’ along with the Wrst draft ‘Autobiography’ in Memoirs (1972). In fact it was not exactly a journal, but more an occasional notebook with dated entries, drafts of poems, and miscellaneous thoughts that Yeats used sporadically right down to 1930. It is an exercise in reXection and self-reXection involving a kind of contemporaneous monitoring of the poet’s ideas and impressions. At times we can see poems emerging from that minute-by-minute record. So, for example, the opening line of the poem ‘Words’ in its Wrst draft version read ‘I had this thought an hour ago’ (Mem 142). In the ‘Journal’ we can see that he did indeed have that thought an hour ago: just one entry back we spot Yeats recording the thought.7 Reading the notebook, therefore, gives a quite vivid sense of time and date. Yeats quarried this notebook for two publications, Estrangement (1926) and The Death of Synge (1928), both of which eventually appeared in Autobiographies with an identical subtitle, ‘Extracts from a Diary Kept in 1909’. In Estrangement all dates are eliminated, although some of the markers of the journal form are retained: ‘Last night, Miss 5 John Kelly estimates that The Wanderings of Oisin was published on 10 January 1889; Yeats died on the 28 January 1939: see A W. B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 15, 312. 6 For the evidence, see Richard Finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983), 64–7. 7 I owe this example to David Holdeman who commented on it in his lecture ‘Yeats’s XYZ Notebook: Modernism and Personality’, Yeats International Summer School, Sligo, 2006.

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Allgood . . . ’ (A 483), ‘I saw Synge today. . . ’ (A 487).8 Yeats evidently wanted the chosen title of Estrangement to be reXected in a dateless disconnection from chronological narrative. Thoughts and aphorisms are deliberately unshipped from their time moorings. By contrast, The Death of Synge does supply an occasional series of dates beginning in March, the month in 1909 when Synge actually died. They continue to appear intermittently, and not always in sequence, through to December and again then for May, September, and October of what one takes to be the following year. No year dates are given, and the entries in fact derive from diVerent years right down to 1914. But for the purposes of this publication, they are made to relate to ‘The Death of Synge’ and reXect the impact of that death over an eighteen-month cycle following it, represented in a diary kept in 1909 and beyond. Dates for Yeats were not mere matters of record but movable markers to be included or withheld, rendered accurately or falsiWed, depending on the literary purpose in hand. As such they constitute one element within the poetic codes which this book aims to explore. At the centre of the present chapter will be the six poems of Yeats that include dates in their titles, where a date is made part of the poem’s actual subject: ‘September 1913’, ‘On Those That Hated The Playboy of the Western World, 1907’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Coole Park, 1929’, and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’. But to supply a context for those particular poems, it is necessary to look more broadly at Yeats’s habits of dating his manuscripts and the circumstances in which he included those dates of composition in printed texts. In some cases, the aim appears to have been to give a sense of the immediacy or topicality of the poem; in some instances, it was strategic, to enforce a tactical objective or political message. Creative misdating, however, is also a feature of some poems, most obviously and problematically with ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’. What meanings do Yeats’s dates carry? How far are they integrated into a designed signiWcance of the poems? And what kinds of historical or imaginative construction do they support? These are the questions the chapter is intended to ask, and if possible to answer.

8 Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Autobiography by William B. Yeats. Copyright ß 1916, 1936 by Macmillan Publishing Company; copyright renewed ß 1944, 1964 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved.

Dates

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DATING POEMS Yeats may have liked to cultivate the manner of a dreamy poet, not altogether of this world, but from early on he was perfectly aware of sublunary time: he developed the habit of dating his manuscripts before he was 19.9 Curtis Bradford outlines what became his regular practice. Writing in bound notebooks, he would compose a series of drafts of a poem, changing and correcting each draft until it was all but unreadable and then going on to a fair copy and more changes. ‘When, Wnally, Yeats felt reasonably satisWed with a work, he would usually initial it, or even sign it in full, ‘‘W. B. Yeats’’, and often add the date.’ After his marriage, when he had been persuaded by George that it was more practical to use looseleaf notebooks, he was no less careful about his compositional recording. ‘When a manuscript written in a looseleaf notebook had once been dictated or transcribed, Yeats would remove the sheets and put them into a Wle envelope. He would sometimes note the principal contents on the Xap of the envelope, and the date of Wling.’10 So, for example, in the earliest extant manuscript notebook, a version of ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ is dated ‘August 29th 1893’, with a second draft given the same date, which was then cancelled and ‘30’ written in instead. The poem that was eventually to become ‘The Lover asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods’ had three drafts written on three successive days, 23, 24, and 25 August 1895.11 Yeats evidently liked to record the date of what he felt to be a poem’s completion, the moment at which he felt he could own it as author, but perfectionist self-reviser that he always was, that moment kept being deferred and the manuscripts re-dated accordingly. There is a diVerence, however, between this private author’s archiving and the dating of poems in print. In his pre-1900 poems, the latter was relatively unusual. In the case of a few poems published in journals and newspapers, he did give a date and sometimes a place of composition. So, for instance, ‘The Ballad of Earl Paul’, which appeared in The Irish Weekly 9 For one unpublished poem, signed and dated ‘WBY March 8th 1884’, see W. B. Yeats, The Early Poems: II. ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and Other Early Poems to 1895 Manuscript Materials, ed. George Bornstein (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 361. 10 Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), p. xiii. 11 Ibid. 19–20, 35.

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Independent on 8 April 1893, is dated ‘Sligo, April 4th’ (VP 739–42).12 The topography as much as the time may have been the important feature here: the poet is signing in from his West of Ireland home. Occasionally Yeats would date prefatory poems, as in the verses ‘Where My Books Go’, that appeared in his volume, Irish Fairy Tales, as from ‘London, January 1892’ (VP 739). This is typical of the widespread authorial instinct to mark the moment in time when the completed work is released from the author’s control into the futurity of readership: ‘Go little book’. It is not until Poems (1895) that we Wnd Yeats using dates for periodizing eVect. That volume, which in its many revised editions went on to become Yeats’s long-term best seller, is frontloaded with his narrative and dramatic work: The Wanderings of Usheen, The Countess 12 Prose passages, reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright ß (New York: Macmillan, 1957). All rights reserved. Poems, reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I: the Poems, Revised, edited by Richard Finneran, as follows: ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee’, ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, ‘Sixteen Dead Men’, ‘Towards Break of Day’, ‘I Walked among the Seven Woods of Coole’, ‘Demon and Beast’, ‘On a Political Prisoner’, ‘An Image from a Past Life’, ‘Solomon and the Witch’, ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, ‘The Rose Tree’. Copyright ß 1924 by the Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ß 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Reprisals’, ‘The Tower’, Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘Wisdom’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Among School Children’, ‘Wisdom and Dreams’, ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, ‘The Death of the Hare’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’, ‘A Prayer for My Son’, ‘The Friends of His Youth’, ‘Summer and Spring’, ‘The Secrets of the Old’, ‘The Empty Cup’, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’. Copyright ß 1928 by the Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ß 1956 by Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. ‘The Choice’, ‘Coole Park, 1929’, ‘The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus’, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, ‘In Memory of Con Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth’, ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’, ‘At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death’, ‘Blood and the Moon’, ‘Byzantium’, ‘Mohini Chatterjee’, ‘Meeting’, ‘Her Vision in the Wood’, ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, ‘Vacillation’. Copyright ß 1933 by the Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ß 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. ‘There’, ‘Meru’, ‘Whence Had They Come?’, ‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’, ‘Ribh in Ecstasy’. Copyright ß 1934 by the Macmillan Company; copyright renewed ß 1962 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. ‘Politics’, ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, ‘The Man and the Echo’, ‘Alternative Song for the Severed Head in ‘‘The King of the Great Clock Tower’’ ’, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, ‘A Bronze Head’, ‘Long-Legged Fly’, ‘What Then?’, ‘Sweet Dancer’, ‘Hound Voice’. Copyright ß 1940 by Georgie Yeats; copyright renewed ß 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved.

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Cathleen, The Land of Heart’s Desire, the work for which at this stage, apparently, Yeats wanted to be known. It is only after the section of lyrics, to which he here for the Wrst time gives the name of ‘The Rose’, that he tucks in at the very end of the book the grouping of poems he called ‘Crossways’, because, as he explains in his Preface, dated ‘Sligo, March 24th 1895’, ‘in them he tried many pathways’ (VP 845). The poet, who is not yet 30, is here looking back with the perspective of maturity on his 20-year-old self. That condescension towards his own novitiate is tempered by an awareness of his still limited craft. He has jettisoned many of his earlier poems, retaining only those pieces he believes worthy of him: ‘This volume contains all the writer cares to preserve out of his previous volumes of verse’. Yet, despite his best eVorts at editing and revision, he confesses, ‘He has . . . been compelled to leave unchanged many lines he would have gladly re-written, because his present skill is not great enough to separate them from thoughts and expressions which seem to him worth preserving’ (VP 845). This may be the clue to why a few of the ‘Crossways’ poems, unlike any others in the collection, have dates appended. Of the Wrst six, Wve are dated: ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Sad Shepherd’ both 1885, ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ 1887, ‘The Indian upon God’ and ‘The Indian to His Love’ 1886. It is probably no accident that these are all Arcadian or Indian in setting, the wandering paths Yeats took before he committed himself to Ireland as the one true way. In dating these poems, he is stigmatizing them or, as it were, asking indulgence for them as juvenilia. This is what I wrote at 20, 21, 22, when I could do no better. ‘Then in 1900 everybody got down oV their stilts’, Yeats famously remarked in his 1936 Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.13 In his own case, the new century produced a new willingness to admit the world of present time into his poems. His Wrst twentiethcentury works continued earlier dating practices but with a diVerence. So, for example, his dedicatory poem to Lady Gregory that prefaced the 1900 version of The Shadowy Waters was dated September 1900, and located in the Seven Woods of Coole. As with earlier poems it gives date and place of composition as departure points for the new book about to be launched out on its journey to its readers. But the note to the collection In the Seven Woods gives a new integrated importance to both time and setting: ‘I made some of these poems walking about among the Seven Woods, before the big wind of nineteen hundred and 13 W. B. Yeats (ed.), Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), p. xi.

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three blew down so many trees, & troubled the wild creatures, & changed the look of things’ (VP 814). Elizabeth Yeats, printing this, the Wrst of her Dun Emer Press books, picks up on her brother’s note in the Wnal signature; the printing, it states, was ‘Wnished the sixteenth day of July, in the year of the big wind 1903’.14 Both Yeatses in this book mark the time of its composition and its production in terms of conventional anno domini time, 1903, and in the folk-time chronicle of the estate, ‘the year of the big wind’. ‘In the Seven Woods’, the opening title poem of the collection, dated August 1902, marks in a way that is new for Yeats a point of intersection between the time of composition and contemporary historical time. As Daniel Albright puts it tellingly, ‘this is the Wrst of Yeats’s poems in which the poet is obviously a man who reads the newspaper.’15 In the natural retreat of the Seven Woods, Yeats tells us I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper Xowers from post to post

(VP 198)

What Coole has enabled him temporarily to forget are the public events of the summer that had most agitated and disgusted him. There had been a renewal in June of archaeological excavations of the Hill of Tara by an Englishman in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant and Yeats had been involved in active protests against it.16 On 9 August the coronation of Edward VII, deferred from 26 June because of the king’s illness, had taken place with due rejoicing by his loyalist Irish subjects. The coronation enthusiasm had been forecast in an essay Yeats had published in the United Irishman two years earlier commenting on the welcome given to Queen Victoria on her visit to Ireland in 1900: ‘In a few years more crowds will gather, in as many thousands, to see a carriage with an elderly man, her son, who has used his example and his inXuence to make the love of man and woman seem a light and vulgar thing among great numbers in his islands’ (UP II 212). The contrast could not be greater or more oVensive between what Yeats called the ‘ignoble loyalties’ of Irish people to this vulgar British monarch, and 14 W. B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods. Being Poems ChieXy of the Irish Heroic Age (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1903), 64. 15 W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (2nd edn, London: Dent, 1994), 483. 16 See the letter of protest to The Times by Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and George Moore published 27 June 1902 (CL III 208–9) and the ongoing controversy (CL III 213–14).

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the desecration of Tara, seat of the ancient High Kings of Ireland. Maud Gonne made the symbolic point with characteristic Xamboyance when she led a children’s excursion to Tara and set alight, in ‘honor of an Independent Ireland’, a bonWre prepared by the Unionist owner of the land to celebrate the King’s coronation (GYL 156). From all this the natural surroundings of the Seven Woods allowed Yeats distance—for a time: ‘I have forgot awhile’. But whatever the distance, that August 1902 world is one shared by the poet writing his poem and the maYcking coronation crowds in Dublin, the excavators in Tara. After his Wrst visit to Coole in 1897, Yeats was to make it his summer home for many successive years. He could date prefaces from ‘In the Seven Woods’ as earlier from Sligo (VP 850–1). The locale provided him with the natural setting removed from the ordinary contemporary world that inspired him to create poems, as the subtitle of In the Seven Woods put it, ‘ChieXy of the Irish Heroic Age’. Yet the very unheroic age of early twentieth-century Ireland remained not far oV from the soothingly wild setting of the Coole woods. The contrast and contiguity provided the basis for his satiric ‘An Appointment’ written in 1907: Being out of heart with government I took a broken root to Xing Where the proud, wayward squirrel went, Taking delight that he could spring; And he, with that loud whinnying sound That is like laughter, sprang again And so to the other tree at a bound. Nor the tame will, nor timid brain, Nor heavy knitting of the brow Bred that Werce tooth and cleanly limb And threw him up to laugh on the bough; No government appointed him.

(VP 317–18)

On Lady Gregory’s copy of this poem, Yeats set out an expanded title that gave the details of the event that provoked it, with names named: ‘On the appointment of Count Plunkett to the Curatorship of Dublin Museum, by Mr T.W. Russell and Mr Birrell, Hugh Lane being a candidate’. Gregory, recording this inscription, comments that this poem was ‘the Wrst [Yeats] had ever written on any public event’.17 It may have been the Wrst, but it certainly was not the last. In the volume 17 Lady Gregory, Sir Hugh Lane: His Life and Legacy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1973), 75.

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Responsibilities, in which ‘An Appointment’ was Wrst collected, Yeats is openly embattled in contemporary controversies and the strategic dating of poems becomes an instrument of politics. STRATEGIC DATING It was again Hugh Lane who was at the centre of the controversy animating the series of 1912–13 poems over the Municipal Art Gallery: Lane who had promised a gift of his collection of pictures to Dublin, provided the city would build a suitable gallery for them, Lane who insisted on the bridge site over the LiVey planned by his friend, the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was to design the Indian imperial capital New Delhi. Yeats’s Wrst poetic contribution to this debate was the publication in The Irish Times on 11 January 1913 of the poem then called ‘The Gift’ with the bracketed subtitle, ‘To a friend who promises a bigger subscription than his Wrst to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if the amount collected proves that there is considerable ‘‘popular demand’’ for the pictures’ (VP 287). The poem is a disdainful proclamation of the responsibility of an elite aristocracy to set cultural standards regardless of popular taste: Leave Paudeens to their pitch and toss; Look up in the sun’s eye, and give What the exultant heart calls good, That some new day may breed the best Because you gave, not what they would, But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest.

(VP 288)18

In The Irish Times ‘The Gift’ was dated ‘January 8th. 1913’, but it is clear that this is not a date of composition. The poem was actually written somewhat earlier, in reaction to Lord Ardilaun saying that he would only increase his support for the Municipal Gallery project if matching funds could be raised from the public. Yeats was busy working on it over Christmas—there are manuscript drafts dated 24 and 25 December—and it was sent oV to Hugh Lane on New Year’s Day.19 The 18 This is the original Irish Times text. For a reproduction of the ‘The Gift’ see Foster I 480. 19 For the manuscript drafts of the poem, see W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities: Manuscript Materials, ed. William H. O’Donnell (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 206–31, and for the letter of 1 January dispatching the poem to Hugh Lane see L 573.

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date of 8 January, just three days before publication, has the eVect of foregrounding the poem’s topicality and its function as part of the propaganda campaign for the Gallery. The poem is strategically printed at the top of a column immediately followed by the headline ‘Municipal Gallery Further Subscriptions’ with an account of a meeting of the Municipal Art Gallery Building Fund committee the previous Thursday, listing subscriptions received and appealing for more. And the membership of the committee, chaired by none less than the redoubtable MahaVy, Provost of Trinity and arch-enemy of nationalism, together with the list of subscribers, bring out how much the cause of the Gallery was identiWed with the Unionists, and how inevitable it was that William Martin Murphy, nationalist owner of the Irish Independent, would come out Wghting from the opposite corner. It is clear that the publication of Yeats’s poem was part of a concerted campaign, backed up in the same issue of the paper with a pre-arranged leader by Joseph Hone on ‘Art and Aristocracy’, reinforcing Yeats’s viewpoint.20 But that leader also suggests how one thing led to another in the cycle of Yeats poems that emerged out of the public controversy. ‘Idealism is gone out of Nationalist politics’, wrote Hone. ‘Home Rule may come, or it may not; either event will complete the mental reaction.’21 This sounds like a text for the poem that was to become ‘September 1913’. Yeats deliberately worked poems out of the controversy, used it to feed the anger that fed the poems. As early as 24 January, he was writing to Lady Gregory ‘I’ve a couple of poems in my head, to be written if the Gallery falls through’, and on 1 July he asked her to send him an Irish Times with an account of the Corporation debates: ‘it may move me to another poem’ (Foster I 481, 620). So when September 1913 came along, and the proposal for the Municipal Gallery was Wnally defeated, Yeats was well prepared with a stock of poems including the poem written in August which Wrst appeared in the letters column of The Irish Times on 8 September as ‘Romance in Ireland (on reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery)’. Once again the publication was strategic. It was printed in the Wnal phase of the (by then enormously protracted) row over the Gallery on the day when the Corporation was due to vote on the issue of the bridge site for the Gallery. Again its placing and dating were signiWcant. It is 20 In a letter to Lady Gregory of 8 January 1913, Yeats wrote: ‘I dined with Lane on Sunday. He is very pleased with the poem which Hone has now. Hone was excited with doing a leader elaborating the thought of the poem’ (L 573–4). 21 ‘Art and Aristocracy’, Irish Times, 11 January 1913, p. 7.

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dated ‘Dublin, September 7th’ that is just the day before publication, and is followed immediately by a long and eloquent letter by Lady Gregory in support of the Gallery, also dated 7 September. One further pro-Gallery letter is added before eventually one reaches an anti-Gallery letter from William Martin Murphy, dated 5 September, downgraded to a later page. The paper is obviously giving pride of place and time to the pro-Gallery lobby in which Yeats’s poem is the most prominent display piece. And the editorial support is further enforced by a leader which cites both Yeats’s poem and Lady Gregory’s letter in its appeal to the Corporation to make the right decision, even if the leader-writer is uneasily conscious that the Irish Times readers may not altogether relish the heroic status given to the Fenian O’Leary, the rebels Emmet, Fitzgerald, and Tone: ‘Irish Unionists would hardly vindicate the romantic spirit from the historical events to which Mr Yeats refers, but he makes his point clear’.22 George Bornstein speaks of the ‘thick political codings’ of the poem’s original publication in the Irish Times, pointing to its juxtaposition with the headlines covering the Dublin lockout, the ongoing saga of the industrial dispute between the Irish Transport and General Workers Union led by James Larkin, and the employers’ grouping headed by none other than William Martin Murphy.23 He sums up as follows: The Irish Times title and subtitle of ‘September 1913’ thus tie the poem tightly to a speciWc political and economic nexus of the strike and the lockout on the one hand and the art gallery controversy on the other. . . . the primary meaning of the you [‘What need you, being come to sense’] in the newspaper version would be those who have written letters protesting the gallery, and beyond them the antagonists of both the strike and the art gallery, especially the Catholic urban middle class.24

Yug Mohit Chaudhry contests this view, pointing to the strong Unionist aYliations of the Irish Times, and calls the poem ‘a Protestant cri de coeur’.25 It is true that in the lockout dispute Yeats warmly supported Larkin and the workers, just as Larkin supported the cause of the Gallery. They had a common enemy in Murphy. But politics makes for strange alliances, and here the alliance is primarily between the 22 ‘The Art Gallery, Irish Times, 8 September 1913, p. 6. 23 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55. 24 Ibid. 58 25 Yug Mohit Chaudhry, Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 23.

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Unionist Irish Times and the committed nationalist W.B. Yeats—hence the embarrassment of the leader-writer’s comment at the poem’s heroizing of the dead rebels of 1798. Chaudhry brings out the degree of sectarian animus in Yeats’s opposition to those antagonistic to the Gallery. He reported to Gregory that, in a speech given in July 1913, he had to censor some of what he wanted to say: ‘I described Ireland if the present movement failed as ‘‘a little huckstering nation groping for halfpence in a greasy till’’ but did not add except in thought ‘‘by the light of a holy candle’’ ’. When he came to write the poem, he was apparently anxious that the allusion in the ‘greasy till’ to the ‘tallow’ of holy candles would be clear.26 Whether it is or not, the combination of class and religious animus in the terms of the poem’s attack is apparent enough: What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone? For men were born to pray and save. (VP 289)

These ‘Paudeens’ with their greasy tills are ‘in trade’: this is the poet who in ‘Pardon, Old Fathers’ congratulated himself on ‘blood j That has not passed through any huckster’s loin’ (VP 269). At the same time, from a prejudiced Protestant viewpoint, their commercial materialism is at one with their Catholic theology. Against the Reformed churches’ emphasis on salvation by grace alone, Catholics were thought to believe that they could earn their way to salvation. Thus ‘men were born to pray and save’, adding up their prayers as they add their halfpence to the pence, getting to heaven by accumulated entries in their spiritual bankbooks. By the end of the month of September, the controversy was over and Yeats had a set of poems ready to go to press. This was the collection that he had printed by the Cuala Press in a private edition as Poems Written in Discouragement 1912–1913. It begins with what had been ‘The Gift’, with the changed title of ‘To a Wealthy Man, who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’: he had now stopped being ‘a friend who promises’ as in the newspaper version, where there was still a chance that Ardilaun might have come good with some more money, and had 26 Ibid. 19.

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become the arms length ‘Wealthy Man, who promised’ but of course did not produce the second subscription. ‘To a Wealthy Man’ in the book collection is dated December 1912 and is immediately followed by the poem which, here for the Wrst time, is entitled ‘September, 1913’. On the printed page one date appears immediately after another: the period of discouragement is now dated from the winter of one year to the autumn of the next and the month of September is its apogee. The two remaining poems in the little pamphlet, ‘Paudeen’ and ‘To a Shade’, may well be the other poems which Yeats had in his head back in January ‘to be written if the Gallery falls through’. The month September 1913 gathered in to it all of Yeats’s sense of the degeneracy of Irish public life, and the poem ‘September 1913’ expressed that sense most fully and most powerfully. In bringing together the cycle of Poems Written in Discouragement, however, and in keeping them together when they were republished in Responsibilities in 1914, Yeats contrived an extended historical perspective on the Municipal Gallery controversy. His ‘Note’ on these poems in Responsibilities identiWes the cause of the Lane pictures as the last of three public controversies which ‘have stirred my imagination’ in the ‘thirty years or so during which I have been reading Irish newspapers’, the previous two being the Parnellite split of 1891 and the Playboy riots of 1907 (VP 818). Parnell had already been bound in to the Municipal Gallery row in ‘To a Shade’, which turns on the fact that Lane’s adversary Murphy had been Parnell’s also: ‘Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set j The pack upon him’ (VP 292). But the Responsibilities volume allowed him also to bring in The Playboy. The next but one poem after ‘To a Shade’ in Responsibilities was there called ‘The Attack on ‘‘The Playboy of the Western World’’, 1907’, and it has an interesting history. The central image of eunuchs in Hell staring enviously at Don Juan riding by was inspired by a painting of Charles Ricketts. It came to Yeats as far back as March 1909 as a metaphor for the spiteful ignorance (as he saw it) of the nationalist press. He did not, at that point, have The Playboy in mind, though the death of Synge later that month and its ungracious recognition by Sinn Fein and other nationalist papers may have made for an association. The poem itself shows up in Yeats’s ‘Journal’ over a year later in April 1910 as ‘On the attack on the Playboy’ (Mem 176, 244). It was not published until a year later, in December 1911 in The Irish Review, and with a signiWcant change of title. It appeared there as ‘On those who Dislike The Playboy’ (VP 294). The present tense is signiWcant because this was the time of the Abbey tour of America in which The Playboy was once

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again the target of hostility, with riots sparked oV by the New York production. Yeats’s Irish Review publication is an up-to-the-minute polemical thrust: it is John Devoy and the Clan-na-Gael Irish Americans who are the targets of the violent epigram: Once when midnight smote the air Eunuchs ran through Hell, and met Round about Hell’s gate to stare At great Juan riding by; And like these to rail and sweat Maddened by that sinewy thigh.

(VP 294)27

But in Responsibilities it was the Dublin middle classes on whom Yeats wanted to concentrate, and so he reverted to the form of the original manuscript title, calling it ‘The Attack on ‘‘The Playboy of the Western World’’ ’, but adding the date 1907 by way of re-focusing the poem back on the original riots. That allowed him to establish the three dated controversies, over Parnell in 1891, The Playboy in 1907, and the Municipal Gallery in 1913, as manifestations of what he called in his note ‘our new middle class . . . showing how base . . . at moments of excitement are minds without culture’ (VP 819). The self-representation of Responsibilities is of the poet drawn in spite of himself into polemics, into a world of increasingly degenerate public debate. The datedness of poems and controversies lends speciWc shape and point to this vision of things, the apparent immediacy of response a controlled constituent within the overriding trope of a corrupt and vulgar latterdays time. In the month of September 1913 the age of heroes is no more: ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone j It’s with O’Leary in the grave’ (VP 289). Such was the signiWcance of ‘September 1913’ when published in the 1914 Cuala edition of Responsibilities. But ‘Easter 1916’ was eventually to change that perspective. We can already see that change beginning to happen even before the poem was written. In the expanded trade edition of Responsibilities, published by Macmillan in 1916 after the Rebellion, in an added ‘Note’ on the Municipal Gallery poems dated July 1916, there is a partial recantation of ‘September 1913’. In it Yeats commented on the altered view of things created by the Rising: ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’ sounds old-fashioned now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one can say 27 The text here is that of The Irish Review.

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of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism. ‘They weighed so lightly what they gave,’ and gave too in some cases without hope of success. (VP 820)

The poem ‘Easter 1916’ was germinating at the time this was written, and was in some sort intended to talk back to ‘September 1913’. If ‘September 1913’ stood for a speciWc time and a mood, ‘Easter 1916’ announced a changed order of time, the start of a new epoch. The publication of ‘Easter 1916’ was long deferred but when it took its place within the established canon of Yeats’s poetry, it was to act as counterpart to ‘September 1913’. Its completion date of ‘September 25, 1916’ places it three years on from ‘September 1913’. In the earlier poem, the dead patriots belonged to the lost generations of the past, irretrievably gone from the degenerate world in which contemporary Irishmen fumbled in greasy tills and added prayer to shivering prayer. In ‘Easter 1916’ acquaintances whom the poet regularly met in the street, thought of as belonging in the casual comedy of modern life, were changed, changed utterly. Where in September 1913 it appeared that Romantic Ireland was dead and gone with O’Leary in the grave, in 1916 a terrible beauty was born. The look back to ‘September 1913’ pointed the contrast between that autumnal season of discouragement and decay and the ‘Easter 1916’ era of resurrection and re-birth, even if it was an awesome re-birth. ‘September 1913’, as it appears in the Collected Poems, reads as though it is waiting for ‘Easter 1916’ to be written and complete its meaning. C R E AT I V E M I S D AT I N G To give a poem a dated title or to include a speciWc date of composition could thus be strategic decisions on Yeats’s part to construct a continuum of time within his books. Such choices worked to inscribe history in the poetry and to fashion a meaningful narrative for the creation of the poems themselves. But the dates as they appear in the Collected Poems are not always to be relied upon, as we can see in the case of the paired Coole Park poems. ‘Coole Park, 1929’ is an anticipatory elegy, a favourite mode of Yeats. In poem after poem, ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’, ‘These are the Clouds’, ‘The New Faces’, the poet looked forward with a mixture of dread and gloomy satisfaction to the death of Lady Gregory and the destruction of her house that had meant so much to him. ‘Coole Park, 1929’, the most elaborate and

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most accomplished of these, appeared Wrst as the prefatory poem to Lady Gregory’s 1931 book Coole. Then entitled just ‘Coole Park’, it was dated ‘September 7th, 1929’ (VP 488). That is indeed the date on a manuscript fair copy and a typescript draft of the poem, but in fact Yeats was still struggling to Wnish the poem at the end of the month of September.28 It was only in 1932, when it was published in Words for Music Perhaps, that it acquired the dated version of its title. At this point the date moved from the end of the poem to its head and acquired a new status. In that volume, also, on a facing page, and obviously intended to go with ‘Coole Park 1929’ is ‘Coole Park and Ballylee 1932’: 1932 not 1931. It seems probable that this was the actual year of the poem’s composition, and that the change of title to ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ in the later collection, The Winding Stair, and in all printings beyond that, may have been based on a genuine mistake.29 But the eVect was to change the signiWcance of the poems’ datedness. Words for Music Perhaps was published by Cuala Press in the autumn of 1932 following the death of Lady Gregory that May, and the eVect there would have been to match the anticipatory elegy ‘Coole Park 1929’, written when 28 See NLI MSS 21,862 and 13,590 for the manuscript and typescript drafts; see letter to Lady Gregory of 30 September 1929 for his continuing eVorts to Wnish it (L 769). 29 The evidence from Yeats’s letters suggests that the poem may have been started in the winter of 1932. From a letter to George Yeats, dated 3 February [1932], it would appear that it was a quite new departure: ‘I have at last found a rich theme for verse. I am turning the introductory verses to Lady Gregory’s ‘‘Coole’’ (Cuala) into a poem of some length—various sections with more or less symbolic subject matter. Yesterday I wrote an account of the sudden ascent of a swan—a symbol of inspiration I think’; see unpublished letters in John Kelly (ed.), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (InteLex Past Masters), available at http://library.nlx.com, accessed 30 April 2007. In what looks to be a Wrst manuscript draft of the poem, headed ‘Coole Park II’, clearly planned as a companion piece to ‘Coole Park, 1929’, what Yeats in the letter calls the ‘introductory verses’ to Coole, many of the earliest pages are taken up with the image of the swan rising oV the lake, including a crossed out line in which it is referred to as ‘Image of inspiration’ (W. B. Yeats, Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. David R. Clark (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 177). The 1931 date derives from the copy of the 1933 Macmillan Collected Poems in Yeats’s library, annotated by George Yeats, in which she wrote ‘See letter to GY Feb. 3. 1931’; see Wayne K. Chapman, ‘W. B. and George Yeats: The Writing, Editing, and Dating of Yeats’s Poems of the Mid-1920s and 1930s, with a Chronology of the Composition of the Poems’, Yeats Annual, 15 (2002): Yeats’s Collaborations, ed. Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould, 153. Yeats was in Coole also in the month of February 1931 but there are no references to the poem in the letters from that time, and it is likely that reading through the letter dated 3 February with no year given, George Yeats confused 1932 with 1931. The references in the poem to Gregory’s painfully reduced mobility—‘somebody that toils from chair to chair’ (VP 491)—are consistent with this last period of her terminal illness.

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Lady Gregory was still alive, with a mourning elegy, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee 1932’. In the later canonical version they both look towards a future that is imminent but has not yet arrived. The date of ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ may have been erroneously changed. But the poem eventually to become known as ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ must have been deliberately misdated. The troublesome question of when this poem was written has caused a number of Yeats scholars to scratch their heads, and a number of diVerent answers have been produced. A. N. JeVares, for instance, in his revised New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats takes Yeats at his word: it was written in 1919 as it is dated in The Tower.30 Richard Ellmann, in The Identity of Yeats, gives 1919–22 as the period of composition, the dates assigned to it in George Yeats’s annotated copy of the 1933 Collected Poems.31 Rob Doggett also implies a continuous period of composition, when he comments, in relation to the poem’s 1919 dating, that ‘Yeats was still working on the poem in April 1921’ (my italics).32 Daniel Albright narrows the period down to 1920–1, speculating that Yeats may have changed the title and re-dated the poem in The Tower because 1919 was the year in which the Irish War of Independence took ‘on a new ferocity’.33 It is a plausible enough explanation, except that it does not correspond to the historical facts. In 1919 the war had only just begun and 1920 was in fact the year when it developed newly ferocious levels of violence. Robert Kee supplies some Wgures as indicators: ‘Whereas in 1919 thirteen policemen and one soldier had been killed by the Volunteers, in 1920 Crown casualties were to be much more than ten times that number—182 police and 50 soldiers killed and 387 wounded altogether’.34 And it was only in 1920, in response to that worsening situation, that the British government stiVened the RIC with the new recruits who became infamous as the Black and Tans. The appalling cycle of Republican ambushes and Black and Tan reprisals came especially close to Lady Gregory (and thus to Yeats even though he was living in England at the time) with the terrible incident 30 A. N. JeVares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 229. 31 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (2nd edn, London: Faber, 1964), 291. See Chapman, ‘W. B. and George Yeats’, 151. 32 Rob Doggett, Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler Yeats (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 74. 33 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright p. 651. 34 Robert Kee, The Green Flag. III: Ourselves Alone (London: Quartet, 1976), 97–8.

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in Kiltartan in November 1920 where a young mother was shot by the Black and Tans at the door of her house with her child in her arms.35 This was the image that Yeats was to draw upon for its horriWc eVect in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’. Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free (VP 429)

His Wrst eVort to express his outrage at this event came in the poem ‘Reprisals’, where the ghost of the dead Robert Gregory with his distinguished war record is invoked to witness the horrors in his own village of Kiltartan: Where may new-married women sit And suckle children now? Armed men May murder them in passing by Nor law nor parliament take heed.

(VP 791)

In November 1920 Yeats was preparing to publish this poem in the English Liberal paper The Nation as an expression of protest when Lady Gregory, who felt it was an abuse of her dead son’s memory, objected so strenuously that he withdrew it.36 Over the winter of 1920/1 the continuing war news and anxiety over Thoor Ballylee (which had been damaged in the conXict) kept his mind focused on Ireland, though there was no immediate prospect of returning, as his wife was pregnant with their second child. It was apparently only in April 1921, in a rented cottage in Berkshire with the two-year old Anne Yeats recovering from whooping-cough, that Yeats composed the sequence ultimately to be titled ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’. On 9 April Yeats mentioned it in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, and on 10 April he wrote in a letter to Lady Gregory a passage worth quoting in full: I am writing a series of poems all making up one poem on the state of things in Ireland & am now in the middle of the third. I do not know what degree of merit they have or whether I have now enough emotion for personal poetry. I begin to Wnd a diYculty in Wnding themes. I had this about twelve years ago & it passed over. I may have to start another Noh play & get caught up into it, if these poems turn out badly. The Wrst poem is rather in the mood of the Anne 35 See Lady Gregory, Journals I, ed. Daniel J. Murphy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1978), 197. 36 See her entries for 25 November, 2 December 1920 in Journals I 207–8.

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Dates

poem [evidently ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’] but the rest are wilder. Newspapers & letters alike await now till my work is Wnished (L 668–9)37

This passage makes it clear that the sequence was conceived from the start as a single poem and that it was a quite new beginning, coming as it did after a dry creative period. It was not therefore a return to work started earlier. It is also obvious that, for all his diYdence about the merit of the poem, he was very absorbed in the writing and that it was developing rapidly: only two poems had been written when he wrote to Olivia Shakespear the previous day, here he is in the middle of the third. The version of the poem which Wrst appeared in print in The Dial in September 1921 with the title ‘Thoughts upon the Present State of the World’ was in fact dated ‘May 1921’. ‘Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World’: for readers of the poem in The Dial that dated present was May 1921 (VP 433). For readers of the version printed in The London Mercury where it appeared in November 1921, with the same title but without a date of composition, the present implied would have shifted to the time of publication. And there would have been another shift again for those who read it in 1922 in the little Cuala Press book Seven Poems and a Fragment, where it was published still as ‘Thoughts upon the Present State of the World’. The poem stays the same, or nearly the same, written in April 1921, but the present state of the world on which it represents the poet’s ‘thoughts’, keeps altering. And how much diVerent again does it seem when published in The Tower with the title ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ and an authenticating/falsifying composition date 1919 at the end? The re-dating and re-titling of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ constitute a puzzle, which can perhaps best be seen in relation to the dating pattern of the Wrst four poems in The Tower, in each of which there is some degree of adjustment of the actual dates of composition. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ was written in the autumn of 1926, with manuscript drafts dated 25 and 26 September 1926: in The Tower it is dated 1927, possibly because there is a later typescript of the poem from April/May of that year. ‘The Tower’ was written in 1925, with a manuscript dating of 7 October 1925, and appeared with a 1925 date in the Cuala collection October Blast : there is a draft of one part of the poem from November 1926, which may be why it is dated 1926 in The Tower. ‘Meditations in 37 The text here has been corrected by reference to the original letter transcribed in Kelly (ed.), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (InteLex Past Masters), available at http:// library.nlx.com, accessed 25 July 2007.

Dates

25

Time of Civil War’ was written during the summer of 1922 after the outbreak of the war, but in The Tower it is dated 1923.38 And then there is ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ actually written in April 1921. These dates of composition, however arrived at, become signs that support a deliberately recessive movement of the four poems taken in the order Yeats designed for them at the start of The Tower. Yeats commonly placed his most recent poems Wrst in the cumulative collections like The Tower that brought together previous more limited Cuala editions. October Blast, brought out by Cuala in 1927, had opened with the magniWcently achieved ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘The Tower’ in that order, and it was to be expected that those two poems might head up The Tower volume also. But Yeats decided to give a more elaborate pattern to the opening of the book by placing ‘Meditations’ and the re-named and redated ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ where he did, immediately following the Wrst two. Each of the poems in this sequence takes oV from the previous one, undoing what the previous poem has seemed to have closed oV, opening out as the focus moves backward in time. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ the world of mortality has been abandoned—‘That is no country for old men’ (VP 407)—and the poet has come (perfect tense) to the ‘holy city of Byzantium’ (VP 408). The poet is not yet out of nature, his heart is still ‘sick with desire j And fastened to a dying animal’ (VP 408), but he is at least on the very point of translation into the permanent world of art. But that struggle with the body and old age, which seems so deWnitively to have been won in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, is there to be much more painfully struggled through in ‘The Tower’: What shall I do with this absurdity— O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail?

(VP 409)

The poet who has so triumphantly sailed oV to Byzantium is, in ‘The Tower’, once more a creature Wxed in a body and a place, a place with a history which he must interrogate to establish his own identity as he faces towards death. The place and the history loom larger again in 38 For these dates of composition, see W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials, ed. Richard Finneran with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. xxxviii–xlvii. I am most grateful to Ann Saddlemyer for letting me see an advance copy of the Chronology of Manuscripts from this volume.

26

Dates

‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, and there are no easy answers, none of the deWant bravado of the last section of ‘The Tower’, as the bleak political realities that surround Thoor Ballylee come in at the sequestered poet. The attempted idealization of the big house is troubled by the awareness of the forces that made it: And what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways Where slippered Contemplation Wnds his ease And Childhood a delight for every sense, But take our greatness with our violence?

(VP 418)

In the sense of helplessness produced by the war around him, there is a poignant feeling of the fragility of culture and of peace. And there is a disturbing awareness of the poet’s own complicity in the ethos of violence: We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare

(VP 425)

We had fed the heart on fantasies, not they. This backward, darkening, spiralling movement one could call a widening gyre, and it is completed in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’. Yeats associated the poem in his letter to Lady Gregory with the ‘Anne poem’, that is ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ which actually was written in 1919 and was related to ‘The Second Coming’ written in the same year.39 It is to the mood of these poems and the emotions out of which they were written that the redating of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ guides the reader. Although the starting point of the sequence may have been ‘the state of things in Ireland’, its Wrst title suggests a much grander sweep: ‘Thoughts on the Present State of the World’. One dimension of this is its reference back to the Great War, originally a very precisely dated reference. The terse fourth section of the poem reads We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth, Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

(VP 431)

‘Seven years ago’, written in a poem composed and published in 1921 on the present state of the world, refers unmistakably to 1914, the last year of the pre-war illusions captured in the Wrst section of the poem: 39 See Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 16–45.

Dates All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, And a great army but a showy thing

27 (VP 429)

There is an illuminating source for this in a 1924 speech of Yeats recalling how A fortnight before the great war a friend of mine was standing beside an English Member of Parliament watching a Review in one of the London Parks. My friend said as the troops march past ‘it is a Wne sight.’ And the Member of Parliament answered ‘It is a Wne sight, but it is nothing else, there will never be another war.’ ‘There will never be another war’, that was our opium dream.40

There is a sense in which ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is Yeats’s Waste Land, the poem in which he contemplated the broken wreckage of the world in the wake of the war. Re-titling and re-dating ‘Thoughts upon the Present State of the World’ both highlighted and obscured this sense: highlighting it in so far as 1919 was the year immediately following the end of the war, but obscuring it by blurring the dates. ‘Seven years ago’, taken literally in a poem called ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, removes the attention from 1914 to the less signiWcant 1912. But Yeats was not in the business of literal dating when he gave the poem its new title and its new date. His purpose, rather, was to tie the poem to his theory of the gyres and to the imagination of millennial disaster Wgured in ‘The Second Coming’. On a manuscript draft of the poem, Yeats tried out a title of ‘The Things Return’ or ‘The Things that Come again’.41 There is a hint here of the cyclical pattern of the Yeatsian theory of history developed in section II of the poem: So the Platonic Year Whirls out new right and wrong, Whirls in the old instead (VP 430)

The world stands poised at the point of a second coming, a return of the antithetical phase after the primary phase of the Christian era. And it is to suggest this, perhaps, that Yeats gave the poem the title he did in the form he did. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is written out thus in words rather than given in numerals and, as such, it evokes irrationally an idea of the millennium minus one. Yeats was not to be allowed the 40 Cited by JeVares, A New Commentary, 231. 41 See Bradford, Yeats at Work, 65.

28

Dates

dubious pleasure of living on into the twenty-Wrst century: he would have had to survive to the age of 135 to have done that. But by calling his poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, he wanted an eVect like that in Tony Kushner’s 1990s play, The Millennium Approaches, the Wrst part of Angels in America. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ not only has those written out words as title but, on the pages of The Tower on which the poem appears, it has ‘Nineteen [hyphen] Nineteen’ as running head. That redoubled nineteen conveys the numerically irrational impression that the completion of ‘twenty twenty’ is almost accomplished. This is comparable to the climax of ‘The Second Coming’: but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(VP 402)

‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is not apocalypse now, but apocalypse tomorrow. Yeats wrote with posterity in mind and at one level the dates appended to manuscripts, to typescripts, and to published versions of the poems were part of the historical record, the record of the poet’s life of composition. Yeats was conscious, and increasingly so in his later years with his growing fame, that everything related to his writing was a subject of scholarly attention. But dates were also susceptible to rearrangement: they were Wctive things that could be included or adjusted to suit the context of publication. Sometimes it was a matter of the topical business of the day, poems that could enter into the Lane pictures controversy with the cutting edge of a date. Sometimes dated poems worked towards the support of a periodized narrative of Ireland’s contemporary history, as in the three controversies schema from the Parnellite split through the Playboy riots to the Municipal Gallery debate, or the pattern in which the spiritual nadir of ‘September 1913’ was countered by the terrible renewal of ‘Easter 1916’. But with Yeats one can never rule out the possibility that all dates, all times, are to be read in the light of Wxed and absolute patterns beyond historical actuality to which they at best approximate. Within the structure of the Collected Poems, the dated works take their place in a constructed narrative of history, and a trajectory of the poet’s own development. They allow to a reader a simultaneous sense of the immediacy of the

Dates

29

poem’s present voice and its allotted moment in the past. Yet that dated speciWcity may be Wgurative rather than literal. Dates help thus to create the time frames within which the poems are encountered. In my next chapter I will look at some of the gestural words by which Yeats situates himself, his poems, and his reader in shared spaces.

2 This and That, Here and There How can I, that girl standing there, My attention Wx On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?

(VP 631)

What girl where? Biographers have attempted to identify the woman and the situation in ‘Politics’. Brenda Maddox, for instance, maintains that the person in question was Yeats’s last love, Edith Shackleton Heald, even though Heald’s 53 years at the time of the poem’s 1938 composition would make her being called a ‘girl’ something of a stretch, as Maddox herself admits.1 The candidate of both R. F. Foster and W. J. Mc Cormack, based on apparently quite separate evidence, is Cora Hughes, committed left-wing activist and former lover of Charles Donnelly, the Irish poet who had died the previous year in the Spanish Civil War. Mc Cormack states that Hughes was the ‘girl’ of ‘Politics’, the information coming originally from Peadar O’Donnell.2 Foster provides a diVerent source for the identiWcation of Hughes, and a somewhat more circumstantial description: ‘the poem allegedly referred to a beautiful red-headed republican who used to sell newspapers at Republican Congress meetings

1 Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 364. In fact, the evidence she produces, a letter written to Heald on 24 May, the day after ‘Politics’ was Wrst drafted, would seem to suggest that she was not in fact the model for the ‘girl’. He wrote another letter on the same day to Dorothy Wellesley very excited about the poem he had just composed and sending her a copy, and it seems improbable that, if ‘Politics’ had actually been centred on Heald, he would not have mentioned the fact in what amounts to a love letter to her. See unpublished letters to Wellesley and Heald in John Kelly (ed.), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (InteLex Past Masters), available at http://library.nlx.com, accessed 16 April 2007. 2 W. J. Mc Cormack, Blood Kindred. W. B. Yeats: The Life, the Death, the Politics (London: Pimlico, 2005), 122. Although Mc Cormack does not supply his source for this in the book, he has informed me that it came from O’Donnell by way of the researcher Larry White: personal e-mail, 9 March 2007.

This and That, Here and There

31

on O’Connell Street, regularly noted by WBY as he left the Gresham Hotel’ (Foster II 623).3 In this scenario, the poet coming out of the Gresham is presumably in earnest conversation with other men about the political situation, when his eye is caught by the striking red-haired woman standing on the street. With a poem written in May 1938, the year that was to climax in Munich, there would have been plenty to talk about relating to Roman, Russian, or Spanish politics. The London Times for that month recorded a much publicized visit of Hitler to Mussolini in Rome, the fears of the Comintern fomenting world revolution, the continuing Civil War in Spain. However, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford pictures the situation in the poem quite diVerently from Foster. In ‘Politics’, she asserts, ‘Yeats rejects public verse in the interests of love poetry, as the speaker turns away from the news report to gaze at a good-looking woman’.4 In this version of the scene, the poet is sitting down browsing a newspaper: Yet here’s a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there’s a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war’s alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!

(VP 631)

The ‘here’ and ‘there’ might indeed quite plausibly refer to one or another article in the paper that the poet cannot concentrate on reading. Yeats himself, on the other hand, denied that it had any such single reallife source as critics and biographers have sought to establish. In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, noted by Foster, he declared, ‘It is not a real incident, but a moment of meditation.’5 Yeats’s dates, looked at in the previous chapter, seemed to inscribe his poems in historical time, the public life of his country or the world, and draw their signiWcance from that chronological datedness. ‘Politics’, which most scholars and editors now think Yeats intended to stand as 3 Foster’s source is given as a ‘reminiscence of George Gilmore’ (another important Wgure in Dublin left-wing circles of the time), as transmitted to him by Richard English: Foster II 762. 4 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2. 5 W. B. Yeats, Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley (1940; London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 163.

32

This and That, Here and There

the last of the Last Poems, and thus the Wnal statement of his poetic canon, appears to do just the opposite. The year was indeed a historic one; even at the time people were aware that the events leading up to the Munich crisis, whatever the outcome, made it of epochal importance. The year 1938, reXected in works as diVerent as Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal or Jean-Paul Sartre’s Le Sursis, was one to illustrate the truth of Thomas Mann’s statement, used as epigraph for ‘Politics’: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms’ (VP 631). Yet Yeats’s poem is a challenge to such a belief. He cannot concentrate on the momentous public events going on in various parts of Europe, the war and war’s alarms disturbing the peace of the whole world. The sight of that girl standing there disturbs him from this proper perspective on the destiny of man, as a gust of private, personal emotion shakes him with the realization that his individual lifespan is coming to an end, and he yearns (impossibly) for a return to his youth: ‘O that I were young again j And held her in my arms!’. What is set up in ‘Politics’ is a dramatic situation based on a moment of the inner life. We live with the poet in the grip of an emotion that comes to him with the spontaneousness and immediacy of the phenomenal. Yet as we try to Wx the speciWcities of the poem’s givens—‘that girl standing there’—they elude the conWdent identiWcation that they seem to invite. It is not the dramatization of a particular event that took place in an actual time and place, but rather, as Yeats insists, a ‘meditation’. The dated poems, ‘September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, or ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, named months and years as landmarks in history. The poems I am considering in this chapter use instead the markers ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ to pinpoint micromoments in the mental or emotional life of the writer. Yet these small dramatic gestures in space are no more to be taken at face value than the much grander narrative eVects of the dated poems’ dates. Poems that seem to be designed to place us in a precise position and share a perceptible space with the poet who points to that girl standing there dissolve into a set of verbal strategies resistant to visualization. The aim of the present chapter is to tease out the way these delusively spatial poetic spaces are created. THAT: REL ATIVES AND DEMONSTRATIVES If it is placed last in the Collected Poems, ‘Politics’ appears to speak to the dilemma set up in ‘The Choice’:

This and That, Here and There The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work

33

(VP 495)

At the moment the work is perfected, the oeuvre completed, comes this poignant reminder of the imperfection of the life, the lack and loss of which ‘that girl standing there’ is emblem. She represents what is always other and out there, not possessed, extrinsic to the space actually occupied by the poet. She is ‘that girl’, not known, not named, standing there, out of reach if not out of sight. And the ‘there’ where that girl stands is quite diVerent from the ‘there’ in ‘there’s a politician’. The ‘here’ and ‘there’ of the ‘travelled man’ and the ‘politician’—whether physically present or only represented in print—are within the ordinary ambit of the poet. The real division of the poem is between a normative, talky, discursive shape of the present with the poet beset by earnest maledominated language, and that other place of the girl and sexual fulWlment in an inconceivably re-run youth of the past. In this it is characteristically Yeatsian in its opposition of a foregrounded, more or less unsatisfactory present here and now and some otherness indicated by ‘that’ and ‘there’. The raw statistics are suggestive of Yeats’s imaginative preferences in this matter. ‘This’, ‘that’, ‘here’, and ‘there’ are among the words judged too insigniWcant to be included in Stephen Parrish’s pioneering Concordance, but the computer did generate Wgures for their relative frequency, and these are listed in the editorial Preface.6 The table shows that ‘here’ (77) is considerably outnumbered by ‘there’ (468). However, there is a much more startling disparity between ‘this’ (306) and ‘that’ (2357). An explanation can be oVered for this wild proliferation of ‘that’-ing. ‘That’ is used very often in three quite diVerent ways. There is ‘that’ as demonstrative adjective, as in ‘that girl standing there’. There is ‘that’ as conjunction introducing a clause of purpose, highlighted, for instance, by inverted word order in ‘Long-Legged Fly’, ‘That civilisation may not sink, j Its great battle lost’ (VP 617). But most peculiar to Yeats is the liking for ‘that’ as relative pronoun, often replacing ‘who’ or ‘which’, as in the last section of ‘The Tower’, ‘I choose upstanding men j That climb the streams’ (VP 414).7 As well as replacing ‘who’ with ‘that’ as in this example, Yeats deliberately ignored the correct 6 Stephen M. Parrish (ed.), A Concordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. xii. 7 On the distinctive use of ‘that’ as relative pronoun replacing ‘who’, ‘whom’, and ‘which’ in Hiberno-English see P. L. Henry, An Anglo-Irish Dialect of North Roscommon (Dublin: Department of English, University College Dublin, n.d.), 99.

34

This and That, Here and There

distinction between ‘that’ used with a restrictive clause, and ‘which’ for a non-restrictive clause. He very rarely uses ‘which’: it appears just 10 times in the whole Collected Poems, and in many of those cases it is only there to provide a rhyme-word. Such is the case in ‘Ancestral Houses’ where, ironically, ‘which’ is actually used incorrectly in place of ‘that’: now it seems As if some marvellous empty sea-shell Xung Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams, And not a fountain, were the symbol which Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

(VP 417–18)

The refusal of the relative pronouns ‘who’ and ‘which’, the marked preference for the one word ‘that’ in its multiple functions, facilitates the extraordinary sinuousness of Yeats’s syntax. James Longenbach has commented on the ‘one syntactical swoop’ typical of the Yeatsian stanza.8 ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ provides a Wne illustration: And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place, Towards nightfall upon a race Passionate and simple like his heart.

(VP 324–5)

In the Wrst line ‘that’ is used as a demonstrative adjective, ‘that enquiring man’. In the second it is a relative pronoun, replacing the more normal ‘who’. And in the fourth line, it is a conjunction introducing a dependent clause: Synge never could have rested in the tomb—main clause—if he had not come—dependent clause. In replacing the relative whos and whiches with one grammatically anonymous link-word ‘that’, Yeats removes the scaVolding of subordination from his sentence, allowing stanzaic shaping to override syntactic structure. ‘That’ operates as a kind of verbal mortar, at once separating words from one another and binding them together, blurring any awareness we might have of the more Wnicky distinctions of usage. ‘That’ in its very frequency of recurrence in Yeats becomes as if a neutral connective of word to word and phrase to phrase, removing impediments to the Xow of the lines and the shape of the stanza. 8 James Longenbach, ‘Purity, Restraint, Stillness’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 823 (2006), 223-XI, available at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk, accessed 16 April 2007.

This and That, Here and There

35

Within this multipurpose usage of ‘that’, the demonstrative form in ‘that enquiring man’ is a striking Yeatsian mannerism. Richard Ellmann deWnes it acutely: Many of [Yeats’s] devices tease or entice the reader into granting the poet his assent. Such is the function of the word ‘that’ used as a demonstrative adjective; it implicates the reader in common awareness of what the poet is talking about, as if the poet’s world contained only objects which were readily recognizable.9

John Synge is not only characterized by the epithet—it was his nature to be ‘enquiring’—but we are expected to agree that this deWnes the person he was. Later, in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, the adjective is changed but the eVect is the same: ‘And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man’ (VP 603). Daniel Harris comments on the eVect of the last lines of ‘In the Seven Woods’, ‘while that Great Archer, j Who but awaits his Hour to shoot, still hangs j A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee’ (VP 198): In the assured intimations of ‘that Great Archer’ you Wnd the characteristic gestures of Yeats’s later poetry: the Adamic naming of a world, the self-dramatizing creation of its population, the allusion to mythological Wgures which alter the environment so unexpectedly that you must think them the common properties of the speaker’s mind and universe.10

It may be a familiarizing strategy, even when there is a simultaneous element of defamiliarization. So it is, for example, in ‘Wisdom’: The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeller; Swept the sawdust from the Xoor Of that working-carpenter.

(VP 440)

It is one of Yeats’s more Protestant poems, ironically protesting against the elaborate, falsifying iconography of the Church. In demystifying Jesus as ‘that working-carpenter’, he demands that we accept that this was the reality of the Gospel narrative. ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ makes use of what one could call the photo-album technique. The dead friends he summons up in memory ‘seem to look j Out of some old picture-book’ (VP 325); in ‘All Souls’ Night’ 9 Richard Ellman, The Identity of Yeats (2nd edn, London: Faber, 1964), 138. 10 Daniel A. Harris, Yeats: Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 18.

36

This and That, Here and There

it becomes a literal seance, as the dead are named and conjured up one after another. The eVect is rather diVerent when the people in question are not actually identiWed, as in the initial stages of ‘Easter 1916’. Declan Kiberd has argued persuasively that the poem represents a series of strategies by which the poet defers naming the leaders, the task that Kiberd maintains he knows he is bound to take on as the traditional duty of the national bard going back to the practices of Irish poetry.11 ‘Easter 1916’ is indeed this sort of public poem, monumentalizing the event and the leaders involved. Yet there is an estrangement in the opening of the second stanza: That woman’s days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill.

(VP 392)

Who is that woman? We have heard about no woman in the preceding lines. It would be very diYcult for a Wrst-time reader to associate the woman here with one of the unnamed, collective ‘them’, the ‘vivid faces’, referred to at the start of the Wrst stanza. There is here no photo-album array, as with ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, from which this one Wgure can be singled out. Instead we have an abrupt and initially mystifying switch in direction, when the poet so suddenly identiWes her with the commanding demonstrative ‘that’ as though pointing to someone we could see and immediately recognize. The stanza continues with its enumeration, giving the history or attributes of three men who are equally unnamed: ‘This man had kept a school . . . This other his helper and friend . . . This other man’ (VP 392–3). In one sense, of course, these allusions are there to be decoded; they operate as poetic kennings. As the sea in Old English poetry is the ‘whale-road’, so Patrick Pearse, well known as the founder of St Enda’s, poet, orator and idealist, is the man who ‘had kept a school j And rode our winge´d horse’ (VP 392). Yet there is also a degree of deliberate occlusion of identity in this catalogue. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart

(VP 393)

By now we are very aware of the biographical connection of Yeats to John MacBride, who had married Maud Gonne against the poet’s 11 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 213–17.

This and That, Here and There

37

desperate pleas to her to change her mind, had proved a brutally drunken husband, had seduced Gonne’s half-sister Eileen, and molested her young daughter Iseult (Foster I 330–1). But this is not public knowledge that the poem expects a reader to be able to share. Quite the opposite; the poet is speaking of his personal feelings for ‘this other man’, the ‘other’ deliberately alienating, but burying the detail of those feelings in vague and opaque language: ‘most bitter wrong j To some who are near my heart’. ‘Dreamed’ is the key word here, a word I will be returning to as the subject of the next chapter. Against the new deWniteness of the heroic action of the Rising, the earlier assumed knowledge of these Wgures becomes dream or phantasm. The ordinary conversations of the casual comedy of the past are reduced to unrealities. ‘That woman’, ‘this man’, rise up into the poet’s consciousness as he had thought he knew them, but they are now phantoms in the completely altered order of things that the Rising has brought about. The pointing gestures of ‘that’ and ‘this’ point to these Wgures as they appear in Yeats’s memory. There is no diVerentiation implied in using ‘that’ for Marciewicz, ‘this’ for Pearse, MacDonagh, MacBride; they are equally before him in a single series from which he picks out now this one, now that one. But the vision in which they appear is not at this stage of the poem yet a public one that we as readers are automatically expected to share. The familiarity of ‘that’ and ‘this’ is the poet’s familiarity with the men and woman he contemplates, not necessarily ours. ‘Easter 1916’, for all that it is a public poem on a public event, announced as such in its very title, up to the end of the last stanza works in the characteristic Yeatsian mode of overheard reverie, in which we watch and only half-comprehend the poet conjuring up an inner landscape. The demonstrative ‘that’ is used elusively by Yeats also within a private, social setting, where it is casual conversation that we are overhearing, as in ‘Adam’s Curse’: We sat together, at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. (VP 204)

‘That beautiful mild woman’ was Maud Gonne’s younger sister Kathleen Pilcher; Gonne gave details of the incident on which the poem was based in her autobiography A Servant of the Queen.12 In not naming 12 Maud Gonne, A Servant of the Queen, ed. A. Norman JeVares and Anna McBride White (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994), 317–18.

38

This and That, Here and There

Kathleen, in referring to her only as ‘that beautiful mild woman’, Yeats is following his general practice of discretion in relation to living individuals. Maud Gonne herself is never named in a poem until the very late ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’; Augusta Gregory is normally referred to allusively as a ‘friend’—‘A Friend’s Illness’, or ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’. In only identifying Kathleen Pilcher, ‘that beautiful mild woman’ as ‘your close friend’, Yeats might even have been deliberately camouXaging the actual relationship with Maud Gonne, or he might simply have needed a rhyme for ‘end’. Whatever the motive, the discreet refusal to name ‘that beautiful mild woman’ sets up a privacy between the three, the poet, ‘you’, and ‘close friend’, from which the reader is partly excluded. There is a degree of ‘you know who’ mystifying involved. We are admitted to a conversation among intimates but with the identity of the individuals blanked out. The poet says his piece about the diYculty of writing poetry, especially the diYculty of writing it so that it seems to have come eVortlessly (and ‘Adam’s Curse’ is an early example of Yeats’s mastery of just that art.) And he gets his answer: And thereupon That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There’s many a one shall Wnd out all heartache On Wnding that her voice is sweet and low Replied . . .

(VP 205)

The exact repetition of the words ‘that beautiful mild woman’ was not in the original published text of the poem; the lines there had run ‘That woman then j Murmured with her young voice for whose mild sake j There’s many a one shall Wnd out all heartache’ (VP 205). The revised version makes the formula almost like a Wxed Homeric epithet: Kathleen Pilcher can never be named in any other way than as ‘that beautiful mild woman’. Odd tricks are also being played with age and status here in terms of the real life source. Kathleen, born in 1868, must have been at least 33 at the time of the conversation in question, had been married for some 12 years and had four children. She is hardly the young girl whose emergent beauty, sweet and low voice, are going to break men’s hearts in the future. But Yeats wants to build a contrast between this ‘beautiful mild woman’, young and soft-voiced, and the other presence in the poem—the ‘you’ who by implication is less mild, less young, and whose voice is not ‘sweet and low’.

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The outstanding feature of the equally unnamed Maud Gonne in this poem is that she is completely silent throughout. The conversation goes back and forth between the poet and ‘that beautiful mild woman’ who, for all her apparent inge´nue status, is surprisingly knowing about the eVort that goes into female appearance. Like poets with their poems, ‘we [women] must labour to be beautiful’ (VP 205). This allows the poet to sum up, linking not only poetry and beauty but love as arts which require diligent hard work. And there the conversation falters: ‘We sat grown quiet at the name of love’ (VP 205). It is with the talk dying away, as they contemplate together the end of twilight and the risen moon, that a shift in the perspective of the poem takes place. I had a thought for no-one’s but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love

(VP 206)

Suddenly we become conscious of the wholly silent ‘you’ to whom the poem is addressed, and who has been only a tacit presence through the Wrst thirty-three lines. Now in place of the voiced exchanges between poet and ‘that beautiful mild woman’ on the abstract principles of art, beauty and love, is the much deeper unspoken feeling shared between ‘you’ and ‘I’, ‘a thought for no-one but your ears’. At this point, the formula ‘that beautiful mild woman’, twice repeated earlier, becomes a distancing device; she is merely a third party before whom certain things cannot be spoken. The strategy of ‘Adam’s Curse’ is to take us to an intimacy within an intimacy, from a relaxed if private conversation to a privacy beyond words. THIS AND THAT, HERE AND THERE: DEICTICS Deixis is the grammatical action of indicating, pointing out; ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, are deictic markers in so far as they point to objects nearer to—this here—or further away from—that there—the speaker. Yeats, however, does not always make use of this spatial separation. So, as we have seen, in ‘Easter 1916’ there is no real distinction between Marciewicz (‘that woman’) and Pearse, MacDonagh, MacBride, picked out with ‘this’. The demonstrative adjectives appear randomly distributed, except for the hint of aversion in MacBride being called ‘this other man’. In fact, Yeats quite often links the two deictics ‘this’ and ‘that’ in their Tweedledum/Tweedledee lack of diVerence. So, for example, Baile

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and Aillinn by their premature deaths were spared mundane worries: ‘Their love was never drowned in care j Of this or that thing’ (VP 189). This and that, in their paired heterogeneity, in fact mark the trivial miscellaneousness of the ordinary world. In the ecstatic epiphany of ‘The Cold Heaven’, ‘imagination and heart were driven j So wild that every casual thought of that and this j Vanished’ (VP 316). In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, this is expanded into a triplet similarly expressive of the random diVuseness of intellect ‘wandering j To this and that and t’other thing’ (VP 478). Yet the opposition of ‘this’ and ‘that’ could be made to bear the weight of radical alterity in Yeats. It is surely not accidental that in the dialogue poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ it is Ille, ‘that man’, who is obviously identiWed with the poet in his argument with Hic, ‘this man’. Hic speaks of the desire for self-expression: ‘I would Wnd myself and not an image’. Ille voices the true Yeatsian artistic credo in his appeal to an anti-self: I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon.

(VP 367)

Ille both articulates the poet’s yearning need for attaining such an antiself and, in his thatness, is the persona that opposes the conventional self of Hic. The frequency with which ‘that’ appears in Yeats’s poems is not just a statistical consequence of the diVerent ways he uses the word. ‘That’ names the otherness towards which his imagination strains. ‘In illo tempore’, ‘in that time’, was the narrative formula for naming a ‘holy era of the Beginning’ before the time of ordinary mortal experience.13 Such a pristine lost era is constantly adumbrated in Yeats’s early poetry, as it can still be glimpsed in its latter-day embodiment. So in ‘He remembers Forgotten Beauty’ the poet asserts: that pale breast and lingering hand Came from a more dream-heavy land, A more dream-heavy hour than this (VP 156)

‘That pale breast’ refers back to the antecedent ‘you’ of the poem’s opening line, ‘When my arms wrap you round’ (VP 155). But the body, which the lover embraces in the present tense, does not truly belong to ‘this’ stigmatized present time and place. At his most aggressively 13 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Collins, 1968), 17.

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transcendental, the poet will use ‘this’ to aYrm the presentness and immediacy of the eternal ‘Rose of the World’: Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna’s children died.

(VP 111)

‘These red lips’, which the visionary poet sees before his eyes, are belated in a post-epic period—‘Mournful that no new wonder may betide’—and at the same time stand as the archetypally destructive female beauty of both Greek and Irish mythology. The mythological archetype surviving into a degenerate present modulates into a historical perspective in Yeats’s polemic poems of Responsibilities. In ‘September 1913’, ‘this’ scornfully and emphatically gestures towards all the contemporary pettiness summed up in the dated title: Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? (VP 290)

Technically, the repeated ‘this’ gestures back to the situation described in the Wrst stanza, the money-grubbing pietistics of the men who ‘pray and save’, as ‘that blood’ refers on to the martyred heroes of the following lines, Fitzgerald, Emmet, and Tone. But the ‘this’ and ‘that’ insist on a binary division well beyond their immediate grammatical function. Combined with ‘all’—‘all that blood’, ‘all that delirium of the brave’—‘that’ acts as epic ampliWer, taking us into a shared awe at the heroic dimensions of the past age. There is a similar sense of the struggle of the imagination to capture the legendary beauty of the young Maud Gonne, latter-day avatar of the Homeric Helen, in ‘Peace’: All that sternness amid charm, All that sweetness amid strength

(VP 259)

Gonne, in ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ and ‘No Second Troy’, becomes the very type of the heroic misplaced in an unheroic era, ‘a kind j That is not natural in an age like this’ (VP 256–7). In the disillusioned bitterness of

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the Wrst decade of the twentieth century the crepuscular atmospherics of the Celtic Twilight turn, in ‘These Are the Clouds’, into a darkened sunset of greatness: These are the clouds about the fallen sun, The majesty that shuts his burning eye: The weak lay hand on what the strong has done, Till that be tumbled that was lifted high And discord follow upon unison, And all things at one common level lie. And therefore, friend, if your great race were run And these things came, so much the more thereby Have you made greatness your companion, Although it be for children that you sigh: These are the clouds about the fallen sun, The majesty that shuts his burning eye. (VP 265)

The serious illness of Lady Gregory (the ‘friend’ addressed in the poem), combined with the threat to the Coole estate represented by current land legislation, drew from Yeats this prospective elegy for her and her house. Her death, the destruction of Coole Park, are still only potential—‘if your great race were run’—but the deictic force of the repeated ‘these’ brings into present time the as-yet hypothetical future. The poem enumerates with Renaissance-like horror the levelling of all the proper ordering of heliocentric hierarchy: ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, j And hark what discord follows’ (Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.109–10).14 ‘These’ metaphoric clouds of present-day apocalypse blot out ‘that . . . that was lifted high’. The opposition of ‘these’ with the re-doubled ‘that’ works extra-grammatically to enforce the scale of the greatness of the past that is (about to be) lost. Yeats could use ‘this’ in conventional self-reference to the poem the poet was writing and that the reader would be reading in some projected future present. ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep, j And nodding by the Wre, take down this book’ (VP 120). This is an adaptation of the standard topos assuring the lover of his/her perpetuity in the poem: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, j So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (Sonnet XVIII, 11. 13–14). Yeats’s most characteristic usage of such self-referencing, however, is turned towards 14 The quotation here, and those from Shakespeare throughout this book, are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

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the elegiac and the monumental, most strikingly in the lines ‘To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee’: I, the poet William Yeats, With old mill boards and sea-green slates, And smithy work from the Gort forge, Restored this tower for my wife George; And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again.

(VP 406)

George Yeats might have had the right to feel a bit resentful that her (very considerable) part in the restoration of the tower went unacknowledged in the poem.15 What is so remarkable, though, is the way the poet, even at the dedicatory moment of the tower’s initiation as the couple’s home, imagines it returned to ruin with nothing remaining but ‘these characters’ as fragmentary commemorative inscription. The great set-piece in this pre-memorializing Yeatsian mode is ‘Coole Park, 1929’. In 1929 Gregory was still alive and Coole was still standing. But the last stanza of the poem imagines, in the siste viator style of the epitaph, a present of the future: Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand When all those rooms and passages are gone, When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound And saplings root among the broken stone, And dedicate—eyes bent upon the ground, Back turned upon the brightness of the sun And all the sensuality of the shade— A moment’s memory to that laurelled head.

(VP 489)

It is from such a ‘here’, from which house and owner are obliterated, that the poem contemplates ‘those rooms and passages’, ‘that laurelled head’ and all the scene once there. There Hyde before he had beaten into prose That noble blade the Muses buckled on, There one that ruZed in a manly pose For all his timid heart, there that slow man, That meditative man, John Synge, and those Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane, Found pride established in humility, A scene well set and excellent company. (VP 489) 15 See Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167–9.

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The insistently returning ‘there’s and ‘that’s point towards the irrecoverable otherness of the past and its lost accomplishment. Yeats’s deictics are temporal as much as spatial, contrasting a variety of privileged pasts with present times that are nearly always lapsed and depleted by contrast. The past may be mythic and primordial (‘The Rose of the World’), historic (‘September 1913’), or merely recollected from the earlier life of the poet himself (‘Coole Park, 1929’). Set against such other times, the ‘this’ and ‘these’ of the now are inadequate and unworthy successors. Yet there is no one Wxed antithetical pattern of heroic past and eVete present. The imagination of the poet within the space of the poem can range freely across time zones, making available any state, past or future, in a visionary present. So in ‘The Fisherman’, the central Wgure is ‘this wise and simple man’, even though he is placed as someone conceived of ‘a twelvemonth since’ and he is, as the poem Wnally admits, ‘A man who does not exist, j A man who is but a dream’ (VP 347, 348). Such a man may not have any existence in a normal temporal continuum but insofar as the poet can conjure him up, he can be seen in the shared sight of both poet and reader, pinpointed by ‘this’. What appears to be the gestural precision of ‘this’ and ‘that’ masks a shifting indeterminacy of both time and space. HERE AND THERE: THE ILLUSION OF SPACE Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island

(VP 86)

Yeats’s early poems typically conjure up places elsewhere. In ‘The Stolen Child’such a place may be precisely located, but it remains an entrancingly distant ‘there’. In each of the three stanzas the fairy voice conjures up for the about-to-be-stolen child magical night scenes: an island in Lough Gill, the seashore by ‘furthest Rosses’, the Glencar waterfall. But these fairy haunts, however vividly imagined, are not actually present. They represent an otherness to which the child is lured away from the domesticity of the Wnal stanza, the known familiarity of the sights and sounds he is leaving behind, the calves and the kettle and the brown mice around the oatmeal chest. The contrast is similar in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in which the insistently repeated ‘there’ emphasizes the other order of being represented by this haven of escape: ‘a small cabin build there . . . Nine bean-rows will I have there . . . I shall have some peace there . . . There midnight’s all a glimmer’ (VP 117).

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45

Early Yeats poems thus yearn towards a space outside of an implied here, the ‘pavement grey’ on which the poet stands hearing the lake water lapping in the deep heart’s core, the homely realities the stolen child is just leaving. At the other end of his writing career, in ‘Supernatural Songs’, ‘There’ represents the ultimate point of mystical contemplation: There all the barrel-hoops are knit, There all the serpent-tails are bit, There all the gyres converge in one, There all the planets drop in the Sun.

(VP 557)

This is the most abstracted and extreme use of a ‘there’ beyond the limits of the human imagination. In the later visionary poems, however, it is more often a phantasmagoric locus to which the word gestures. So, for instance, in ‘The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus’, last of the series ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, a dramatic image is summoned up out of nowhere: Behold that great Plotinus swim BuVeted by such seas; Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him, But the Golden Race looks dim, Salt blood blocks his eyes.

(VP 530)

The scene is made up of phrases from ‘the Delphic Oracle’s reply, when asked about the fate of Plotinus’ soul after his death, as Porphyry recorded in his Life of Plotinus’.16 A reader, coming to the poem for the Wrst time, however, is not to know that. Instead we are made to experience the painful struggle of the soul as though it were a desperate swimmer, half-blinded by the eVort of trying to reach the shore. The second stanza then switches imperturbably to the afterlife that the dead soul seeks, the company the great Plotinus is to join: Scattered on the level grass Or winding through the grove Plato there and Minos pass, There stately Pythagoras And all the choir of Love.

(VP 530–1)

In his mischievous sequel, ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’, Yeats takes up where he left oV, the ‘there’ of the earlier poem, but in a very diVerent idiom: There all the golden codgers lay, There the silver dew. . . (VP 611) 16 W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (2nd edn, London: Dent, 1994), 743.

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The reduction of the Elysian grandees to ‘golden codgers’ signals the ironic tone of this riposte to the Delphic oracle’s high rhetoric. Plotinus, just landed after his swim, ‘the salt-Xakes on his breast’ (VP 612), lies down to sigh for love with the other stranded dead souls. The rest of the poem plunges the reader back into the sea of transition from life to death, reminding us with crude insistence that it is also the sea of generation, where in violent animality the soul takes on Xesh: Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash Wshlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.

(VP 612)

‘There’ in such poems as these can only be a discomposed collage screened in the poet’s imagination. At other times, however, he locates the voice more precisely. In ‘A Bronze Head’, for instance, he can moor the poem to a place with the slightest of deictic gestures: ‘Here at right of the entrance this bronze head’ (VP 618). The rest of the poem never needs to refer again to the gallery where he contemplates the head of Maud Gonne in old age. It is particularly in the Coole Park and Tower poems that the poetic voice is most fully embedded, spoken from a recognizable time and place. ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ come to us from within a deWnite here and now: ‘now they drift on the still water’, ‘Now that we’re almost settled in our house’ (VP 323). It is only in Thoor Ballylee that Yeats is to be found fully at home in his poems. ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ follows its great precursor, Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, in setting the meditative babysitting father in an interior contrasted with an external world, however diVerent the weather in the two cases: Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.

(VP 403)

The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry Came loud—and hark again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.17 17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 240.

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Where Coleridge instantiates the scene for us with his listening to the repeated call of the owl, Yeats provides a local topography suggestive of the exposed vulnerability of the Tower: There is no obstacle But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed (VP 403)

The poet’s prayer for an idealized sheltered future for his daughter in the context of coming terrors is spoken from within the local habitation of Thoor Ballylee. Again and again in the Tower poems, as nowhere else in his work, Yeats evokes the place where he lives, with inside and outside views. We look out with him from the battlements in ‘The Tower’: ‘Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French . . . Some few remembered still when I was young j A peasant girl commended by a song, j Who’d lived somewhere upon that place’ (VP 410). In successive sections of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ he meditates on ‘My House’ or ‘My Table’, he looks out at ‘The Road at My Door’ or ‘The Stare’s Nest at My Window’. ‘Two men have founded here’ (VP 420), he declares with emphasis on his occupation of the very place where the original medieval ‘man-at-arms’ had built his castle. Yet the Tower is not only his home but avowedly a symbol, his objective in ‘found[ing] here’ that after me My bodily heirs may Wnd, To exalt a lonely mind, BeWtting emblems of adversity.

(VP 420)

The best example of this capacity of Yeats’s poetic voice to shift in and out of locatedness is ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’. The poem begins apparently with a present moment view from the Tower: ‘Under my window-ledge the waters race’ (VP 490). But it then turns into an imagined topography by which Ballylee is connected to Coole. The waters under his window-ledge Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop, Run underground, rise in a rocky place In Coole demesne, and there to Wnish up Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.

(VP 490)

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This sounds a very circumstantial tracing of the route of the river, including the folkloric explanation of Raftery’s ‘cellar’ as the deep pool where it went underground, recorded in Yeats’s early Celtic Twilight essay, ‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye’ (Myth 23). However, its metaphoric status is suggested by the Xourish of the stanza’s last line, ‘What’s water but the generated soul?’ (VP 490). In the second stanza the poet moves in imagination to the lake in the Coole demesne, but the tenses keep changing so it is impossible to be sure of the temporal status of the scene we are shown: Upon the border of that lake’s a wood Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun, And in a copse of beeches there I stood, For Nature’s pulled her tragic buskin on And all the rant’s a mirror of my mood: At sudden thunder of the mounting swan I turned about and looked where branches break The glittering reaches of the Xooded lake.

(VP 490)

In ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ Yeats brought together two diVerent visions of the swans on the lake but kept the two sightings, nineteen years apart, carefully distinct. Here we are brought into the stanza in a speciWed present of the time of year: ‘Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun’; the poem was in fact written in February 1932 during the extended period of Lady Gregory’s illness when Yeats was more or less living at Coole.18 But the present tenses keep turning into the past—‘stood’, ‘turned’, ‘looked’—as though the contemplating mind of the poet transforms his actions into an instant preterite. The voice of the poem never stays within one mode of vision or reXection, but moves freely from one to another. The third stanza shifts into a self-conscious allegorizing of the mounting swan: Another emblem there! That stormy white But seems a concentration of the sky; And, like the soul, it sails into the sight And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why

(VP 490)

The ‘there’ points in towards the mental reXection rather than out to the bird lifting oV the lake. But the fourth stanza brings another alteration of perspective again: 18 On the evidence for this dating, see Chapter 1, n. 29.

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Sound of a stick upon the Xoor, a sound From somebody that toils from chair to chair

Here suddenly the poet is inside the house, within earshot of the downstairs room where the terminally ill Gregory moves with such diYculty. This movingly vivid evocation of sounds from the sickroom changes, within the same list of nouns in apposition, into a generalizing inventory of the house and its meanings: Beloved books that famous hands have bound, Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere; Great rooms where travelled men and children found Content or joy; a last inheritor Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame Or out of folly into folly came.

(VP 491)

By the time we reach the last stanza—‘We were the last romantics— chose for theme j Traditional sanctity and loveliness’ (VP 491)—the poet’s voice has soared right out of range of visible and auditory location in Coole or Ballylee. The Coole Park and Tower poems are embedded in real places, even if never conWned to identiWable point-of-view shots. It is more problematic in cases such as ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in which the symbolic appears to be literalized by the poem’s emphatic deictic markers: ‘That is no country for old men.’ (VP 407). With its conclusive full stop, this seems a deWnite enough statement with no hint of inner landscape. It is a decisive opening, a turning of the back on whatever country ‘that’ is. So we might legitimately expect to Wnd out from the poem what country the poet is so decisively abandoning as unsuitable for old men. An answer is supplied by most commentators: the country in question in Ireland. A. N. JeVares, in his New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, provides the fullest gloss. The ‘salmon-falls’ in l. 4 of the Wrst stanza is ‘probably a memory of the salmon at Galway (one of the Wrst things Yeats wanted his wife to see when she came to Ireland after their marriage)’, and the ‘mackerel-crowded seas’ in the same line is ‘probably founded on memories of the mackerel ‘‘coming in’’ to harbours and shores in the West of Ireland’.19 Daniel Albright is somewhat more tentative in his note on the line ‘That is no country for old men.’ ‘The following details suggest that the country is Ireland, famous for 19 A. Norman JeVares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 213, 214.

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salmon-streams; but the line also contains a pun on Tı´r na nO´g, literally the Country of the Young.’20 The identiWcation is accepted even by interpreters who see the elements in the Wrst stanza description that do not correspond to Ireland. So, for instance, Marjorie Howes comments: ‘Yeats wrote in ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium’’ (1926) that Ireland was ‘‘no country for old men’’ . . . but the most striking feature of its distinct national culture was that Ireland was a place that young unmarried women wanted to leave.’21 This is a good point and raises the question of how far the place evoked in the opening stanza of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ actually corresponds to the Ireland of the 1920s when it was written. The ‘salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas’ may be identiWed with Ireland, but ‘the young in one another’s arms’ hardly conjures up the exceedingly repressive Irish Free State in which Yeats battled in vain against censorship and legislation on divorce, a country not exactly famous for its ‘sensual music’. Yeats is not talking about Ireland speciWcally when he says, ‘That is no country for old men.’ Albright may be right to see an allusion to Tı´r na ´ g here, making the line a wry tautology: ‘That, a country of the nO young, is not a country for old men.’ The poem had its origins in a general sense of contrasts between old and young. For one radio broadcast, in fact, Yeats altered the Wrst line to ‘Old men should quit a country where the young’.22 It is a symbolic order of things rather than a literal geography that the poem sets up. But we are lured into literalism by the opening ‘that’. Such apparent deWniteness tempts commentators to look for a speciWc identity for ‘that country’, and to pick out those images no doubt drawn from Yeats’s experience of Ireland. This tendency is conWrmed by the lines concluding the second stanza: And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

(VP 408)

A space is set up between the country of the opening line—‘That is no country’—receding from the poet’s view, with the seas traversed to the point of arrival in the holy city of Byzantium. A naive reader coming to the poem for the Wrst time might be forgiven for thinking that the elderly poet had bought a one-way ticket from Dun Laoghaire to Istanbul. 20 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 630. 21 Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137. 22 See Richard J. Finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 120.

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But the space–time indicators in the poem are constantly shifting to make impossible any such single simple trajectory. Setting aside the fact that the holy city of Byzantium (in the form Yeats was thinking of it) existed only in antiquity, it is made deliberately ambiguous whether the eastward journey has been accomplished, is in train, or is only an aspiration. The perfect tense in ‘I have come j To the holy city of Byzantium’ suggests he is there, he has arrived. The title of the poem, present participle or gerund, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, points to an action in progress. But the prayer to the ‘sages standing in God’s holy Wre’ to ‘consume’ his heart away, the future tense of the last stanza, ‘Once out of nature I shall never take j My form from any natural thing’ (VP 408), places the desire to be free of the body, to be gathered into ‘the artiWce of eternity’ as something he longs for but has yet to achieve. The poem’s opening ‘that’, gesturing as it seems to do so clearly and deWnitively, creates for readers a sort of pseudospace in which we lose ourselves as soon as we try to occupy it. That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive.23 Mark but this Xea, and mark in this How little that which thou deny’st me is.24

In the opening of each poem, the poet’s pointing Wnger arrestingly draws an implied reader in by placing him/her with an imagined in-poem onlooker. In the case of ‘My Last Duchess’, Browning’s dramatic monologue form will provide a full backstory to that portrait we are invited to view. With ‘The Flea’ it is only a mini-drama, a thumbnail sketch, which Donne needs for his witty variation on the poet/seducer’s traditional arguments persuading his coy mistress to yield. Both poems, however, work to Wll in the scene around the initial deictic ‘that’ or ‘this’, supplying the surrounding situation. This is just what Yeats’s poems so often deny us. ‘That is no country for old men’: what country? ‘That girl standing there’: what girl where? Such questions, which the demonstratives appear to invite, never get answered as the poems slip away into other non-located forms of utterance. ‘This’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ in Yeats suggest an immediacy and deWnition that prove multiply elusive upon investigation. This is in part because of the way they shift between the seen and the imagined, the 23 Adam Roberts (ed.), Robert Browning, the Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York, 1997), 101. 24 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 58.

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This and That, Here and There

spatial and the temporal, the known and the unknown. The demonstrative ‘that’ Yeats frequently uses as a Wxative, pinning down the essential nature of a famous Wgure, as in the succession of diVerent characterizations of Synge: ‘that enquiring man’ (‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’), ‘that meditative man’ (‘Coole Park, 1929’), ‘that rooted man’ (‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’). Each epithet is in fact serving local strategic purposes within the poem in which it appears, but the ‘that’ appears to aYx him permanently in the one given character. The deictic words place us at indeterminate points within a space–time continuum. In some instances the pointing practice can be expansively gestural, ‘all that delirium of the brave’, while contrasting that heroic past with the contemptuous ‘this’ of the degenerative present: ‘was it for this . . . ?’ In other cases, just such a separation of that time with this is collapsed: ‘for these red lips . . . Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, j And Usna’s children died’. In the poet’s imaginary all images may coexist in a perpetual present from which they can be summoned into dramatic verbal being: ‘Behold that great Plotinus swim’. But we are admitted or excluded at will from that presence. Even in ‘Easter 1916’, Yeats’s most public commemorative poem, the dead leaders appear at Wrst as ‘vivid faces’ visible only to the poet, ‘that woman’ and ‘this man’ at whose identity we can only guess. I described this technique in ‘Easter 1916’ as Yeats’s mode of overheard reverie. We listen to something that both is and is not addressed to us; we watch Wgures, places, and situations that both are and are not present before us. Reverie is a very important Yeatsian word, with a more or less technical meaning. In his essay on ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, he cites Shelley’s deWnition: ‘Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding universe or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their being’ (E & I 79–80). The title Reveries over Childhood and Youth, his Wrst published autobiographical memoir, was intended thus to suggest not just recollection and meditation but the play of images arising involuntarily and signiWcantly out of memory. Within that capacious mode of reverie, the immediate and the visible may come and go according to non-rational associative principles of their own. In the form of heightened daydream that is reverie, the logic of grammar governing the use of ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’ to locate us in time and space may be suspended. Deictic gestures direct us in the interstitial spaces between mind and world but in no very certain and Wxed directions. At that liminal point between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the word ‘dream’ has a key function in Yeats and it is to dreams that I turn in the next chapter.

3 Dream Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

(VP 67)

‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, placed as his Wrst lyric from Yeats’s earliest canonical collection Poems (1895), asserts the visionary truth of dreaming. The shepherd/poet here strikes a characteristic Romantic attitude in rejecting the empiricist verities of Enlightenment science: there is no truth Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then, No learning from the starry men, Who follow with the optic glass The whirling ways of stars that pass

(VP 66)

A primal wisdom of ‘dreaming’ is contrasted with the latter-day ‘grey Truth’ of what Blake called ‘Single vision & Newton’s sleep’.1 The poet telling his story to some ‘twisted, echo-harbouring shell’ (VP 66) stands as symbol for the self-generating, self-validating dream of art. But already also in Poems (1895), Yeats had picked out from his previous lyrics the poem originally called ‘Miserrimus’, re-titling it ‘The Sad Shepherd’, to stand second as antithetical complement to ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. The sad shepherd’s eVort to conWde his ‘most piteous story’ to the sea is doomed to failure: The sea swept on and cried her old cry still, Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill. (VP 68)

When he seeks the comfort of whispering words to the seashell, it ‘changed all he sang to inarticulate moan’ (VP 69). Here the poet, so far from speaking the deep truths of the universe, is a mere narcissist who can make no connection with a natural world equally absorbed in itself. This set-piece pairing of poems reXects what George Bornstein calls Yeats’s ‘innate balance of credulity with scepticism’, a dialectic between 1 William Blake, Poetry and Prose, ed. GeoVrey Keynes (4th edn, London: Nonesuch Library, 1961), 862.

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Dream

poetic faith and doubt that continues throughout the canon.2 But within this framework the word ‘dream’ itself functions in complex and varying ways. Take the opening line of ‘The Rose of the World’, for instance: ‘Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?’(VP 111). This is a deWant challenge to the conventional attribution of dream-like transience to mortal beauty. The loveliness of ‘the rose of the world’ is not ephemeral; it is eternal and ‘lives on’ while ‘we and the labouring world are passing by’ (VP 112). Yet, even while the rhetorical question polemically proclaims beauty’s transcendence of time, it doubly discredits dream. Beauty does not pass like a dream, but a dream does. And those who imagine that beauty is no more than fading appearance are themselves dreamers adrift from reality. ‘Dream’ has no single valency in Yeats but acts as a shifting site where diVerent attitudes and perspectives are negotiated. Between the poles of belief and disbelief, there is a whole conceptual continuum underpinning usage. Surprisingly often it is simply equated with unreality. In ‘Ancestral Houses’, the opening lyric in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, the alluring imagination of spontaneous, unforced living in the stately home voiced in the Wrst stanza is abruptly dismissed in the second: ‘Mere dreams, mere dreams!’ (VP 417). ‘Dream’ is used repeatedly to suggest mistaken belief or fantasy, as in the case of ‘The Rose of the World’: to think beauty passes like a dream is a vulgar error. The mistaken belief may, however, be merely counterfactual expectation rather than delusion. ‘We dreamed that a great painter had been born’ (VP 326), remembers Yeats in the Robert Gregory elegy: ‘What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?’ (VP 327). Events with their fatal inevitability overtake our plausible-seeming but erroneous projections. Such ‘dreams’ belong in an ordinary world of human hopes and fears disproved by the order of tragic destiny. But the word is attributed also to those with heroic aspirations incapable of realization in actuality. So it is with the executed leaders in ‘Easter 1916’: ‘We know their dream; enough j To know they dreamed and are dead’ (VP 394). There is awed respect for the vision of the dead men here in its very vulnerability to death. In a very diVerent idiom, the poet seeks tenderness for his oVerings in ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’: ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’ (VP 176). The ethereal insubstantiality of the lover’s dreams is admitted, yet with the plea for the beloved to tread 2 George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot and Stevens (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 48.

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55

softly on them, they are given a kind of substance. The dream vision is of course a standard poetic resource, and Yeats takes up the poet’s privilege to make poems out of more or less raw dreams of his own in ‘A Dream of Death’, ‘His Dream’, and ‘Towards Break of Day’. Such works suggest the symbolic or allegorical truths available only to the poet and only communicable in the imagery of the dreamworld. But at the same time with the very declaration of their status as dreams and their evocation of a dream psychology so diVerent from that of the waking mind, they preserve the dream versus reality distinction. The status of the poetic imagination and the nature of its vision are constantly fought out in Yeats’s poetry with the word ‘dream’ a key battleground. In the early conWdent ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, Yeats claims added authority for his position as patriot poet because My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body’s laid asleep. (VP 138)

The poet’s reverie gives him access to deeper than ordinary sources of knowledge; dream and truth are equated as consubstantial: While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew.

(VP 139)

In the discouraged mood of the late ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’ it is just such an equation that is denied. In this disenchanted retrospect, the phantasmagoria of the poetry was a mere secondary derivative of selfinterested passion: And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love.

(VP 630)

The vacillations in belief over the poet’s vision in Yeats are linked to more fundamental metaphysical issues. When Ille in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ declares that ‘art j Is but a vision of reality’ it is a transcendent Platonic reality available only to one who has ‘awakened from the common dream’ (VP 369). Elsewhere, though, Yeats espouses an idealist epistemology with Berkeley as his philosophical sponsor, ‘Godappointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream’ (VP 481). In the Wnal section of ‘The Tower’, where he vehemently rejects Plato and Plotinus, he declares that even the Platonic heaven of the Forms is a human projection:

56

Dream being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar Paradise.

(VP 415)

Dream and dreaming run right through Yeats’s poetry, not just in the ‘dream-heavy’ (VP 156) early work. I am not concerned in this chapter to try to track changes in his understanding of dream over time, much less to analyse his complex hermeneutics of dreams put to use most elaborately in the construction of A Vision. I have conWned myself to the work the word ‘dream’does in the poems. To give a clearer structure to the argument, I have ordered it in sections that categorize the uses of dream on a spectrum of doubt and faith: illusion, Utopian vision, imagination, revelation. But my focus throughout is on the contextual variation in the signiWcance of dream, the way it forces a continuous re-orientation on us as readers, and carries within itself in any one instance the resonance of its multiple meanings. ILLUSION Dream in Yeats, explicitly or implicitly, is often opposed to reality, the tragic reality that contrasts with our vain imaginings of how things are or may be. So, for example, there is the delusory hope in ‘The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’: I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end: She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away.

(VP 152)

In terms of its biographical origins, the scenario of a happy-ever-after union with Olivia Shakespear is revealed as a false alternative to the indelibly scripted unrequited love for Maud Gonne. Our limited understanding, our need for comfortable solutions, lead to such hopeful misreadings. The poet looks on in pity at the young girl in ‘Two Years Later’, and foresees what she will go through, helpless to forewarn her: O you will take whatever’s oVered And dream that all the world’s a friend, SuVer as your mother suVered, Be as broken in the end. (VP 313)

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57

Sometimes, in the light of the revealed tragic order, there is an edge of wonder at the extent of people’s error. So, in ‘Sixteen Dead Men’, the fact of the executions overtakes all the regular pre-Rising political arguments, of which we are given a specimen: You say that we should still the land Till Germany’s overcome . . .

Such Redmondite positions—stay loyal to Britain for the duration of the War—are rendered fatuous by the image of the dead men who have arrived in the pantheon of past heroes: How could you dream they’d listen That have an ear alone For those new comrades they have found, Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone (VP 395)

The inXection is rather diVerent in ‘Easter 1916’ with Yeats’s lines on MacBride: This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout.

The poet does not retract the accusation that the dead patriot ‘had done most bitter wrong j To some who are near my heart’, but he is forced to acknowledge that MacBride ‘too, has been changed in his turn’ (VP 393), and that he can no longer be adequately summed up in that three-word denunciation. His previous understanding of his rival, Gonne’s husband who had treated her so badly, is downgraded into another limited sort of apprehension. Dream is regularly thus contrasted with reality, but what reality? In Yeats’s early poetry, Faeryland represents an alternative order of being to what only passes for the real. In ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, Niamh calls out to human listeners to join them: ‘Empty your heart of its mortal dream’(VP 140). The Sidhe live within a realm of eternal verities where the false conjectures, hopes, and fears of ‘mortal dream’ may be discarded. Yet the dreamless peace beyond human vicissitude is the very opposite of the eVect the fairies have on those who listen to their call. ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’ is disabled by his dreaming from any ordinary human satisfaction in love, in ambition, or in anger, and even in death will not be able to achieve ‘unhaunted sleep’ (VP 128). The refrain of ‘The Withering of the Boughs’ implies a necessarily inverse relationship between the natural and fairy worlds:

58

Dream No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams. (VP 203)

The folk belief on which this is based receives its explication in The Celtic Twilight: There is a war between the living and the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping on it. They will have it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of the earth decay, they ripen in Faery, and that our dreams lose their wisdom when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make the trees wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of Faery in November, and that blind eyes can see more than any other eyes. (Myth 116)3

The inhuman perfection of Faeryland is at once alluring and sinister, and dreams of its otherness incapacitate the dreamers from a more ordinary enjoyment of human existence. Yeats gives extended treatment to the encounter with the fairy world in ‘The Host of the Air’, naturalizing the experience of the dream vision in all its ambiguity. The traditional story of the changeling bride, based on a Gaelic ballad that Yeats heard in Ballisodare, starts briskly enough with the very this-worldly O’Driscoll breaking the stillness of the natural scene: O’Driscoll drove with a song The wild duck and the drake From the tall and the tufted reeds Of the drear Hart Lake. (VP 143)

Even if the poetic word ‘drear’ may suggest something sinister, the careless exuberance of the singing O’Driscoll, the mallards Xapping up oV the water, the speciWcity of the reed-fringed Sligo lake, all make for a vividly realized scene. With the second stanza, however, that scene changes: And he saw how the reeds grew dark At the coming of night-tide, And dreamed of the long dim hair Of Bridget his bride.

(VP 144)

This might be no more than a natural observation of twilight, but for the uncertain signiWcance of ‘dreamed’. It could be literal—O’Driscoll falls asleep by the lake at dusk—or semi-literal, a newly married man falling into a reverie of his bride and her beauty, even when he is away 3 Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Mythologies by W. B. Yeats. Copyright ß 1959 by Mrs W. B. Yeats. All rights reserved.

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oV singing by Hart Lake. The next stanza, however, suggests it is the onset of enchantment : He heard while he sang and dreamed A piper piping away, And never was piping so sad, And never was piping so gay.

(VP 44)

While he sang and dreamed: that seems to rule out a literal sequence— the daylight O’Driscoll singing along by the lake, falling asleep, and then starting to dream. The dream involves a vision of Bridget with the dancing fairies, O’Driscoll distracted into playing cards with a group of old men, and while he is so distracted, Bridget being carried oV by a young man of the fairy troupe. Bridget still seems to care enough for O’Driscoll to stop him from taking food from the fairies—the red wine and white bread that provide the poem with its audaciously punning title of sacramental host: The bread and the wine had a doom, For these were the host of the air (VP 144)

Partaking of these, as Yeats’s own note on the poem makes clear, would have made O’Driscoll too the permanent prisoner of Faery (VP 143). In a manuscript draft there were lines that made Bridget’s motivation clear: She had fear of the bread and the wine Of the people of the air 4

By drawing him away to ‘old men playing at cards’, Bridget thus saves him, but at the expense of herself. For He played with the merry old men And thought not of evil chance, Until one bore Bridget his bride Away from the merry dance.

(VP 145)

What is most peculiar at this point in the poem is the relationship between Bridget and her fairy kidnapper: He bore her away in his arms, The handsomest young man there, And his neck and his breast and his arms Were drowned in her long dim hair.

(VP 145)

4 See Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 30.

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Dream

Any expected pathos of the bride victim stolen away from her helpless husband is complicated by this image in which Bridget’s fairy partner is enveloped in that same ‘long dim hair’ of which O’Driscoll dreamed. ‘Long dim hair’ is an obsessively recurring attribute of the beloved in The Wind among the Reeds, the book in which ‘The Host of the Air’ was collected. Being covered over by that hair in poem after poem is, for the poet, the consummation of love he longs for and fears. In what appears to be a standard changeling bride ballad, ‘The Host of the Air’ hints at a terror of female sexuality, the long dim hair that not only bewitches O’Driscoll but appears to drown her fairy lover. Yeats changes the original ballad ending in which ‘the husband found the keeners keening his wife when he got to the house’, and which he kept in the Wrst published version of the poem (VP 804, 145), and substitutes instead an ambivalent, only partial return to normality: O’Driscoll scattered the cards And out of his dream awoke: Old men and young men and young girls Were gone like a drifting smoke; But he heard high up in the air A piper piping away, And never was piping so sad, And never was piping so gay.

(VP 145)

The dream vision, by virtue of being a dream vision, allows for an open interpretation of its expressiveness: the haunted doubleness of the lived world, the vulnerability of love, the fears that are its repressed other. UTOPIAN VISION Dream may be illusory appearance; one of its commonest rhyme words in Yeats is ‘seem’. Yet the reach of the dream beyond the ordinary can tell its own truths, as in ‘The Host of the Air’, or can command respect and admiration for its heroic amplitude. In ‘Against Unworthy Praise’, Yeats Wnds comfort for a lack of popular appreciation in the reminder that he has written ‘for a woman’s sake’. Enough if the work has seemed, So did she your strength renew, A dream that a lion had dreamed (VP 259)

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(Animals dream quite often in Yeats’s earlier poetry; in the 1890 ‘Street Dancers’ he even has ‘the camel’s dreaming eye’ (VP 733).) Attitudes towards the heroic dream are at their most conXicted in Yeats when it takes political form. There appears to be little sympathy for Eva GoreBooth’s suVragist and trades union activism in the elegy for herself and her older sister Con Markiewicz: I know not what the younger dreams— Some vague Utopia—and she seems, When withered old and skeleton-gaunt, An image of such politics.

(VP 475)

The tone is similar in ‘Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?’. One of the instances of wasted potential driving such old men to distraction is having seen ‘A Helen of social welfare dream, j Climb on a wagonette to scream’ (VP 626). Elizabeth Butler Cullingford thinks that Yeats could have been thinking of either of the Gore-Booth sisters here, but Daniel Albright maintains that it is Maud Gonne ‘to whom Yeats generally reserved the name Helen’.5 Either interpretation may be correct. But the invocation of Helen does conjure up the epic Wgure of female beauty Yeats recurrently identiWes with Gonne as the ‘woman Homer sung’ misplaced in a latter-day world unworthy of her heroic vision. ‘Why, what could she have done, being what she is? j Was there another Troy for her to burn?’ (VP 257). It is a similar eVect in ‘September 1913’ where the idealism of the past icons of Romantic Ireland has come to seem like delusion—‘all that delirium of the brave’ (VP 290). And the lines in ‘Easter 1916’ are not so diVerent, with their eVect of awe-struck distance from those who have given their lives for their dream: We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead.

The poem goes on to consider the possibility that they were deluded in that dream: And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died?

(VP 394)

It does not matter, the historical outcome is the same, ‘a terrible beauty is born’. 5 See Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 124; W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (2nd edn, London: Dent, 1994), 804.

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Dream

The political aspiration towards change is always more or less a dream, an imagination of things not in itself grounded in the real. Only history can falsify or validate that dreamed imagination. In ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ the emphasis is on the bitter realization of delusion: O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To aZict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed. (VP 431)

In the disenchanted wake of the ‘war to end all wars’, the Utopian meliorism of the Edwardian period looks like no more than crack-pated dreaming. This is not only an indictment of a general pre-War complacency, but speciWcally of Yeats’s own Anglo-Irish caste: We too had many pretty toys when young: A law indiVerent to blame or praise, To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays; Public opinion ripening for so long We thought it would outlive all future days.

(VP 428)

The conWdence in British colonial justice, the comfortably deferred anticipation of the panacea of Home Rule, all look naively childish in the aftermath of the Rising and the bloody atrocities of the War of Independence. ‘O but we dreamed to mend’. The Wrst-person plural is speciWc, the group of Anglo-Irish cultural nationalists including the poet, like-minded optimistic liberals before 1914, but it is also generic, a human tendency towards hopeful belief illustrated Wrst in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ by the faith of the ancient Greeks that their ‘ingenious lovely things’ (VP 428) could be protected against the destructiveness of time. Dream at its most basic in Yeats signiWes this general myopia in the face of the longterm truths of life and history. But the delusions of dreams take many forms, not merely the ordinary overoptimistic misapprehensions of the future. Dream may mediate between the actual and an imagined otherness that constitutes an alternative reality. Such a dreamed imagination may set the dreamer at odds with the normal rhythms of being, displacing him from a hold on the quotidian. Anyone, it seems, is open to such dream enchantment; the man who dreamed of Faeryland is an Everyman Wgure, O’Driscoll of ‘The Host of the Air’ might be any Sligo countryman. But

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there are those whose dreams are expressive of their singular, heroic personalities, and who seek to shape a world to match their vision. Yeats may disapprove of the political form this vision takes and see it as disastrously misguided, as in the cases of Gore-Booth, Markieviecz, and Gonne, or, if they are the heroes of 1798 and 1916, he may regard them with admiring wonder. With all of these, however, the poet can only look on and muse about the nature of the dream and its consequences. When it is the poet’s own dreams that are the material of his poetry, the issues are necessarily diVerent. IMAGINATION There are two epigraphs to the volume Responsibilities. In the critical interpretation of the development of Yeats’s poetic career, the emphasis has tended to fall largely on the Wrst one, the aphorism he seems to have coined and attributed to a suspiciously unnamed ‘Old Play’: ‘In dreams begins responsibility’. This has been taken as a declaration of the continuity between the dream-laden mysticism of the early verse and the newly astringent poetry of public responsibility heralded by the 1914 volume. As such it can be taken as the mark of a new maturity. But the second epigraph, from Confucius, points the other way: ‘How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams’ (VP 269). This is suggestive, rather, of the waning powers of the middle-aged writer, to whom inspiring vision now comes more rarely, a note sounded again in the ‘Closing Rhymes’, in which the ‘reed-throated whisperer’ is ‘not now as once j A clear articulation in the air’ (VP 320). Not only the Responsibilities collection, but the two volumes preceding it, In the Seven Woods and The Green Helmet, and the one following, The Wild Swans at Coole, which together constitute the middle Yeats, are full of illustrations of these contrasting attitudes: the belief in a high poetic vision to be enacted in an external public sphere, and a tired distance from younger ideals. The stakes are higher for dream in poetry when it is linked to the poet’s capacity for the imagination that makes poetry itself. Yeats could occasionally lend his dreams to a poetic persona as in the case of ‘Her Dream’, where the female protagonist’s shorn-oV locks are metamorphosed into the constellation ‘Berenice’s burning hair’ (VP 519).6 6 For the source dream, see Myth 358.

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Dream

More often, however, he owns them in the Wrst person, as with ‘A Dream of Death’: I dreamed that one had died in a strange place Near no accustomed hand . . .

(VP 123)

Traditionally, the form of the dream vision has allowed the poet liberation from the verisimilitudes of a ‘real’ situation, while oVering the possibility of symbolic meaning or vatic truths. The opening formula ‘I dreamed’, therefore, necessarily has a diVerent status from the dreaming of a folk-ballad Wgure such as O’Driscoll in ‘The Host of the Air’ Wrmly located, at least to begin with, in a ground distinct from the alien space of dreams. ‘A Dream of Death’ may be no more than a conventional lover’s premonitory fears of the loss of his beloved, his feeling of helplessness to protect her, and his deWant assertion of her beauty, but we experience all that from within the dreamer/poet’s consciousness.7 ‘His Dream’ is much less easily read and suggests more as a result. Yeats made clear in a note when he Wrst published the poem (in The Nation in 1908) how closely he followed the actual dream on which it was based: A few days ago I dreamed that I was steering a very gay and elaborate ship upon some narrow water with many people upon its banks, and there was a Wgure upon a bed in the middle of the ship. The people were pointing to the Wgure and questioning, and in my dream I sang verses which faded as I awoke, all but this fragmentary thought, ‘We call it, it has such dignity of limb, by the sweet name of Death’ (VP 253)

In the poem he heightens the ambiguities characteristic of dream psychology: I swayed upon the gaudy stern The butt-end of a steering-oar, And saw wherever I could turn A crowd upon a shore.

(VP 253)

From the source it is clear that ‘swayed’ must here mean ‘steered’ or ‘controlled’, but in the context it sounds more as though the poet is moved by the movement of the boat. This preWgures the way the attempted act of will fails under the force of collective emotion: 7 Jahan Ramazani associates the poem with ‘a troubling line of Romantic love elegies’ from Wordsworth to Hardy: Yeats and the Poetry of Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 21.

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And though I would have hushed the crowd, There was no mother’s son but said, ‘What is the Wgure in a shroud Upon a gaudy bed?’

(VP 253)

Some automaton impulse moves the poet, despite himself, to join the chorus of the crowd: Though I’d my Wnger on my lip, What could I but take up the song? And running crowd and gaudy ship Cried out the whole night long, Crying amid the glittering sea, Naming it with ecstatic breath, Because it has such dignity, By the sweet name of Death.

(VP 254)

With the instability of dream imagery, the poem Wgures the pull of the death wish towards an afterlife in which the individual soul is gathered into the congregation of the dead, the poet’s voice subsumed into their voices. Yeats’s 1908 note on ‘His Dream’ concluded: ‘I have made my poem out of my dream and the sentiment of my dream, and can almost say, as Blake did, ‘‘The Authors are in Eternity’’ ’ (VP 253).8 The ‘almost’ is signiWcant. In his discursive work Yeats frequently aYrmed his belief in the Great Memory, a storehouse of images liable to surface out of Spiritus Mundi.9 Yet rarely in his poems is he as unequivocally aYrmative about the non-subjective signiWcance of the dream vision. So he casts in the form of an open question the nature of the telepathic aYnity between his dream and that of his wife in ‘Towards Break of Day’: Was it the double of my dream The woman that by me lay Dreamed, or did we halve a dream Under the Wrst cold gleam of day?

(VP 398)

8 In a letter to Thomas Butts, 6 July 1803, Blake wrote of his long poem Milton, ‘I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity’ Blake, Poetry and Prose, 869. 9 For one of the most lucid and persuasive accounts by Yeats of how he ‘came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation’, see ‘Anima Mundi’, the second part of Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Myth 343–69)

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Fraternal or identical twin dreams—the poet is unable to say. Both nocturnal visions, his of the ‘waterfall j Upon Ben Bulben side’, hers of ‘the marvellous stag of Arthur’ (VP 398–9), adumbrate in their diVerent images the glory of an imaginative form beyond human grasp. The congruent dreams thus both symbolize the nature of dream itself, and in their appearance in separate but contiguous minds hint at a common consciousness to which they have no direct access. Night dreams give partial or occluded glimpses of ‘things discovered in the deep j Where only body’s laid asleep’ (VP 138). Reverie, however, that centrally important Yeatsian mode, may overtake the waking mind as well, and move it into a twilight zone between the conscious and the half-conscious. ‘Among School Children’ opens with Yeats’s most externally situated self-portrait: ‘I walk through the long schoolroom questioning’ (VP 443). Here is Senator Yeats visiting St Otteran’s Montessori School in Waterford in 1926, as seen by those he is visiting: the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

(VP 443)

The next stanza then begins with an apparently complete jump of mode: I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking Wre . . .

(VP 443)

The strange periphrasis ‘Ledaean body’ takes some decoding; readers need to remember that Helen was the daughter of Leda and that within Yeatsian symbology Helen nearly always stands for Gonne. It is as though we, like the dreaming mind, must struggle to construe the Ledaean body into an actual person. The stanza goes on to reveal that the dreamed image is a recollection of a recollection, the poet remembering how, in his youthful past, he listened sympathetically to ‘a tale that she j Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event j That changed some childish day to tragedy’ (VP 443). But it is not until the third stanza that this is attached back to the actual experience of the Wrst stanza: I look upon one child or t’other there And wonder if she stood so at that age (VP 443–4)

The discontinuity of the dream interim, the moment of reverie, suggests the involuntary projection of images onto a mental screen supervening between perceiver and perceived.

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Yeats’s aspiration to celebrate Gonne’s haunting beauty is often expressed in terms of dreams, where the word edges towards a discouraged sense of unreality. In ‘AWoman Homer Sung’, a contrast is set up between the torturing agony of young love, caught between jealousy and ardent admiration, and the implied present of the middle-aged writer: now, being grey, I dream that I have brought To such a pitch my thought That coming time can say, ‘He shadowed in a glass What thing her body was.’

(VP 255)

It is the conventional claim of the love-poet to capture for posterity the necessarily Xeeting corporeal moment of the body’s perfection. But here that claim is undercut by the word ‘dream’, with its undertow of mistaken fancy, and the insubstantiality of ‘shadowed’. The Wnal stanza conWrms this sense of the inadequacy of the representation of the lost youthful body: For she had Wery blood When I was young, And trod so sweetly proud As ’twere upon a cloud, A woman Homer sung, That life and letters seem But an heroic dream.

(VP 255)

It is ‘an heroic dream’, a beauty worthy of Homer’s epic, but by implication no more than a dream for this latter-day post-Homeric poet. One of Yeats’s most defeated male menopause poems, ‘Men Improve with the Years’, was inspired by Maud’s daughter Iseult: I am worn out with dreams; A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams

(VP 329)

At Wrst glance it might appear that the ‘with’ is instrumental, the poet is worn down with dreams, as the stone statue of the sea-god in the fountain is eroded by the water that plays continually over it, a reading enforced by the rhyming of ‘dreams’ with ‘streams’. However, as the poem goes on, the emphasis falls more on the contrast between the petriWed Wgure of the poet, weather-worn by the passing of time, and the stream of life that Xows round him; this is the central image of

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‘Easter 1916’—‘the stone’s in the midst of all’ (VP 393)—put to very diVerent purpose. He regards the attactiveness of the young woman with a pure aesthetic enjoyment, undisturbed by the kinetic force of desire: And all day long I look Upon this lady’s beauty As though I had found in a book A pictured beauty, Pleased to have Wlled the eyes Or the discerning ears, Delighted to be but wise, For men improve with the years

(VP 329)

Implicit here, though unstated, is the reverse perspective: to the then 21-year-old Iseult—the poem was written in 1916—the famous poet, old friend and frequent visitor of her mother, might well have appeared merely monumental. There is a sort of protest against that view in the lines that follow: And yet, and yet, Is this my dream, or the truth?

(VP 329)

Is resignation to growing old gracefully all that is left to the poet, must he accept the death of desire as inevitable, or is that itself his deluded dream? ‘This’ may refer back to the wryly sententious platitude, ‘men improve with the years’; but it might also look forward to the outburst of the next two lines: O would that we had met When I had my burning youth!

(VP 329)

That, rather, may be the fantasy, the impossible dream of a time warp in which the generation gap is miraculously closed. The poem then dies back into a diminuendo repetition: But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams.

(VP 329)

Repeated here, the word dream takes to itself the full range of potential meanings the poem has brought into play: the formal beauty of the lady, unanimated by sexual longing; the illusion of settled maturation in the middle-aged poet; the imagination of an impossible romance.

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No poem of Yeats better catches the discouraged mood of middle ageing than ‘Broken Dreams’, and yet it too doubles back upon that mood in a remarkable way. It is one of his most direct love poems, written in a free verse that at times seems almost like prose. It opens with the plain, apparently face-to-face statement: ‘There is grey in your hair’. The ‘Broken Dreams’ of the title suggest fragmentary images, the last remaining vestiges of youthful beauty. ‘Dream’ for ‘remember’ is used in a similar context in ‘When You are Old’ where the beloved in old age is told to ‘dream of the soft look j Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep’ (VP 121). The beauty of Maud Gonne in ‘Broken Dreams’ survives only as ‘vague memories, nothing but memories’ (VP 356). The brokenness of the body itself is matched by the insubstantiality of memory as a medium. Yeats deliberately withholds the word ‘dream’ from the text of the poem until its third last line: All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.

(VP 357)

The assonantal equation of ‘dream’ and ‘rhyme’ here highlights the matching of subject to form. The desultory old man’s maunderings over the lost beauty of his beloved Wnds its Wtting shape in a poem where rhyme is erratic and irregular. And yet in the centre of this self-deprecating, self-undoing poem that enacts ageing and loss, there is the retrothrust of a totally contradictory emotion: Vague memories, nothing but memories. But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed. The certainty that I shall see that lady Leaning or standing or walking In the Wrst loveliness of womanhood, And with the fervour of my youthful eyes, Has set me muttering like a fool.

(VP 356)

Certainty—not hope, or wish, or even expectation, but certainty. Elsewhere, as in ‘King and No King’, Yeats saw Gonne’s Catholic belief in an afterlife as one of the things that divided them: I that have not your faith, how shall I know That in the blinding light beyond the grave We’ll Wnd so good a thing as that we have lost?

(VP 258)

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The lines in ‘Broken Dreams’, by contrast, are rendered extraordinary by their literal imagination of the resurrection as a bodily event. The poem’s whole sequence of melancholy reXections is based on the inevitable disappearance of physical beauty leaving nothing but vague memories. Yet ‘in the grave all, all, shall be renewed’ and so completely transWgured that the poet implores his beloved to keep unchanged her one less than beautiful feature, ‘the hands that I have kissed, j For old sake’s sake’ (VP 357). ‘Broken Dreams’ marks oV the profound gap between two orders of imagination: the heart-rendingly human awareness of the frailty of the ageing body and rambling mind, and some quite other certitude of faith in a life beyond death. Faith and doubt, scepticism and belief play continuously through the word ‘dream’ as it represents the mind and imagination of the poet. There is more here than merely the bipolar swings between conWdence and dejection in the signiWcance of his/her own work that aZict almost every writer. What is at issue is the way the image-making powers of the poet relate, if at all, to images drawn from a deeper pool of consciousness than his own. For the medieval poet, the dream vision allowed for a coded representation of the truths of revealed religion. Romantics such as Keats might feel obliged to content themselves with negative capability, with only occasional revelations ‘caught from the Penetralium of mystery’.10 Yeats was a Blakean rather than a Keatsian in his need for a systematic mythological structure as his imaginative groundbase: hence, eventually, A Vision. But his dream poems remain poised between a psychologically credible rendering of their dream-like irrational fragmentariness and the hint of more abiding certainties, symbolically expressed. In Yeats’s sense of the dreaming imagination there is also the constant awareness of the physical incarnation of the dreamer and the beauty of which he dreams. Wallace Stevens could have been speaking for Yeats in the famous lines from ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’: Beauty is momentary in the mind— The Wtful tracing of a portal; But in the Xesh it is immortal.11

Yeats, like Stevens here, could reverse the love-poet’s usual claim to give a perpetual afterlife to the ephemerally beautiful body of the loved one. 10 Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817, in D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (eds), English Critical Texts (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 257. 11 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955), 91.

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On the contrary, all his years of laborious work to honour and commemorate Gonne might seem ‘but an heroic dream’. Growing older, the poet is not only conscious of his own waning powers of vision matching his ageing physical being, his inability any longer to ‘meet the Prince of Chang in my dreams’. He is haunted by the fear that his imagination of formal beauty may be dream only, and not a Wgure of the incarnate truth. His struggle throughout his career was to Wnd a means so to embed the oneiric poetic imagination in the lived world that it could convincingly lay claim to revelation. REVEL ATION Struggle is certainly the word for The Shadowy Waters, the work that Yeats laboured for so many years to re-cast as dramatic poem and stage play. The poet’s eVort to Wnd concrete realization for one of his most ethereal conceptions is matched by the quest of the hero Forgael into ever more shadowy waters in pursuit of the woman that will embody his dream. In the revised 1906 poetic version that he included in the Collected Poems, Forgael expounds his beliefs to his loyal henchman Aibric, who cannot understand why his captain has steered their pirate ship into seas so desolately void of piratical pickings. The world’s promises, pirate booty and the like, he assures Aibric, are deceptive: We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh, And Wnd their laughter sweeter to the taste For that brief sighing. (VP 228)

Love too, Forgael argues, is haunted by something other than its object: never have two lovers kissed but they Believed there was some other near at hand, And almost wept because they could not Wnd it.

(VP 229)

The pragmatic Aibric remarks that this may be so at twenty, but ‘in middle life j They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth, j And let the dream go by’ (VP 229). Such realist hedonism, Forgael insistently rebuts: It’s not a dream, But the reality that makes our passion As a lamp shadow—no—no lamp, the sun.

(VP 229)

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This is Yeats at his most Platonist, echoing the allegory in the Republic, where human reality can be no more than silhouettes on the wall of the cave. ‘All would be well’, Forgael continues later, Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, And get into their world that to the sense Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly Among substantial things; for it is dreams That lift us to the Xowing, changing world That the heart longs for.

(VP 230)

Forgael’s conception of dreams here involves two-way traYc. They are not just aspirations upward by man, but projections downward by the ‘Ever-living’, projections that come to us like will-of-the-wisp images, teasing us and leaving us unsatisWed. What is love itself, Even though it be the lightest of light love, But dreams that hurry from beyond the world To make low laughter more than meat and drink, Though it but set us sighing?

(VP 230)

At this point in the storybook narrative, the shadowy waters do miraculously yield up a richly laden ship satisfying the pirates’ needs, and bringing to Forgael the object of his quest in the queen Dectora. Having overcome, by the power of his magical harp, Dectora’s understandable antipathy to the man on whose orders her husband the king has just been killed, Forgael has found what he sought. He and Dectora, their love conXicts resolved, separate themselves from their companions, and journey on into the Shadowy Waters alone. The ending of the poem proclaims the possibility of attaining union with the eternal world from which the dreams come. Forgael concludes triumphantly: Beloved, having dragged the net about us, And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal; And that old harp awakens of itself To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams, That have had dreams for father, live in us.

(VP 252)

The net is the net of destiny which they have taken to themselves as an act of will; the harp, which has been Forgael’s magical instrument of poetic expression, can now play by itself to the grey birds, the disembodied souls that have been Forgael’s guide. The fulWlled yearning of the lovers for one another is the true incarnation of the images of the inWnite

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from which it derived. Yet this consummation can be achieved only in the death to which the lovers sail on. Mortal life cannot sustain the complete integration of dream in embodied form. In ‘The Phases of the Moon’ the desire for the realization of the beautiful is theorized as one aspect of the need for the anti-self, and located in the Wrst half of the lunar cycle. ‘From the Wrst crescent to the full’, the visionary Michael Robartes informs us, ‘the dream j But summons to adventure’ (VP 373). But as the moon waxes, the arduous yearning is for the union of soul with a perfect body, something that could only be achieved at Phase 15, where, at the full moon, no actual human life is possible. Hence, Aherne moralizes, ‘All dreams of the soul j End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body’ (VP 374). Yeats’s idea of love here is like that of Socrates in the Symposium, where he uses Diotima’s allegorical story of how desire is conceived by Poverty mating with Resource at the feast celebrating the birth of Aphrodite. Love is the need for the beautiful combined with the resourceful determination to pursue it. But where in Plato the ladder of love leads upward from physical objects to the form of the beautiful itself, for Yeats it must be sought in its material embodiment. It is this that Michael Robartes sees in the second of his two visions on the Hill of Cashel in ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’. The Wrst is of the nothingness associated with Phase 28, the extinction of self and being. The second is the image of the dancing girl at Phase 15, Xanked on the one side by the Sphinx and the other the Buddha, the one standing for Phases 12–14, the other for Phases 16–18. They represent, it appears from Yeats’s comments in A Vision, ‘the outward-looking mind, love and its lure, contrasted with introspective knowledge of the mind’s selfbegotten unity, an intellectual excitement’ and they stand ‘like heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the Wfteenth phase’ (V 207).12 It is this mystery that lives on with Robartes in the poem’s Wnal section: I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights held fast Or else my dreams that Xy If I should rub an eye, And yet in Xying Xing into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat 12 Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Autobiography by William B. Yeats. Copyright ß 1937 by W. B. yeats; copyright renewed ß by Bertha Georgie Yeats and Anne Butler Yeats. All rights reserved.

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Dream As though I had been undone By Homer’s Paragon

(VP 384)

The vision of the dancer that is the perfect incarnation of soul in body is ‘held fast’ in the deep sleep beyond dreams, but equally in the dreams from which it is so easy to wake oneself up. Even when awake, however, it leaves a disturbing obsessiveness with that unattainable object of desire. In ‘My Descendants’, the fourth part of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, Yeats could posit the reproductive urge as a realization of the image. Having inherited a vigorous mind From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams And leave a woman and a man behind As vigorous of mind . . .

(VP 422)

Here the poet, so long associated with unrequited desire, as the fulWlled married man and father of a son and daughter, proclaims proudly his potency to ‘nourish dreams’, to perpetuate physically the spirit he has inherited. But that mood hardly lasts longer than the time it takes to utter it, for the very next lines go on: and yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there’s but common greenness after that.

(VP 422)

Given the frailty of the Xesh, the inherent likelihood that his descendants will ‘lose the Xower j Through natural declension of the soul’ (VP 423), the poet must rely instead on the tower, ruined once again, as the physical monument to his individual life and its achievement in art. Yeats believed, or needed to believe, in an identiWcation between the creativity of the greatest human minds and the dynamic forces of the universe itself; he believed, or needed to believe, in the power of the image to animate material lives. He put it baldly and badly in his little 1893 poem ‘Wisdom and Dreams’, which he sensibly excluded from collection: Wisdom and dreams are one, For dreams are the Xowers ablow, And Wisdom the fruit of the garden: God planted him long ago. (VP 743)

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The relationship between dream and truth, and the role of art in imaging that truth, is put with inWnitely more skill and obliqueness at the other end of his career in ‘Under Ben Bulben’: Quattrocento put in paint On backgrounds for a God or Saint Gardens where a soul’s at ease; Where everything that meets the eye, Flowers and grass and cloudless sky, Resemble forms that are or seem When sleepers wake and yet still dream, And when it’s vanished still declare, With only bed and bedstead there, That heavens had opened. (VP 639)

The poem leads the eye away from the foregrounded iconic Wgures of the Renaissance painting to the sensuous idyll of the Edenic garden behind them. It is this that constitutes the revelation. But it is multiply hedged round with equivocation; the ‘gardens where a soul’s at ease’ only ‘resemble forms that are or seem’, the wakened dreamers must deny the reality of the bare bedroom to persist in believing in their dreams. And yet the run of the lines gives the conclusive weight of a full pause on the mid-line caesura to the declaration that ‘heavens had opened’. The eVect is characteristic. Yeats holds on doggedly to the possibility of revelation expressed in the image, while always remaining aware of its ontological uncertainty. His philosophical position could shift radically from high Platonism to Berkeleyan solipsism. The twists and turns of dialectic within individual poems demanded at times a strategic rejection of one or other point of view, as in the violent renunciation of Plato and Plotinus in the third section of ‘The Tower’. This is to be expected from the poet of masks, of self and anti-self. What is striking is the way the shifting registers of ‘dream’ in the poems allow for a multidirectional circulation between diVerent apprehensions of reality and imagination. Dream may be placed as empty fantasy in contrast to a real world of the actual; it may represent the fallacious conception of limited human beings in the face of the immutable laws of fate and destiny; it can express the aspirational ideals always just beyond human realization; it can express the truths of eternity if only in a dark and partial symbology. Dream can be simultaneously both truth and illusion, mad obsession and inspired revelation, incompatible alternatives encoded in the one word.

4 Place Names In its earliest printed version, published as ‘The Stolen Bride’ in The Bookman in 1893, the opening lines of ‘The Host of the Air’ read as follows: O’Driscoll drove with a song The wild duck and the drake From the tall and the tufted reeds Of the drear Heart Lake.

(VP 143)

This was also the form in which they appeared also a year later in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club. But when the poem was collected in The Wind among the Reeds, the reeds from which O’Driscoll disturbs the duck and drake were those ‘Of the drear Hart Lake’. From ‘Heart’ to ‘Hart’ is not a very signiWcant change, one might well imagine. The poem, as Yeats explained in a note in The Bookman, had an oral origin: I heard the story on which this ballad is founded from an old woman at Balesodare, Sligo. She repeated me a Gaelic poem on the subject, and then translated it to me. I have always regretted not having taken down her words, and as some amends for not having done so, have made this ballad. (VP 143)

It would be understandable, therefore, if the poet had heard ‘Hart’ as ‘Heart’ and was correcting his own mistake when he came to reprint the poem in The Wind among the Reeds. However, it may not be quite such a trivial change as it appears. There are, in fact, implausible as it may seem, two diVerent lakes within a couple of miles of one another in a single area of Sligo: Heart Lake and Hart Lake. Lough Aghree, as it is now known, literally meaning ‘the lake of the heart’, lies ‘[a]t the foot of The Ladies Brae at the Skreen end of the pass through the Ox Mountains to Coolaney. The name has two attributions: Wrstly, it is heart-shaped, and secondly there is a local story of drowning, after which the heart of a horse was seen Xoating on the lake.’1 This is certainly the lake 1 James P. McGarry with Edward Malins, Place Names in the Writings of William Butler Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), 52.

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that Yeats originally had in mind. In the essay ‘Kidnappers’ in The Celtic Twilight, where he tells the story of ‘The Host of the Air’, he describes it as ‘a gloomy and tree-bordered pond, a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the Heart Lake’ (Myth 75). However, there is also a Hart Lake, on Ordnance Survey maps Lough Minnaun, also in the Ox Mountains, also on the pass from Coolaney to Skreen but a little further south, which took its name, McGarry tells us, ‘from the family of Hart living beside it’.2 So it is possible Yeats realized that he had got the two lakes mixed up, and punctiliously changed the spelling to register the right place. But why would he bother? Did he self-consciously want to avoid the folklore associations of Heart Lake, with the drowning and the horse’s heart as a distracting irrelevance to his changeling ballad of the stolen bride? Or was it merely that Hart Lake, with no romantic aura of the heart, seemed to him more blankly and appropriately ‘drear’ as a setting? The case of the twinned Hart/Heart lakes brings into focus the issue of how Yeats uses place names in his poetry. One more instance may further illustrate the matter. The Wrst lines of ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, Wrst poem in The Wind among the Reeds, gives a topography for the fairy gathering: The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare

(VP 140)

Knocknarea, the mountain to the west of Sligo topped by Maeve’s Mount, was considered familiar enough not to need explanation. But ‘Clooth-na-bare’ was suYciently obscure to rate a considerable chunk of the astonishingly detailed note that Yeats appended to the poem in The Wind among the Reeds. First he cited his own account of the legend in The Celtic Twilight. According to this version, Clooth-na-Bare was a mortal enchanted by the fairies who ‘went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the Birds’ Mountain at Sligo’ (Myth 79).3 This would make topographic sense for the poem: Slieve Daeane, the ‘mountain of the two birds’, lies southeast of Knocknarea, overlooking Lough Gill, well within fairy riding distance. What Yeats calls Lough Ia now appears as Lough Dagee, the ‘lake of the two geese’. 2 Ibid. 3 This wording, from the essay ‘The Untiring Ones’, is slightly diVerent from the version given in The Wind among the Reeds note, reproduced in VP 801.

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In his Wind among the Reeds note, he goes on to a learned account of the drowned changeling: Clooth-na-bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places. Mr O’Grady found her haunting Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac Buillia. (VP 802)

This is Yeats on his high antiquarian horse; the philological assurance of ‘evidently’—‘evidently a corruption’—is splendid.4 He is drawing into his local legend the old woman of Beare, one of the most pervasive Wgures in Irish mythology. But by 1903, he seems to have forgotten his own identiWcation with all its carefully marshalled variants. For in ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’ ‘Clooth-na-bare’ appears to have become a mountain: ‘The yellow pool has overXowed high up on Cloothna-Bare’ (VP 207). Daniel Albright, in the gloss of this line in his edition of the poems, does the best he can for the poet: ‘It is uncertain whether Yeats meant a lake, or (incorrectly) a mountain’.5 In fact, it would be wrong even if Yeats did mean a lake; according to his own earlier account, the place is Lough Ia, not Clooth-na-Bare who drowned herself in it. The line in ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’ comes at the beginning of the third stanza. What Yeats needs is a third place to match the two Sligo locations he has used in the opening two stanzas: The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand


The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea. (VP 206–7)

His Wrst shot had been ‘Dark and dull and earthy the stream of Drumahair’, but he was evidently unhappy with that.And it was at this point thatCloothna-Bare came to his rescue, with just the right rhythm, associated in his mind with Knocknarea from ‘Hosting of the Sidhe’. So, for the purposes of this poem, the old woman of Beare becomes a mountain in Sligo. Places and place names Wgure largely in Yeats’s poetry, particularly the early poetry. They are among the crucial signs marking out his Irishness, 4 The Celtic scholar John V. Kelleher unkindly calls Yeats’s note ‘a frustrating mishmash of misremembered misquotation of bad nineteenth-century pseudo-learning’. See ‘Yeats’s Use of Irish Materials’, Tri-Quarterly, 4 (Fall 1965), 115–25, quoted in Mary Helen Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980), 146. 5 W. B. Yeats, The Poems ed. Daniel Albright (2nd edn, London: Dent, 1994), 488.

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his Sligoness. Yet it is hard to be sure just how much they signify, in what way and to whom. The gathering of local folklore was of enormous importance to him. Many of his poems, like ‘The Host of the Air’, originated in stories, poems, and ballads he heard among the country people. But to what extent is topographic legend stored within the speciWc place names of the poems? Was the decision to choose Hart rather than Heart Lake informed by the folkloric associations of one rather than the other? We must remember always that we are dealing with a poet who did not himself speak Irish, who was likely to be dependent on friends such as Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory for the interpretation of Irish-derived names of places. For all his display of learning in the gloss on Clooth-na-Bare, he would therefore have heard Irish place names primarily as sounds rather than meanings. In many cases, as in ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’, it is the sound rather than the signiWcance that he needs in the poem. And if Yeats was a nonIrish-speaking Irish poet, his main target audience in the period when these place name-laden poems Wrst appeared were British readers who would not have known Knocknarea from a hole in the head. ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’ was initially published in The National Observer, edited by the strongly imperialist W. E. Henley, as were ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’. Place names in Yeats tell stories, act as landmarks, merely sound Irish, depending on how you see them or hear them. The aim of this chapter is to explore the multivalence of that seeing and hearing. SLIGO: HOME PL ACES ‘DrumcliV and Rosses were, are, and ever shall be, please Heaven! places of unearthly resort. I have lived near by them and in them, time after time, and thereby gathered much fairy lore’ (Myth 88). So Yeats begins his essay on ‘DrumcliV and Rosses’ in The Celtic Twilight. The Sligo locality was so important in his imagination because of its mythological associations, because of its fairy legends, but above all because it contained ‘places of unearthly resort’ on his own home territory. Ben Bulben Wgured in the Irish epic poetic tradition as the traditional site of Diarmuid’s fatal wounding in the boar-hunt, climax of the tale of Diarmuid and Grainne from the Fianna cycle. Maeve’s Mount on the top of Knocknarea was the legendary burial site of the ruler of Connacht, adversary of Ulster in the Ta´in. For Yeats there was no clear

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distinction between the mythological and the folkloric. The fairies were the Tuatha de Danaan, the lost gods of pagan Ireland, and Maeve was ‘a great queen of the western Sidhe’ (VP 801). She could equally be identiWed, as she is in John Sherman, with the English ‘Mab of the fairies’ ( JS & D 76). The places of Sligo were sites of intersection between the heroic world of epic, the otherworld of the supernatural, and the immediately familiar landscape of the poet’s childhood. Sligo was for Yeats the primal reality from which banishment to England had exiled him. Its status as his own sacred place of origin reinforced its sacredness as the haunt of heroes and fairies. It was the more authentically unheimlich because it was home. To name its places in poetry was a way of invoking this double magic. ‘The Stolen Child’ was a key poem in Yeats’s appropriation of the local. ‘The Madness of King Goll’, written in 1884, apparently a year before his meeting with John O’Leary normally considered the source of Yeats’s commitment to things Irish, seems to have been his Wrst poem with an Irish mythical setting.6 There the place names are mere epic ampliWers; Goll’s reign extends from ‘Ith to Emain’ (variously spelled ‘Eman’ and ‘Emen’, pronounced to rhyme with ‘seamen’, VP 81), that is, from the coast of Donegal to Emain Macha, seat of the kings of the Red Branch, near Armagh on the other side of the country. But it was not until ‘The Stolen Child’ that he wrote a poem based speciWcally around the places of Sligo. Irish literary traditions supplied him with plenty of precedents for incorporating place names into poetry in laments and love songs, and the translations and adaptations into English by J. J. Callanan, James Clarence Mangan, and Samuel Ferguson would have made them familiar to Yeats. His most immediate role model, however, was William Allingham, whose home territory was Ballyshannon in Donegal, just a few bays up from Sligo. For all Yeats’s reservations about Allingham’s work, there was an evident identiWcation with one who ‘grew up, Wlling his mind with all the quaint legends and fancies that linger still in such odd corners of the world . . . To feel the entire fascination of his poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent one’s childhood, like the present writer, in one of those seaboard Connaught towns’ (UP I 259–60).

6 For the 1884 date see Wayne K. Chapman, ‘W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Writing, Editing and Dating of Yeats’s Poems of the Mid-1920s and 1930s, with a Chronology of the Composition of the Poems’, Yeats Annual, 15 (2002), 144.

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‘Adieu to Belashanny’, one of Allingham’s best-known poems, is a classic emigrant’s farewell, in which the exile catalogues all the places he is leaving behind along ‘the winding banks of Erne’: Farewell to you, Kildoney lads, and them that pull an oar, A lug-sail set, or haul a net, from the Point to Mullaghmore.7

Allingham’s equally anthologized poem ‘The Fairies’ is close kin to Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’, with a similar setting—‘Up the airy mountain, j Down the rushy glen’—and a comparable story of fairy kidnapping: ‘They stole little Bridget j For seven years long’. They even have one place name in common—Allingham’s ‘old King [ . . . ] crosses, j On his stately journeys j From Slieveleague to Rosses’—though they are diVerent Rosses, Allingham’s in Donegal, Yeats’s in Sligo. Yeats, however, eliminates Allingham’s fanciful whimsy—‘They live on crispy pancakes j Of yellow tide foam’—and denies his readers the reassuringly picturesque sight of the pixies in ‘Green jacket, red cap j And white owl’s feather’.8 In his poem we only hear the seductive voices of the fairies luring the stolen child to themselves. And the natural night world in which they move is precisely located in the restricted Sligo countryside with no giant journeys ‘on a bridge of white mist’ from the massive sea cliVs of Slieveleague at the northwest corner of Donegal to the Rosses many miles up the coast. The poem’s opening sets the reader down by Lough Gill: Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island

(VP 86).

Lough Gill is in fact so dotted with islands that there is an embarrassment of choice as to which one might be intended here. However, Slishwood Island East is closest to the tip of the tree-covered headland where it slopes down to the lake. Whichever the island, the correct name is Slish Wood, though, not Sleuth Wood or ‘Slewth Wood’ as Yeats wrote it in early printings of the poem. Slish comes from ‘the Irish word ‘‘slios’’, meaning ‘‘sloped’’ or ‘‘inclined’’ ’, and McGarry suggests that ‘Sleuth’ is also ‘derived from an Irish word ‘‘Sliu’’ meaning a slope or slant.’ He goes on to say that ‘Although the name Sleuth Wood seems unknown to residents in that locality, it is possible the poet heard it so 7 William Allingham, Poems, ed. John Hewitt (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1967), 39. 8 Ibid. 24.

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called by local inhabitants.’9 Or misheard it. Elsewhere, in his prose, Yeats seems happy to use now one form of the name, now another.10 For the purposes of ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘Sleuth’ may have sounded stealthier. A literal topography is not the issue with the movement of the fairies. We are not called upon to imagine the fairies on the southern shores of Lough Gill in stanza one, trooping out to ‘furthest Rosses’, the long Wnger of land on the northern side of Sligo Bay, in stanza two, and then in stanza three on up to Glencar Lake in the valley of the DrumcliV River further north again. For many of Yeats’s readers these will be no more than evocative names, Wt settings for the entrancingly beautiful but slightly sinister activities of the fairies. But for the poet the proximity and the familiarity of these places give them a special resonance and power. To say ‘Sleuth Wood’ was to conjure up that particular promontory with its adjoining islet and imagine its night occupants. The ‘furthest Rosses’ of Dead Man’s Point and Rosses Point, where the fairies weave their suberotic ‘olden dances, j Mingling hands and mingling glances’, were further out towards the sea even than his uncle George Pollexfen’s house, where he so often stayed in the summer and heard local fairy lore from the second-sighted servant Mary Battle. The names, surface sounds to a reader, were to Yeats depth-charged with memory and meaning. At times Yeats could choose place names on a purely associative basis. There never was, nor could have been a Wddler of Dooney as in the popular ballad that closes The Wind among the Reeds. Dooney Rock is a picturesque outcrop that fronts Lough Gill, not a village or townland. Yeats explained: The places mentioned in the poem are all in County Sligo. Dooney Rock is a great rock on the edge of Lough Gill. I had been to many picnics there and in gratitude called my Wddler by its name. (UP II 496)

McGarry seems to be rationalizing when he explains that ‘in Yeats’time the Rock was a meeting place for outdoor country dances on Sunday evenings, when the music was supplied by James Howley, a blind Wddler from Ballysadare’.11 Perhaps, but it seems more likely that the remembered 9 McGarry, Place Names, 82–3. 10 See for example, ‘Sleuth Wood away to the south looked as though cut out of green beryl’ (Myth 175) and ‘I was well into Slish Wood by bedtime’ (A 72). 11 McGarry, Place Names, 41.

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pleasure of lakeside picnics is transformed into the irresistible joy aroused by the Wddler: When I play on my Wddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea

(VP 178).

It is true, as Yeats says, that all the places in the poem are in Sligo, but in the Wrst version the Wddler’s sober clerical relations were somewhat diVerently located: My brother is priest of Kilbarnet, My cousin of Rosnaree.

Yeats then revised this to: My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet, My brother in Mocharabuiee.

(VP 178)

Brother and cousin swap parishes for the sake of rhythm and alliteration. In ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’, the places are once again all plausibly grouped in the neighbourhood of Sligo town: Dromahair at the east end of Lough Gill, just into the neighbouring county of Leitrim; Lissadell the peninsula on the northern side of DrumcliV Bay; the ‘well of Scanavin’, that is Tubberscanavin, the village a mile south of Collooney; Lugnagall, the hollow (not as Yeats has it the ‘hill’) under the cliV of Cope’s Mountain across from Ben Bulben. In this poem Yeats perfects the technique Wrst employed in ‘The Stolen Child’, using a separate named location for each stanza. But here there is no necessary connection between the places and the Faeryland of which the man dreams. He was thinking of his beloved as he ‘stood among a crowd at Dromahair’. ‘His mind ran all on money cares and fears’ as ‘he wandered by the sands of Lissadell’. He planned his ‘sudden vengeance’ on his ‘mockers’, while ‘he mused upon the well of Scanavin’. He was buried ‘under the hill of Lugnagall’ (VP 126–8). Unlike Oisin, who is whisked oV by Niamh in succession to the palpably otherworld Islands of Dancing, Victory, and Forgetfulness, the dream of Faeryland is an alternative universe haunting the ordinary. It is not fairies, mysterious night denizens of speciWc lakes and lands that sing to the man; it is Wsh on a Wsherman’s stall, a lugworm in the sand, a knotgrass or the worms of the grave that proclaim another vision of things, making ordinary human experiences of love, money, anger, even death seem unreal and unsatisfying. At one level, the fact that the man dreams of Faeryland in a succession of Sligo

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places is an irrelevance here. You can dream of Faeryland anywhere. What Dromahair, Lissadell, Scanavin, and Lugnagall have in common is an iamb and a half in length and an easy terminal rhyme. What then of Innisfree, Yeats’s most famous Sligo place in what remained to the end of his life his most famous poem, however much he hated the fact? Remarkably for the tiny island it is, barely out from the shore in Lough Gill, there was a choice of legend and history associated with it. It Wgures in the last entry for the year 1244 in the Annals of the Four Masters: ‘Farrel Mac Tagadain was treacherously slain by Conor Mac Tiernan on Inishfree, an island in Lough Gill.’12 W. G. Wood-Martin, a contemporary of Yeats, whose history of Sligo he certainly knew, relates ‘an interesting legend, concerning the little island of Inishfree, or the heathery island’.13 Some luscious-looking but poisonous fruit grew on the island, reserved for the gods and guarded by a dragon. At the demand of the daughter of a local chief, ‘a young warrior named Free’, went to fetch some of the fruit; he succeeded in killing the dragon, but badly wounded, ate some of the fruit and returned dying as a result. His lover, learning of what had happened, also ate the fruit, died too and both were buried on the island. Yeats uses a variant of this story for his poem ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’, published in 1893. An author’s note gave the background: ‘It is said that an enchanted tree grew once on the little lake-island of Innisfree, and that its berries were, according to one legend, poisonous to mortals, and according to another, able to endow them with more than mortal powers’ (VP 742). The legend, as both Wood-Martin and Yeats tell it, has obvious echoes of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. Yeats’s poem starts as though it is going to dramatize the tale of the warrior Free: Beloved, hear my bitter tale!— Now making busy with the oar, Now Xinging loose the slanting sail, I hurried from the woody shore, And plucked small fruits on Innisfree. (Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!)

(VP 742)

12 John O’Donovan, Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters, III (Dublin: Hodges, Smith, 1885; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1966), 313. O’Donovan’s note on the name reads: ‘Inishfree, Inis Fraoich, i.e. the Island of the Heath.—This island retains its name to this day. It lies near the extremity of Lough Gill, where it receives the River Buanaid (Bonet) from the County Leitrim’ (313 n). 13 W. G. Wood-Martin, History of Sligo, County and Town (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1882), i. 63–4.

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However, what befalls the speaker in the poem is not a dragon Wght and death by berry poisoning but fairy enchantment. A ‘faery multitude’ throws him fruit that removes him from the ordinary world of love and battle. In the last stanza he is under the spell of the ‘Danaan quicken tree’: Cast out all hope, cast out all fear, And taste with me the faeries’ meat, For while I blamed them I could hear Dark Joan call the berries sweet, Where Niam heads the revelry. (Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!) (VP 743)14

Yeats never reprinted this poem after its solitary outing in The Bookman. And in ‘The Lake Isle’ he created a very diVerent version of Innisfree, shorn of all its legendary attachments, without dragons, enchanted fruit, or fairy sirens. He drew instead on his own youthful myth about the island, a fantasy of living there alone. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth, he tells of staying with his uncle and ‘nursing a new ambition. My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innishfree’ (A 71–2). Later, in The Trembling of the Veil, he described the incident in his lonely life in London in the 1880s that gave him the poem: I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my Wrst lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. (A 153)

It may seem ironic that this most plangent evocation of lake solitude should have been inspired by a metropolitan window display. But in Yeats’s Wctional use of this moment, in his early pseudonymously published novel John Sherman, he makes it clear that everything in London, however improbably, reminded him of Sligo, here called Ballah: Ballah was being constantly suggested to him. The grey corner of a cloud slanting its rain upon Cheapside called to mind by some remote suggestion the clouds rushing and falling in cloven surf on the seaward steep of a mountain north of Ballah. ( JS & D 56) 14 ‘Dark Joan’, Yeats tells us in his note, ‘is a famous faery who often goes about the roads disguised as a clutch of chickens’ (VP 742).

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In this version, it is the strange waterfall above Glencar, Sruth-innagaidh-an-Aird, where the water seems to blow back up the cliV-face, which is suggested to him by the sight in the shop window: Delayed by a crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling of water near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-jet balanced a wooden ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract with a long Gaelic name, that leaped crying into the Gate of the Winds at Ballah. ( JS & D 56–7)

In this passage, it is actually an ‘osier-covered Chiswick eyot’ in the Thames that recalls ‘the little islet called Innisfree’, given here its most accurate description—‘Its rocky centre, covered with many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake’—and a lyrical evocation of his childhood dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, Wshing, or lying on the island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water and the quivering of the bushes— full always of unknown creatures—and going out at morning to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds. ( JS & D 57)

This is a hunter–gatherer idyll, not the cultivator of bean rows and beehives. The several variant accounts of the poem’s origins and inspiration make it clear that Innisfree was a talisman Sligo Yeats carried in his head rather than an actual place. In his Reveries account of his night-time walk out towards the island he misplaces it ‘opposite Slish Wood’, turning it into the ‘leafy island’ of ‘The Stolen Child’, whereas it is in fact much further down the south shore of Lough Gill. When on a 1918 visit to Sligo with his wife George, he rowed in vain round Lough Gill trying to Wnd Innisfree.15 It is indeed the non-speciWc, generic nature of the poem’s image of escape that provided the basis for its extraordinary success. It could speak to any homesick exile, most famously to Robert Louis Stevenson, stuck out in Samoa, who found it ‘simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart’ (CL I 404 n). The eVect has been treated captiously by Hugh Kenner, who casts his colder eye on the poem’s supposed Irishness: [W]hile W.B. Yeats was forming his Wrst style, English stylists were determining what he could say with it. One result was to suVuse his Irish Eden with unreality. ‘Noon a purple glow,’ indeed!—not a Lough Gill noon, that noon, an aesthetic noon.16 15 See Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 186. 16 Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye (New York: Knopf, 1983), 51.

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It is certainly true that the poem’s sumptuous language is in striking contrast with the asceticism of the ideal it proclaims. A more sympathetic view is to admire the skill with which Yeats weaves together his composite and eclectic idyll. There is warrant for the purpleness of the glow of noon in the island’s name, the heathery island: ‘Yeats explained in a radio broadcast that this referred to the reXection of heather in the water.’17 But, as Kenner points out, the eVectiveness of the opening ‘I will arise and go now’ derives from ‘St. Luke’s account of the homesick Prodigal Son (Luke xv.18)’.18 The abrupt announcement recalls the Biblical drama of the moment when the hired man feeding swine decides to return to his father’s house. On the other hand, the beans, so improbable a crop on the wooded rock that is Innisfree, must come from Thoreau. A whole chapter of Walden is devoted to ‘The Bean-Weld’, Thoreau’s account of his summer spent planting, hoeing, and harvesting two and a half acres of beans.19 It is a far cry from Thoreau’s advocacy of organic market gardening, his meticulously delivered accounts of income and expenditure, to Yeats’s modest and delightfully uncommercial ‘nine bean-rows’. But the Thoreauesque ideal of natural self-suYciency is one essential component in the poem’s making. All of this goes by the name of Innisfree. For English-speaking readers in 1890 when the poem Wrst appeared, the initial ‘Innis’ would probably already have sounded Irish, even if they did not know that it meant ‘island’. The name would have struck the Celtic note, with all its associations of the wild margins remote from the urban centre of the ‘roadway’ and ‘pavement grey’. But the English word ‘free’, generated adventitiously from the Irish for heather, must have played its part in the poem’s heard drama of liberation. ‘Innisfree’ does not merely evoke a homesick Irish poet’s longing for the lost country of his childhood. The lake water lapping that he hears night and day is heard ‘within the deep heart’s core’ (VP 117). The phrase has an ancestry going back beyond Shelley’s Adonais, cited as one possible echo,20 to Hamlet cherishing his stoic friend Horatio ‘In my heart’s core, ay in my heart of heart’ (III.ii.71). Beyond any literal geography, the lake isle stands for the self within the self, the isolation of the island contained within the containedness of the inland lake. 17 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright 437. 18 Kenner, A Colder Eye, 51. 19 Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Sherman Paul (Boston: Houghton MiZin, 1957), 107–15. 20 See A. Norman JeVares (ed.), Yeats’s Poems (London: Macmillan, 1989), 500.

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M OV I N G TO G A LWAY: C O O L E PAR K AN D E N V I RO N S In July 1897, Yeats went to stay with Lady Gregory at Coole Park for what became a two-month-long visit and initiated a summer pattern for his life that was to continue more or less uninterrupted for the next twenty years.21 He joined enthusiastically in collecting folklore with his hostess in the local neighbourhood, even if ‘his stylish black clothes meant he was mistaken for a proselytizing clergyman’ (Foster I 171). From this point on the basis for his imaginative landscape shifted from Sligo to Galway, a shift most obvious in the various versions of his stories of Red Hanrahan. The Wrst four in this sequence were published in the National Observer, Yeats’s outlet of choice in the early 1890s, at various times between November 1892 and September 1894.22 In this Wrst form, the central Wgure was O’Sullivan the Red, loosely based on the real-life Owen Rua O’Sullivan (1748–84), and the opening tale, ‘The Devil’s Book’, was set in the Munster of O’Sullivan’s actual origins. By the second story of what was already told as a sequence, however, Yeats had contrived to bring him up to Connacht, and in the third and fourth, detailed Sligo place names supplied a precise location. In the versions Yeats collected in The Secret Rose in 1897, he tried a remarkable experiment, giving the names of places in English versions loosely based on their Irish originals. So, for example, in the original ‘Kathleen-ny-Houlihan’ story, O’Sullivan travels ‘in the direction of Sligo, through Drumahair and Drumease’, meeting Margaret Rooney from the slums of the Burrough, ‘on the road between Sligo and Drumease and close to Colgagh Lough.’ In The Secret Rose Hanrahan is journeying in the ‘direction of the Town of the Shelly River, through the Ridge of the Two Demons of the Air.’ His meeting with Margaret Rooney takes place ‘Between the Ridge of the Two Demons of the Air and the Lough of Swords’.23 Yeats was even prepared completely to re-write the lyric, eventually called ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’, in the interests of this experiment in nomenclature. The Wrst two lines had originally read: 21 John Kelly, A W. B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 44. 22 See Michael J. Sidnell, ‘Versions of the Stories of Red Hanrahan’, Yeats Studies, 1 (1971), 119–74; for a full discussion of the changes see Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 196–219. 23 Sidnell, ‘Versions’, 145.

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Veering, Xeeting, Wckle, the winds of Knocknarea, When in ragged vapour they mutter night and day

These were changed to: O tufted reeds, bend low and low in pools on the Green Land, Under the bitter Black Winds blowing out of the left hand! (VP 206)

The second stanza was similarly altered from: Weak and worn and weary the waves of Cummen Strand, When the wind comes blowing across the hilly land

to: O tattered clouds of the world, call from the high Cairn of Maive, And shake down thunder on the stones because the Red Winds rave! (VP 207)

It seems that for these stories in The Secret Rose Yeats wanted to recreate the sense of a pristine time when place names still retained their original semantic force, or that he wanted to render for Anglophone readers, and for non-Irish speakers like himself, the meaningfulness of the names to those who could understand them. It was an eVort at once to make transparent and to defamiliarize the stories’ Sligo setting. Yeats evidently turned against this translinguistic experiment as part of ‘that artiWcial, elaborate English so many of us played with in the ‘nineties’ (Myth 1), and he re-wrote the stories with Lady Gregory’s help. One outcome of that re-writing was a basic change in location. Although, in the sequence of six stories, the third, fourth, and Wfth remain set in Sligo, the revised Hanrahan begins and ends his life in Galway. A new introductory story, simply called ‘Red Hanrahan’, places him in the neighbourhood of Loughrea, and culminates with his enchantment in the mountains of Slieve Echtge, ‘an area in Galway where he and Lady Gregory had collected a great deal of folklore’.24 For the Wnal story, ‘The Death of Red Hanrahan’, he is returned again to Slieve Echtge. By 1905, when these stories were written in collaboration with Gregory, Yeats had moved his creative home territory from Sligo to Galway. This is Wrst apparent in the dedicatory poem to Gregory, prefaced to the version of The Shadowy Waters published in 1900, in which he enumerates the seven woods of Coole Park demesne: 24 Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 203.

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Place Names I walked among the seven woods of Coole, Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn; Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-gno Where many hundred squirrels are as happy As though they had been hidden by green boughs Where old age cannot Wnd them; Pairc-na-lea, Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths; Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees Xing Their sudden fragrances on the green air; Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk; Dim Inchy wood that hides badger and fox And martin cat, and borders that old wood Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood. Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.

(VP 217–18)25

This, like its successor, ‘In the Seven Woods’, the opening poem in the volume from which it takes its name, is an appropriate compliment to Gregory whose hospitality had given him the conditions so helpful for his writing. The poems’ dates, discussed in the opening chapter, mark them as products of two summers of Coole creativity, and what more graceful way of marking that than by the lyrical evocation of the house’s sylvan setting? There is more going on here, though, than a poet’s Xattering thank you letter. Yeats plays games with the sound and the meaning of the Irish-derived names in the Anglo-Irish park. ‘Shan-walla’ allows for an assonance and alliteration—‘willow-bordered’, ‘wild duck’, ‘winter dawn’—demanding no knowledge of the meaning of the name.26 But ‘shady Kyle-dortha’, the ‘dark wood’ is deliberately contrasted with ‘sunnier Kyle-na-gno’. And Kyle-na-gno, the ‘nut or hazel wood’, is of course the right place for many hundred squirrels to be happy. What seems at Wrst stranger is Yeats’s insistent repetition of the same epithet, ‘dim’ for the last three woods named, Pairc-na-carraig, Pairc-na-tarav, and Inchy: woods tend to be dim almost by deWnition. With none of these, either, is there any attempt to make capital out of the meaning of their names. The clue comes in the middle wood, ‘Pairc-na-lea, j Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths’. Light is dying out as the verse proceeds, and 25 I have followed here the spelling and punctuation of the text in The Shadowy Waters (1900). 26 McGarry, Place Names, 80, says that there are two possible derivations, ‘old wall’ or ‘old road’.

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the dimness of the remaining woods reXects the fading sublunary world as the ‘immortal, mild, proud shadows’ that will be the subject of the following long poem begin to appear. Yeats may have imagined the central Wgures of that poem, Forgael and Dectora, while walking around the woods of Coole. But the poem also works as a mantra, an invocation, ‘sympathetic magic’, as Daniel Harris puts it, 27 for which the magic number seven is appropriate. Coole here becomes for the poet a sacred space, entry point to a transcendent world whose qualities it mirrors. The ‘shadows’ that are the source of all true knowledge may be near at hand in such a setting: Is Eden out of time and out of space? And do you gather about us when pale light Shining on water and fallen among leaves, And winds blowing from Xowers, and whirr of feathers And the green quiet, have uplifted the heart?

(VP 218–19)

Where Sligo place names were alive with the possibility of unearthly beings, Coole woods induce an ecstatic trance in which the poet may walk with spirits. When we come to ‘In the Seven Woods’, title poem for the volume published in 1903, it is no longer necessary to emumerate each one of the seven individually. We already know their names and can recognize where the poet is when he says I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime tree Xowers . . .

(VP 198)

The low lighting level of the Shadowy Waters has its equivalent here in the silence where the Xight of pigeons is a ‘faint thunder’ and the humming of the garden bees clearly audible. The Seven Woods constitute a refuge from the personal pains of love where he could ‘put away’ The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart

(VP 198)

and the sense of the disgust at the public world discussed in Chapter 1, where Tara could be ‘uprooted’ and rowdy crowds celebrate the coronation of Edward VII, ‘new commonness j Upon the throne’. It can only be a temporary refuge: ‘I have forgot awhile’. The Seven Woods do not 27 Daniel A. Harris, Yeats: Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 15.

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oVer the once and forever transformation of Innisfree. But the peace achieved in Coole is actually achieved, not merely in prospect: ‘I am contented’ as against ‘I shall have some peace there’. The contentment is Wgured in a strange image, very unlike the lulling peace that ‘comes dropping slow’ in the lake isle. I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees.

(VP 198)

What Yeats elsewhere could personify as a demure ‘Maid Quiet’ is here paradoxically at once joyous, self-consuming, and self-sustaining. The strange suggestion of self-consumption in the image of Quiet grows to the threat of coming apocalypse in the poem’s closing lines: while that Great Archer, Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-Lee.

(VP 198)

Richard Ellmann suggests that the Archer here ‘may only be Jupiter Pluvius about to send a thunder shower’;28 the woods were in fact to experience a much more serious devastation when ‘the big wind of nineteen hundred and three blew down so many trees, & troubled the wild creatures, & changed the look of things’ (VP 814), as Yeats commented in a note on the Wrst publication of In the Seven Woods. Most commentators identify the Archer as the constellation Sagittarius, pointing to links with the late ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ where the shooting of an arrow and the eating of a heart are the signs of a changed epoch.29 The haven of the Seven Woods can only be temporary: at the end of his summer at Coole, the poet will have to go back to his misery over Maud Gonne and the modern vulgarities of Dublin and London. Moreover, some greater, perhaps catastrophic change is coming. The single withheld name, Paircna-Lee, coming as the poem’s Wnal word, signiWes the proximity of the momentous future to the speciWcity of the present here and now. The names of the Seven Woods of Coole are established landmarks in Yeats’s poetic texts from this time on. There is no need to explain what or where Kyle-na-no is when, in the closing poem to Responsibilities, the poet 28 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (2nd edn, London: Faber, 1964), 103. 29 See, for instance, Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 483, and JeVares, Yeats’s Poems, 525, citing George Brandon Saul, Prologomena to the Study of Yeats’s Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 77.

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speaks of Wnding ‘when June is come j At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof j A sterner conscience and a friendlier home’ (VP 321). The naming of the wood tells us that the ‘ancient roof’ is that of Coole Park, where the poet returns to take up his summer residence. There is a similar intertextual assumption of prior knowledge in ‘To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no’. The wood of the nuts becomes by association the wood of the squirrels so that we can imagine, without even having it named, that the squirrel in ‘An Appointment’, whose creaturely freedom Yeats sardonically extols—‘No government appointed him’ (VP 318)—must have been seen in Kyle-nano. Even as Coole Park changes in its signiWcance over time, its landscape becomes a given in the poetry, so familarly inhabited by poet and reader alike that there is no need to name it. VIEWS FROM THE TOWER Place names are, in fact, largely absent from Yeats’s poetry for the Wrst Wfteen years of the twentieth century. The vicissitudes of his personal life through this time, the hand-to-hand urban combat of his public culture wars, provided no topographically deWned space on which the imagination could work. As need arose in the ballads of Responsibilities, he could use places for occasional purposes. So it is an ‘old crane of Gort’ (VP 295) who presides in ‘The Three Beggars’ over the impossible challenge set to the beggars by Guaire, an early King of Connacht; the castle Dunguaire is in Kinvara, not far from Gort, the closest town to Coole. ‘Running to Paradise’ is given a notional Sligo setting by the reference to ‘Windy Gap’ (VP 300). In this poem, the contrast between the joys of the irresponsible and the cares of serious people is the same as in ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’, but in this new name-poor style Yeats no longer feels the need to localize the whole district. In ‘The Hour before Dawn’ Cruachan, mythological headquarters of Queen Maeve in Roscommon, provides an appropriately spectral backdrop for the encounter between the ‘cursing rogue with a merry face’ and the beer-drinking, eternal sleeper (VP 302). These named places are starting points for what are in fact unlocated poems. But the decision in 1916 to buy what was to become Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’s marriage in 1917, and the death of Robert Gregory early in 1918 brought a new concentration on Coole and the adjacent tower. Yeats was aware of Ballylee Castle from the late 1890s when he had been exploring the area with Lady Gregory in search of relics of the poet

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Raftery. A long-term part of the Gregory estate, it came on the market when acquired by the Congested Districts Board under the Land Purchase Acts, British Government’s legislation enforcing the transfer of land from landlords to tenant farmers.30 Yeats took possession of the tower in 1917 and made it still more his own by re-naming it. He explained the thinking behind the change of style from Ballylee Castle to Thoor Ballylee in a letter to Olivia Shakespear: ‘Thoor is Irish for tower and it will keep people from suspecting us of modern gothic and a deer park. I think the harsh sound of ‘‘Thoor’’ amends the softness of the rest’ (L 690). With this coinage, whatever its musical virtues, Yeats achieved a name exotically unrecognizable as either Irish ‘tu´r’ or English ‘tower’. From this point on, Yeats is poetically at home in the tower, even if he spent relatively little time living there. There is no further need to name it; it represents the vantage point from which he looks out as a newly married man in a new home: Now that we’re almost settled in our house I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a Wre of turf in th’ ancient tower

(VP 323–4).

As Helen Vendler suggests, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ can be seen as a ‘displaced epithalamium’ for George Hyde-Lees, whom he had married just three months before Gregory died, a muted welcome to the house Yeats had restored for her.31 ‘Almost settled’ vividly pinpoints that infuriatingly protracted period almost everyone moving to a new home experiences when the builders have practically Wnished—but not quite. In the case of the Yeatses it went on for months in 1918. Writing an elegy for Robert Gregory was not an easy business for the poet. He was genuinely grieved at the death himself, heartbroken for Robert’s mother, aware of how much a memorial poem from him would mean to her. Yet his relationship with Robert and his wife Margaret had been an uneasy one, not to put it more strongly, and he resisted writing the sort of elegy the family would have wished. The Wrst draft of the poem, as is well known, was not satisfying to the widow and, was changed at her request; as Yeats put it tartly on a manuscript copy of the poem, ‘The following stanza was added in proof as Mrs Gregory did

30 For a detailed account of the transaction, see Foster II 84–8. 31 See Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 107.

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not think I had said enough of Roberts courage.’32 However, it was with his friend Lady Gregory, who in this case agreed with her daughter-inlaw that he had painfully to negotiate the contents of the new stanza. He explained the delicate situation in a letter to his wife: It has been a little thorny but we have settled a compromise. I have got from her a list of musical place-names where he has hunted & hope for a new representation of the place. I have Wrmly resisted all suggested eloquence about aero planes ‘& the blue Italian sky’ (Foster II 125–6).

Stanza VIII was the result. When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace; At Mooneen he had leaped a place So perilous that half the astonished meet Had shut their eyes; and where was it He rode a race without a bit? And yet his mind outran the horses’ feet. (VP 326)

Evidently from Yeats’s letter the primary requirement here was the musicality of the place names, and he skillfully adapts them to the rhythm of his chosen stanza form. Yet it may also have suited his new ‘representation of the place’ that all these hunting Welds, Castle Taylor, Moneen, and Isertkelly, as they are spelled on the Ordnance Survey map, were on ‘the Roxborough side’, some distance north of Coole. They could thus act as reminders of the hard-riding Persse side of Gregory’s ancestry to counteract the concentration on his gifts as painter and aesthete. What the stanza does so brilliantly, however, is to conjure up a past caught in the shared recollections of a local community. The grace note here is the name the poet can momentarily not recall: ‘where was it j He rode a race without a bit?’, providing what Daniel Harris calls ‘a vivid intimacy reinforced by the casual lapse of memory’.33 By adding the stanza, Yeats provided the Gregory family a more acceptably rounded portrait of the dead son and husband, but he also placed himself as the poet speaker in his tower at Ballylee in a familiarly known neighbourhood reaching out into the Galway countryside.

32 W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole: Manuscript Materials, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 51. 33 Harris, Yeats: Coole and Ballylee, 133.

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Yeats resisted ‘all suggested eloquence about aero planes’ for his elegy. His other best-known commemorative poem on Gregory’s death, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, makes it clear why. By contrast with ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, this represented a striking reconWguration. The dead Gregory is stripped of name and rank; he is just one more anonymous, imagined Irish airman. What is more, he is disassociated with Coole Park. Instead My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor

(VP 328)

Kiltartan is the tiny village close to Coole; it hardly runs even to a cross, more like a fork in the road. It had been identiWed as Lady Gregory’s literary locale by the dedication of Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) to ‘the people of Kiltartan’ and by later publications such as The Kiltartan History Book (1909), which Robert illustrated. Still, to call ‘Kiltartan’s poor’ Robert Gregory’s ‘countrymen’ was to elide the fact that they would also have been his tenants. What Yeats wanted here was to distance Gregory from the heroics of king and country, the conventional patriotism of his class that sent him to war on behalf of England, Those that I Wght I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love (VP 328)

By making him into an anonymous airman from Kiltartan, the poem turns Gregory into a solitary hero, not inspired by the jingoism of ‘public men, nor cheering crowds’, driven instead by ‘a lonely impulse of delight’ (VP 328). Whereas in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ the commemorated dead man haunts a landscape which was his and which the poet is making his own, in ‘An Irish Airman’ he is given his own distanced perspective, in which Kiltartan is no more than a tenuous link to an earth-bound world he is leaving behind. His heroism is individualistic, deliberately dislocated from place, family, and nation. What Yeats looked out on from the tower was no longer a magic countryside like the numinous places of the early Sligo poetry or the Wrst Coole poems where the gods walked in the woods, but a historiated vista. ‘Beyond that ridge lived Mrs French’ (VP 410), he points out in ‘The Tower’. Just outside the line of vision is Peterswell, about a mile away from Ballylee, home of Jonah Barrington’s grandparents, who, in his famous Personal Sketches, tells the anecdote of the clipped ears that Yeats uses in the poem, ‘Mrs French, j Gifted with so Wne an ear’

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(VP 412).34 The stories about Raftery and his beloved Mary Hynes come next in this second section of the poem, stories that Yeats had recorded in the essay ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye’, an early product of his folklore gathering with Lady Gregory round Coole. The excitement of these stories came from the fact that there were still people living round Ballylee in the last years of the nineteenth century who could remember the blind poet and his preternaturally beautiful mistress, or remembered the tales of their parents. So, for instance, there is the situated gesturing anecdote of those besotted with Mary Hynes that Yeats was to use in his poem: There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloone Bog was open then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead there in the morning. (Myth 26)

The phrases—‘up beyond Kilbecanty’, ‘Cloone Bog was open then’— traverse the local time and space shared by storyteller and listener. In the poem Yeats recalls their recollections: Some few remembered still when I was young A peasant girl commended by a song, Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place (VP 410)

Inspired by Raftery’s song in praise of Mary Hynes, the group of men set out to see for themselves: But they mistook the brightness of the moon For the prosaic light of day— Music had driven their wits astray— And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

(VP 411)

The place name coming at the end of the closing long line of the stanza, rhyming as it does with the lunacy-inducing ‘moon’, sounds out a muddy doom for the victims of imagination. Daniel Albright points out that the successive anecdotes of this section of ‘The Tower’ move inward through the landscape towards the building itself and its past owners.35 And the focus on those owners 34 Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches and Recollections of His Own Times (Dublin: AshWeld Press, 1997), 18–19. Barrington emphasizes that Mrs French’s rhetorical exclamation—‘I wish the fellow’s ears were cut oV ’—was purely rhetorical and that she was horriWed when her butler appeared with a large snuV-box containing ‘a considerable portion of a pair of bloody ears’. However, the incident is told to ‘give the reader an idea of the devotion of servants in those days to their masters.’ 35 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 634.

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then moves backward in time. Local folklore had preserved memories of Raftery’s beloved Mary Hynes, but, the poem tells us, ‘There’s not a neighbour left to say’ what became of the ‘ancient bankrupt master of this house’ (VP 412) who lived a hundred years before Yeats’s time. Beyond any living recollection, ‘in the Great Memory stored’, are the earlier generations of the tower’s garrisons, ‘Rough men-at-arms, crossgartered to the knees’ (VP 412). It is not, however, just a palimpsest of history and local legend that Yeats reads in the surroundings of Ballylee. He includes also his own Wctional Wgures: And I myself created Hanrahan And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.

(VP 411)

He recalls here the opening story ‘Red Hanrahan’ which he wrote with Lady Gregory’s help for publication in the revised Stories of Red Hanrahan in 1905; for once Yeats, writing ‘The Tower’ in 1925, is fairly exact in his dating—‘I thought it all out twenty years ago’ (VP 411). The story, in which Hanrahan is bewitched by ‘an old man’s juggleries’ (VP 411), follows the pack of cards transformed into hare and hounds, and loses his love Mary Lavelle forever as a result, is some counterpart to the man drowned in the bog in pursuit of the chimerical Mary Hynes. It does not matter that Yeats made up Hanrahan, and then re-located him successively from Munster to Sligo to Galway. The fact that he imagined him Wnally ‘somewhere in the neighboring cottages’ beside the tower means that the Wctional Hanrahan now shares space with the folklorized Raftery and Mary Hynes. The actual occupants of the tower, recovered from history, become a company of the dead whom the poet can summon up—‘As I would question all, come all who can’ (VP 412)— and again dismiss: ‘Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan, j For I need all his mighty memories’ (VP 413). As Yeats had created Thoor Ballylee out of Ballylee Castle as his own coined place, so he peoples and unpeoples at will the projected world around it. In taking imaginative ownership of the tower, he re-makes a historical landscape to suit his poetic purposes. SLIGO SYNECDOCHES Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I shall never perhaps walk there again, are so deep in my aVections that I dream about them at night; and yet the woods at Coole,

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though they do not come into my dream are so much more knitted to my thought that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded, my longest visit. (A 377–8)

So Yeats wrote in The Trembling of the Veil, published in 1922. His last close family link to Sligo had gone in 1910 with the death of his uncle George Pollexfen. His territorial allegiance had been transferred to Coole and to the tower: the Preface to The Trembling of the Veil is dated from Thoor Ballylee (A 109). Yet still the Sligo countryside returned in dreams and there could even be a sense of guilty betrayal at having abandoned it. This is apparent, for example, in the 1920 poem ‘Under Saturn’, Wrst collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem opens as an attempt to reassure his young wife that he is not preoccupied with past loves, a necessary reassurance, given not only his long and famous devotion to Maud Gonne but his passion for Iseult still unassuaged when he married: Do not because this day I have grown saturnine Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought Because I have no other youth, can make me pine

(VP 390–1)

It is rather, he tells George, old recollections of Sligo, people she never met, that he is brooding upon, ‘childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen, j And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard’ (VP 391). A recent experience they do share is brought up to enforce his mood: You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay— No, no, not said, but cried it out—‘You have come again, And surely after twenty years it was time to come.’ I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home. (VP 391)

Marriage to a woman a generation younger than himself makes him brood on the lost past she can never share, and on his own alienated severance from that past and its landscape. In the later poetry, it tends to be shards of Sligo experience, single places that stand in for larger wholes. The light of evening, Lisadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both Beautiful, one a gazelle.

(VP 475)

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Place Names

In these opening lines of ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, the name of the Gore-Booth house is dropped into a stageset-like description intended to conjure up a complete scene. ‘The Man and the Echo’ uses as backdrop ‘a cleft that’s christened Alt’ (VP 632), the place on the slopes of Knocknarea generally known as the Glen. This was in the grounds of the man Yeats calls Cochrane of the Glen in the Autobiographies (A 284), a strange fault in the rock that has left a long narrow chasm bounded by sheer cliV faces opening up unexpectedly in the side of the mountain. There is, though, an oddity about Yeats’s naming of it. In early drafts of the poem, it does not appear to be a proper name: ‘I stand in this dark alt, this mountain gash’; later versions vary between ‘In the broken stone of an alt’ and ‘In the broken stone of the Alt’.36 ‘Ailt’ in Irish does mean a ‘steep-sided glen’ or ‘ravine’, but it may be Yeats himself who christened it Alt with a capital A.37 Whatever the nomenclature, it is a hallucinatory dream vision that comes to the poet lying sleepless and ill in bed: In a cleft that’s christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit, And shout a secret to the stone.

(VP 632)

This strange place of the Glen/Alt, hiccoughed up out of memory, serves as desolating terminal site for facing death, entering the underworld. In these returning dream fragments of Sligo, it is Ben Bulben that recurs most often. In ‘The Tower’, the standard of his eager boyhood is set by Wshing expeditions when ‘I climbed Ben Bulben’s back’ (VP 409). In ‘Towards Break of Day’ it is ‘a waterfall j Upon Ben Bulben side’ (VP 398) that was to him in childhood the dearest thing in the world. His recollection of Con Markiewicz in ‘On a Political Prisoner’ is of seeing her ride j Under Ben Bulben to the meet’ (VP 397). The ‘Alternative Song for the Severed Head in ‘‘The King of the Great Clock Tower’’ ’ opens with a call to horse: Saddle and ride, I heard a man say, Out of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea

(VP 549)

36 W. B. Yeats, Last Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. James Pethica (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 337, 343, 353. 37 Though Sheelah Kirby says that ‘It is now known locally as THE GLEN, but old people called it the Alt’, the vagueness of ‘old people’ gives this the air of an ex post facto explanation; see The Yeats Country (2nd edn, Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963), 27.

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And of course there is ‘Under Ben Bulben’ itself, designed to be Wrst in the collection of Yeats’s Last Poems. It is hardly surprising that Ben Bulben should survive out of the depleted store of Sligo places to stand as token memory of the countryside so fully composed in the early poetry. The utterly unmistakable mountain is the landmark dominating the surrounding landscape of Sligo. For the young Yeats it was satisfyingly rich both in mythological association—Diarmuid’s fatal boar hunt—and folklore: A little north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand; no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more inaccessible place upon the earth, and to an anxious consideration few more encircled by terror. It is the door of Faeryland. In the middle of the night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. (Myth 70)

These are the fairy riders that seem to be summoned in the ‘Alternative Song’, invoked again in ‘Under Ben Bulben’: Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

(VP 637)

However, the horsemen gathered up in the ‘Alternative Song’ turn out not to be fairies but the ‘tragic characters’ of Yeats’s own creation: Cuchulain, Niamh and Oisin, Deirdre and Naoise, and the rest. What is more, they are assembled as to a hunt—‘the meet’s upon the mountain-side’ (VP, 549)—as if they were unearthly companions to the young and beautiful Constance Gore-Booth riding to harriers under Ben Bulben. The door to Faeryland in these late poems swings open to let out a troop uncannily like the ‘hardriding country gentlemen’ Yeats had come to admire. This double identity applies also to the status of the horseman addressed in the epitaph. The context in which horsemen are Wrst invoked in ‘Under Ben Bulben’ makes them clearly visionary Wgures. The incantation begins far away from Sligo at the Egyptian Lake Mareotis, recalled for both its early Christian ascetic monks and a reference in Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas’: Swear by what the sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

(VP 636–7)

Invoked in such company, there can be little doubt of the supernatural status of the beings next called upon:

102

Place Names Swear by those horsemen, by those women Complexion and form prove superhuman, That pale, long-visaged company That air in immortality Completeness of their passions won (VP 637)

These are the fairy men and women with their more than mortally perfect bodies as seen by Mary Battle: They are Wne and dashing-looking, like the men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now, none so Wnely proportioned. (A 266)

As such they are given an appropriate local habitation: Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene. (VP 637)

Is it such a horseman that the poet in his epitaph asks to cast a cold eye on life, on death? The answer seems to be yes and no. Yeats is drawing here on the traditional siste viator ‘stop, traveller’ formulation, considered in Chapter 2, that he used in the last stanza of ‘Coole Park, 1929’: ‘Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand’ (VP 489). Such a traveller is necessarily imagined as an ordinary passer-by, a mortal like the person buried beneath the gravestone. An early version of the epitaph had ‘Huntsman’ before ‘Horseman’ was substituted; in the cancelled Wrst line, ‘Draw rein, draw breath’, it is a very real horseman imagined, reining in his horse, breathless, perhaps, after a fast run in the hunt.38 Here the ‘hard-riding country gentlemen’ of the immediately preceding stanza do come to mind. Yet the conWdent detachment that allows for the ‘cold eye’ on life and death bespeaks rather the Wgures ‘that air in immortality j Completeness of their passions won’. The horseman that passes DrumcliV Churchyard with no more than a cursory look at the grave and the epitaph is simultaneously the man riding to hounds, careless of his own mortality, and the eternal horseman of the afterlife for whom such things have faded into insigniWcance. It is easy to see why Mrs Yeats should have decided on an arrangement of the Collected Poems that placed ‘Under Ben Bulben’ at the end with the epitaph clanging out as the poet’s last words. It is equally easy to see why Yeats should have planned to have it appear as the Wrst in what he knew was to be his Wnal collection. He wanted it to stand as a 38 For the variant readings see Foster II 631, 635.

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summative poem; its Wrst title was ‘Creed’, and it was not until within two days of his death that what was then called ‘His Convictions’ was changed to ‘Under Ben Bulben’.39 The mountain Wttingly presides as sign over the tenets of faith the verses articulate. The poet is literally rooted in the ground of his forbears—‘An ancestor was rector there’ (VP 640)—the passionately possessed countryside of his childhood, the site of supernatural apparitions. Ben Bulben had been named many times before in his poems, but never before with the epithet ‘bare’. It is an obvious thing to call it: nothing could be less covered or clothed than Ben Bulben’s severe treeless top of naked rock. Yet its bareness also bespeaks the austerity of the dying poet’s credo, his aYrmation of a life beyond death, withdrawn from passion, completed in soul and body. Ben Bulben is thus a substantive sign in all it connotes in the context of Yeats’s life, work, and beliefs. At the same time, it is chosen for metrical and melodic reasons. There is the inbuilt alliteration; just try substituting the Irish ‘Beann Ghulban’, or even more disastrously Yeats’s 1897 Secret Rose experiment with translation, ‘the Mountain of Gulben’. There is the near symmetrical pairing of the two ‘ben’ sounds on either side of the bulbously contrasting broad-vowelled ‘Bulb-’. It is ever thus in Yeats’s poems. This is a poet who believed all his life in the accessibility of the world of nature to the world of the spirit. The names of places, those special places that obsessed him, mattered crucially as they represented lightning rods for forces above. To meditate upon the surroundings of Lough Gill, to invoke one by one the Seven Woods of Coole, to speak of Ben Bulben, was to call up all that dwelled within those familiar locations. But at the same time the poet was composing landscapes in aural braille for a readership of blind strangers. We must take it on trust that it is Heart Lake or Hart Lake; Clooth-na-Bare is an ancient Irish mythological Wgure, a lake, or a mountain in Sligo, as the case may be. These are not mere metrical counters. Their topographical referents may be crucially important to the poet, their derivations alive with meaning. But they can be re-fashioned at will. Remembered picnic pleasures at Dooney Rock can yield a Wddler from a Wctive Dooney. Ballylee Castle, for reasons of euphony and class associations, can become the linguistically impossible Thoor Ballylee. The ‘Yeats country’, the places of Sligo and Galway visited by literary pilgrims in their thousands each year, is a country made up by the poet. 39 See W. B. Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 195.

5 Beasts and Birds With his Irish place names, Yeats gave to his poems a rooted local habitation and a name. At the other end of his imaginative range, there is a phantasmagoria free of topography. The setting of ‘The Second Coming’ could not be further from the sort of identiWable named location looked at in the last chapter: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

(VP 402)

What sort of animal is put before the reader here? Two passages from Yeats’s prose are generally cited as sources for this ‘image out of Spiritus Mundi’. In the ‘Four Years: 1887–1891’ section of Autobiographies, he describes ‘mental images that I could not control’ generated by a cardboard symbol given him by McGregor Mathers: ‘a desert and a black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins’ (A 186). And in his introduction to The Resurrection, he talked of a time many years before when ‘I began to imagine, as always at my left side just out of the range of the sight, a brazen winged beast that I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction’ (Ex 393). Yet the apparition in the poem is not a Titan nor yet is it brazen or winged. It is closer in form to the Sphinx, the Egyptian male Sphinx, as Richard Ellmann was the Wrst to point out, rather than its female Greek counterpart.1 But Sphinxes are not normally thought of as moving. The desert birds may in fact be reeling in shock at this preternatural motion of the Sphinx, ordinarily as immobile as its stone representation beside the Pyramids of Ghiza. It is impossible to piece together the composite form with its ‘lion body and the head of man’ into a single stable image any more than we 1 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (London: Faber, 1964), 259.

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can see the whole picture of which it is the centre. There is an impression of angry chatter from the ‘indignant desert birds’ but we are not told what sort of birds they are; in fact it is only their shadows, not themselves, that appear. Fidelity to this shifting and uncertain congeries of images may account for the otherwise unaccountable syntax of the poem’s Wnal lines: but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(VP 402)

The poet knows with the certainty of revelation that ‘the Second Coming is at hand’; the certainty comes from the Instructors who supplied him with the knowledge, expounded in a lengthy note to the poem (VP 823–5), that was later to be elaborated into the historical system of A Vision. The connective ‘and’ with which the penultimate line starts seems to demand that we read ‘what rough beast’ as the start of a second clause dependent on ‘I know’. But the poet does not know ‘what rough beast’ this is, and the lines turn back into a syntactically anomalous rhetorical question.2 The Sphinx-like creature has the head of a man only; its body is that of a lion. Yet its bodily form too is human or humanoid, as it moves its ‘slow thighs’. ‘Thigh’ is used primarily of the human anatomy, only by extension of the equivalent part of the body in lower vertebrates (OED, sb. 1 and 2). In the context of the poem it appears to have sinister sexual associations. The anthropomorphic strain is present also in the evocation of the birds: they ‘reel’ back in horror from the moving beast. The ‘indignant’ epithet endows them with moral outrage at the sight. And the verb used in the famous Wnal line is signiWcant: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(VP 402)

The loutish ungainliness of the gait, in such shocking contrast to the grace of the Christian Nativity story, is enforced by the word, for only a human being can slouch. The bent and shambling attitude it evokes is animal-like in its deformation of the upright posture proper to man. 2 Compare Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Dispassionate Syntax: Irish Poetry at the End of Yeats’s Century’, Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies, 11 (1999), 171–86 [173].

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This is a rough beast that monstrously mimics the roughest of human characteristics. The turbid image of the rough beast in ‘The Second Coming’, only half-seen yet powerfully evoked, can be placed as one variant in the animal/ human interchange that permeates Yeats’s poetry. At one end of a continuum of representation, there is a phenomenal animal kingdom diVerentiated from, even opposed to, people’s yearning to transcend it. Equally, however, birds and beasts may reXect or stimulate that yearning. There are, as it were, natural correspondences between human beings and other creatures to be observed in a universe that for Yeats is informed by principles animating all living things. He thus takes over and adapts for his own poetic purposes traditional avian iconographies in which seabirds are human souls released into the air, migrants such as swallows are emblems of the transitoriness of mortal life, and cocks crow at the dawn of a new era as at the dawn of a new day. He also makes use of inherited legends of animal metamorphosis, or tropes of animal possession. At other times there is a much more arbitrary and personal coding. In the tangle of conXicting desires from the period around his marriage in 1917, for instance, his wife George emerged in his imagination as cat, Iseult Gonne as hare, and retained these associations through a number of poems. With some Wgures, the swan, the hawk, and the butterXy, Yeats approaches but never quite reaches a systematic symbology, for an element of self-conscious play recurrently disrupts the steadiness of symbolic equation. Beyond the observable fauna of the world around him, Yeats brings into being marvellous and mythical creatures, peacocks and dolphins, centaurs and unicorns, to signify Welds of vision that cannot be otherwise imagined. Such is the disturbing phantasm that ‘troubles’ the poet’s sight in ‘The Second Coming’. This chapter is a mapping exercise which charts Yeats’s use of beasts and birds from the actual to the metaphoric, the way they refuse to stay in place as either literal or symbolic but are always switching values from one to the other. THE A NIMAL KINGDOM In Yeats’s early poetry, where exotic animals abound—‘coloured Asian birds’ in The Wanderings of Oisin (VP 7), lions, deer, and antelope with ‘sacred Xocks j Of red Xamingoes’ in ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ (VP 75)—the humblest creatures could provide tokens of the ordinary. The beloved in ‘To an Isle in the Water’ is ‘shy as a rabbit’ (VP 89); in the less happy autumnal setting of

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‘Ephemera’, when the lovers are about to part, ‘a rabbit old and lame limped down the path’ (VP 80). In ‘The Stolen Child’, the magical night-time realm of the fairies is contrasted in the Wnal stanza by the warm daylight scene the child is losing: he will never again ‘see the brown mice bob j Round and round the oatmeal-chest’ (VP 88). Yeats in these early poems must remain in touch with this mundane natural world for all the attraction of a mystic otherworld of eternal beauty. So the invocation ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ is halted in the second stanza: Come near, come near, come near—Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to Wll! Lest I no more hear common things that crave; The weak worm hiding down in its small cave, The Weld-mouse running by me in the grass, And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass

(VP 101)

The danger for the poet is that he may ‘learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know’ and cultivate a visionary style so remote from the worm and the Weld mouse that it is humanly unintelligible. Elsewhere the poet puts the natural world to very diVerent oppositional purposes. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ it is what he must escape: That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song

(VP 407)

Where in ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’, he feared complete envelopment in the non-mortal mystical order, in the later poem he positively longs to be gathered ‘into the artiWce of eternity’. In the satiric mood of ‘An Appointment’, ‘out of heart with government’, he exults in the wild life of the squirrel: Taking delight that he could spring; And he, with that low whinnying sound That is like laughter, sprang again And so to the other tree at a bound. Nor the tame will, nor timid brain, Nor heavy knitting of the brow Bred that Werce tooth and cleanly limb And threw him up to laugh on the bough; No government appointed him.

(VP 317–18)

Here the wild autonomy of the animal provides an antitype to the demeaning dependencies of human society.

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The natural can yield distraction or solace for the mind-oppressed poet. When he is excited by the drama of action in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, concentration on the miniaturized life of the moor chicks on the river acts as soothing mantra: I count those feathered balls of soot The moor-hen guides upon the stream, To silence the envy in my thought

(VP 424)

Very occasionally and exceptionally, as in ‘Demon and Beast’, release from human hatred and desire makes possible an ecstasy of ‘aimless joy’: To watch a white gull take A bit of bread thrown up in the air; Now gyring down and perning there He splashed where an absurd Portly green-pated bird Shook oV the water from his back; Being no more demoniac A stupid happy creature Could rouse my whole nature.

(VP 400)

For once Yeats’s habitual late vocabulary of ‘perning’ and ‘gyring’ has none of its usual technical meaning; it is to the pure movements of the seagull in and for itself that the spirit of the poet goes out. There can thus be in the poetry strategic separations and oppositions between the natural, on the one hand, and human or supernatural order of being on the other. More commonly, however, there is no such severance; animal and human alike adumbrate powers beyond themselves. In ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’, it is the least speaking of creatures, Wsh, worms, knotgrass, that sing the man’s dreams to him. In the prefatory poem to The Shadowy Waters a vivid image drawn from the last stages of harvesting is used to suggest the elusive immanence of the ‘immortal, mild, proud shadows’: do you hide From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys That run before the reaping-hook and lie In the last ridge of the barley?

(VP 218)

In an expressive passage of Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Yeats professes his faith in an integrated order of the living and the dead, the natural and the human:

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The dead living in their memories are, I am persuaded, the source of all that we call instinct, and it is their love and their desire, all unknowing, that make us drive beyond our reason, or in deWance of our interest it may be; and it is the dream martens that, all unknowing, are master-masons to the living martens building about church windows their elaborate nests (Myth 359)

For a poet with such beliefs it is not merely a matter of projecting human meanings on a distinct natural world, but of drawing upon a set of pre-existing correspondences. The diYculty might be in discovering what those correspondences were in relation to birds as to beasts. THE SIGNIF ICANCE OF BIRDS ‘What is the signiWcance of birds?’ Yeats asked his Instructors early in the period of his wife’s automatic writing.3 The answer distinguishing between ‘birds of the sea—intellectual intellect’ and ‘birds of the air— intellectual love’ appears to have been part of the attempt to sort out the relationships between the three birds representing Maud Gonne, Iseult Gonne, and George Yeats that appeared repeatedly in the script at this time.4 However, there could have been no one answer to the question in relation to Yeats’s poetry more generally, where meanings are constantly diVused and multiplied. There are birds everywhere in the poems whether individually identiWed—herons, sparrows, linnets, rooks, hawks, swallows, swans—or merely named generically. At the simplest level they provide linguistic binding through the ease with which they are rhymed. In seventeen out of the seventy instances of ‘bird’ in the poetic corpus, in eleven out of the Wfty-eight mentions of the plural ‘birds’, they yield rhyme words.5 Birds are so much in their element in Yeats’s poetry, the rhyme schemes themselves so varied, that even an assiduous reader of the Variorum Poems will hardly be aware that ‘bird’ is rhymed with ‘heard’ six times, ‘birds’ with ‘words’ no less than eight. These juxtapositions of rhyme may cumulatively generate their own associations: listening to birdsong and the awareness of its diVerence from human language. 3 Yeats’s Vision Papers, ed. George Mills Harper et al., 3 vols. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), i. 251, cited in Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 219. 4 See Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 219, 222, 245. 5 Stephen M. Parrish, A Concordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 83–5.

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More obviously and deliberately, in speciWc instances Yeats draws on traditional readings of bird life. Migrants that arrive in the spring and depart in the autumn inevitably attract exemplary application as Wgures for the brevity of human existence. The Shepherd in ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ likens the dead Robert Gregory to a cuckoo: ‘Like the speckled bird that steers Thousands of leagues oversea, And runs or a while half-Xies On his yellow legs through our meadows, He stayed a while; and we Had scarcely accustomed our ears To his speech at the break of day, Had scarcely accustomed our eyes To his shape at the rinsing-pool Among the evening shadows, When he vanished from ears and eyes.’

(VP 341)

There are unintended ironies here making this scarcely a fortunate comparison; after all, it was the poet himself who had been for years a most inconvenient cuckoo in the nest at Robert Gregory’s own Coole Park. The designed eVect, however, is clear. The short period in which the cuckoo’s call is heard, the rarity of actually seeing it—how many of us would know from personal observation that it has yellow legs?—are tokens for the evanescence of Gregory’s time on earth. In ‘Coole Park 1929’ Yeats uses an even more familiar Wgure for human transience: ‘I meditate upon a swallow’s Xight, j Upon an aged woman and her house’ (VP 488). The initial prose summary makes it clear that swallows were part of the original elegiac design for the poem: Describe house in Wrst stanza. Here Synge came, Hugh Lane, Shaw Taylor, many names. I too in my timid youth. Coming and going like migratory birds.6

‘They came like swallows and like swallows went’ (VP 489). Although not all of those actually named in the poem were dead at the time of its composition—besides the poet himself, Douglas Hyde was still alive— they are memorialized as part of Coole’s past at a time when both the house and its hostess are approaching their end. But the linear movement through time of the birds/visitors’ coming and going is counterpointed with another spatial Wgure: 6 Quoted in Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 80.

Beasts and Birds And yet a woman’s powerful character Could keep a swallow to its Wrst intent; And half a dozen in formation there, That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point, Found certainty upon the dreaming air

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(VP 489)

Against the initial emblem of the singular ‘swallow’s Xight’, subject of memento mori meditation, is the sky-drawn patterning of the birds as a creative collective gathered by Gregory’s magnetic force. The meaning of bird movements changes from poem to poem, takes on new colouring from new circumstances. Sick in Algeciras in November 1927, Yeats wrote to Maud Gonne evoking the scene before him in the Hotel Reina Cristiana: A multitude of white herons are beginning to roost among the dark branches of the trees just outside my windows. They Wsh in the Mediterranean on the other side of Gibraltar which is some ten miles oV, & then Xy home to the gardens here for a night’s sleep. (GYL 443)

Not herons but cattle egrets, as it turned out, and Yeats followed the common misconception that they lived oV ticks on the cattle on which they regularly attended.7 This made for the rich associative cluster of the opening stanza of ‘At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death’: The heron-billed pale cattle-birds That feed on some foul parasite Of the Moroccan Xocks and herds Cross the narrow Straits to light In the rich midnight of the garden trees Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

(VP, 493–4)

The crossing of the Straits of Gibraltar becomes the passing over into death, dawn the advent of the afterlife. But in the imagined ecosystem of the egrets’ parasitical dependency is a visceral sense of the soul’s occupation of the sickening body. In varying ways, thus, Yeats elaborated the commonplace connection between bird migrancy and the transitoriness of human life. With seabirds it was their obvious grace and freedom that attracted him. The early love 7 ‘Due to their practice of perching on these animals’ backs, cattle egrets are often grouped incorrectly with ‘‘tick-birds.’’ . . . The cattle egret’s major prey is active insects which are disturbed by the grazing activities of the cattle egret’s host animals.’ A. Ivory, 2000. ‘Bubulcus ibis’ (On-line), Animal Diversity Web: http://animaldiversity.ummz. umch.edu/site/accounts/information/Bubulcus_ibis.html, accessed 9 March 2005.

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poem ‘The White Birds’ had its origin in a casual remark of Maud Gonne to Yeats as they walked on the cliVs at Howth that ‘if she was to have the choice of being any bird she would choose to be a seagull’.8 This was translated by the poet into the wish for a seagull life a` deux : ‘I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!’ (VP 121). In ‘On a Political Prisoner’ the eVect is more complex, with the image moving between the literal and the metaphorical. She that but little patience knew, From childhood on, had now so much A grey gull lost its fear and Xew Down to her cell and there alit, And there endured her Wngers’ touch And from her Wngers ate its bit.

(VP 397)

There is a trace of vengeful pleasure in seeing the aggressive Constance Markievicz so tamed by imprisonment like the gull she befriends. It is intended to act as a monitory lesson to her for allowing her mind to be transformed into ‘a bitter, an abstract thing, j Her thought some popular enmity’. Yeats harks back to her youth by way of contrast, as he had in ‘Easter 1916’: ‘What voice more sweet than hers j When, young and beautiful, j She rode to harriers?’ (VP 392). Here, however, the memory of her on the hunting Weld soars up quite unexpectedly: The beauty of her country-side With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred, She seemed to have grown clean and sweet Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird: Sea-borne, or balanced on the air When Wrst it sprang out of the nest Upon some lofty rock to stare Upon the cloudy canopy, While under its storm-beaten breast Cried out the hollows of the sea.

(VP 397)

The horsewoman seen as seabird evokes her aristocratic freedom and strength subsequently degraded by her populist politics—‘Blind and leader of the blind j Drinking the foul ditch where they lie’. But the image escapes from this politically tendentious application to suggest 8 A. Norman JeVares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 32.

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some other order of lonely self-suYciency in the midst of tumult. It is as though the seagull represents her truest being, beyond the accident of birth as the Anglo-Irish Constance Gore-Booth or her history of political activism as Countess Markievicz. The bird as emblem of the human soul must be one of the most fundamental forms of symbolic representation, turning on the contrast between man’s earth-bound life in the body and the seemingly miraculous gift of Xight. Birdsong in Yeats’s poetry could quite surprisingly rouse him out of an obsessive terrestrial perspective. In the midst of the polemics of September 1913, when the class contemptuous term ‘Paudeen’ had come to stand in for the ignorant Philistinism of the shopkeeping Dubliners who rejected the Municipal Gallery, he was yet capable of writing the corrective poem ‘Paudeen’: Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite Of our old Paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light; Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought That on the lonely height where all are in God’s eye, There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot, A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.

(VP 291)

The strength of the poem here depends on its abrupt switch of perspective from the desolate landscape of stones and thorns in which the poet stumbles in darkness to the sudden clarity of vision from above. The curlew’s cry is pivotal, triggering the revelation in which the call of the bird becomes the true voice of the individual human being. This is as close as Yeats ever came to orthodox egalitarian Christianity, the God’s eye view that the soul of each Paudeen has its own distinctive ‘crystalline cry’. SHAPE-CHANGERS The Shadowy Waters dramatizes the moment at which such souls are liberated from the body. As the pirates board the ship they have taken as prize and kill the sleeping crew, their visionary leader Forgael looks on and listens: There! there they come! Gull, gannet, or diver, But with a man’s head, or a fair woman’s, They hover over the masthead awhile

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Beasts and Birds To wait their friends . . .


Now I can hear. There’s one of them says, ‘How light we are, now we are changed to birds!’ Another answers, ‘Maybe we shall Wnd Our heart’s desire now that we are so light.’ (VP 233)

The bloody massacre going on is disconcertingly turned into a sort of gentle euthanasia. But the ‘man-headed birds’ that appear throughout the play/poem are not merely the souls of the dead released into the ether. They are also Forgael’s crucial guides into the shadowy waters in which he will Wnd the fulWlment of his destined love with Dectora. They are associated also with other spectres, like the birds called up by the playing of Forgael’s harp: ‘Aengus and Edain, the wandering lovers, j To whom all lovers pray’ (VP 224). From his Celticist beginnings, Yeats’s is an animist world in which divine powers can inhabit the shapes of birds and beasts. Aengus, the god of love, himself a shape-changer, has the power to bring about the beneWcent metamorphosis of others. So in ‘Baile and Aillinn’ he appears as an anonymous old man Wrst to one lover, then to the other, to contrive a willed version of the Pyramus and Thisbe/Romeo and Juliet tragic catastrophe with each one imagining the other dead. Aengus, though, plans this to be a happy ending, as we see in the heavenly sequel: That old man climbed; the day grew dim; Two swans came Xying up to him, Linked by a gold chain each to each, And with low murmuring laughing speech Alighted on the windy grass. They knew him: his changed body was Tall, proud and ruddy. . .

(VP 194–5)

The lovers are assisted to an eternal and harmonious companionship they could never know on earth. In ‘The Two Kings’, by contrast, divine powers are bested and human love is aYrmed. In this narrative King Eochaid is married to Edain in a mortal incarnation, and her former supernatural lover Midhir twice tries to recover her. He Wrst appears to Eochaid, unexplained, as a miraculous stag which the king must Wght to the death. Returning to his palace, he is told by his wife the strange story of her being solicited by Eochaid’s brother Ardan to sleep with him in order to cure him of a mysterious illness. Torn between conXicting demands of honour, she resolves to sacriWce herself to save her brother-in-law, only to discover that it was

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again Midhir who had lured her to him by possessing the body and voice of Ardan. Edain, however, resists Midhir’s claim upon her as his eternal heavenly wife, remains loyal to Eochaid even though at the end of her mortal life she must revert to Midhir. The very ephemeral nature of love, she insists, is its truest essence: ‘ . . . What can they know of love that do not know She builds her nest upon a narrow ledge Above a windy precipice?’

(VP 285)

At the opposite extreme from the image of the lovers transmogriWed into swans linked with a golden chain, or indeed Yeats’s wish-fulWlment fantasy of himself and Gonne as white birds on the foam of the sea, is this celebration of the necessary precariousness of the love relationship. The animal world in Yeats is imagined as the site of shape-shifting phenomena drawn both from folklore and mythology dramatizing the mysterious interchanges of life and death, the mortal and the immortal. The barnacle goose, Daniel Albright reminds us, is a bird ‘associated with metamorphoses—because they were thought to originate from barnacles, they were legally Wsh, and medieval monks could eat them on fast-days.’9 With more or less of such associations, they are heard in The Wanderings of Oisin as reminders to the three-hundred-year-old hero of the human life to which he returns (VP 57) and in ‘Beggar to Beggar Cried’ as the ironic background to the beggar’s unlikely aspiration to settled domesticity (VP 300); in ‘High Talk’ ‘a barnacle goose j Far up in the stretches of the night’ appears as one more sardonic emblem of the metaphorical tendencies of Malachi Stilt-Jack (VP 623). The immortal soul taking Xight as seabird, so literally dramatized in The Shadowy Waters, is suggested much more indirectly in the deserted Dublin of ‘To a Shade’, where ‘grey gulls Xit about instead of men’ (VP 292). In the levelling afterlife of ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, the second last poem Yeats wrote, the hero Wnds himself in the company of ‘certain Shrouds’ who sing of their past lives as ‘convicted cowards’: They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words, Though all was done in common as before; They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

(VP 635)

It is the anti-heroic coda to Yeats’s long imaginative engagement with Cuchulain, in which the code of honour by which he has lived is 9 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 836.

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reduced to insigniWcance by the bird heaven into which all dead souls are assimilated. The animal transformations follow no one set pattern and are illustrative of no given tendency. The druid of ‘Fergus and the Druid’ is presumably only exhibiting his druidical powers when he constantly changes shape: First as a raven on whose ancient wings Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed A weasel moving on from stone to stone

(VP 102)

But when Fergus persuades the druid to open the bag of dreams that will Wnally release him from his responsibilities as king, he Wnds a dismaying vision of mutability denying him any identity at all: I see my life go drifting like a river From change to change; I have been many things— A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light Upon a sword, a Wr-tree on a hill, An old slave grinding at a heavy quern, A king sitting upon a chair of gold— And all these things were wonderful and great; But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.

(VP 104)

On the other hand, the metamorphosis in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, the ‘little silver trout’ turned into ‘glimmering girl’ (VP 149), produces life-long obsession with the one Wxed object for the protagonist who is ironically given the name of the arch-Protean god of love himself. The most dramatic instances of human/animal transformation in Yeats are those of possession. In ‘The Old Age of Queen Maeve’, the Wrst indication of a message from the otherworld comes to the queen ‘When night was at its deepest, a wild goose j Cried from the porter’s lodge’ (VP 181). On closer inspection the porter is fast asleep, and yet ‘that ear-piercing noise j Broke from his parted lips and broke again’ (VP 182). Aileel, her husband, though also sleeping, is given a voice not his own to tell Maeve what she must do to assist the god Aengus ‘crossed in love’ (VP 183). This poetic trope of possession develops a quite new intimacy and urgency in the period after Yeats’s marriage when his own wife had actually begun to speak with the voices of others. This mediumship is an added dimension in the nightmare disturbance with which ‘An Image from a Past Life’ begins:

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He. Never until this night have I been stirred. The elaborate starlight throws a reXection On the dark stream, Till all the eddies gleam; And thereupon there comes that scream From terriWed, invisible beast or bird: Image of poignant recollection. (VP 389)

‘She’ goes on to explain the terror that produced the scream: ‘the hovering thing night brought me’ was the image of a ‘sweetheart from another life’ (VP 390). A much more benevolent version of the animal cry in the marital bed comes in the poem immediately before this in Michael Robartes and the Dancer, ‘Solomon and the Witch’. There Solomon is the master interpreter of animal as well as human sounds; he understood Whatever has been said, sighed, sung, Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed

(VP 387)

He is therefore in a position to decode the meaning of ‘the Arab lady’ having ‘cried out in a strange tongue’: ‘A cockerel Crew from a blossoming apple bough Three hundred years before the Fall, And never crew again till now. . . ’

(VP 387–8)

This is a heavily overdetermined cock-crow if it ‘signiWes the shriek of orgasm, and the soul’s sudden shock of receptivity to something beyond life, and also the end of the world.’10 But such multivalence is characteristic of the poetry of this period, in which an awesome new order of revelation was being opened up to the poet in immediate conjuction with the sexual initiation of his marriage. In attempting to read poems such as ‘An Image from a Past Life’ or ‘Solomon and the Witch’, we must deal with the projections of a private imaginary. PERSONAL CO DES Yeats wrote poems to or about Maud Gonne for almost Wfty years but only once was she named in the very late ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’. 10 Ibid. 606.

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Elsewhere she is the unidentiWed adressee—‘you’, ‘friend’, ‘beloved’—or appears under a number of guises, most famously and persistently as a second Helen of Troy. A less common Wgure for Gonne is the phoenix. In the all but doggerel ballad ‘His Phoenix’, she is the marvel of the poet’s youthful passion, topping all beauties past and present: ‘I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day’ (VP 353). The legend of the bird re-born from its own ashes is not necessarily active in such allusions. There is nothing especially phoenix-like about the woman who argues with the poet in ‘The People’, replying to his complaints about popular ingratitude: ‘Thereon my phoenix answered in reproof’ (VP 352). This comes in a sequence of eight poems in The Wild Swans at Coole—‘His Phoenix’ follows immediately after it—all concerned with memories of his love. The use of the phoenix here is code in which the cypher itself adds nothing to the meaning of the object encoded. It is not quite so straightforward with the birds associated with the Gonnes, mother and daughter, and with George Yeats. Apparently the very Wrst words of the automatic script, according to Yeats’s account in a letter to Lady Gregory written at the time, were ‘ ‘‘with the bird’’ (Iseult) ‘‘all is well at heart’’ ’ (L 633) But other birds were to complicate the issue in later parts of the script including Maud Gonne as a speckled ‘bird with yellow beak’.11 Yeats, writing at the crisis time of October 1917, in the wake of his marriage, dramatized his own choice between Iseult and George in ‘Owen Aherne and his Dancers’, in which the Lover speaks and his Heart replies: The Heart behind its rib laughed out. ‘You have called me mad,’ it said, ‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child; How could she mate with Wfty years that was so wildly bred? Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’ (VP 450)

Though the wildness and the youthfulness of Iseult were built into Yeats’s poetic Wguration of her, in this context the Lover is not prepared to put up with the implied insult to the dignity of his wife: ‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied. ‘And all those lies have but one end, poor wretches to betray; I did not Wnd in any cage the woman at my side’ (VP 450) 11 Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 221.

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Iseult might be a wild bird, not a Wt mate for the middle-aged poet, but George Yeats was no pet canary. This is typical of the way metaphors, developing out of coded references, take on their own life within the poems. According to George’s own account, the opening reassuring message of the automatic writing was quite diVerent from that relayed to Lady Gregory by Yeats: ‘What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare.’12 Cat and hare certainly did come to stand for George and Iseult in the symbolism of the script and in several of Yeats’s poems. Yet it is not possible simply to dub in the two women each time the two animals appear, or to allegorize the relationship when they are linked together. A number of commentators, for instance, read Iseult back into the hare in ‘Memory’: One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain Because the mountain grass Cannot but keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.

(VP 350)13

However, the context demands that this is the mother rather than the daughter. The poem, written in 1915–16, is part of the Maud Gonne sequence, in which ‘His Phoenix’ is also included, poems all preoccupied with the early love to which he is now only linked by memory. If the ‘lovely face’ is Olivia Shakespear’s—and on this there is general agreement—then Yeats is here reprising the situation of 1897 when Shakespear broke oV her aVair with him because she realized he was still in love with Gonne. When Yeats came to identify Iseult with the hare, he was drawing upon associations with her mother set up in ‘Memory’, just as in the Solomon and Sheba poems he re-cycles for his relationship with his wife a trope Wrst used about himself and Maud Gonne.14 There are similar crossovers of meaning in ‘The Cat and the Moon’. It is placed towards the end of The Wild Swans at Coole in the collection of doctrinally explicit poems that expound the theories of the lunar cycle: ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ and ‘The Phases of the Moon’. The cat, so intuitively responsive to the moon’s movements, might well be identiWed with the medium George Yeats, the human interpreter of the system: 12 Ibid. 102. 13 See, for instance, JeVares, New Commentary, 154, and Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 574. 14 On the diVerences between the Sheba of ‘On Woman’ and that in the married Solomon and Sheba poems, see Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117–20.

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Beasts and Birds Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes.

(VP 379)

In point of fact, the poem was written when staying with the Gonnes in 1917, and Minnaloushe was Iseult’s Persian cat who is mentioned in the dedication of Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Myth 319). Even where cat and hare come together as they do in ‘Two Songs of a Fool’, the poem’s images makes it impossible to read it simply as coded autobiography: A speckled cat and a tame hare Eat at my hearthstone And sleep there; And both look up to me alone For learning and defence As I look up to Providence.

(VP 380)

There seems little doubt that here Yeats does have in mind his position in the wake of his marriage. Having written it in the autumn of 1918, he sent it to Iseult, R. F. Foster tells us, as ‘a poem which framed his symbolic images of George and herself, tame and wild, as cat and hare. It also expresses his sense of responsibility for her—‘‘Fool’’ though he was—and his fears for her future: all too prophetic, as it would turn out’ (Foster II 129). Those fears are expressed in the second song: I slept on my three-legged stool by the Wre, The speckled cat slept on my knee; We never thought to enquire Where the brown hare might be

(VP 381)

Saddlemyer interprets this as Yeats’s suspicion of Iseult’s (by then current) aVair with Ezra Pound, while Foster is presumably reading it as an anticipation of her disastrous marriage to Francis Stuart.15 There is an element of biographical reduction in both cases, denying the imagistic autonomy of Fool, cat, and hare. ‘The Death of the Hare’, in the sequence ‘A Man Young and Old’, dramatizes the Wnal fate of the animal feared in ‘Two Songs of a Fool’. JeVares’ gloss here is quite deWnite but misleading: ‘the hare is Iseult Gonne’.16 In a letter to an editor who wanted a note on the poem, Yeats himself was reluctant to be explicit: 15 See Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 187.

16 JeVares, New Commentary, 260.

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If an author interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility. You can say that the poem means that the lover may, while loving, feel sympathy with his beloved’s dread of captivity. (L 840–1)

In fact, it was an experience with Maud Gonne that provided the poem’s emotional source. At a point when he thought Gonne was going to accept his love, he reveals in the draft Autobiography ‘I had even as I watched her a sense of cruelty, as though I were a hunter taking captive some beautiful wild creature . . . I noticed that one evening when I paid her some compliment her face was deeply tinted’ (Mem 49–50). The full poem shows the range of ‘suggestibility’ that the poet was so disinclined to limit: I have pointed out the yelling pack, The hare leap to the wood, And when I pass a compliment Rejoice as lover should At the drooping of an eye, At the mantling of the blood. Then suddenly my heart is wrung By her distracted air And I remember wildness lost And after, swept from there, Am set down standing in the wood At the death of the hare.

(VP 453)

Coded in here may well be Yeats’s sense of helpless anguish at ‘wildness lost’ in the aftermath of Iseult’s impulsive marriage to Stuart, which went so badly wrong so quickly. But that knowledge does not adequately account for the poem’s jumps in perspective: the initially strange juxtaposition of the hounds in pursuit of the hare with the blushing reaction of the woman to the lover’s compliment, linked by ‘and’ as though in logical apposition; the instantaneous transportation from the distant prospect of the quarry’s ‘leap to the wood’ to an up-close presence at the kill; the sense of horror that activates retrospectively a feeling of complicity—‘I have pointed out the yelling pack’. Glimpsed here is the predatory element in all male courtship, and the rebound of guilt catching the bystanding poet who is not personally responsible for the death of the hare. SELF -CONSCIOUS SYMBOLS There are symbols in Yeats that do appear to have Wxed values, as, for instance, the linked pairing of hawk and butterXy. They are most clearly deWned in the fool’s voice of ‘Tom O’Roughley’:

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Beasts and Birds ‘Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy,’ Or so did Tom O’Roughley say That saw the surges running by, ‘And wisdom is a butterXy And not a gloomy bird of prey’

(VP 337–8)

Yeats has a cross-referencing footnote on these lines in the 1933 Collected Poems directing readers to a gloss on the hawks in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’: I suppose that I must have put hawks into the fourth stanza because I have a ring with a hawk and butterXy upon it, to symbolize the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition. (VP 827)

The ring had been designed for Yeats by Edmund Dulac on the occasion of the poet’s marriage, and was intended to emblematize the relationship between husband and wife. Yeats had always hated abstraction, not least in himself, and contrasted his own goal-oriented pursuit of truth with George’s inspired and undirected wisdom: ‘the Hawk pounces, the ButterXy Xutters’.17 The tentativeness of the note on the hawks in ‘Meditations’, however, is suggestive: ‘I suppose that I must have’. This is a conjectural reconstruction of symbolic intention. Similarly, it is possible to read back later interpretative loading into the 1916 poem ‘The Hawk’ as Yeats himself does in the ‘Four Years’ section of Autobiographies. ‘I thought’, he writes, that the enemy of Unity of Being ‘was abstraction, meaning by abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or class or faculty’ (A 190). He then goes on to quote the Wrst stanza of ‘The Hawk’: ‘Call down the hawk from the air; Let him be hooded or caged Till the yellow eye has grown mild, For larder and spit are bare, The old cook enraged, The scullion gone wild.’

(VP 349)

17 Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 140. Saddlemeyer’s account of the exchanges in the automatic writing at this point, in which Yeats was an eagle rather than a hawk, makes it clear that there was resistance to his interpretation of the two symbols: ‘Is butterXy symbolic of cleared subconsciousness’ ‘No ButterXy symbol of innocence of emotions Eagle complexity and unbalanced emotion anger overcoming wisdom . . . ’

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The hawk here is presumably the mind cut loose from association with the other faculties, refusing to be disciplined to its hunting tasks. Yet it is surely hard not to respond positively to the reply of the hawk in the second stanza, soaring away independent of cook and scullion. ‘I will not be clapped in a hood, Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist, Now I have learnt to be proud Hovering over the wood In the broken mist Or tumbling cloud.’

(VP 349)

This free Xight in the sky seems to contrast with the instrumentality of training the hawk to provide game for the sportsman’s kitchen, which is arguably closer to the purposive pursuits of reason stigmatized in ‘Tom O’Roughley’, where ‘logic-choppers rule the town’. In the Vision period of Yeats’s thought systematic meanings are allotted to images that have an earlier pre-history in his writing. So, for instance, in the 1914 version of The Hour-Glass, the butterXy appears to the Fool at the moment of the Wise Man’s death: O, look what has come from his mouth! O, look what has come from his mouth—the white butterXy! (VPl 639)

This, which draws upon a tradition of the butterXy as ‘the Greek personiWcation of the psyche or soul’,18 is suggestively close to the hawk–butterXy antithesis of ‘Tom O’Roughley’. The opposition of the play, like that of the poem, is between the Wise Man’s relentlessly rational, utilitarian, knowledge-based ‘wisdom’ and the intuitive, mystical ‘folly’ of the Fool that proves superior in the end. Yeats went back to the play’s last scene to create the poem ‘Another Song of a Fool’: This great purple butterXy, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands. Once he lived a schoolmaster With a stark, denying look; A string of scholars went in fear Of his great birch and his great book. 18 Ronald Schuchard, ‘Hawk and ButterXy: The Double Vision of The Wild Swans at Coole (1917, 1919)’ Yeats Annual, 10 (1993), 111–34 [125].

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Beasts and Birds Like the clangour of a bell, Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet, That is how he learnt so well To take the roses for his meat.

(VP 381–2)

The imaginative eVect here is quite diVerent. Gone is the triumphant release of the soul Xuttering out of the body; the ‘purple butterXy’ is now a prisoner in the Fool’s hands. There is irony in the ‘learning’ seen in the butterXy’s eye, a touch of mordant vindictiveness in the helplessness of the former tyrant who reduced beauty to instructional pabulum. It is only in a very ironic sense that the butterXy can be linked to wisdom in this poem. The eVect is changed once again when butterXies reappear in ‘Blood and the Moon’: Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling, And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies, Tortoiseshell butterXies, peacock butterXies, A couple of night-moths are on the wing. Is every modern nation like the tower, Half dead at the top?

(VP 482)

Yeats explained the source for this in his general note for The Winding Stair where the poem was collected: ‘Part of the symbolism of Blood and the Moon was suggested by the fact that Thoor Ballylee has a waste room at the top and that butterXies come in through the loopholes and die against the window-panes’ (VP 831). The conceptual framework for the poem is historical. The degeneracy of the modern age has removed the eighteenth-century capacity of the ‘blood’ of human will to respond to the promptings of the ‘moon’ of imaginative inspiration. There can be no liberation for these souls, who belong by rights to the ‘moonlit skies’ but are divided from them by a pane of glass. The pathos of this entrapment is enforced by the beauty of the multicoloured insects Xuttering between life and death in the tower’s attic. Tom O’Roughley’s butterXy, the white butterXy of the Wise Man’s soul in The Hour-Glass, the purple butterXy of ‘Another Song of a Fool’, the tortoiseshells and peacocks in ‘Blood and the Moon’ are all reconWgurations of an image that has no one stable signiWcation. Swans appear repeatedly in Yeats’s poems and once at least, in a note to Calvary, he tried to assign them a place within his classiWcatory system of primary and antithetical phases, the objective and the subjective: ‘Certain birds, especially as I see them, such lonely birds as the heron, hawk, eagle and swan, are the natural symbols of subjectivity, especially when Xoating

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upon the wind alone or alighting upon some pool or river, while the beasts that run upon the ground, especially those that run in packs, are the natural symbols of objective man’ (VPl 789). It is easy to see how this taxonomy Wts the heron, so commonly seen standing by itself in water, and it is the heron that is the principal symbol in Calvary of the subjective naysayers—Lazarus, Judas, the Roman soldiers—who reject Christ’s sacriWce on the Cross: ‘God has not died for the white heron’ (VPl 780). But there are problems with the inclusion of the hawk here, used elsewhere, as we have seen, for the principle of logic and rationality characteristic of the late primary cycle, and even more of a problem with the swan. So far from being a lone bird of narcissistic introspection like the heron, swans had been previously identiWed in Yeats’s poems with mated mutuality and congregation in groups. The swan is in fact an excellent example of the changing and adaptable nature of Yeats’s poetic imagination. Years ago, Giorgio Melchiori demonstrated at length the multiple sources and ramifying meanings of the swan in Yeats.19 For Thomas Parkinson the swan hovered ‘between image and symbol’. He pointed out that ‘the identical icon can be employed for emotional qualities diametrically opposed, and the tragic limitations of one poem [‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’] can assert boundaries for the swan that the transcendent possibilities of another poem [‘The Tower’] can ignore.’20 It has been argued that speciWc associations of the swan with Maud Gonne in earlier poems are ‘exorcised’ in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, freeing it up as a symbol to be put to quite other uses in later work.21 The various appearances of the swan strikingly illustrate the changing combinations of the symbolic and the experiential, together with the often improvisatory nature of the image in Yeats. The lovers of ‘Baile and Aillinn’, changed into two swans, ‘linked by a gold chain each to each’ (VP 194), are almost heraldically emblematic; we are certainly not invited to worry about the inconvenience of their Xying with the gold chain chinking between them. The wild swans at Coole are more naturalistically observed but remain exemplars of faithful monogamy: Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams . . .

(VP 323)

19 Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 73–163. 20 Parkinson, W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry, 136. 21 Herbert J. Levine, ‘ ‘‘Freeing the Swans’’: Yeats’s Exorcism of Maud Gonne’, ELH, 48:2 (1981), 411–26.

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Like Keats’s nightingale in the ‘Ode’, they represent in their generic continuity unchanging icons of beauty that can only wring the heart of the ageing poet. What, though, of their speciWc number—‘nine-andWfty swans’? Are there Wfty-nine swans simply because that was how many Yeats counted on Coole lake in the autumn of 1916 or for some more arcane reason? It is clear that Yeats did have the habit of counting birds, as with the moor chicks in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’. Writing from Coole to his daughter Anne in February 1932, he remarked with envy that ‘the head forester here a little while ago counted sixty two wild swans on the lake, that is seven or eight more than I ever saw. A little before that he saw a Xight of twenty Wve herons rising from the bank & I never saw more than two or three.’22 ‘Seven or eight more’: the arithmetic here suggests that in actuality Yeats never did count Wfty-nine swans on the lake at Coole, though he might have come close to that total. That in turn forces a reader back to symbolic explanation. The ‘nine-and-Wfty’ might have a magical signiWcance derived from Faeryland ballads.23 Certainly with the poetic inversion, it has a storybook air to it. Alternately Linda Fox ingeniously proposes that the number is linked ‘to Yeats’s view of the cyclicity of history. The minute hand of a clock, reaching the Wfty-ninth mark, signals the beginning of an hour’s last minute.’24 It would thus resemble the pre-millennial numbering I argued for in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ in the Wrst chapter. However we interpret the number of swans in the poem, it somehow must represent a designed eVect of the poet: they are not simply there because they were there. ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ is Yeats’s most realistically observed swan poem, with whatever added dimension of symbolic intent. ‘Leda and the Swan’, by contrast, the poem that prefaces the ‘Dove or Swan’ section of A Vision, is a set-piece of his historical system, the ‘annunciation’ introducing the Greek antithetical era, paralleled with the Annunciation to Mary that began the primary Christian period. Yet the drafting of ‘Leda and the Swan’ took Yeats towards a naturalizing of this most symbolic moment. The Wrst manuscript version emphasized the divine nature of the disguised Zeus: 22 Saddlemyer, Becoming George, 448–9. 23 See Joseph Vogel, ‘Yeats’s ‘‘Nine-and-Fifty’’ Swans’, English Language Notes, 5 (1968), 297–300. 24 Linda Fox, ‘Nine-and-Fifty as Symbol in Yeats’s ‘‘The Wild Swans at Coole’’ ’, English Language Notes, 26 (1988), 54–8 [55].

Beasts and Birds Now can the swooping Godhead have his will Yet hovers, though her helpless thighs are pressed By the webbed toes; and that all powerful bill Has suddenly bowed her face upon his breast.

127

(Mem 272)

The Wnal version makes the god much more swan-like and the perspective closer to that of the unfortunate Leda. A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. (VP 441)

As Elizabeth Cullingford says, ‘Yeats forces his readers to confront the brutality of rape’.25 In ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ the birds are serene objects of contemplation safely out on the lake, composing themselves into the picturesque, or soaring up into the sky in the patterning of ‘great broken rings’. Here the swan with all its terrifying physical strength is literally in Leda’s face before she knows what is happening. This is no distanced symbolic representation but a shocking assault upon a woman’s body. Yeats could draw upon standard attributes of the swan: the lifelong partnership that made them emblems of marital Wdelity in ‘Baile and Aillinn’ or ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’; their song sung only at the moment of death an icon of deWant pride in ‘The Tower’. He could literalize the myth of Leda and the swan into rape. In other poems, however, he seems to signal the self-conscious arbitrariness of his deployment of the swan as symbol. In ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ he, as it were, walks round a comparison of swan and soul: Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisWed with that, SatisWed if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam or its life be gone, An image of its state; The wings half spread for Xight, The breast thrust out in pride Whether to play, or to ride Those winds that clamour of approaching night. (VP 430–1)

25 Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, 155.

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The casualness of the source in ‘some moralist or mythological poet’, the experimental tentativeness of the tone—‘I am satisWed with that’— dramatize the poet’s rumination on his own image-making. Instead of concentrating on the expected swansong at the moment of death, he tries out, as in a painter’s sketchbook, postures of the swan that might Wttingly mirror the soul on the point of departure. When the swan does take oV, though, in the next stanza but one, it stimulates an angry reaction against the very process of such poetic myth-making: The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven: That image can bring wildness, bring a rage To end all things, to end What my laborious life imagined, even The half-imagined, the half-written page

(VP 431)

The swan, Xying clear of the poet’s attempted mythopoeia, makes such imaginings appear inadequate and contrived. In ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, the last time Yeats was to use the swan in a poem, he reprises earlier themes. This is the same scene as in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ but in winter rather than autumn: Upon the border of that lake’s a wood Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun

(VP 490)

Here, though, the poet acknowledges how much the emotional colouring of the landscape is a projection of his own: ‘all the rant’s a mirror of my mood’. The swan lifting oV the lake again as in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ stimulates a medley of reXections: Another emblem there! That stormy white But seems a concentration of the sky; And, like the soul, it sails into the sight And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why; And is so lovely that it sets to right What knowledge or its lack has set awry, So arrogantly pure, a child might think It can be murdered with a spot of ink.

(VP 490–1)

Once again Yeats oVers a variety of possible applications of the ‘emblem’, deliberately identiWed as such: the mysterious transitoriness of the soul in the ephemeral life of the body; its possible incorporation into a transcendental heaven beyond; the perfection of its beauty as correction to imperfect mortal understanding. And yet all of this is itself merely writing,

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potentially easily blotted out ‘with a spot of ink’. The perceived world prompts symbolic interpretation, and one of the most persistent urges of Yeats’s poetic imagination is towards a coherent symbology that will tell the truths of universal correspondences. Its countermovement is a sceptical self-awareness underlining the constructedness of all such imagination. THE MARVEL LOUS AND T HE MY THICAL Yeats’s aesthetic was from Wrst to last polemically anti-mimetic. His little poem in Responsibilities, ironically entitled ‘The Realists’, gestures towards the sort of fantasticated art of which he approves: Hope that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but awake a hope to live That had gone With the dragons?

(VP 309)

An invigorated sense of life and the understanding of reality itself are to be reached through an art of extravagant imagination. The creatures of an ordinary, observable landscape are not enough; the poet must reach out to the monstrous and the chimerical to penetrate below the mere surfaces of things. With the supernatural as with the natural world, Yeats was often content to take his beasts from wherever he found them. So in The Wanderings of Oisin he carried over from his source in Michael Comyn’s ‘The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth’ the Wgure of a hornless deer pursued by a hound with one red ear (VP 11–12).26 They reappear as more explicit images of the endless pursuit of desire in ‘He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World’: Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear

(VP 153)

The distinctive animal that lacks some normal feature is ominous: the ‘white deer with no horns’ is matched at the end of this poem by the 26 See JeVares, New Commentary, 432.

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‘Boar without bristles’, a Wgure from Celtic mythology that signals the end of the world. The marvellous could equally take the form of preternatural size and strength, as with the whiter than white stag that is the disguised immortal King Midhir in ‘The Two Kings’, or the ‘lofty white stag’ of Arthur taken from Malory in ‘Towards Break of Day’ (VP 399), both representative of the power of male sexuality, as the hornless deer stands for the unattainable female. Yeats adapts and reinterprets a traditional bestiary of Wctive beasts, sometimes for ironic or playful purposes. In ‘The Fascination of What’s DiYcult’, Pegasus, winged horse of the poetic imagination, is reduced to a carthorse that must ‘Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt j As though it dragged road-metal’ (VP 260). ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ is a provocatively heterodox reading of the St George and the dragon legend: In this altar-piece the knight, Who grips his long spear so to push That dragon through the fading light, Loved the lady; and it’s plain The half-dead dragon was her thought, That every morning rose again And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.

(VP 385)

As Michael Robartes elaborates ever more unintelligibly on this diatribe against women’s education, the dancer wittily retorts, ‘My wretched dragon is perplexed’ (VP 386). It is only occasionally that Yeats could treat mythical beasts so lightheartedly. They properly belonged in the treasured lunar landscape that he was in danger of losing in the menopause of the middle years: hence the ‘Lines Written in Dejection’. When have I last looked on The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies Of the dark leopards of the moon? All the wild witches, those most noble ladies, For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone. The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished; I have nothing but the embittered sun

(VP 343–4)

The traditionally monstrous and unnatural are transvalued in Yeats as they stand against a daylight order of reason. ‘Wild witches’ are ‘most noble ladies’; the half-men, half-horses often interpreted as types of the

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bestial are here ‘most holy centaurs’. Where the uncategorizable manlike features of the ‘rough beast’ in ‘The Second Coming’ are what make it sinister, the human/animal hybridity of the centaur is sanctiWed. That very hybridity is what made it an approved image for Yeats. ReXecting on his early beliefs in Autobiographies, he commented: ‘I thought that all art should be a Centaur Wnding in the popular lore its back and its strong legs’ (A 191). This anticipates‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, where the giant Antaeus, invincible while he touched the ground, commemorates the credo he shared with Synge and Gregory: All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

(VP 603)

Yet in ‘On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’, there is an animal violence that belies such idealizing: Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,


My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud. I knew that horse-play, knew it for a murderous thing. (VP 442)

There is a degree of exaltation in the acceptance of the centaur’s ‘horseplay’; the poet feels renewed and invigorated by the destruction of his work. The title ‘On a Picture . . . ’ would lead a reader to expect that the poem reXects the visual eVect of the painting. But the black centaur in Dulac’s ‘The Good Chiron Taught His Pupils How to Play upon the Harp’, which Elizabeth Loizeaux thinks may be the source, is benevolently unlike the frightening beast of Yeats’s poem. It is closer in spirit to Dulac’s much later drawing of ‘The Centaurs and the Lapith Women’ that Loizeaux also reproduces.27 The painter Cecil Salkeld claimed that Yeats’s inspiration was Salkeld’s watercolour ‘of a weird centaur at the edge of a dark wood: in the foreground, in the shade of the wood, lay the seven Ephesian ‘‘topers’’ in a drunken stupor’.28 Yet neither Dulac’s nor Salkeld’s painting appears to contain the ‘horrible green parrots’ that are such a striking feature of Yeats’s poem. These stand in for the sort of representational art that is the ultimate enemy in the Yeatsian aesthetic; 27 Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 139–40. 28 JeVares, New Commentary, 249, citing J. M. Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (1943; London: Macmillan, 1962), 326–8.

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they are parrots only because the parrot is identiWed with the mechanical mimicry of the sounds of others. In the allegorical schema of the poem, the poet has been so enraged by mimetic art, ‘driven half insane j Because of some green wing’, that he has been forced into an overelaboration of the arcane and gathered old mummy wheat In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain And after baked it slowly in an oven

(VP 442)

It is the function of the centaur to reinvigorate his poetry by stamping such recondite artiWce into the mud. In the working out of this fable any coherent visual design disappears altogether. Emblem is piled upon emblem: ‘mummy wheat’, seed capable of germinating centuries later, is equated with recovered archaic symbols; the ‘full-Xavoured wine’ borrowed from the seven sleepers represents a newly Dionysiac inspiration. If the green birds are parroting imitative art, then the synecdochal ‘green wing’ is enough to represent the general concept of such mimesis. This subordination of the visual to the conceptual is a feature also of the dolphins of ‘Byzantium’. The dolphins that carry souls of the dead from time into eternity were a part of Yeats’s original conception of the afterlife already in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. One draft imagined the sea ‘Where the dark drowsy Wns a moment rise j Of Wsh, that carry souls to Paradise’ and another prayed the ‘saints that stand amid God’s sacred Wre’ to ‘send the dolphins back & gather me j Into the artiWce of eternity’.29 They were eventually eliminated from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ to re-surface in ‘Byzantium’, but not until the poem’s Wnal stanza: Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, Spirit after spirit!

(VP 498)

The Wrst stanza introduces the zeugma of the ‘fury and the mire of human veins’ to stand for the mortal body—‘All that man is, j All mere complexities’ (VP 497). The third produces a variation on the phrase, extending it to all organic things, ‘Common bird or petal j And all complexities of mire or blood’ (VP 498). By the time we reach the dolphin it is not visibly there in body. It is just one more example of ‘mire and blood’ opposed to the immateriality of the ‘Spirit after spirit’. It is no wonder that Sturge Moore was confused on Wrst reading the poem, asking ‘Is your dolphin to be so large that the whole of humanity 29 Stallworthy, Between the Lines, 96, 100.

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can ride on its back?’ No, corrected Yeats: ‘One dolphin, one man. Do you know Raphael’s statue of the Dolphin carrying one of the Holy Innocents to Heaven?’30 In ‘Byzantium’, Yeats’s imagination is under strain in a supreme eVort of the sublime, depicting the crossing point from mortality into the afterlife. In ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ he imagines heaven itself in iconoclastically physical terms. Here, at last we do get to see the dolphins: Straddling each a dolphin’s back And steadied by a Wn, Those Innocents re-live their death, Their wounds open again. The ecstatic waters laugh because Their cries are sweet and strange, Through their ancestral patterns dance, And the brute dolphins plunge Until, in some cliV-sheltered bay Where wades the choir of love ProVering its sacred laurel crowns, They pitch their burdens oV.

(VP 612)

The extreme compression of the last line of ‘Byzantium’, ‘That dolphintorn, that gong-tormented sea’ (VP 498), composes the juxtaposed sacred and profane into something merely notional. In ‘News from the Delphic Oracle’, by contrast, the joyful cries of the immortal Innocents reliving their terrible deaths are strikingly counterpointed by the actual and the literal: the handhold needed to stay on the dolphin’s back—‘steadied by a Wn’—the unceremoniousness with which the Innocents are dumped at journey’s end—‘They pitch their burdens oV’. These are ‘brute dolphins’ no doubt. We are prepared for the Wnal stanza’s orgiastic conclusion so unlike any Christian imagination of a spiritual Paradise: Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash Wshlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam. (VP 612)

There is a provocatively physical promiscuity of Wsh and Xesh in this carnivalesque version of the afterlife. 30 Ursula Bridge (ed.), W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901–1937 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 164–5.

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The imaginary beasts and birds of myth and folklore came encrypted with already existing meanings. They are therefore more amenable to allegorical application, images closer to idea than their natural fellowcreatures in Yeats. Yet always there is the potential for a kickback towards the animality of the animal, the stamping of the centaur’s hooves, the plunging of the dolphins. One passage in A Vision speaks eloquently to this dialectic of embodied creature and meaning in Yeats: My imagination was for a time haunted by Wgures that, muttering ‘The great systems’, held out to me the sun-dried skeletons of birds, and it seemed to me that this image was meant to turn my thoughts to the living bird. That bird signiWes truth when it eats, evacuates, builds its nest, engenders, feeds its young; do not all intelligible truths lie in its passage from egg to dust? (V 214)

At Wrst this appears to be a self-undoing mockery of A Vision itself, its ‘great system’ no more than a dead carcase of ideas. Yet the sun-dried skeletons Yeats believed were ‘meant to turn my thoughts to the living bird’. If all ‘intelligible truths’ are to be discerned in the life cycle of the bird from conception to decomposition, it is because they are immanent within those processes. The´ophile Gautier declared that he was a man for whom the visible world existed: ‘je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe’.31 That phenomenal world existed for Yeats also, but it could never be fully independent of the sign systems attributed to it by the poet. At the same time, his beasts and birds cannot be reduced to a coded symbolic function within the practice of Yeats’s poetic codes. As signiWer and signiWed, they live one another’s life, die one another’s death. 31 Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal 1 (Paris: Robert LaVont, 1989), 254.

6 Tense and Mood The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed

(VP 497)

Joseph Adams cites these lines as an example of what he calls the ‘masks of syntax’ in Yeats, linguistic constructions that are undecidably ambiguous.1 For most of his book he concentrates on phrases and subordinate clauses that jump two ways, masquerading as one syntactical pattern while behaving like another—hence masks of syntax. His Wnal chapter, however, is devoted to the ‘grammar of time’, the forms of grammatical tense, as with ‘recede’ here in the opening of ‘Byzantium’. He points to the fact that English normally uses the progressive form of the verb to convey a deWnite action simultaneous with the moment of speaking—‘are receding’—as against the simple present form ‘recede’, which is normally reserved for indeWnite actions that do not happen on just one occasion: ‘every night the unpurged images recede’. While Yeats’s description of the night scene on the streets of Byzantium appears to be the observation of a speciWc moment, the deWniteness conWrmed by the second line—on this occasion ‘The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed’—the use of the simple present pushes us towards the opposite conclusion, that this is an indeWnite statement. Adams gives many further examples of this peculiar ambiguity where the ‘contexts . . . demand the deWnite present—though in Yeats the indeWnite is used’.2 The opening of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ is one such instance: The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky

(VP 322)

1 Joseph Adams, Yeats and the Masks of Syntax (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 77. 2 Ibid.

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Or the beginning of the Wrst poem, ‘Her Courtesy’, in the sequence ‘Upon a Dying Lady’: With the old kindness, the old distinguished grace, She lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair Propped upon pillows (VP 362)

An analogy with the style of stage directions may help to clarify the eVect of this simultaneity of deWnite and indeWnite in Yeats’s use of present tense forms. In stage directions, the indeWnite simple form of the present is frequently used in contexts that determine the action as a deWnite one. A couple of examples from Yeats’s plays may illustrate the point. In the 1914 version of The Hour-Glass, the initial stage direction tells us: ‘Pupils come in and stand before the stage curtain, which is still closed. One Pupil carries a book’ (VPl 577). At the beginning of The Words upon the Window-pane, we hear ‘The sound of a knocker.’ Miss McKenna passes through and then she re-enters hall together with John Corbet, a man of twenty-two or twenty-three, and Dr Trench, a man of between sixty and seventy. (VPl 937)3

It is standard practice with stage directions to use the indeWnite present in this way. What is evoked here is the scene that an audience will see before them at the moment the play starts. It is in fact a set of instructions to director and actors to prepare a certain appearance of things and take certain actions that will have to be done at every performance—hence the imperative form ‘enter’, as in ‘Enter Hamlet’. To that extent the directions are indeWnite and repetitive. But for each separate audience this will be oVered as an immediate present time. In a similar way, Yeats’s present tenses in the poems call up scenes to ‘the eye of the mind’, bring them into present being. In fact, he often uses what amount to verbless stage directions.4 So the Wrst line of ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ sets the scene at Glasnevin in a sentence without a main verb: ‘Under the Great Comedian’s tomb the crowd’ (VP 541). The opening of ‘A Bronze Head’ similarly places a reader inside the Muncipal Gallery, looking at the head of Maud Gonne: 3 Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from the Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats edited by Russell K. Alspach. Copyright ß 1965 by Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright ß by Russell K. Alspach and Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. 4 Helen Vendler speaks of the opening of ‘After Long Silence’ as a ‘verbless speech-act: ‘The Later Poetry’, in Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 90.

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Here at right of the entrance this bronze head, Human, superhuman, a bird’s round eye, Everything else withered and mummy-dead. (VP 618)

The dramatic present with which these poems begin, like the start of ‘Byzantium’, enacts an immediacy that is at once the Wctive situation imagined by the poet and that of the consciousness of the reader in the act of reading. In Yeats’s early poetry the present strains back towards a time before time, or on towards a time when time will be undone, the poem itself ‘a place of mediation between Time and Eternity’.5 The ‘Rose of the World’ predates the Creation: He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet. (VP 112)

To escape from the unending anguish of desire the lover ‘longs for the End of the World’: I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest. (VP 153)

Though the proximity of the eternal persists in Yeats, in his later poetry it is the time shifts of human history that are more commonly registered in the movement of tenses, the poet’s own history or the history of the race. Both the past conjured up in memory and imagined futures coexist in the simultaneity of the poem’s present consciousness. Yeats needs not only the full range of indicative tenses to negotiate the complex time perspectives of his poems; he makes use of the imperatives of command, prayer, and entreaty, the optatives of longing and desire, subjunctive moods to register the hypothetical possibilities that surround the actual. Where Chapter 2 looked at ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, the deictic markers that move the reader around the space of the poem, the aim of this chapter is to explore the shifts in consciousness expressed by the inXections of tense and mood. The Wrst half is concerned with time and tense, beginning with the yearning towards origins and endings, going on to the management of temporal sequence within historical frameworks. The second half of the chapter deals with grammatical mood. The management of tense and mood in the poems is the mechanism for enacting the multiple modes of being, feeling, and belief in Yeats. 5 Edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of DiVerence (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 58

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Tense and Mood ORIGINS AND ENDINGS

Yeats was the most heterodox of believers but the poems often posit a God, the Creator of the world, who drove it forward and might in due course bring it to an end. So in The Wanderings of Oisin the Danaans may sing of their immunity to the changes that aZict all mortal things; unlike merely human lovers, ‘care cannot trouble the least of our days, j Or the softness of youth be gone from our faces’ (VP 27). Yet even their endless youth has a notional terminus: the love-dew dims our eyes till the day When God shall come from the sea with a sigh And bid the stars drop down from the sky, And the moon like a pale rose wither away.

(VP 28)

This decadent aesthete of a God, wearying at last of his creation, represents a very diVerent imagination of apocalypse from the brutal ‘Boar without bristles’, derived from Celtic mythology, found in ‘He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World’. But the sense of an ending, however conceived, serves as counterpart to the intuition of origin. The Celtic twilight is the afterglow of some primal time that the poet, doomed to existence in the latter days of human history, can only envision as it lives on in eternal beauty. This is the signiWcance of ‘The Rose of the World’. The conventional notion that beauty is doomed to decay is dismissed with the bravado of the opening rhetorical question: Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

(VP 111)

The present disproof of such a banality, banished into the fallacy of the past, is represented by ‘these red lips’: For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna’s children died. (VP 111)

The beauty, which the demonstrative ‘these’ places before the eyes of poet and reader, is the same beauty that in the form of Helen caused the sack of Troy, incarnated in Deirdre the death of Naisi and his brothers. The sentence not only collapses the icons of two mythological pasts into the

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present but makes her ‘mournful that no new wonder may betide’ in the future. The object of unsatisWable desire is herself unsatisWed in the condition of time. The contrast of the second stanza is between those of us who live in this condition and ‘she’ who is outside it. It is ‘we’ not beauty who pass like a dream: We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face. (VP 112)

The progressive present here conveys the sense of process, ‘are passing by’; contrasted with this, the simple form, ‘lives on’, highlighted at the start of the last line, is a deWant assertion of indeWnite duration. It is into such a context that Yeats inserts, in the poem’s Wnal stanza, his pre-Genesis Creation myth. Like the Almighty in Book V of Paradise Lost proclaiming the sovereignty of the newly begotten Son to the heavenly host, all must here worship the Rose of the World who antedated the world itself: Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet. (VP 112)

The parallel brings out the intended contrast between Milton’s heroic masculine Son, and Yeats’s languid and wayward spirit of female beauty. Both poets, however, back-project to an originary moment, anterior to human or even archangelic time. Yeats used his Rosicrucian beliefs of the 1890s as a key to all the mythologies, an iconography inclusive of both the Hellenic Helen and the Celtic Deirdre. But that universalism was diYcult to reconcile with his claim to the status of a distinctively Irish national poet. It is a problem he addressed directly in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. ‘The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write’, Yeats wrote deWantly to John O’Leary in 1892, at the time that the poem was Wrst published as ‘Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days’ (CL I 303). If Wordsworth’s diYculty in Book VIII of The Prelude was to show ‘Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man’, Yeats’s was to convince readers of the compatibility of his worship of the Rose with his aspiration to be one with the Irish patriot poets.

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Tense and Mood Nor be I any less of them Because the red-rose-bordered hem Of her, whose history began Before God made the angelic clan, Trails all about the written page. (VP 137–8)

The poet here places himself as a follower of those who came before— Davis, Mangan, Ferguson—who in the past ‘sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong’. In addressing himself to a future Ireland of the ‘coming times’, he is staking the place that he wants to be assigned in posterity. That is one temporal perspective. But on the written page that the reader reads in a present time, whenever that may be, ‘trails’ the ‘red-rose-bordered hem’ of a Wgure always out of sight, who belongs in a time before time. The word ‘history’ is paradoxical used of a being who existed before the creation of the angels, much less the world. The way this Wgure is related to a historical Ireland is complicated by the fact that Yeats substantially revised the poem in 1925 to oVer an alternative vision of the relation between Ireland and the Rose, history and eternity. In 1892 the lines continued with a comma, not a full stop, after ‘the written page’ For in the world’s Wrst blossoming age The light fall of her Xying feet Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat, And still the starry candles Xare To help her light foot here and there, And still the thoughts of Ireland brood, Upon her holy quietude.

(Foster I 122)6

Here the mystic Rose is the quickening spirit that gave original life to Ireland; Ireland is still in tune to her dancing, still meditates upon her stillness. In the 1925 text there is a much less benevolently natural start to the human time in which Ireland originated than ‘the world’s Wrst blossoming age’. The new beginning now has a new sentence: When Time began to rant and rage The measure of her Xying feet Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat; And Time bade all his candles Xare To light a measure here and there; 6 Foster usefully reproduces the whole of the poem as it appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London: Fisher Unwin, 1892): Foster I 122–3.

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And may the thoughts of Ireland brood Upon a measured quietude. (VP 138)

The time of human history, as Yeats re-conceived it in the 1920s, is not simply at one with the dance time of the Rose; it is no more than occasionally that Time’s candles Xare up to illuminate ‘a measure here and there’. Rather than the conWdent assertion that the thoughts of Ireland do still ‘brood j Upon her holy quietude’, it is only a devout wish that they ‘may’.7 What is striking in both versions is the switch in the Wnal stanza to the immediacy of a time-bound present after the elaborate adumbrations of the inWnite and the eternal: While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew.

(VP 139)

The earlier form of the Wrst line—‘While still I may I write out true’ (Foster I 123)—is not signiWcantly diVerent, except that the personalized ‘you’ allows the poet to include as addressee contemporary Ireland, Maud Gonne, and the readers of any future Ireland. The poet can only write in the order of time, a time that he knows is pathetically short: From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye

(VP 139)

And it is not only mortal humans that are thus subject to time but the very magical symbols that point beyond the temporal: all things Are passing on to where may be, In truth’s consuming ecstasy, No place for love and dream at all; For God goes by with white footfall.

(VP 139)

As there was a time before time, so there will be a time when the yearning of desire and the need for mortal images of the eternal will be done away. In the meantime, however, the poet writes in the now of writing for readers in the future of reading: I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, 7 Matthew Campbell has analyzed subtly and persuasively the changing conceptions of time in the changing texts of the poems, the diVerent Irelands they assume, and the altered ‘coming times’ to which they look forward. Matthew Campbell, ‘Yeats in the Coming Times’, Essays in Criticism, 53:1 (2003), 10–32.

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Tense and Mood May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.

(VP 139)

The present tense moment of composition is placed within a timespan of Ireland’s past of patriot poets, Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, and a vaguely conceived ‘coming times’ ahead; but that historical sequence is itself seen against a pre-Creation proto-past and an ultimate extratemporal consummation. The Rose is simultaneously the image of beautiful perfection and the troubling, potentially destructive object of human desire for such perfection. Hence she is both the ‘Rose of Peace’ and the ‘Rose of Battles’. Helen was from the beginning one Wgure for that paradox: ‘For these red lips . . . Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam’ (VP 111). Helen in her modern incarnation as Maud Gonne was marooned in a time when there was no second Troy for her to burn. But Yeats’s emergent conception of the gyres of history, his growing conviction that in the twentieth century he was witness to a turning point in the gyres, let him meditate on the annunciatory occasion in which Helen was conceived. ‘Leda and the Swan’ opens with a dramatic present that, in its appalling immediacy, assaults the reader as the swan assaults the woman: ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still j Above the staggering girl’ (VP 441).8 At the same time the language suggests another dimension of reXection on the event even as it happens. The title presupposes the knownness and pastness of the myth that the poem so shockingly conjures up as rape in action. That makes possible the violent foreshortening of perspective on the instant of coitus and its consequences: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.

(VP 441)

The whole tragic chain—Paris, Helen, the siege and fall of Troy down to the catastrophic return of Agamemnon to Argos—are coiled in that present tense ‘engenders’. And that equally makes possible the pullback into the past tense of the Wnal lines: Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, 8 As Ralph Harding Earle puts it, the Wrst phrase ‘signiWes syntactically what it signiWes semantically; it is a sudden burst of sound, grammar, and meaning.’ Ralph Harding Erle, ‘Questions of Syntax, Syntax of Questions: Yeats and the Topology of Passion’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 7 (1988), 19–48 [34].

Tense and Mood Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indiVerent beak could let her drop?

143 (VP 441)

The poet speaks here from outside the poem in a present that looks back to the rape of Leda, not only with a knowledge of that mythical moment in its imagined momentariness, but as it is representative of any and all such epochal occasions. The model of the double cone, with the point of the antithetical phase starting up from the base of the primary phase when it is at the outermost limit of its circling, allowed to Yeats the imagination of a time that was at once both ending and origin. ‘The Second Coming’ opens with approaching apocalypse, the doomsday signalled in its title: ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (VP 402). The present tenses of the poem’s Wrst stanza are signs of rapid degeneration in process—‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’—the tokens of imminent disaster. ‘Surely some revelation is at hand’. The intimation of the Second Coming produces ‘a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi’, that is, out of the repository of universal memory. And the image produced is not of a second coming of Christ that will bring with it judgement and the end of the world, but a parodic second Nativity, with the birth of the rough beast inaugurating another twenty-century era. The more historical preoccupations of Yeats’s later poetry meant that he no longer tried to imagine a time ‘before God made the angelic clan’ nor yet an ultimate goal of ‘truth’s consuming ecstasy’. Instead generic and endlessly recurrent patterns of origins and endings press upon the poem’s present consciousness. PRESENT, PAST, FUTURE The temporal perspectives in Yeats are not always so grandly cosmological in scope. Often he limits himself to the time spans of his own life. There are formal retrospectives that declare themselves as such— ‘Coole Park, 1929’, or ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’—but there are other poems that start in a present time only Wnally revealed as recollection. ‘The People’ recalls a past conversation with Maud Gonne, ‘my phoenix’, in which the poet complains of the ingratitude of the people for whom he has done so much: ‘What have I earned for all that work,’ I said, ‘For all that I have done at my own charge?

(VP 351)

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Though the ‘I said’ marks this as having happened in the past, the perfect used in the remembered speech brings us into the present time of its utterance. We are listening as if to a viva voce exchange in which the poet expresses his current mood of disenchantment. It is a retrospect within a retrospect, as Yeats looks back on his choice of public service and regrets the life he might have had: ‘I might have lived . . . In the green shadow of Ferrara wall . . . I might have used the one substantial right j My trade allows’ (VP 351–2). Gonne’s reproof involves a similar reference back to her past history. Despite all that she has suVered at the hands of ‘Those I had served and some that I had fed’, she declares ringingly Yet never have I, now nor any time, Complained of the people.

(VP 352)

Yeats attempts a defence, distinguishing between her active and his contemplative life: ‘You, that have not lived in thought but deed, Can have the purity of a natural force, But I, whose virtues are the deWnitions Of the analytic mind, can neither close The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.’

(VP 353)

It is only at this point, at the very end of a thirty-seven-line poem, that Yeats reveals that the conversation he has been recording happened at a measurable time from the poem’s present. And yet, because my heart leaped at her words, I was abashed, and now they come to mind After nine years, I sink my head abashed.

(VP 353)

The poem was written in January 1915; it makes biographical sense of this dialogue if it happened in 1905–6, a time when Gonne had suVered public odium in nationalist Dublin in the aftermath of her separation from John MacBride.9 There is, however, an oddity in the explicitness of the dating. We live through the emotions of the exchange, Yeats’s selfpitying complaint, Gonne’s resoundingly unanswerable reply and his uneasy attempt to answer it. The Wnal unexpected foregrounding of the time of composition then doubles these emotions of the re-lived past as a present both of then and now. The unclosing ‘eye of the mind’ makes immediate this recalled scene, and the shame of being unable to ‘keep my 9 See A. Norman JeVares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 154–6.

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tongue from speech’—a characteristic Yeatsian recoil from his own incurable tendency to talk—sinks him into silence in 1915 at it did in 1906. A comparable grounding of dated retrospect in an immediacy of address is adopted in ‘The Fisherman’. But there the eVect is complicated by the fact that what is recalled was Wctive rather than real, and the poem looks to the future as well as the past. Yeats backs into the poem with a concessive clause: Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his Xies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. (VP 347)

The eVort to ‘see him still’ suggests the Wgure is receding into the distance, but the main clause, when we eventually reach it, makes it clear that the distance is in time not space, and that the Wsherman is not someone literally seen but ‘called up’ into vision. At this point it is not clear from where he is called up—whether from the imagination or a memory of actuality even further back than the ‘long’ time ago when the poet ‘began’ to summon him. Whichever it was, in the mind’s eye of the poet the Wsherman ‘goes’ about his Wshing in a perpetual present repeated each dawn. In the next lines there seems to be a jump to a quite diVerent time perspective: All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality (VP 347)

‘All day I’d looked’ recalls a day-long contemplation in the past from the time of its completion. It is like the ending of ‘Broken Dreams’ where, equally unexpectedly, the poet reveals that the substance of the poem has been a single day’s reverie: The last stroke of midnight dies. All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged

(VP 357)

In the case of ‘The Fisherman’ we have a pluperfect within a pluperfect: what the poet had spent all day considering was what he had, in a still

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paster past, hoped it would be, looking forward from that past time, to ‘write for my own race’—hoped it would be, but it wasn’t. The ‘reality’ was otherwise. He then lists the litany of complaints against the Philistinism and ingratitude of his would-be audience, the Dublin nationalist community, a litany familiar from the poems of Responsibilities, ending with a couplet that sums it all up: The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.

(VP 348)

So concludes the Wrst stanza. The second starts with another unexpected shift in perspective: Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man (VP 348)

Once again, as with ‘The People’, Yeats is taking us into real time. The manuscript of the poem is dated 4 June 1914, just over a year after an entry in his manuscript book records a ‘Subject for a poem’: Who is this by the edge of the stream That walks in a homespun coat And carries a Wshing [rod] in his hand10

The vagueness of ‘maybe a twelvemonth since’ belies the precision of something that took place on a given date in May 1913, at a time when Yeats, preoccupied with the Municipal Gallery controversy, was writing his poems of ‘discouragement’. We can, if we want, unearth from ‘The Fisherman’ a sequence of events leading up to its composition: the poem is being written a year after the poet spent a day thinking about his disillusionment with his actual audience and imagined an alternative in the Wsherman, an image that has not left him since. However, the poem is designed speciWcally to deny us that sort of clarity. A year is indeed a long time, yet the eVect of ‘it’s long since’ is very diVerent from ‘maybe a twelvemonth since’. Yeats re-locates the Wsherman in some primordial time while simultaneously recording the exact point at which the image came to him: ‘suddenly I began’. In the Wrst stanza the Wsherman was stably there in the mind’s eye, a complete icon held still in perpetual motion. In the second stanza we watch him being put together detail by detail: 10 See A. Norman JeVares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 153.

Tense and Mood Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down-turn of the wrist When the Xies drop in the stream

147

(VP 348)

And it is at this point when the Wsherman has been most vividly assembled in a collage of discrete impressions, gummed together with the repeated ‘and’s, that his Wctiveness is disclosed: A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream (VP 348)

In the original sketched ‘subject’ for ‘The Fisherman’ he was ‘one j That I can see always though he is not yet born’.11 The Wnished poem pushes forward towards a future in which it will be possible for the poet to write for this unborn/inexistent Wsherman: ‘Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.’

(VP 348)

The future perfect here, ‘I shall have written’, replicates the past, disappointed aspiration—‘What I had hoped ’twould be j To write’. That replication in itself, the doubtfulness of ‘maybe’, the notional status of the Wsherman, make the achievement of that poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn’ an all but impossible goal. ‘The Fisherman’ lives in a reading present that incorporates folds in time: the apparently receding memory of the Wsherman, the circumstances of imagining him at a deWnable moment of the past, the resolution to write for this chimerical person a new kind of poem— some day. ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ begins with an intention, apparently carries it through, only to declare the resultant poem an aborted eVort. ‘Now that we’re almost settled in our house’ (VP 323): the Wrst word ‘Now’ Wrmly establishes the moment of speaking and the third line establishes the place, ‘Beside a Wre of turf in th’ ancient tower’ (VP 324). Even as the poet prepares to enumerate the absent friends who ‘cannot sup with us’, he imagines the passing of a long 11 Ibid.

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evening together, when ‘having talked to some late hour’, they ‘Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed’ (VP 324). The second stanza moves from an actual to a habitual, generic present: ‘Always we’d have the new friend meet the old’ (VP 324). The contracted ‘would’ in ‘we’d’ is not a conditional but an aspirational ‘want’, characteristic in Yeats, as with the Druid’s repeated question in ‘Fergus and the Druid’, ‘What would you, Fergus?’ (VP 103). Here the poet reXects on the micropolitics of friendship: we are hurt if either friend seem cold, And there is salt to lengthen out the smart In the aVections of our heart, And quarrels are blown up upon that head

(VP 324)

The whole sequential scenario from the edginess of the introductions through injured feelings to downright rows is sketched in. That at least is not a risk in the current situation, as Yeats comments with a bitter joke: But not a friend that I would bring This night can set us quarrelling, For all that come into my mind are dead.

(VP 324)

In the survivor’s memory the dead live together in a companionship that runs no risk of social abrasion. Though for the linear purposes of the poem, Johnson, Synge, Pollexfen succeed one another processionally— ‘comes the Wrst to mind . . . comes next . . . And then I think’—they belong together in the photo-album of the past: their breathless faces seem to look Out of some old picture-book (VP 325)

With the entry of Gregory into the poem and the fact of his recent death, the time indicators switch back to the immediate present and the vivid presence of his absence: For all things the delighted eye now sees Were loved by him . . .

(VP 326)

We are asked to look at what the poet sees before him—the trees, the tower, the ford—with the eyes of the dead man who can no longer see them. To all of this ‘He might have been your heartiest welcomer’ (VP 326). Here, as throughout the poem, George Yeats, the poet’s recently married bride, both is and is not the direct addressee. She is included in the Wrst-person plurals of the opening line ‘we’re almost settled in our

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house’. Later we are told that the couple lack the best advice they could have had in its renovation: What other could so well have counselled us In all lovely intricacies of a house

(VP 327)

And yet the dead that Yeats remembers are his own dead, the dead of a past his wife did not share. So Gregory ‘might have been your [George Yeats’s] heartiest welcomer’ in that she is coming as a stranger to the tower, in what had been Gregory’s home property. By the poem’s last stanza, however, there is little remaining sign of George Yeats’s presence. It is not domestic comfort in the ‘almost settled’ house that he contemplates, nor yet the putative pleasures of company beside the Wre of turf, but the harshness of external conditions and the failure of his attempt to oVset them: I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved Or boyish intellect approved, With some appropriate commentary on each; Until imagination brought A Wtter welcome . . . (VP 327–8)

‘I had thought’ is a pluperfect of unfuWlled intention. The lines neatly summarize what the Wrst half of the poem in fact accomplished, yet this did not lead on, as planned, to a ‘Wtter welcome’—for his wife, it is to be presumed. Instead, ‘a thought j Of that late death took all my heart for speech’. As Seamus Deane puts it, ‘Ending the poem on a declaration which, in eVect, says that he can go on no longer, so overwhelming is his grief for this man, even in comparison with his grief for the others, is a strategy which permits the writer to Wnish what he has to say under the pretence that it is unWnished, and unWnishable.’12 Yeats’s conclusion to ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ attempts to counter Dr Johnson’s famous criticism of ‘Lycidas’: ‘Where there is leisure for Wction, there is little grief ’.13 Yeats may well have been dissatisWed with ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, his Wrst pastoral elegy for 12 Seamus Deane, ‘Yeats: The Creation of an Audience’, in Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene (eds), Tradition and InXuence in Anglo-Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 31–46 [38]. 13 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. S. C. Roberts (London: Collins, 1963), 123.

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Gregory, and have needed some way of disavowing the artiWce of the elegy form. The poem more generally exempliWes Yeats’s capacity to take the reader through shifting time zones in which a speciWcally dramatized present moves in and out of focus. We are, at the start of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, in the tower with Yeats and his wife; this might almost be the epithalamion that seems Wtting to the situation. At the same time, we are in the consciousness of the poet, sharing with him the memory of those dead friends who might but cannot make up part of a house-warming party. Brief obits bring before us the lifespans of those who are gone. A much more strenuous eVort is needed to make sense of the death and life of Gregory in all its multiple aspects. But then that very composition into accomplished form— ‘Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, j And all he did done perfectly’ (VP 327)—is undone as a past, failed purpose that validates the poem by denying that it could be written. The poem we read in Yeats is thus recurrently shadowed by its other, an elegy that might be adequate for Gregory, the poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn’ that might be written for the Wsherman. Beyond imagined presents, pasts, and futures, other non-indicative moods are necessary to register these shadow states of the notional, hypothetical, or counterfactual. PRAYER AND DESIRE If in his early poetry Yeats posited a Creator, however unlike the conventional Christian God, belated parenthood brought a need to pray to a tutelary deity for the protection and fulWlment of his children’s lives. ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ is couched in the optative subjunctives traditional in prayer, ‘May she be granted . . . May she become . . . And may her bridegroom’ (VP 403–5).14 The force of the optative here is to express a devout wish for the Deity to bring about the desired end. The imperative with which ‘A Prayer for my Son’ starts may seem rather more peremptory but is equally common in prayer (‘Give us this day our daily bread’): Bid a strong ghost stand at the head That my Michael may sleep sound, Nor cry, nor turn in the bed 14 For such optative subjunctives, see Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, GeoVrey Leech, Jan Svartik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London and New York: Longman, 1985), 11.39.

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Till his morning meal come round (VP 435)

Most babies’ parents have devoutly wished for an uninterrupted night’s sleep without feeling they had the right to ask divine intervention to bring it about. But Yeats had Messianic ambitions for his son and thought he needed exceptional protection: Bid the ghost have sword in Wst: Some there are, for I avow Such devilish things exist, Who have planned his murder (VP 435–6)

Although in some ways a conventionally Christian poem, with Christ’s incarnation movingly evoked in the next stanza—‘You have lacked articulate speech j To tell Your simplest want’ (VP 436)—Yeats here does not hesitate to proclaim his own personal beliefs in the ‘devilish’ Frustrators, who battled to defeat his Instructors in the occult knowledge that gave him A Vision, and might equally conspire to deny Michael Yeats the glorious life planned for him.15 And in the Wnal stanza of the poem, he recalls the Flight into Egypt as precedent for the parents’ protection of the infant child against murderous designs— ‘Unless’, he adds mischievously, ‘the Holy Writings lie’ (VP 436). Even at his most prayerful, Yeats cannot give unqualiWed assent to orthodox belief; his invocation of aid for his baby son is launched towards a power that may—or may not—be the God of the Christian Gospels. ‘On Woman’ is more provocatively heterodox from the very start: May God be praised for woman That gives up all her mind, A man may Wnd in no man A friendship of her kind (VP 345)

The poem takes on and challenges the misogynist bias of the JudaeoChristian tradition in its re-reading of the story of Solomon: Though pedantry denies, It’s plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens

(VP 345)

He goes further still and aYrms that the apogee of Solomon’s achievement came in the consummation of his love with the Queen of Sheba. 15 See Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs. W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 279.

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This leads on to a single nineteen-line sentence which, in the complexity of its handling of mood and tense, needs to be quoted in full: What else He give or keep God grant me—no, not here, For I am not so bold To hope a thing so dear Now I am growing old, But when, if the tale’s true, The Pestle of the moon That pounds up all anew Brings me to birth again— To Wnd what once I had And know what once I have known, Until I am driven mad, Sleep driven from my bed, By tenderness and care, Pity, an aching head, Gnashing of teeth, despair; And all because of some one Perverse creature of chance, And live like Solomon That Sheba led a dance. (VP 346)

It’s an extraordinary prayer. The wish, ‘God grant me’, is separated from what is wished for, ‘To Wnd’, by the eight-line parenthesis pre-deWning the state in which the poet wants his wish to be granted: not in the here and now in which he is—continuous present—‘growing old’, but at re-birth, that is if the doctrine of reincarnation proves correct. ‘If the tale’s true’ puts Yeats’s own belief in the phases of the moon on the same hypothetical basis as Christian Scripture, ‘unless the Holy Writings lie’. The desire to re-live ‘what once I have known’ drives him to live it again in an anticipated present: ‘I am driven mad’. After this plunge back into the vortex of tormented passion brought about by ‘one j Perverse creature of chance’, it is astonishing to come upon the completion of the prayer: ‘God grant me . . . [1] To Wnd what once I had . . . [2] And live like Solomon’. Where the poem begins by praising God for the complementary friendship of woman, continues with the celebration of sexual congress between Solomon and Sheba, what Yeats positively prays for in the next life is the renewed pursuit of woman as the object of unattainable need. Yeats’s optatives normally yearn for what is not to be had. ‘I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!’ (VP 121).

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In one of his more convoluted poems, ‘King and No King’, Yeats goes out to the situation of the frustrated lover who needs to re-make the constitution of things in order to achieve his desires: ‘Would it were anything but merely voice!’ The No King cried who after that was King, Because he had not heard of anything That balanced with a word is more than noise (VP 258)

It was Richard Ellmann who uncovered the context for this in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, A King and No King: King Arbaces, in love with his supposed sister Panthea, fulminates against the word ‘incest’ that bars him from fulWlment.16 The Wrst line is a characteristic Yeatsian misquotation. In the original, King Arbaces, military conqueror that he is, wishes to be able to destroy the words ‘brother and sister’: ‘Let ’em be anything but merely voice’. The typically hopeless optative that Yeats substitutes, ‘Would it were’, batters its head against the impossibility of the situation. The poem then goes on to gesture towards the absurd ease with which Beaumont and Fletcher resolved their artiWcially contrived impasse: Old Romance being kind, let him prevail Somewhere or somehow that I have forgot (VP 258)

In point of fact Arbaces turned out not to be the brother of Panthea, and therefore No King, yet as a consequence was able to marry her and thus become actual King; but Yeats does not care about any of that. The plot of the ‘Old Romance’ was only introduced into the poem to contrast with his own more intractable real-life position in relation to Maud Gonne: we that had thought To have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale Have been defeated by that pledge you gave In momentary anger long ago . . .

(VP 258)

Scholars remain uncertain as to just what ‘pledge’ is referred to here, possibly a vow by Gonne not to marry.17 At the time he wrote ‘King and No King’ in December 1909, Gonne had insisted that they return to their condition of platonic friendship after the brief consummation of their love a year before. The eVect is clear: a word, a vow will keep them 16 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (2nd edn, London: Faber, 1964), 252. 17 See, for example, JeVares, New Commentary, 96, or W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (2nd edn, London: Dent, 1994), 507.

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apart, doom them to be mere brother and sister without the hope of a Beaumont and Fletcher style happy ending. Will there be consolation in a future life? Yeats here can only look forward to the heaven in which the Catholic Gonne, not he, believes: And I that have not your faith, how shall I know That in the blinding light beyond the grave We’ll Wnd so good a thing as that we have lost? (VP 258)

In ‘On Woman’ the poet actually prayed to be given again in another incarnation the unfulWlled dance of desire he had lived out so tormentedly in the present life. In this poem he imagines an idyll of the companionate marriage that the lovers have perversely renounced: The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech, The habitual content of each with each When neither soul nor body has been crossed.

(VP 258)

In Yeats, language strains in optatives and imperatives to desiderata beyond the humanly achievable. By times he can utilize the conventional forms of prayer to express such yearning. He can even occupy the position of the believer calling upon God to ‘bid a strong ghost’ protect his baby son Michael. He moves in and out of such orthodoxy, combining it at will with his own more idiosyncratic beliefs in reincarnation, the phases of the moon, the conXict of magical powers. Yet the poetry withholds conWdent faith from any creed that might guarantee a mode of being beyond the sublunary. The rhetorical aspiration of the ‘woulds’ and ‘mays’ is thus left exposed as just that, a linguistic eVort unable to lift itself into the security of the indicative. In the contrarieties of love, in particular, Yeats can oscillate between a deWant wish to have the endless pursuit of desire endlessly repeated in lives to come, and a remorseful fear that there will be nothing to compensate for the lost opportunities of earthly union. P O S S I B I L I T Y AN D P U R P O S E In its optative function, the subjunctive mood allows the speaker to wish for what may or may not come to pass. It is used also, however, to express unreal conditions that can never be fulWlled. ‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths . . . I would spread the cloths under your feet’ (VP 176): I haven’t and I cannot, but I would if I could. This is a standard subjunctive

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followed by conditional.18 It has a startling eVect in what appears from the title to be an optative: ‘He wishes his Beloved were Dead’: Were you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast; And you would murmur tender words, Forgiving me, because you were dead

(VP 175)

The poet does not really want his loved one dead; this is rather a wishfulWlment fantasy expressive of the impossiblity of her murmuring tender words to him in the present life. The very embodied nature of the imagined embrace from the woman cold and dead in the grave points up the paradox, a more self-aware version of the terrible tragic irony in Othello’s lines to the sleeping Desdemona he is about to murder: ‘Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee j And love thee after’ (V.ii. 18–19). Real and unreal play in and out of this sort of hypothetical construction. The Shadowy Waters in its dim ideality pushes further beyond the actual than almost any other Yeats work. At the poem’s climax, when Dectora has come to accept her destiny as Forgael’s lover, she rehearses what we have actually seen take place as if it was nothing but a story: If something’s that most fabulous were true— If you had taken me by magic spells, And killed a lover or husband at my feet— I would not let you speak, for I would know That it was yesterday and not to-day I loved him . . .

(VP 245–6)

This is like the switch around of the word ‘dream’ in the poem, analyzed in Chapter 3. The plotted narrative in which Dectora was taken by magic spells, did have a husband killed at her feet, is relegated to the realm of fantastical hypothesis. All the following apparatus of conditionals is held at arm’s length by a new certainty that the past of yesterday is divided by a quantum change from the truth of to-day. This is a hyperbole where the unreal condition authenticates a luminous revelation. More often we Wnd competing suppositions standing in doubtful counterpoise. In ‘Ancestral Houses’, the Wrst poem in ‘Meditations in 18 See Quirke et al., Comprehensive Grammar, 3.62.

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Time of Civil War’, Yeats begins with an idyll of the cultivated country house: Surely among a rich man’s Xowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overXows without ambitious pains (VP 417)

But the tentative ‘surely’ prepares us for the emphatic dismissal with which the second stanza starts: ‘Mere dreams, mere dreams!’ What follows then sways back and forth between competing valuations of art and culture: Yet Homer had not sung Had he not found it certain beyond dreams That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems As if some marvellous empty sea-shell Xung Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams, And not a fountain, were the symbol which Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

(VP 417–8)

Homer’s conviction, with all the authority that Homer carries in Yeats, stands against the sceptical devaluation of the ideal of gracious living as ‘mere dreams’. Yet the negative form of the hypothesis—‘had not sung j Had he not found it’—puts distance between us and the Homeric certainty, and belief in the fountain as the positive image of art’s spontaneous self-expression is placed as his belief only. The contrary view, civilized culture as a beautiful but meaningless gesture snatched from the Xux of time, is equally suppositious: ‘now it seems’. It may be only to our modern latter-day sensibilities that the seashell appears the appropriate symbol of high art; the pristine Homer may have been right. The long, dialectical sentence in its puzzled pondering of the question eschews any straight indicative. The debate between the aYrmation and the denial of the value of art goes back to those paired poems, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Sad Shepherd’, placed at the head of Crossways, opening the canon of Yeats’s lyrics, and there too the seashell was a crucial image in the debate. In the combative phase of his career represented by the public poems collected in Responsibilities, the contrast tends to be between what art once was, what it ought to be, and the way in a degenerate present it is now treated. So it is, for instance, with ‘To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin

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Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’, where the subjunctive ‘were’ in the title expresses the unfulWlled condition for the man’s further donation. The poem underlines scornfully the gap between subjunctive and indicative: You gave, but will not give again Until enough of Paudeen’s pence By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain To be ‘some sort of evidence’, Before you’ll put your guineas down, That things it were a pride to give Are what the blind and ignorant town Imagines best to make it thrive.

(VP 287)

The shaming paltriness of the pence and halfpennies beside the wealthy man’s guineas, the derisively quoted ‘some sort of evidence’, contribute to the eVect here. The man’s misguided thinking in making his philanthropy dependent on public support reduces the pictures that ought to have an absolute value in themselves—‘things it were a pride to give’— to what the goal-oriented reasoning of the ‘blind and ignorant town j Imagines best to make it thrive’. Yet Yeats insists that there are goals also to the unconditional free gift of such supreme works of art. The Italian Renaissance patrons, who are held up as positive role models to the wealthy man, had long-term objectives overriding mere popular will: What cared Duke Ercole, that bid His mummers to the market-place, What th’ onion-sellers thought or did So that his Plautus set the pace For the Italian comedies? (VP 287)

Similarly, Cosimo de Medici, victim of the faction Wghting in Florence, nonetheless funded the San Marco Library Whence turbulent Italy should draw Delight in Art whose end is peace

(VP 287)

The Wnal imperatives to Lord Ardilaun urge him to act to achieve such a result beyond any immediate calculation of utility: Look up in the sun’s eye and give What the exultant heart calls good That some new day may breed the best (VP 287)

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The desired aims are cast as subjunctives—‘should draw’, ‘may breed’— to indicate their status in a potentially improved futurity. Such subjunctive clauses of purpose, positive and negative, are very common in Yeats. ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ yields one of each. The Rose is invoked to ‘Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate, j I Wnd . . . Eternal beauty wandering on her way’, but then asked to draw back a little ‘Lest I no more hear common things that crave’ (VP 101). He often foregrounds the purpose by moving the clause up to the head of the sentence. So the Wrst stanza of ‘Mohini Chatterjee’ recalls, long after, the Indian sage’s advice to him as a young man in Dublin: That he might set at rest A boy’s turbulent days Mohini Chatterjee Spoke these, or words like these.

(VP 496)

In ‘That the Night Come’ the clause of purpose, towards which the brilliantly articulated single sentence makes its way, is advanced up to the title. She lived in storm and strife, Her soul had such desire For what proud death may bring That it could not endure The common good of life, But lived as ’twere a king That packed his marriage day With banneret and pennon, Trumpet and kettledrum, And the outrageous cannon, To bundle time away That the night come. (VP 317)

The urgency of the death wish with which we start, and with which we end, drives the poem forward. The most arresting instance of this sort of dislocated sentence structure with its teleological subjunctives is ‘Long-Legged Fly’. Each of the three stanzas starts with a clause of purpose headed by ‘that’, as though in imitation of Latin ‘ut’:19 19 Yeats did learn Latin at the High School in Dublin (Foster I 33), but it seems likely, given his lack of facility for foreign languages, that his use of Latinate syntax here and elsewhere may have derived from his reading of Milton.

Tense and Mood That civilization may not sink, Its great battle lost, Quiet the dog, tether the pony To a distant post

159

(VP 617)

The immediacy of the imperatives addressed as if in present time to Caesar’s soldiers is conditioned by the hindsight perspective of what is at stake. And the momentousness of the outcome is in striking contrast to the minimalism of what can actually be seen at the time: Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes Wxed upon nothing, A hand under his head. Like a long-legged Xy upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

(VP 617)

Is there irony here, and if so how does it work? The image of the longlegged Xy comes from Coleridge’s observation of ‘a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets’, ‘how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it . . . This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking’.20 Indeed, and in Yeats a Wtting symbol of the stillness, even vacancy, of creativity at its most intense. In ‘Easter 1916’ the stone of the leaders’ Wxed purpose troubled the living stream of history and had the ultimate eVect of diverting its course. Here the microscopic scale suggests rather the fragility and instinctive skills of those who can work against the current of time. The delicacy and beauty of the refrain leave the magniloquence of the opening—‘That civilisation may not sink’—sounding strained and bombastic. The other two instances used in the poem make it hard to be sure of the intended eVect. Certainly the Trojan war initiated by Helen, imagined in the second stanza practising a ‘tinker shuZe j Picked up on a street’ (VP 617), was always for Yeats an epochal event. And there is ample evidence elsewhere that he took seriously the demented eugenic aesthetics of the last stanza by which Michelangelo must work on the Sistine Chapel ‘That girls at puberty may Wnd j The Wrst Adam in their thought’ (VP 617). Yet, whether it is consistent with the poem’s intention or not, it is hard in ‘Long-Legged Fly’ to resist some sense of 20 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 831, citing W. E. Rodgers, who Wrst noted the source in Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria.

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absurdity in the disproportion of action to event. At least, the grand schemes of historical destiny are left exposed to question in the clauses of purpose stranded at the top of each stanza. Yeats believed Wrmly in causality and design in history, a purposefulness in the way human lives were shaped over time. But that purposefulness had none of the progressive force of the Whig view of history; on the contrary, the cyclic theory of the gyres bound man to a wheel of repeated change that he could neither alter nor direct. If ‘Long-Legged Fly’ sets key moments of great creativity in quizzical relation to the onward march of culture, ‘Meru’, the last of the ‘Supernatural Songs’, posits an all-destroying quest as man’s ultimate telos; an alternative title on a manuscript draft was ‘The summing up’21: Civilization is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality

(VP 563)

Yeats might polemically demand that his wealthy man should endow excellence ‘that some new day may breed the best’, or could perhaps convince himself ‘That girls at puberty may Wnd j The Wrst Adam in their thought’ as a result of Michelangelo’s painting. But here the only goal is the realization of nothingness: Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome! Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest, Caverned in night under the drifted snow, Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast Beat down upon their naked bodies, know That day brings round the night, that before dawn His glory and his monuments are gone. (VP 563)

Yeats’s poems commonly stress the instantaneity of a dramatic moment, even if it is conjured up from the past: ‘Suddenly I began’ in ‘The Fisherman’; ‘Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven’ in ‘The Cold Heaven’; ‘A sudden blow’, ‘Leda and the Swan’. Round these 21 W. B. Yeats, ‘‘Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems’’ from ‘‘A Full Moon in March’’: Manuscript Materials, ed. David R. Clark (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 252–3.

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epiphanic instants of revelation a whole intricate scaVolding of tenses is built. We are not allowed simply to watch a spectacle as if it were taking place in the staged immediacy of a theatre. Instead the revelatory occasion is hedged around with perspectives altering its status as directly apprehended present. Changing tenses make us aware how this ‘sudden’ event came into being in the past, the degree to which it is now imagined or real, and its status in a projected futurity. The moment of epiphany is qualiWed by our consciousness of the continuum of time that it aspires to transcend. However much the poet aYrms an order of things outside time, God the Creator or the Rose of eternal beauty, the imagination that strains towards it is time-bound. And whether he meditates upon the events of his own life or the patterns of human history, the spectrum of tenses used enforces the simultaneous presence of past, present, and future in imagination and memory. Yet Yeats did always believe in poetry as an instrument of revelation, ‘a place of mediation between Time and Eternity’ as Larrissy puts it. The problematic nature of that revelation is dramatized in ‘Whence Had They Come?’ also from the sequence ‘Supernatural Songs’. Eternity is passion, girl or boy Cry at the onset of their sexual joy ‘For ever and for ever’; then awake Ignorant what Dramatis Personae spake; A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought; The Flagellant lashes those submissive loins Ignorant what that dramatist enjoins, What master made the lash. Whence had they come, The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

(VP 560)

The vows of eternal love sworn by the young couple in their ecstasy are not illusions but lines written for them by the same playwright who plotted the downfall of Rome, and the rise of Christianity. The spontaneity of the lovers’ cries or the ascetic’s Xagellation, the coital climax of the emperor’s mother, are all pre-scripted. Yeats is Platonist enough to believe in a divine force animating human actions, playwright enough to imagine it as sacred drama. Still, the poem’s title remains an open rhetorical question. That there was a design to the universe beyond rational understanding was for Yeats an article of faith. That magic represented the best means towards

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grasping it was equally a conviction: ‘The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write’. But certainty this conviction could never grant him. The imperatives, optatives, and subjunctives in the poems are the inXections of this commitment to belief in what he could only imagine as imaginable.

7 Voices Yeats was addicted to talk. For all his youthful fantasies of life alone in a bee-loud glade on Innisfree, he knew he could not exist without the stimulus of gossip, chat, and argument. ‘Nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for conversation’ (A 171). This was the poet who kept his Monday evenings in Woburn Buildings, his salon in Merrion Square, the clubman of the Arts Club in Dublin, the Savile and eventually the Athenaeum in London, a man who thrived on public debate in every forum, political, theatrical, or cultural, who enjoyed long, intimate conversations with women, combative exchanges with men. We can hear the sound of talk in and around many of the poems. He exchanges a few words with the men coming from counter or desk and ‘thought before I had done j Of a mocking tale or a gibe j To please a companion j Around the Wre at the club’ (VP 392). He resolves that he will ‘talk no more of . . . the long war’ (VP 351), the subject that no one could avoid talking about in 1915. Unlike with other meetings of the new friend and the old, in the colloquy of the dead set up in the Robert Gregory elegy, ‘not a friend that I would bring j This night can set us quarrelling’ (VP 324). Yet, as with all addictions, Yeats’s need for talk brought its own nauseated recoil in a hung-over morning after. He expresses this most tellingly in the opening of Per Amica Silentia Lunae: When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy.

And in reaction against such inauthentic self-exposure in conversation comes the disciplined and controlled voice of poetry: But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a marmorean Muse, an art where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man has

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thought or felt something diVerent, for now there must be no reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart’s discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and conWdence. (Myth 325)

Cynically, one might say that for Yeats poetry aVorded the occasion for a gloriWed esprit de l’escalier. Re-writing conversations that had gone wrong, things he had missaid or overstated, allowed him not only to express himself more truly, but potentially to raise the game of his interlocutors as well. Instead of the random strangers who arouse fear or ‘undisciplined sympathy’, they can become the world whose function is to ‘move my heart but to the heart’s discovery of itself ’. Yeats began his career writing poetic dramas and the clash of voice on voice rings through his work as a lyric poet as well as his plays. Sometimes these take the form of scripted dialogues for identiWed dramatis personae: Patrick and Oisin, Fergus and the Druid, Shepherd and Goatherd. Elsewhere they are remembered conversations, apparently casual and occasional, the threesome of ‘Adam’s Curse’, the recollected argument about popular acclaim in ‘The People’. At times there is an unnamed ‘you’, an implied addressee who does not speak—Parnell in ‘To a Shade’, Lady Gregory in ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’ or ‘The New Faces’. But the ordinary rhythms of human talk are everywhere translated into the ringing rightness of poetic voice. Not all those voices are the poet’s own. Yeats’s earliest impulse was to create peopled worlds of heroes, fairies, exotic Wgures from India or ancient Ireland to give variegated expression to the life of his imagination. His roles as lover and mage required a whole array of substitute personae, Aedh, Hanrahan, Michael Robartes, to articulate the diVerent modes of yearning and being. In later work the preferred masks are still wilder and stranger: Crazy Jane, the hermit Ribh, the wild old wicked man. The poet’s voice, ventriloquized through these costumed characters, may be disguised, distorted, or ampliWed, but it is never completely unrecognizable. Rather the voices of these personae are like the selfdramatizing soliloquies that Yeats describes in ‘The Bounty of Sweden’ as starting point for his poems: Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagination, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and dramatize myself, very much as I have seen a mad old woman do upon the Dublin quays, and sometimes detect myself speaking and moving as if I were still young, or walking perhaps like an old man with fumbling steps. (A 532)

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The self-projections here allow for some degree of escape from the self; the comparison with the Crazy Jane-like mad old woman suggests even the capacity to move beyond gender limits. ‘They stir my interest’, he claims, ‘by their appropriateness to the men I imagine myself to be’ (A 532). What is involved is something other than mere self-expression, something less than full dramatization. The play of voices, wherever they come from, whose ever they are, works towards the ‘heart’s discovery of itself ’. It is the heart that is apostrophized in many of Yeats’s poems of self-communing, most famously in ‘The Tower’: ‘What shall I do with this absurdity— j O heart, O troubled heart’ (VP 409). In ‘Owen Aherne and his Dancers’, the Heart even gets to talk back. Long before he Wrst introduced the term ‘anti-self ’ in the poem ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, the concept of the conXicted, divided personality was fundamental to Yeats’s poetic theory and practice.1 Hic and Ille, Self and Soul, Soul and Heart hammer out the issues between them. My concern here is not to provide one more exposition of the Yeatsian doctrine of mask and anti-self. The aim of this chapter rather is to look at the way voices are managed in Yeats, whether in the antiphonal forms of dialogue and conversation, in the ventriloqual personae who speak in their various idioms for the poet, in the addresses to silent interlocutors, and in the self-Wssuring meditations and debates within. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Myth 331). It is a rhetorical distinction only; Yeats could make magniWcent poetry out of his quarrel with others, but that quarrel was always in some sense a quarrel with himself. DIALOGUES AND CONVERSATIONS Oisin, tell me the famous story Why thou outlivest, blind and hoary, The bad old days. Thou wert, men sing, Trapped of an amorous demon thing. (VP 2)

Saint Patrick, in this Wrst published version of The Wanderings of Oisin, acts very obviously as feed for Oisin’s story. And in the traditional dialogue, borrowed from Middle Irish, between the Rip Van Winkle 1 A. Norman JeVares cites the 1886 poem ‘Life’ as the earliest expression of the idea: W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 166.

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leftover warrior of the Fianna and the saint who converted Ireland to Christianity, it is evident where the poet’s sympathies lie. The poem’s original subtitle—The Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him—is heavy with Yeatsian irony. She may be a demon to Patrick, but as the poet tells Oisin’s story, he is more than willingly seduced by a beautiful, sympathetic and understanding Niamh. Through many of Yeats’s dialogue poems, there is one voice that clearly speaks for the poet himself, the other a mere prompt or straw man antagonist. Owen Aherne is only present in ‘The Phases of the Moon’ to urge Michael Robartes to recount the esoteric doctrines the poet in the tower labours to understand: ‘Sing out the song; sing to the end’ (VP 374). In ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, the Goatherd listens condescendingly to the Shepherd’s elegy, as one ‘that made like music in my youth’ (VP 342), before going on to expound the superior wisdom expressed in his own lyric. In ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ the poet’s clear identiWcation with one side of the argument provoked Pound’s wisecrack that they should have been labelled Hic and Willie.2 In The Island of Statues and Mosada Yeats attempted poetic dramas with the full apparatus of dramatis personae, stage directions, and the rest. In the Wrst version of The Wanderings of Oisin he sought to incorporate similar dramatic elements into the narrative poem: cross interjections by Patrick denouncing Oisin’s paganism, deWant responses by Oisin, at one point even an oVstage ‘Song of Monks without’ to illustrate Patrick’s doctrine of mortiWcation (VP 43). In the revisions we can see Yeats clearing the poem of some of these pseudodramatic elements to give a more eVective contrast of voices. In the original Patrick rebuked a passionate lamentation by Oisin for his lost companions and rather clumsily urged him on with his tale: Bard Oisin, boast not of thy deeds Nor thy companions. Let them rest, The Fenians. Let their deer-hounds sleep. Tell on, nor bow thy heathen crest In brooding memory, nor weep. (VP 11)

In the revised version, this becomes a three-line interjection— Boast not, nor mourn with drooping head Companions long accurst and dead, And hounds for centuries dust and air. 2 Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (rpt., New York: Dutton, 1958), 197.

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—which Oisin ignores and continues unprompted with his story: We galloped over the glossy sea

(VP 11)

This technique of voices that talk past one another or communicate only obliquely Yeats was to put to good use in later poems, including the ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’. In The Wanderings of Oisin, however, there is never a genuine conXict between equally matched opponents. Patrick is merely an instrument to stimulate Oisin’s elegiac celebration of the pagan past. In ‘Fergus and the Druid’, by contrast, there is a real tension in the exchanges between the two speakers; they enact a minidrama of desire and understanding. The scene is set by Fergus’s evocation of the shapechanging Druid whom he has followed all day through his various forms. As a ‘thin grey man half lost in gathering night’, he is a minatory presence who will only repeat the one line, ‘What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?’ (VP 102). Fergus’s replies are expansive, explaining how he has wearied of kingship, turned over the government to Conchubar, but still can ‘feel the crown upon my head’. The Druid continues only to repeat insistently, ‘What would you, Fergus?’ (VP 103). Despite the Druid’s warnings, Fergus is determined to escape the life of action ‘and learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours’. He opens the bag of dreams the Druid reluctantly oVers him and is annihilated by the knowledge he acquires: ‘now I have grown nothing, knowing all’ (VP 104). The fable of the self-defeating need to transcend the self is given dynamic shape by the dramatization: the forward-moving eagerness and determination of Fergus met by the Druid’s grim taciturnity; the fulcrum point of the poem where the bag is silently opened;3 the dismayed ebbing away of Fergus’s previous urgency—‘I see my life go drifting like a river j From change to change’ (VP 104). Yeats never abandoned the formal dialogue but he came to tune it towards something more like the give and take of conversation. ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ is an interesting case in point. The ‘He’ and ‘She’ here are Yeats and Iseult Gonne, arguing about the value of women’s education and independent thought. The twelve opening lines represent the bravura reinterpretation of a ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ painting, used to illustrate the combative statement, ‘Opinion

3 Yeats sensibly suppressed a stage direction that appeared in the Wrst published versions, ‘Fergus (having unloosed the cord)’ (VP 104).

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is not worth a rush’ (VP 385). The dragon from which the lady had to be rescued not once but repeatedly was her thought, That every morning rose again And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.

(VP 385)

‘She’ is unimpressed and counters with the puncturing half-line—‘you mean they argued’—before which ‘He’ seems forced to give a bit of ground ‘Put it so’ (VP 385), before moving back into his mode of hectoring male overstatement. The doctrines expounded by He/Michael Robartes are Yeats’s own, the evil of opinionated women, the embodied nature of the soul, the need for beautiful women to ‘live in uncomposite blessedness’ (VP 387). And yet the sly retorts of She/the Dancer seem to undercut and expose the posturings of the masculine voice. She mocks the obscurity of his argument in the terms of his own allegory: ‘My wretched dragon is perplexed’ (VP 386). The Wnal line may appear to cede the victory to Robartes’ position, but it can equally be read as a dry way of withholding assent: ‘They say such diVerent things at school’ (VP 387). The challenge for Yeats is whether it is possible ever to articulate an authentically alternative female point of view. In ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ there is at least the suggestion of such an alternative voice. ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ (published in 1902) is some sort of breakthrough in Yeats because it is the Wrst time he made a poem out of what sounds like an ordinary conversation, though as so often this is in part because of later revisions. ‘One that is ever kind said yesterday’ (VP 199)—the remark is recalled as something casual, immediate, an incident of the everyday life. And it is reported as though verbatim: ‘Your well-belove`d’s hair has threads of grey, And little shadows come about her eyes; Time can but make it easier to be wise Though now it seem impossible, and so All that you need is patience.’ (VP 199–200)

In the original published versions the last two lines read as a completed couplet: Though now it’s hard, till trouble is at an end; And so be patient; be wise and patient, friend.’ (VP 200)

Even here Yeats was trying to mimic the rhythm of spoken speech, in the tender emphasis of the repeated advice by the ‘friend’. In the 1922

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revision, the couplet is disrupted by the heavy caesura and the run-on line—‘ ‘‘now it seems impossible, jj and so j All that you need is patience.’’ ’—and by the interruption of another voice, completing the verse line: ‘Heart cries, ‘‘No’’ ’ (VP 200). What follows are not the words of the poet but the words of his Heart: Heart cries, ‘No, I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. Time can but make her beauty over again: Because of that great nobleness of hers The Wre that stirs about her, when she stirs, Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’ (VP 200)

Once again, revision accentuated the spokenness of these lines. In earlier printings, they were addressed as apostrophe to the heart—‘But heart, there is no comfort, not a grain’ (VP 200). The Wnal eVect is of a threeway conversation: the ever-kind friend speaks aloud to the poet; the poet’s heart speaks, presumably not aloud, in response; and Wnally, the poet speaks back to the heart in the concluding couplet: O heart! O heart! If she’d but turn her head, You’d know the folly of being comforted.

(VP 200)

What is strangest about the ending here is that it makes it appear as if ‘the well-belove`d’ had been present all along. The friend made her/his would-be comforting remarks yesterday. Heart talks back, implicitly the day after, but as though in direct denial of what it has just heard. And suddenly his loved one is there in the room, head turned away, only needing to face him to reveal the absurd idea that love might fade with her fading beauty. What Yeats develops here is a strategy of spoken and unspoken subtext that resonates below the actual dialogue. This is the eVect in the much more important contemporary conversation poem, ‘Adam’s Curse’. On the surface, what is recorded is a summer evening’s discussion of poetry and beauty between the poet and ‘That beautiful mild woman, your close friend’ (VP 204). The poet complains of the eVort of making verses that have to seem eVortless; his companion says the same thing is true of women’s beauty; the poet concludes that ‘It’s certain there is no Wne thing j Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring’ (VP 205). But the silent presence of ‘you’, the person to whom the poem is addressed, informs the whole. It is only in the Wnal

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section that the poet speaks the words that cannot be spoken in the presence of a third person: I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love

(VP 206)

Yet in retrospect this deeper tacit feeling makes chit-chat of the talk about poetry and beauty. It has the somewhat laboured quality of conversation swimming against the undertow of emotional currents. Yeats’s skill here is to render in the one poem the split level of surface voices and silent communion. Maud Gonne’s voice is not often heard in Yeats’s poems. Although they spent a good deal of time together, she would never agree to marry him, and her ever-recurrent presence in his thoughts is often the presence of an absence. He carries on with her the asymmetrical, onesided dialogue of the unrequited lover. Even when we do hear her speak, as in ‘The People’, her ringing rebuke to Yeats’s whining about popular ingratitude— ‘never have I, now nor any time Complained of the people.’

(VP 352)

—is mediated through the memory of the poet, recalling the exchange nine years after. Returned love, successful marriage, and the special shared intimacy with his wife represented by the automatic writing called for a sort of dialogue in poetry diVerent from the one-way communications with Gonne. The dramatis personae for such a relationship were, as it were, preprepared. In his 1909 Diary, ‘Estrangement’, Yeats commented: It seems to me that true love is a discipline, and it needs so much wisdom that the love of Solomon and Sheba must have lasted, for all the silence of the Scriptures. Each divines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life; for love also creates the Mask. (A 464)

In ‘On Woman’, he tried out Solomon and Sheba as Wgures for himself and Maud Gonne, Gonne who had been a fellow member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Gonne with whom he had hoped to be secret sharer in the occult Castle of Heroes. But in ‘On Woman’ Solomon is ‘led a dance’ by Sheba; she is his inspiring, torturing, never quite attainable object of desire. It was much more diYcult to imagine the

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reciprocity of an enduring love between Solomon and Sheba. What voice was to be given to those who refuse ‘to believe in the mere daily self ’? In ‘Solomon to Sheba’, in which Sheba bends for George, Yeats reaches for Donne’s ecstatic language of consummated love: ‘She’is all states, and all princes, I, j Nothing else is.’4 The more homely Yeatsian equivalent of this cosmic contraction is the animal pound: There’s not a thing but love can make The world a narrow pound.

(VP 333)

But the exchange between Solomon and an exoticized, orientalized Sheba is a purely formal one: Sang Solomon to Sheba, And kissed her dusky face


Sang Solomon to Sheba And kissed her Arab eyes (VP 332–3)

Where the earlier Gonne/Sheba had driven her Solomon mad with unfulWlled desire, this one demurely defers to her Solomon’s superior wisdom: it is her thoughts, in comparison with his, that ‘Are but a narrow pound’ (VP 333). It is a measure of the failure of invention in ‘Solomon and Sheba’ that Yeats repeated in it almost exactly the form, metre, and rhyme scheme used for ‘The Rose Tree’: Pearse speaks, Connolly replies, Pearse concludes with the close-out lines replicated in the later love poem: There’s nothing but our own red blood Can make a right Rose Tree.

(VP 396)

The continuities of stable married love are not an easy subject for poetry. SigniWcantly, the Donne poem that is probably the closest model for ‘Solomon to Sheba’, ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’, is an illustration of the ephemeral nature of love. The lovers in Donne, as in Yeats, have spent the day in talk; at the moment that Yeats calls ‘shadowless noon’, for Donne’s lovers also, ‘to brave clearness all things are reduced’. But the conclusion in ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’ is very diVerent: Love is a growing, or full constant light; And his Wrst minute, after noon, is night.5 4 ‘The Sun Rising’, in John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 80. 5 Ibid. 62–3.

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Yeats’s problem, however, was not merely the diYculty of Wnding a poetic mode for marital love as against the epiphany of passion. There is also the issue of voice and of knowledge in his coded representation of his own relationship with George as Solomon and Sheba. In ‘Solomon and the Witch’, ‘that Arab lady’ recounts how in her night of love with Solomon, ‘I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue Not his, not mine.’

(VP 387)

It is Solomon, universal interpreter of all voices animal as well as human, who must decipher the meaning of this cry of orgasmic possession. He tells Sheba that it was a cockcrow signalling the mysterious identity of Choice and Chance, embodied in their love, bringing with it the end of the world. As in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, a half-line gives the woman’s laconic dissent: ‘Yet the world stays’ (VP 388). Solomon is forced to agree that the moment of apocalypse may not quite have arrived yet. However, this merely urges Sheba on to greater longing, and for once the woman is given the telling last word: ‘O! Solomon! let us try again’ (VP 389). Elizabeth Butler Cullingford argues that this poem ‘reveals that the satisfaction of desire need not entail the silencing of the poet’s voice, though it may prompt inclusion of the woman’s speech.’6 The dialogue remains an uneasy one, however, with a sense of the stagey in the assumed personae, an imbalance of power between the proverbially wise ‘great Solomon’ and the Queen of Sheba, even though radically re-interpreted by Yeats. The terriWed scream from the woman that erupts into ‘An Image from a Past Life’ is more convincing than Sheba’s orgasmic cry of satisfaction. The image that provokes that scream is from his past life, disrupting the married couple’s togetherness. In ‘Under Saturn’ it is again out of the poet’s mental landscape that he speaks to his newly married wife, attempting to reassure her that his preoccupation is not caused by obsession with a past relationship: Do not because this day I have grown saturnine Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought Because I have no other youth, can make me pine; For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought, The comfort that you made? (VP 390–1)

It’s an honest, if not altogether reassuring reassurance. 6 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and Poetry in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119.

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Dialogue is a feature of Yeats’s lyric poetry throughout his career. Voices clash and contend over key Yeatsian issues: Christian abnegation against heroic individuality; the desire for transcendence and the fear of self-annihilation; the life of the body and the life of the mind. He is capable of mimicking the seemingly colloquial exchanges of conversation. But rarely does he render a full interchange with the otherness of another voice; the controlling consciousness of the poems remains the poet’s own. The multiplication of voices in Yeats is achieved not by the inclusion of others in dialogue with himself or with one another, but by the throwing of his voice into a variety of diVerent personae. PER SO NA E Yeats felt the need to use the Wgures of Solomon and Sheba to express the relationship between himself and his wife, all the more so, probably, because George was most insistent that he should not speak of their experiences with the automatic writing, a prohibition that the uncontrollably gabby Yeats repeatedly ignored. But the poet had always been (relatively) discreet in his love poetry. Maud Gonne came to be identiWed as Helen of Troy almost as a Wxed equation, Iseult was variously a hare and a dancer, but neither was named in the poems. And in The Wind among the Reeds, the poet takes to himself a whole range of soubriquets: Aedh, Red Hanrahan, Michael Robartes, Mongan, Breasal the Fisherman. Red Hanrahan’s origins as a Wctionalized version of the historical Owen Rua O’Sullivan were discussed in an earlier chapter; a number of the poems attributed to Hanrahan in The Wind among the Reeds had previously been credited to O’Sullivan Rua, O’Sullivan the Red. Mongan, we are told by Yeats in a note, ‘in the old Celtic poetry, is a famous wizard and king who remembers his passed lives’ (VP 177). The explanation given for Aedh, Hanrahan, and Michael Robartes is loftily unelucidating: I have used them in this book more as principles of the mind than as actual personages. It is probable that only students of the magical tradition will understand me when I say that ‘Michael Robartes’ is Wre reXected in water, and that Hanrahan is Wre blown by the wind, and that Aedh, whose name is not merely the Irish form of Hugh, but the Irish for Wre, is Wre burning by itself. (VP 803)

This all sounds systematic enough for those in the know, but in point of fact Yeats does not consistently follow his own system. So, for example, although some of the poems that were Wrst associated with O’Sullivan

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Rua are transferred to Hanrahan, others are re-distributed—‘He remembers Forgotten Beauty’ to Michael Robartes (VP 155), ‘He tells of the Perfect Beauty’ to Aedh (VP 164). Mongan, who only has two poems, and Breasal the Fisherman, who only appears once, lie outside the Robartes/Hanrahan/Aedh, Wre/wind/water scheme altogether. The attribution of the poems in The Wind among the Reeds, rather than following a discernible division of voices, seems designed to cultivate the sense of a misty pageant of Wgures associated with ‘the old Celtic poetry’ and occult knowledge. In revising the poems from The Wind among the Reeds for his 1906 Poetical Works, Yeats did a complete house-cleaning of all the Aedhs and Hanrahans. Thereafter the speakers are identiWed only as ‘the Lover’ or ‘the Poet’. We can see, in fact, a steady erosion of speciWcity in the continuing process of revision. In the Wrst periodical publication of several of the love poems, both poet and addressee were named: ‘Aodh to Dectora’ (VP 152) or ‘O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell’ (VP 155). In The Wind among the Reeds it is to a nameless ‘beloved’, an unidentiWed ‘you’, that Aedh, Hanrahan, or Robartes speaks. These aliases themselves are then removed in the next stage of de-attribution. Yet the eVect is still that of overheard voices. One poem, such as ‘The Lover asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods’ (VP 162), is followed by a sequence in which the pronoun—‘He tells of a Valley full of Lovers’ (VP 163), ‘He tells of the Perfect Beauty’ (VP 164)—implies that we are listening to the same speaker. The rather fussy distinctions between the several personae have been removed, but the ‘Lover’ and the ‘Poet’ still speak from some dim, imaginary space in which they can be both individual and archetype. The poet W. B. Yeats, writing of his feelings for Maud Gonne and Olivia Shakespear, is no longer elaborately masked now as Aedh, now as Hanrahan; instead he is subsumed within the category of lover/poet. From near the start of his career, Yeats had used ballad modes and peasant personae as alternatives to his high hieratic style: The Wind among the Reeds, his most otherworldly and ethereal volume, closed with the populist—and very popular—‘The Fiddler of Dooney’. The beggar poems of Responsibilities, ‘The Three Beggars’, ‘Beggar to Beggar Cried’, ‘Running to Paradise’, are rougher and more grotesque versions of this life on the poetic margins. The later sequences, ‘A Man Young and Old’, which appeared in The Tower, and its counterpart ‘A Woman Young and Old’ with Words for Music Perhaps, both of which were collected in The Winding Stair, represent a somewhat diVerent exercise

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in impersonation. Its object is that ‘simpliWcation through intensity’ that Yeats thought the True Mask of Phase 17 in A Vision (V 140). With the poems in ‘A Man Young and Old’, as with The Wind among the Reeds, there was a process of depersoniWcation from Wrst publication through to collection. The Wrst four of these appeared originally as ‘Four Songs from the Young Countryman’, as part of a series that included other groupings ‘More Songs of an Old Countryman’ and ‘Two Songs from the Old Countryman’.7 In October Blast (1927), where the ten poems were collected and ordered as in ‘A Man Young and Old’, they were still diVerentiated as ‘The Young Countryman, I–IV’, and ‘The Old Countryman, I–VI’. It was only in The Tower that the poems were not so divided and the speakers no longer countriWed. In the Wnal version of the sequence, therefore, there is a blurred and intermittent sense of persona. Some of the poems imply a retrospective narrative of the old man’s past. In ‘The Friends of His Youth’, he laughs with something like horror at the spectacle of the now-mad Madge, deludedly nursing a stone for baby, the previously ‘pushing man’ Peter who Shrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’ And perches on a stone.

(VP 456)

In ‘Summer and Spring’, a delighted recollection of their youth together by Madge and the old man ‘under an old thorn-tree’ provokes murderous jealousy from Peter because ‘he and she j Had spoken of their childish days j Under that very tree’. The memory provokes a poignant outburst of loss: O what a bursting out there was, And what a blossoming, When we had all the summer-time And she had all the spring! (VP 457)

In ‘The Secrets of the Old’, the secrets are shared by another trio, this time the old man with Madge and Margery. For these Wgures with their conventionally lower class, country names, Yeats imagines extended memories of youthful sexuality: How such a man pleased women most Of all that are gone, 7 Confusingly, ‘More Songs of an Old Countryman’ were published Wrst, in London Mercury, April 1926, with both ‘Four Songs from a Young Countryman’ and ‘Two Songs from the Old Countryman’ appearing in London Mercury, May 1927. See VP 451–8.

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Voices How such a pair loved many years And such a pair but one, Stories of the bed of straw Or the bed of down. (VP 458)

In these poems, Yeats allowed himself to recall just such a sexually active past as he had never had—to his lasting regret. This regret is expressed in the identiWably autobiographical ‘The Empty Cup’: A crazy man that found a cup, When all but dead of thirst, Hardly dared to wet his mouth Imagining, moon-accursed, That another mouthful And his beating heart would burst. October last I found it too But found it dry as bone, And for that reason am I crazed And my sleep is gone. (VP 454)

A letter to Olivia Shakespear of December 1926, including a Wrst version of the poem, makes it clear that it is his aborted love aVair with her of the 1890s which he now sees as a madly wasted opportunity: ‘One looks back to one’s youth as to [a] cup that a mad man dying of thirst left half tasted’ (L 721). There is even a literalism in the reference to ‘October last’; Yeats had had a meeting with Shakespear in October 1926, the poem was written in December.8 The man of ‘A Man Young and Old’ is by times some distanced ‘Countryman’, associate of Madge’s and Margery’s, in other poems the ageing poet W. B. Yeats distraught at the idea of his insuYciently misspent youth. In the imaginative hinterland of both ‘A Man Young and Old’ and ‘A Woman Young and Old’ are Wgures from Synge, particularly the blind beggars of The Well of the Saints. The characteristic landscape of these poems, reduced to stone and thorn tree, is like the austerely minimalist setting of Synge’s play. ‘We should be hidden from their eyes, j Being but holy shows’, says the old man in ‘His Memories’ (VP 454); the elderly Martin Doul has been left by his wife, once she regains her sight, because he is a ‘pitiful show’.9 The tragicomedy of The Well of the Saints is built 8 See A. Norman JeVares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 261. 9 J. M. Synge, Collected Works, III: Plays, Book I, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 115.

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around the two ugly beggars’ grotesque obsession with their own beauty, the sexual desire in Martin that is no less urgent for his age. ‘Meeting’ in ‘A Woman Young and Old’ re-plays in poetic miniature the climactic scene of Synge’s Wrst act where the beggars, cured of their blindness and disappointed in their imagined good looks, Wercely abuse each other: Hidden by old age awhile In masker’s cloak and hood, Each hating what the other loved, Face to face we stood: ‘That I have met with such,’ said he, Bodes me little good.’

(VP 539)

In the last stanza, the quarrel between Yeats’s old lovers rises to a Syngelike crescendo before turning in a diVerent direction: ‘A loony’d boast of such a love,’ He in his rage declared: But such as he for such as me— Could we both discard This beggarly habiliment— Had found a sweeter word.

(VP 539)

Martin and Mary Doul do eventually achieve such a reconciliation as the old woman in ‘Meeting’ only imagines: ‘There’s a sweet tone in your voice I’ve not heard for a space’, says Mary to Martin when they come together in Act III.10 But the characteristic Yeatsian phrase ‘beggarly habiliment’ lifts the poem out of beggars’ speech and conWrms the metaphoric status of their beggardom. Their rags are merely the bodily disguise in which they have been masked by old age. Synge as a playwright submits himself to the full discipline of drama: his characters can think no thoughts that are not characteristic, can speak no words that are not their own. Yeats can reach at will for the full range of his poetic vocabulary and the heights of his style. This is most obvious in the magniWcent summit of the ‘Woman Young and Old’ sequence, ‘Her Vision in the Wood’: Dry timber under that rich foliage, At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood, Too old for a man’s love I stood in rage Imagining men. Imagining that I could 10 Ibid. 127.

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Voices A greater with a lesser pang assuage Or but to Wnd if withered vein ran blood, I tore my body that its wine might cover Whatever could recall the lip of lover.

(VP 537)

It is symptomatic that, for this great and complex poem, Yeats could not make do with the tight ballad-like octosyllabics he used in so much of this sequence, nor the sparse imagery of stone and thorn tree. Instead he went back to the capacious ottava rima stanza used in his large-scale reXective poems, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ or ‘Among School Children’; for the starkness of stone and thorn are substituted the amplitude and classical resonances of ‘foliage’, ‘wine-dark’, ‘sacred wood’. ‘Her’ vision of the mourning Bacchantes attending the wounded Adonis Wgure is depicted with all the textured technique of an Italian Renaissance scene: It seemed a Quattrocento painter’s throng, A thoughtless image of Mantegna’s thought

(VP 537)

The anguish of sexual frustration in old age here opens out into a mythological imagination of the self-lacerating terrors of love that can be contained in no deWned persona. Yeats’s own frustration, recovering from his serious illness in 1928, was a factor in the creation of his most famous transgendered persona, Crazy Jane, and her sequence of poems in Words for Music Perhaps. ‘Sexual abstinence fed their Wre’, he told Olivia Shakespear, ‘I was ill and yet full of desire’ (L 814). Jane’s arguments with the Bishop are like a re-play of the Oisin versus Patrick dialogue in The Wanderings of Oisin. As Patrick urged repentance and prayer on the three-hundred-year-old Oisin, the Bishop reads a similar lesson in ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’: ‘Those breasts are Xat and fallen now, Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.’ (VP 513)

Jane deWes the episcopal admonitions, as Oisin had deWed the saint; she is as committed to her Jack the Journeyman even after death as Oisin was to the Fianna. But Oisin, whose values were those of the strong heroic male, is very much distressed by his aged body: Ah me! to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain, Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear (VP 63)

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Jane is famously insistent on the holiness of the body in all its basic materiality: ‘A woman can be proud and stiV When on love intent; But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’ (VP 513)

There is a double subversiveness here, challenging both the stereotype of the submissive female—the erection is not only a male function— and the Christian ascetic mortiWcation of the Xesh. Elizabeth Cullingford is no doubt right to associate Jane’s erotics with the anti-clerical Yeats of the 1920s who resisted the alliance of Church and State in legislating on sexual matters. ‘Reading Yeats through the lens of carnivalesque dialogism reveals Crazy Jane not as the eccentric spokeswoman for Yeats’s private desires, but as the Wgure for an eroticized politics of female transgression.’11 It may, however, be a case of both rather than either/or. Crazy Jane was from the beginning a composite creation. When the poems Wrst appeared in The New Republic in 1930, she was ‘Cracked Mary’, ‘more or less founded’, as Yeats told Shakespear, ‘on an old woman who lives in a little cottage near Gort’ with ‘an amazing power of audacious speech. . . . She is the local satirist and a really terrible one’ (L 785–6). In changing her name from the speciWcally Irish ‘Cracked Mary’ to ‘Crazy Jane’, Yeats hybridized her with ‘a mad forsaken girl in English folklore’.12 Yeats wrote for her an eclectic idiom of low and high. Crazy Jane is convincingly the local satirist when abusing the Bishop with his skin ‘Wrinked like the foot of a goose’, and even more so in remembering his unexalted status when he denounced Jack the Journeyman from the altar: no Bishop then, ‘Nor so much as parish priest’ (VP 508). Yet a phrase such as the ‘place of excrement’ has its origins in Blake and St Augustine.13 11 Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, 229. 12 Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 333. 13 See Barbara Hardy, ‘The Wildness of Crazy Jane’, in A. Norman JeVares (ed.), Yeats, Sligo and Ireland (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980), 31–55 [50] for the reference to St Augustine. Daniel Albright, like many other commentators, cites the line from Blake’s Jerusalem, ‘I will make their places of joy & love, excrementious’, as well as a comparable passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel Yeats much admired: W. B. Yeats, The Poems ed. Daniel Albright (2nd edn, London: Dent, 1994), 734–5.

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There has been some critical suspicion of Yeats’s ventriloqual use of Crazy Jane. C. L. Innes, for instance, comments that ‘Crazy Jane’s idiom is not that of the peasant, but is instead a stylized and decorous one. She inhabits Yeats’s tongue and expresses his desire, not her own.’14 It is odd to see Jane’s language, with its calculated violations of decorum, being called ‘decorous’, but one knows what Innes means. There is a suspect literariness in some of the Crazy Jane poems, a degree of posturing in the acclaimed Nobel-Prize-winning poet speaking in the mouth of the mad old countrywoman. Yet it is only necessary to look back at some of Yeats’s early attempts at Wordsworthian style lyrical ballads to see how far he had come from the patronizing sentimentality of poems such as ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’. Crazy Jane allows Yeats a licensed strangeness and wildness in which sexuality can be expressed as the sacred/ desecrated meeting place of the physical and the metaphysical. In this she can speak for Yeats, as Yeats, in his own person, could not speak for himself. Many of Yeats’s personae are no more than costume characters, standing in for the poet and his concerns. In emotionally sensitive areas, particularly, he made use of this apparatus of aliases. The Wgures from his stories in The Secret Rose, Michael Robartes and Red Hanrahan, are recruited to do double duty in The Wind among the Reeds. In ‘The Phases of the Moon’, and again in the Wrst edition of A Vision, where Yeats was clearly anxious about the reception of his occult theories, Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne were recalled to life to provide extra-authorial distancing. With an increase in conWdence over time, Yeats could take greater ownership of what was Wrst expressed through such Wctional mouthpieces. So in the second edition of A Vision, he dropped the elaborate ‘Introduction’ by Owen Aherne, with its metaWctional account of the book’s origins, and in the revised poems of The Wind among the Reeds, the named personae are anonymized into the Lover and the Poet, impersonal versions of the personal. With many of the later masks, the Young and Old Countryman, Crazy Jane, the ‘wild old wicked man’, Yeats’s strategy is not disguise but imaginative enlargement. They allow him access to a simpler and more reduced speech, sparer forms of utterance, which can bring with them a piercing intensity of vision. But he denies himself none of the complexity of his own thought, nor (when needed) the sophistication of his own vocabulary. 14 C. L. Innes, ‘Yeats’s Female Voices: Crazy Jane and Other Women in The Winding Stair and Other Poems’, Text and Context, 3 (1988), 55–69 [69].

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Where such an author-contaminated language would compromise entirely the integrity of stage characters, in Yeats’s dramatic lyrics these voices carry their own credibility. ADDRESSES AND APOSTRO PHES Ribh, the hermit of ‘Supernatural Songs’, the last persona Yeats put to extended use, addresses a nameless observer at the opening of ‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’, the Wrst in the sequence: Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night With open book you ask me what I do.

(VP 554)

The technique here is like that of the painter who shows one of the subjects of a painting looking out of the picture space towards the viewer looking in. As the viewer is viewed, so the reader of the poem is engaged as the ‘you’ addressed. The ‘you’ in ‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’ is never identiWed. He/she only reappears once again in the ‘Supernatural Songs’ in the role of uninitiated observer, who has listened to ‘Ribh in Ecstasy’ What matter that you understood no word! Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard In broken sentences. (VP 557)

It is appropriate that the reader of these very gnomic poems should be placed as a puzzled bystander waiting for explanation of the unintelligible. The eVect is similar even when, as in ‘The Gift of Harun AlRashid’, the addressee is named as Abd Al-Rabban, to whom the letter is written. If the ageing poet who has received the unexpected gift of marriage to a young wife with automatic writing powers masks himself as Kusta Ben Luka, the poem’s reader must occupy the position of Abd Al-Rabban, or of the unnamed ‘learned man’ of the future intended to discover the letter in the Caliphs’ Treasure House (VP 461).15 Named and unnamed addressees in Yeats’s poetry supply the silent other part in the act of communication by the poem’s speaking voice. The strategy by which the reader is placed in the receiving mode of the 15 For a Wne analysis of the poem and its source in Browning, see Daniel A. Harris, ‘The ‘‘Figured Page’’: Dramatic Epistle in Browning and Yeats’, Yeats Annual, 1 (1982), 133–94.

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addressee is facilitated by Yeats’s discreet practice of withholding names, writing instead typically ‘to a friend’. As readers of an annotated edition, we will know that the poem ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’ was written to Lady Gregory in the wake of the collapsed Municipal Gallery scheme in 1913, when all her eVorts on behalf of her nephew’s project had failed. Even if we do not know that, we are perfectly aware that we are not the poet’s ‘friend’. Yet the words reach us, if only as eavesdropping third parties to the I–you speaking transaction. This is of course a standard form of dynamic in many types of poetry. Yeats is using the traditional mode of the epitaph when he enjoins the horseman/reader to ‘Cast a cold eye j On life, on death’ (VP 640) or the reader as ‘traveller, scholar, poet’ to devote at Coole ‘A moment’s memory to that laurelled head’ (VP 489). He is equally conventional in addressing the dead Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, ‘Dear shadows, now you know it all’ (VP 476). Any number of love poems include the reader in the most intimate of speeches, as Yeats does: ‘Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair’ (VP 166). Sometimes, however, what seems like a direct address turns out to be monologue. ‘Broken Dreams’ begins in what appears to be immediate teˆte-a`-teˆte, blunt speech from the poet to the beloved who is no longer young: There is grey in your hair. Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath When you are passing (VP 355)

It is not until more than twenty lines into the poem that ‘you’ changes to ‘that lady’, and not until the very end that we discover the whole poem has been a soliloquy, the presence of the loved one merely imagined: All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.

(VP 357)

In ‘Broken Dreams’ what purports to be a poem spoken to the loved one turns out to be the poet’s reverie on the past. In ‘The Old Age of Queen Maeve’ the Wctional narrative of the legendary heroic age keeps being disrupted by poetic apostrophe in the present. For his 1933 Collected Poems, Yeats added a framing prologue to this poem: A certain poet in outlandish clothes Gathered a crowd in some Byzantine lane, Talked of his country and its people

(VP 180)

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It’s as though the poet’s aspiration to sail to Byzantium had been granted, and he imagines himself in what to the Byzantines look like ‘outlandish clothes’ bringing them the far-oV story of Queen Maeve. But, for all that extra-distancing device, the interruptions to the story by a present-speaking voice are left unaltered. He breaks into his description of Maeve’s Werce beauty: O unquiet heart, Why do you praise another, praising her, As if there were no tale but your own tale Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound?

(VP 181)

He acknowledges here his own obsessive feelings that undermine the status of his Wction, and forces his reluctant heart on with its assigned mission: Have I not bid you tell of that great queen Who has been buried some two thousand years?

(VP 181)

Yet, later in the poem, Maeve’s contemporary alter ego Maud Gonne is herself addressed—‘Friend of these many years’ (VP 186)—and the identity of immediate feeling and imaginative projection aYrmed: there is no high story about queens In any ancient book but tells of you; And when I’ve heard how they grew old and died, Or fell into unhappiness, I’ve said, ‘She will grow old and die, and she has wept!’ And when I’d write it out anew, the words, Half crazy with the thought, She too has wept! Outrun the measure.

(VP 186)

The verse here enacts the emotional process. Maeve and her legendary like are only types of the poet’s own loved one; but the realization of her vulnerability and mortality that this brings is an intolerable anguish, all the more painful when this is translated into writing. The ‘friend’, the addressed ‘you’, fades Wrst into the ‘she’ of the poet’s voiced self-communion—‘She will grow old and die’—and then into the second-phase written repetition in which it is the ‘words’ not the poet that run ‘Half crazy with the thought’. The ostensible address of the apostrophe to Gonne is metamorphosed into the live action of autonomous poetic language that is beyond the control even of the poet. Yeats talks to his heart a great deal. Here in ‘The Old Age of Queen Maeve’, it is the troublesome emotional obsession that prevents him from

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concentrating on the job of work in hand. In ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’, as we have seen, the heart is mutinously incapable of the comfort which the ever-kind friend tries to dispense. Whatever head says, heart remains unconsoled. Elsewhere, as in ‘Into the Twilight’ it represents, at least aspirationally, the truest, deepest self. The tired heart is urged to renew itself and return to the pristine values of the Celtic Twilight: Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. (VP 147)

The upbeat tone here, the vigour of the imperatives, allows the heart no opportunity to respond. But the very trope of speaking to the heart represents linguistic self-doubling; ‘the world must move my heart but to the heart’s discovery of itself ’. At times that process requires a full-scale internal dialogue. In ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, as so often when dealing with highly sensitive material, Yeats moved to the shelter of a persona. Though T. R. Henn may well be right that the dancers stand for ‘the delighted senses, the principle of desire’, the title seems designed to serve as counterpart to ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’—‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’.16 The visionary Michael Robartes arguing with his dancer is Yeats in bullish mood hectoring Iseult Gonne about women’s education. The ascetic Owen Aherne is the deeply disconsolate Yeats, immediately after his marriage, convinced he has wronged both Iseult (with whom he is still in love) and George, whom he should not have married. The Wrst section, entitled ‘The Lover Speaks’ when it was originally published, regards the decision to renounce the love of Iseult as a mad perversity of the heart: A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should Wnd no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad. (VP 449)

The second answering set of three quatrains, although originally entitled ‘The Heart Replies’, is actually a sharp argument between Lover and Heart. The Heart, sounding not a bit ‘worn out’, mocks the Lover: his impulse was not madness but sound good sense. 16 T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (2nd edn, London: Methuen, 1965), 47.

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The Heart behind its rib laughed out. ‘You have called me mad,’ it said, ‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child’

The Lover responds just as Wercely, taking exception to the image of the wild and cage birds: ‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied. And all those lies have but one end, poor wretches to betray; I did not Wnd in any cage the woman at my side. O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’

This has the authentic tangled feeling of a real quarrel, the poet bridling up at the insult to his wife implied by calling her a cage bird, then breaking back to guilt at his mental inWdelity to her. Heart, though, is given the brutal last word: ‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares, Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake Her childish gratitude for love and match your Wfty years? O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’ (VP 450)

In ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’ the Heart is the truth-teller, standing for the reality principle we might more usually associate with the head; the antagonist Lover, by contrast, is a confused mess of regret, remorse, and turbid feeling. The contesting voices dramatize the inner conXict. In ‘The Tower’, the opening apostrophe vividly sets the scene for the poem as a whole, the continuing urgencies of the imagination in the ageing body: What shall I do with this absurdity— O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail? (VP 409)

The alternating impulses, in Part I to ‘Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend’, in Part III to ‘mock Plotinus’ thought j And cry in Plato’s teeth’ (VP 409, 415), are worked through as the systole–diastole of the mind’s movements. Yeats’s poems that formally address others have a way of turning into monologue, the addressee a merely notional ‘you’ standing in for the reader, receiver of the poet’s voice. The poet’s own heart is more stubborn and unmanageable as interlocutor. The interplay of voices is never more dramatic than when Yeats is talking to himself.

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Many of Yeats’s poems are somewhere between voiced meditation and unspoken soliloquy. The direct address to the lover in ‘Broken Dreams’ at the end stands revealed as the rambling self-communings of the poet sitting alone in his chair. ‘Ancestral Houses’, the Wrst in the ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, begins as though conversationally: Surely among a rich man’s Xowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overXows without ambitious pains (VP 417)

But it is a conversation with himself, in which the second stanza brings a shrugging rebuttal—‘Mere dreams, mere dreams!’ (VP 417). ‘Was it the double of my dream . . . ?’ (VP 398), he wonders aloud to himself in ‘Towards Break of Day’. In his early narrative poems, as we have seen, Yeats learned the art of managing dialogue as counterpointed voices pursuing their own train of thought. Patrick and Oisin talk past one another as much as to one another. And it is this technique of cross-talk that Yeats employs in his major internal debate, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’. Marvell’s ‘Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ is an obvious model for Yeats’s poem. In Marvell, Soul and Body in alternate stanzas complain of their tragic situation ineluctably bound to their incompatible twin. Soul O Who shall, from this Dungeon, raise A Soul enslav’d so many wayes?


Body O who shall me deliver whole, From bonds of this Tyrannic Soul?17

The success of Marvell’s dialogue form lies in the perfect symmetry of the answering voices, the non-partisan clarity with which it renders the contending points of view. Body without Soul would be free of hope, fear, sinfulness; Soul without Body could return contentedly to its source in God. Although Body is given an additional four lines in the Wnal stanza that appear to leave it with the victory— 17 Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. George de F. Lord (London: Dent, 1984), 17.

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What but a Soul could have the wit To build me up for Sin so Wt? So Architects do square and hew Green Trees that in the Forest grew.18

—the overall eVect is of irresolvable impasse. Yeats had his secular equivalent of this body/soul conXict in ‘The Tower’. In ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ the contestants are rather diVerent, and so is the way their voices are juxtaposed. In the opening stanza it is not immediately clear whom or what ‘My Soul’ is addressing: I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent

(VP 477)

There is no object to the verb ‘summon’, which appears to be intransitive as though to deWne the function of the soul as summoner. ‘Your mind’ could as well be generic as speciWc. The stanza ends with a very evidently rhetorical question launched into air—‘Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’ (VP 477). The second stanza, attributed to ‘My Self ’, ignores altogether what Soul has said: The consecrated blade upon my knees Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-sharp, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries . . .

(VP 477)

The poem was collected in The Winding Stair, companion volume to The Tower, and the constant reader of Yeats will have recognized this as an interior of Thoor Ballylee, will have remembered Sato’s sword, so prominently displayed on ‘My Table’, third in the series ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’. In drafting ‘A Dialogue’ Yeats referred to it as ‘Sword and Tower’ (L 729). Still, there is no apparent connection between Soul’s opening summons to the winding stair and the sword with its embroidered covering, on which Self concentrates. Self does not hear Soul as, in the psychomachia of Dr Faustus, Faustus is deaf to the warnings of his Good Angel. Soul, though, responds to what Self has said and remonstrates: Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? 18 Ibid. 18.

(VP 477)

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Now it becomes clear that the imperatives of the Wrst stanza—‘Set all your mind’, ‘Fix every wandering thought’—were addressed to the Self, as Soul urges further: Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect its wandering To this and that and t’other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth. (VP 478)

Self, however, persists in his meticulous evocation of sword and scabbard, as oblivious to Soul’s speech as the individual choric singer is to surrounding counterpointed melodies: Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it Five hundred years ago, about it lie Flowers from I know not what embroidery— Heart’s purple . . .

(VP 478)

It is only here, midway through the fourth stanza and in mid-line, that Self ’s speech rounds back into a deWant response to Soul: —and all these I set For emblems of the day against the tower Emblematical of the night, And claim as by a soldier’s right A charter to commit the crime once more.

(VP 478)

Here at last are answers to Soul’s imagery of darkness, the winding stair, the crime of birth and death. Now it is Soul’s turn to drift away from direct response: Such fullness in that quarter overXows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind (VP 478)

This is a reversion to the Wrst stanza, an expository explanation of ‘That quarter where all thought is done’. What follows is an articulation of the theory of A Vision: ‘the Soul is speaking of a condition when the human faculties will no longer be distinct from one another, a condition outside the reincarnative cycle.’19 But by deWnition this is a quarter of the moon in which no human life is possible and therefore no human speech; 19 Yeats, The Poems, ed. Albright, 697.

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hence, Soul ends, ‘But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone’ (VP 478). Soul is forced into silence by the ineVability of the state of being to which he summons Self, and the dialogue as a dialogue is over. For the whole second half of the poem, Self has the Xoor to himself. He starts by picking up on a word in Soul’s last stanza; in the state beyond life, Soul has said, ‘man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind’. So what? says Self: ‘A living man is blind and drinks his drop’. He resists the promise of an escape from life and reincarnation: What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? (VP 478)

The Self, though, then forces himself to think about what living it all once more will mean, the painful stages of adolescence and youth, the enmities of adulthood, the empty consolation of success in old age. With the formal dialogue of Self and Soul abandoned, Self moves into internal dialogue with a series of anguished and unanswerable rhetorical questions: How in the name of Heaven can he escape That deWling and disWgured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape? And what’s the good of an escape If honour Wnd him in the wintry blast?

(VP 479)

And despite all that, Self declares, ‘I am content to live it all again’. Balachandra Rajan speaks well of ‘a familiar Yeatsian strategy’ here. ‘It is to accept the situation at its worst and to drive the aYrmation through by the sheer force of poetry against a resistance that is deliberately maximized.’20 Self does not win the argument with Soul; he does not deny or overcome his own horror at the thought of living life again. Instead the energy of the voice surges up as an act of faith, in deWance of reason: I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! (VP 479)

20 Balachandra Rajan, ‘The Poetry of Confrontation: Yeats and the Dialogue Poem’, in Joseph Ronsley (ed.), Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977), 118–28 [125].

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Looking back to The Wanderings of Oisin from the vantage point of 1932, when preparing his Collected Poems, Yeats summed up in a well-known phrase the recurrent pattern still visible in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’: ‘The swordsman throughout repudiates the saint, but not without vacillation’ (L 798). In the poem ‘Vacillation’ itself, the debate takes the form of an eddying series of discrete lyrics; only section VII is a set dialogue, the stichomythia of ‘The Soul’ and ‘The Heart’: The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem. The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme? The Soul. Isiah’s coal, what more can man desire? The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of Wre! The Soul. Look on that Wre, salvation walks within. The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

(VP 502)

Here the exchange does have the balanced symmetry of Marvell. But it is to be followed by the Wnal meditation in which the theologian Von Hu¨gel stands for the saint, and the poet/swordsman stresses all that they share before the concluding valediction: ‘So get you gone, Von Hu¨gel, though with blessings on your head’ (VP 503). This benignly respectful awareness of the other in ‘Vacillation’ is strikingly diVerent from the strategy in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, where the Soul must be silenced, the Self left to soliloquize. The later poems Wnd other ways again of making self and other talk. In ‘What Then?’ it is by means of the refrain. Here the life is lived through again with the stress on purpose and fulWlment rather than the nagging sense of futility that haunts the thoughts of the Self in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’. Instead of ‘that toil of growing up; j The ignominy of boyhood’ (VP 478), there is the dedicated discipline of living ‘by rule, j All his twenties crammed with toil’ (VP 576). Where Self imagined the ‘Wnished man among his enemies’, honour achieved only uselessly in the ‘wintry blast’ of old age (VP 479), ‘What Then?’ conjures up an idyll of contented achievement: All his happier dreams come true— A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, Poets and Wits about him drew (VP 577)

The verses in ‘What Then?’ move forward with a satisfactory sequential logic summed up as ‘Something to perfection brought’ (VP 577).

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But at the end of each verse comes the dead replication of the refrain: ‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. ‘What then?’

(VP 576–7)

The unanswerable question from the philosopher who denied the reality of the actual simultaneously undermines what is claimed for the lived life and points forward to the dark unknown of the afterlife. In the Wnal section of ‘The Tower’ the poet might ‘cry in Plato’s teeth’, but Plato can still talk back with his ‘What then?’ The ultimate extension of this technique is the one-way dialogue of ‘The Man and the Echo’. The paradoxical nature of speech in the poem is caught in the phrase ‘shout a secret to the stone’ (VP 632). The inwardness of the self-questioning poet, lying old and ill— I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right

(VP 632)

—is transposed into the Wgure of the man in the underworld-like ‘cleft’ voicing vehement questions to the unresponding rock-face, locked-in thoughts shouted aloud. It is the diminuendo of despair that the Echo catches up and repeats: all seems evil until I Sleepless would lie down and die. ECHO Lie down and die. (VP 632)

Echo cannot ‘hear’ the Man, is not talking to him. Yet Man talks back, completing Echo’s verse line as though in answer: That were to shirk The spiritual intellect’s great work, And shirk it in vain.

(VP 632)

The choice of death or life is pursued as a philosophical issue for man. Man generically must continue in the body and ‘Pursues the thoughts that I pursue’ (VP 633). But all the intricate reasoning about the relation of judgements in this life to the completion of death is turned into the Echo’s sombre repetition of the Man’s Wnal phrase ‘Into the night’ (VP 633). Man gives up trying to argue with Echo and addresses it as oracle: O Rocky Voice, Shall we in that great night rejoice?

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Voices What do we know but that we face One another in this place?

(VP 633)

But suddenly the whole symbolic projection—man facing death, the blank stone cliV face as delphic source of ultimate truth—is erased and we are returned to a natural world of manifold phenomena: But hush, for I have lost the theme, Its joy or night seem but a dream; Up there some hawk or owl has struck, Dropping out of sky or rock, A stricken rabbit is crying out, And its cry distracts my thought. (VP 633)

There is a strange switch in perspective here. It is as though the Man, whose appearance in the stony cleft was initially a metaphor for the poet’s sleepless self-examination, has actually been listening to the Echo, and the noises of an environment continuing outside his mental life have dissipated the grand drama of the confrontation with death. In the passage from ‘The Bounty of Sweden’ quoted near the start of this chapter, Yeats represented the origins of lyric poetry in an emotional excitement that moved him to talk aloud in a sort of muttered selfdramatization like the mad old woman on the Dublin quays. Yet poetry could come also from the willed determination to write in default of a subject: I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

(VP 629)

Again and again, when he feared he had lost the energy and feeling necessary for lyric poetry, Yeats used the writing of plays as a self-starter. ‘I begin to feel a diYculty in Wnding themes’, he wrote to Lady Gregory in 1921. ‘I had this about twelve years ago and it passed over. I may have to start another Noh play and get caught up into it’ (L 668–9). The technical exercise of writing the lyrics for a drama enabled him to renew his own poetic capacity. Yet there remained a sense of revulsion against the factitiously imagined situation. In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ Yeats was following in the Sidney tradition of the stalled poet berating his own inauthenticity—‘ ‘‘Fool,’’ said my Muse to me, ‘‘look in thy heart and write’’ ’.21 But it is signiWcant that the unreal images which he there renounces are characterized as theatrical: 21 Gerald Bullett (ed.), Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century (London: Dent, 1947), 173.

Voices Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

193 (VP 630)

Yeats throughout his career cultivated the art of living speech, the turn and counterturn of conversation, the rhetorical gestures of address and apostrophe. He could divide himself against himself, speak through multiple personae. But he always remained closer to the thrown voice of what remains identiWably the self than to the full occupation of other selves that is theatre. That is why so many of his plays, boldly and daringly conceived as they are, remain ‘players and painted stage’, and why so much of his Wnest lyric poetry is drama in low relief, why Yeats is, in the last analysis, a great dramatic poet and not a great poetic dramatist.

8 Bitter/Sweet The symbolists sought, in the terms of Mallarme´’s much re-cycled line, ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe’, to create a poetry purged of the banalities of commonplace usage.1 Whatever his aYnities with symbolism, this was not Yeats’s way with words. At times at least he was prepared to let ordinary language do ordinary work without inhibitions about its conventionality. So it was with ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’. The king in ‘The Madness of King Goll’ recalls the comfort of his former life at court: ‘I sat and mused and drank sweet wine’ (VP 82). Cuchulain’s mistress in ‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’ is ‘sweetthroated like a bird’ (VP 106). In ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’ it is ‘a bitter black wind’ that breaks the thorn trees over Cummen Strand (VP 206). Similarly with ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, the poet sitting in his drafty tower comments on ‘how bitter is that wind j That shakes the shutter’ (VP 327). Yeats could allow himself the all but incidental echo of a literary association. In ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, Dante in exile is ‘driven out j To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread’ (VP 369). There is a recollection here of Bolingbroke’s alliterative line from Richard II, ‘eating the bitter bread of banishment’ (III.i.21). It is not a particularly signiWcant allusion, just a trick of aural memory. ‘Bitter’ and ‘sweet’ thus slip into many Yeats poems without any self-conscious anxiety about their pre-used impurities. With these words, however, there are also the characteristic usages of a poetic ideolect. So, for example, for most adults the concept of ‘sweetness’ has a cloying quality associated with an outgrown taste. As applied to people it is at best condescending, at worst downright 1 ‘Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu’, Ste´phane Mallarme´, ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’, Poe´sies (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 129. The English language version is from T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), 218, but it is often cited in loosely adapted form in relation to the symbolist poetic enterprise as a whole.

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dismissive. In reading Yeats we must accustom ourselves to a much stronger and more positive value for ‘sweet’ and its cognates. As the word that denotes rhetorical persuasiveness, harmony and aesthetic order, it has a signiWcance well beyond its common, insipid associations. In ‘Baile and Aillinn’, the hero is—perhaps not altogether fortunately— named ‘Baile Honey-Mouth’ as a tribute to his outstanding eloquence (VP 189).2 The laborious task of the poet in ‘Adam’s Curse’ is to ‘articulate sweet sounds together’ (VP 205). This use of ‘sweet’ in an aesthetic context links Yeats to Arnold in their shared belief in ‘sweetness and light’ as a cultural force. As such, it shades from an aesthetics into a politics of culture, most notably in Yeats’s aspiration in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ to join the ‘company j That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong’ (VP 137). ‘Sweetness’ is constantly associated by Yeats with those cultural ideals which he hoped could combat what he, equally constantly, identiWed as the bitterness of Irish politics: ‘this blind bitter land’ (VP 256). ‘Sweet’ and ‘bitter’ in such contexts take on meanings that have their origins in Yeats’s basic systems of value and belief. Yeatsian sweetness and bitterness in this way bespeak a cultural politics. But they are also expressive of a psychology of gender and of ageing, an erotics of desire. ‘Sweet’ often seems to be associated with the feminine in a conventionally sexist way. ‘The women that I picked spoke sweet and low’ (VP 622) echoes Lear’s patriarchal approval of Cordelia, ‘Her voice was ever soft, j Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman’ (V.iii.247–8). But Yeats’s lines go on: ‘The women that I picked spoke sweet and low j And yet gave tongue. ‘‘Hound Voices’’ were they all’ (VP 622). The heroic aYnity that is celebrated in this poem cuts across gender distinctions. And those distinctions themselves are complicated because Yeats does not subscribe to a simple sex–gender equation. In a signiWcant late letter to Ethel Mannin, he warns her against the disabling eVect of propaganda: it will embitter your soul with hatred as it has mine. You are doubly a woman, Wrst because of yourself and secondly because of the muses, whereas I am but once a woman. (L 831)

Yeats might have been biologically male but as a creative poet he could regard himself as feminine. 2 The name and the explanation derive from Yeats’s source text, Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (5th edn, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1970), 231.

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There is a comparable complexity in the way in which sweetness and bitterness relate to youth and old age. Against expectation, youth is more often than not thought of as a time of bitterness. The adult married woman in ‘An Image from a Past Life’ had thought herself safe, ‘Youth’s bitterness being past’ (VP 389). The Wgure in ‘Sweet Dancer’ has also ‘Escaped from bitter youth’ (VP 568). But even when the sweetness of young physical being is admitted, it is in an unbreakable oxymoron. Kusta Ben Luka’s bride in ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, sleep-talking occult wisdom, has a ‘body j Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth’ (VP 469). The passions of youthful unrequited love can produce bitterness (‘In the Seven Woods’) or sweetness (‘Friends’) or both together. Old age, by contrast, brings occasionally, intermittently, a more unconditional sweetness, a condition as close to blessedness as Yeats can well imagine. And yet he is aware that such a feeling may be a mere function of the ageing body, declined energies: ‘mere growing old, that brings j Chilled blood, this sweetness brought’ (VP 401). The antinomies of bitter/sweet in Yeats are deployed to enact an aesthetics, a politics, and a psychology. How possible is it to go further and explore a philosophy of being underlying this dialectic? Daniel Albright, commenting on the lines from ‘The Tower’, ‘Death and life were not j Till man made up the whole, j Made lock, stock and barrel j Out of his bitter soul’ (VP 415), asks the question: ‘Why is the human soul bitter in its creating act?’3 By way of answer, he adduces a Gnostic legend of creation by which the world was formed out of the grief of a spirit separated from God. This would chime with Yeats’s doctrines of self and anti-self in which artistic creativity necessarily derives from need, the deWcit of desire for an unattainable Other. As such, although the created artefact may be sweet, it issues from an imagination ‘by the moon embittered’ (VP 498). The whole personality cycle of A Vision is predicated on the impossibility of human life at either the full or the new moon, those phases in which there would be no yearning for the anti-self. With the use of ‘bitter’ and ‘sweet’, however, as with the other poetic codes analyzed in this book, there can be no one master interpretation, no single decoding that unlocks signiWcance once and for all. Instead what this chapter attempts to tease out is the network of interlocking meanings embedded in Yeats’s poetic practice, how 3 Daniel Albright, The Myth against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination in Old Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 37–8.

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they speak to one another, clash with one another, embody the truths of the mind and spirit they tell, truths that can be told no other way. SWEETNESS AND LIGHT In a published letter greeting the Wrst issue of The Leader in 1900, Yeats took pains to mollify its Wercely Irish-Ireland editor D. P. Moran by stressing the importance of the revival of the Irish language for the longterm future of the country. But he went on to defend the value in the short to middle term of Irish writing in the English language (which Moran had denigrated as mere ‘Anglo-Irish literature’), claiming that ‘the more sincere it is, the more lofty it is, the more beautiful it is, the more will the general life of Ireland be sweetened by its inXuence’ (CL II 564). Later in the letter, Yeats went on to disavow Matthew Arnold’s version of Celticism, denying that he had ‘ever used the phrases ‘‘Celtic note’’ and ‘‘Celtic Renaissance’’ except as a quotation from others, if even then, or that I have quoted Matthew Arnold’s essay on Celtic literature ‘‘on a hundred platforms’’ or elsewhere in support of the ideas behind these phrases’ (CL II 568). Here and elsewhere Yeats was at pains to disentangle his views on ‘the Celtic element in literature’ from that of the English imperialist Arnold.4 Yet in relation to the ‘sweetening’ inXuence of English-language literature on Ireland, the editors of the Collected Letters point to an Arnoldian origin: ‘WBY frequently uses this term, derived from Swift’s The Battle of the Books (‘‘the two noblest of things, sweetness and light’’) by way of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy’ (CL II 564 n.10). In Swift the phrase appears in the debate between the spider and the bee, analogue for the argument between ancients and moderns, and in Yeats too the bee and the honeycomb recur as part of the image cluster around the idea of sweetness. But it is to the doctrine of sweetness and light, as popularized by Arnold, to which Yeats’s concept of the sweetening impact of culture is most closely related. A principal motive force of Culture and Anarchy was the defence of culture against the ethos of materialist, utilitarian, democratizing mid-Victorian Britain. In the opening chapter, Arnold promulgates a comprehensive concept of culture no less than the pursuit of human 4 For a full discussion of the relationship between Arnold and Yeats’s thinking on Celticism, see Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18–32.

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perfection, deWned as ‘an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy’.5 It is resistant, therefore, to the mechanical and acquisitive impulses of what Arnold goes on to denounce as the Philistines, but it is equally opposed to the divisiveness and repressiveness of most organized religion. ‘Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred: culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.’6 Arnold is sceptical of the democratic dissemination of popular literature to the masses: [Culture] does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely,—to be nourished and not bound by them.7

This is close to Yeats in many respects, not least in its elitism, its insistence that culture must operate as a trickle-down eVect from its most accomplished upper-class practitioners. In his letter to The Leader, he makes clear that the ‘sweetening’ inXuence he talks of must come indirectly ‘through its inXuence over a few governing minds’ (CL II 564). The crucial diVerence between Arnold and Yeats is the diVerence in their situations. Arnold speaks against the complacencies of middleclass Britain at the height of its commercial and technological successes, where the intellectual and political conXicts were between rampant individualism, secular radicalism, and militant evangelical Christianity. Yeats must Wght his corner for culture in late colonial Ireland, where the struggle to achieve national self-identity was constantly vitiated by political rancour not only against the imperial enemy but within the nationalist community itself. ‘Culture hates hatred’, maintains Arnold. For Yeats, the hatred that culture hated was the bitterness of factional strife generated by Ireland’s history, and it was this that it essayed to sweeten. In his ‘Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists’, Yeats compared the anthology he had edited to a magical bell branch from ancient Ireland that ‘hushed in sleep the roaring ranks of battle: j And all grew friendly for a little while’ (VP 129). Addressed to the Irish of the diaspora—Representative Irish Tales was published in 5 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 44. 6 Ibid. 47. 7 Ibid. 48.

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New York and London—it claims a similar eVect for the ‘memories j Of half-forgotten innocent old places’ in the selected stories: ‘A honied ringing! under the new skies’ in the original version (VP 130). We and our bitterness have left no traces On Munster grass and Connemara skies.

(VP 130)

The cultural inheritance of the past in its imaginative form is like the natural beauty of the landscape, something immune to the deformations of history. It is in this light that we need to read ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’: Know, that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong (VP 137)

Yeats does not oVer merely consolatory diversion for the colonized Irish, ‘pap for the dispossessed’, but a transformed vision of themselves and their situation.8 When the poem was Wrst published, Yeats found himself in trouble with nationalist critics for his presumption in associating himself with the major poets of the past. Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Because, to him who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body’s laid asleep. (VP 138)

In fact, it must have cost him a gulp to include in the trio Davis, a poet whom, as a poet, he did not respect, along with Mangan and Ferguson whom he did admire. The litotes of ‘Nor less may I be counted one’ may sound modest, apologetic, special pleading for nationalist credentials despite his apparently irrelevant Rosicrucianism. It is actually the reverse. Yeats is claiming that his poetry speaks in images that can nourish the imagination of Ireland at its deepest level, ‘where only body’s laid asleep’. The scale and character of Yeats’s original ambitions for what culture could achieve in Ireland can be measured in his regretful 8 The phrase ‘pap for the dispossessed’, taken from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Hercules and Antaeus’, Wrst published in North, is used as the title of David Lloyd’s critique of Heaney’s poetry in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), 13–40.

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retrospects on what it had failed to achieve. Meditating in The Trembling of the Veil on the importance of the writing of Standish O’Grady in the early Literary Revival, he speculates on what a wider dissemination of O’Grady’s books might have produced: ‘if . . . we had got all his histories and imaginative works into the hands of our young men, he might have brought the imagination of Ireland nearer the Image and the honeycomb’ (A 221). The Wnal formulation is obscure; Terence Brown usefully glosses it, by association with the use of honey and images in ‘Among School Children,’ as ‘an understanding of the dynamic energy of life which derives from the dialectic of ideal images and the passionate body’.9 But consistently Yeats thought of the whole enterprise of the cultural nationalist movement as the counteracting, sweetening alternative to the divisive anatagonisms of politics. His Wrst reaction to the Easter Rising, recorded in a letter to Lady Gregory, was of dismay and despondency: ‘I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics’ (L 613). It is in signiWcantly similar terms that Yeats wrote to the British politician Lord Haldane to warn him of the long-term consequences of the imposition of conscription in Ireland in 1918: all the work of my life-time and that of my fellow-workers, all our eVort to clarify and sweeten the popular mind, will be destroyed and Ireland, for another hundred years, will live in the sterility of her bitterness. (Foster II 132)

The terms used here, ‘to clarify and sweeten the popular mind’, can sound condescending, and Yeats, like Arnold, always did have a topdown model of cultural transmission. The ideal principle was to oVer the Wnest productions of the human imagination as exemplars that transcended politics and divisiveness, Yeats’s ‘bringing together of classes’, Arnold’s culture that ‘seeks to do away with classes’. But social stratiWcation was necessarily implied in the high/low cultural hierarchy. So in the newspaper controversy over The Playboy Yeats would denounce the ignorance of those who had attacked the play: ‘the people who formed the opposition had no books in their houses’.10 These were lower order Arnoldian Philistines. And as the culture wars in Ireland hotted up through the Wrst two decades of the twentieth century,

9 Terence Brown, personal e-mail to the author, 28 June 2006. 10 Quoted in James Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971), 32.

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Yeats increasingly came to associate his version of sweetness and light speciWcally with aristocratic values. So in ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’, he defended the inherited excellence of Coole as Big House against the utilitarian principle of the greatest good of the greatest number: How should the world be luckier if this house, Where passion and precision have been one Time out of mind, became too ruinous To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun? And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow Where wings have memory of wings, and all That comes of the best knit to the best?

(VP 264)

‘Sweet laughing eagle thoughts’ appears to be an extraordinary pile-up of incompatibles: one hardly associates eagles with sweetness nor yet laughter, or indeed thought with any of the three. But for Yeats they make up a single congeries of nobility. The soaring aspiration of eagles is combined with the nonchalant sprezzatura of laughter that is sweet because above and beyond petty cares and spites: majesty, in ‘Fallen Majesty’, has ‘a heart that laughter has made sweet’ (VP 315). In the Wercest and most contentious of the polemic poems of Responsibilities, Yeats proclaims the absolute value of an elite cultural excellence, and in ‘To a Wealthy Man’ urges the wealthy man to support it ignoring the will of the Paudeens and Biddies. Yet into this deWant elitism is smuggled a suggestion of longer term beneWt: Look up in the sun’s eye and give What the exultant heart calls good That some new day may breed the best

(VP 288)

The sweetness and light of high culture, linked as it may be to aristocracy and inherited power, is nonetheless transmissible. This is made explicit, if only hypothetically by a negative example, in ‘To a Shade’, addressed to Parnell, counterpart of the latter-day Hugh Lane: A man Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought In his full hands what, had they only known, Had given their children’s children loftier thought, Sweeter emotion, working in their veins Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place

(VP 292)

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A Municipal Gallery full of Monets and Renoirs over the generations could have cultivated middle class Dubliners into tastes resembling those of their upper class betters—‘working in their veins j Like gentle blood’. It is an argument that will end up with the eugenics of ‘Under Ben Bulben’, where the forms on the Sistine Chapel ceiling can inspire the ‘globe-trotting Madam’ to choose the right shape of marriage partner, conceive the right sort of children, and achieve ‘profane perfection of mankind’ (VP 638–9). It is not easy to make the case for the social utility of culture, culture that by deWnition serves no obvious function; there is a sense of rhetorical overemphasis in Arnold’s promotion of sweetness and light, and there is a feeling of factitiousness in Yeats’s agitations for the goodness of the gracious life. In ‘Ancestral Houses’, the Wrst of the ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ sequence, he is in fact prepared to examine the origins of that idealized aristocratic graciousness and disassemble the disparate forces gathered up in ‘sweet laughing eagle thoughts’. The stately home—Lady Ottoline Morel’s Garsington was the model here (Foster II 217)—appears in the opening stanzas to be the epitome of perfect, cultivated spontaneity of which the perpetual fountain is the image. Yeats, though, goes on to contemplate the paradox of the way this ideal order came into being: Some violent bitter man, some powerful man Called architect and artist in, that they, Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day, The gentleness none there had ever known (VP 418)

This is consonant with Yeats’s theory of creativity as a pursuit of the anti-self; the bitter and violent men seek to construct an imagined idea of exactly what their own lives have lacked. But where in other poems the high artistic exemplars ‘breed the best’ in a benevolent afterlife, here the poet envisages the eVeteness of succeeding generations: And maybe the great-grandson of that house, For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse. (VP 418)

Maybe, Yeats considers, it is only in proximity to those brutal originating forces that the antithetical order of harmonious decorum can exist: What if those things the greatest of mankind Consider most to magnify, or to bless, But take our greatness with our bitterness?

(VP 418)

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This is surprisingly close in spirit to Benjamin’s famous dictum that ‘there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.11 ‘Re-reading The Tower’, Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear in 1928 at the book’s Wrst appearance, ‘I was astonished at its bitterness, and long to live out of Ireland that I may Wnd some new vintage’ (L 742). That bitterness involved the recognition of the unreality of his past hopes for an Ireland of growing sweetness and light: ‘we too had many pretty toys when young’ (VP 428). In place of an order of high culture spreading its civilizing force down through the classes and the generations, he contemplated an unstoppable destruction leaving only fragments and ruins in its wake. For someone who knows no work can stand, Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent, On master-work of intellect or hand, No honour leave its mighty monument

there can only be the elegiac recognition: ‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes’ (VP 429). The need for the sweetness of harmony and artistic order, engendered by the bitterness of that need, can never be realized in an enduring grace. And this recognition applied not just to Ireland riven by civil war. ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, the poem from which these lines are quoted, was originally entitled ‘Some Thoughts upon the Present State of the World’. In such a situation all that is left to the poet is a prayer for some sort of renewal at the site of desolation: ‘O honeybees, j Come build in the empty house of the stare’ (VP 425). On a personal basis, Yeats’s hopes for such a renewal were focused on escape from Ireland: ‘When I get to Rapallo I am a honey bee’, he wrote Maud Gonne from Dublin in the autumn of 1928 as his term as Senator was coming to an end; ‘here I am a wasp’ (GYL 447). He was remembering the feelings of his Wrst visit to Rapallo earlier in the year about which he had written to Olivia Shakespear: ‘Once out of Irish bitterness I can Wnd some measure of sweetness and of light, as beWts old age— already new poems are Xoating in my head, bird songs of an old man, joy in the passing moment, emotion without the bitterness of memory’ (L 737). Bitterness is here associated with Ireland and the rancour of the public life in which he was there engaged, but it is also very personal. 11 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 248.

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The sweetness and light to which he here aspires is that which ‘beWts old age’. The emotions of The Tower that he hoped to transcend in this new phase were those with which he struggled in the title poem, the anguished resistance to ageing. So far I have been concentrating on the cultural application of the sweet/bitter polarity deriving from the Arnoldian concept of sweetness and light. But Yeats’s poetic vocabulary is never univocal in its signiWcance, nor does it necessarily shift sequentially from one period to another. Twined into the signifying strands of sweetness and bitterness along with their aesthetic/political connotations is the tangle of feeling related to gender and erotic desire, to youth and age. BIT TER SWEETNESS Summer visits to Coole and the solace of Lady Gregory oVered Yeats times of temporary respite care, enabled him for a time at least to put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart.

(VP 198)

The paradox is that the bitterness of unrequited love so Wlls the heart that it leaves it empty, incapable of cherishing any other objects. And yet the memory of Gonne and the suVering she had caused the poet can bring the exact opposite as well. In ‘Friends’, in which he praises the three women who have meant most to him, the beloved who ‘took j All till my youth was gone j With scarce a pitying look’ is included along with his dear and selXess friends, Shakespear and Gregory: When day begins to break I count my good and bad, Being wakeful for her sake, Remembering what she had, What eagle look still shows, While up from my heart’s root So great a sweetness Xows I shake from head to foot.

(VP 315–16)

The idea of love as simultaneously bitter and sweet is hardly a novel one. Yeats found ‘bitter sweetness’ in Sappho and used it in his address to love in ‘From the ‘‘Antigone’’ ’ and in the return of desire to the old

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woman in ‘Her Vision in the Wood’—‘love’s bitter-sweet had all come back’ (VP 537).12 Yeats recurrently illustrates the ways in which the sweetness of beauty, and the imagination of erotic satisfaction which it evokes, are linked to the anguish of absence, loss, and death. Aoife in ‘The Grey Rock’ angrily complains: Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces?

(VP 275)

This is not a case where the woman has been betrayed by an unfaithful lover; rather, she the immortal has been cheated by the mortal man who has insisted on dying. ‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes, j What more is there to say?’ But Eros and Thanatos in Yeats are proximate and interconnected, not antithetical. In ‘His Dream’, the dreamer calls the ‘Wgure in a shroud . . . By the sweet name of Death’ (VP 253–4). In ‘The Two Kings’, the love that Edain chooses with the mortal King Eochaid is ‘this life j Sweetened by death’ (VP 285). At its simplest this is only the pathos of life’s transience enhancing the ardour of desire, as in the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII: This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

But at its most extreme the lover positively ‘wishes his Beloved were Dead’, so that he could reconstruct her in the tenderly loving form she has never taken in life: Were you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast (VP 175)

The Ninety-ish decadence of The Wind among the Reeds here licenced the necrophilia of male desire, which is rarely as explicit elsewhere in Yeats. But he did recurrently seek to compose women into still and controllable images, women who in their animated life so kinetically resisted such control. Thus in ‘The Two Trees’, although Yeats is drawing on an elaborate Cabbalistic symbolism in his contrast between the ‘holy tree’ and its fatal Upas counterpart, it is used to enforce monitory alternatives for the beloved. She is urged to ‘Gaze no more 12 See David R. Clark, Yeats at Songs and Choruses (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), 217.

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in the bitter glass’. In the blasted tree she will see there ‘all things turn to barrenness . . . There, through the broken branches, go j The ravens of unresting thought’ (VP 135–6). The results, from the lover’s point of view, are most unsatisfactory. Where on contemplation of the holy tree, ‘Thine eyes grow full of tender care’, the perverse enchantment of the opposite makes ‘Thy tender eyes grow all unkind’ (VP 135–6). It is the ‘ravens of unresting thought’ that disturb the loved woman and turn her away from the gentle reciprocity of love that is her true essence. Here for the Wrst time, but by no means the last, Yeats sets up an ideal of sweet femininity perverted by thought and politics. ‘On a Political Prisoner’ is the most notable later articulation of the idea, as Markiewicz, with the tamed seagull in her cell, is imagined recalling her own untransformed self: Did she in touching that lone wing Recall the years before her mind Became a bitter, an abstract thing, Her thought some popular enmity

(VP 397)

In her populist politics and her commitment to principle, she has betrayed both her gender and her class, embodied in the iconic memory of her riding to hounds: When long ago I saw her ride Under Ben Bulben to the meet, The beauty of her country-side With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred, She seemed to have grown clean and sweet Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird

(VP 397)

It is an elaboration on the same contrast in ‘Easter 1916’, there turned on the voice. As against the ‘shrill’ tones of the activist, ‘What voice more sweet than hers j When, young and beautiful, j She rode to harriers?’ (VP 392) The ideal of ‘sweetness’, composed of female pliancy and upper class grace, here and even more in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, has understandably attracted strong feminist criticism. The imagery of tree and bird in the later poem has been seen as especially oVensive: May she become a Xourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound (VP 404)

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Joyce Carol Oates comments icily: ‘This celebrated poet would have his daughter an object in nature for others’—which is to say male—delectation.’ Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, who cites this while oVering a more nuanced and historically informed reading of the poem, also concludes: In conjunction with Yeats’s rejection of intellectual hatred in women, his identiWcation of his daughter with the linnet and the rooted tree implies her subordinate relationship to male culture.13

And yet ‘sweetness’ is not necessarily gendered, nor in Yeats’s imagination of an ideal femininity is he necessarily preening himself on his superior masculinity. It is not often remarked that, in the same stanza of ‘Easter 1916’ where the ‘sweet voice’ of Markiewicz riding to harriers is recalled, the word ‘sweet’ is repeated in a quite diVerent context. Thomas MacDonagh, ‘helper and friend’ of Pearse might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. (VP 392–3)

By the shared epithet Markiewicz is aligned here with MacDonagh, his creativity and her youthful grace alike remembered in contrast to the changed Wgures they have now become in the context of the Rising. Yeats includes himself in the condemnation of all that is antithetical to what he wishes for his daughter in his ‘Prayer’: My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. (VP 405)

The intellectual hatred that he abhors he recognizes in himself and in the women to which he has been most drawn. It is not just a prescription for subordinated women that he states in the poem, but a principle of the undiVerentiated soul: all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, 13 Elizabeth Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137. The essay of Oates from which she quotes is ‘ ‘‘At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her’’: Images of Women in Twentieth-Century Literature’, Georgia Review 37:1 (1983), 7–30 [17].

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(VP 405)

Sweetness here is not a recipe for female passivity; it is the recovery of an unself-conscious unity of being. Feminine feeling in Yeats, in principle at least, is not seen as the hierarchical inferior of male reason but the opposite. This is the justiWcation for the belligerence of the male speaker in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ in denying thought and knowledge to his female interlocutor. He has learning to prove That blest souls are not composite, And that all beautiful women may Live in uncomposite blessedness, And lead us to the like (VP 387)

It is to this that the eternal feminine leads men on in Yeats, an ideal of ‘uncomposite blessedness’, where ‘The body is not bruised to pleasure soul’, to quote the later formulation of ‘Among School Children’ (VP 445). It is an ideal associated with the beautiful female body and as such the object of male desire, but it is not easily or unproblematically incarnated in women. Rather, as Yeats maintains in ‘Adam’s Curse’, women must ‘labour to be beautiful’ as the male poet, creating his second-order beauty of poetry, must work unceasingly ‘to articulate sweet sounds together’ (VP 205). ‘Uncomposite blessedness’ is a Holy Grail of being that men and women alike pursue, with almost equal diYculty and with equally little likelihood of success. Is it more likely in old age than in youth? Certainly bitterness for Yeats was not only or primarily an attribute of ageing disillusionment. It seems, if anything, to be almost routinely associated with youth. The woman in ‘An Image from a Past Life’ had thought she was done with all that, when the tormenting image appears from nowhere: An image of my heart that is smitten through Out of all likelihood, or reason, And when at last, Youth’s bitterness being past, I had thought that all my days were cast Amid most lovely places; smitten as though It had not learned its lesson.

(VP 389)

This disproportionate anguish, so reminiscent of what the poet suVers in ‘The Cold Heaven’—‘I took all the blame out of all sense and reason’

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(VP 316)—is something that in the assurance of mutual married love she could assume she had outgrown. The young heart, it is implied, is ordinarily schooled by such punishment; the surprise is to learn that this sort of pain can still recur beyond ‘youth’s bitterness’ where it is normal. ‘Sweet Dancer’ is a special case, because the circumstances were so unusual, the subject being Margot Ruddock, the mentally disturbed poet and actress, with whom Yeats had developed a love relationship: The girl goes dancing there On the leaf-sown, new-mown, smooth Grass plot of the garden; Escaped from bitter youth, Escaped out of her crowd, Or out of her black cloud. Ah, dancer, ah, sweet dancer!

(VP 568)

The epithet ‘sweet’ here compounds admiration for the harmony of the dance, a residual desire for the dancer, and the pathos of her estranged state. Her absorption may be an ecstatic concentration on her art, or it may be madness, but either way it takes her out of troubling emotional vicissitudes. The Wfth and sixth lines may be taken as an expansion of the fourth: the bipolar oscillation between manic sociability and solitary depression is typical of what makes youth bitter. In old age Yeats hoped to be liberated from the youthful humiliations of love, from the lacerating hatreds of public controversy, from vehement resistance to his own ageing. In Rapallo, unlike in Ireland, he could be a honey bee. He had had previous glimpses of what such a state of acceptance of himself and the world could be like. This is the subject of ‘Demon and Beast’. For certain minutes at the least That crafty demon and that loud beast That plague me day and night Ran out of my sight

(VP 399)

Two of these occasions are recalled in the poem, one looking at the paintings in the National Gallery, another in contemplation of the waterfowl in the park in Stephen’s Green. Freedom from the beast of desire and the demon of hatred allows him a kind of loving solidarity with all human beings— There was no portrait in the Gallery But beckoned to sweet company,

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—and a deep identiWcation with the natural world: Being no more demoniac A stupid happy creature Could rouse my whole nature. (VP 400)

Such moments, however, were exceptional and might, the poet acknowledges, be merely physically occasioned by the lassitude of ageing. The state of being driven by hatred and desire, of being at odds with the world, is the normal human condition and speciWcally the condition of all human achievement: Yet I am certain as can be That every natural victory Belongs to beast or demon, That never yet had freeman Right mastery of natural things, And that mere growing old, that brings Chilled blood, this sweetness brought; Yet have no dearer thought Than that I may Wnd out a way To make it linger half a day.

(VP 401)

The last stanza of the poem makes a jump from this involuntary, Xeeting ecstacy of being, which may be no more than geriatric symptom, to the willed transcendence of the early Christian ascetics: O what a sweetness strayed Through barren Thebaid, Or by the Mareotic sea When that exultant Anthony And twice a thousand more Starved upon the shore And withered to a bag of bones! What had the Caesars but their thrones?

(VP 401)

This sweetness, however, achieved by the persistent mortiWcation of the Xesh, is not, nor cannot be the poet’s form of sweetness. For Yeats himself, it is only through acceptance not denial of the body, ageing as it may be, that some temporary state of beatiWc serenity can be found. ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ is Yeats’s coded account of his own marriage and the extraordinary sense of sexual rejuvenation and spiritual

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enlightenment that it brought. It is framed by the story of how and when Harun came to make his ‘gift’ to Kusta Ben Luka, Yeats’s Arabian Nights stand-in. It was after ‘our beloved Caliph put to death j His Vizir JaVer for an unknown reason’ that ‘he j Seemed for a while to have grown young again’ (VP 462). The dialogue that follows between Harun and Kusta is commended to all the chroniclers To show how violent great hearts can lose Their bitterness and Wnd the honeycomb. (VP 463)

The violent great heart in question is of course that of the Caliph, not the elderly scholar Kusta; the turn from arbitrary cruelty to tender generosity is akin to that of the ‘violent and bitter man’ of ‘Ancestral Houses’ with his need for ‘The sweetness that all longed for night and day’. For Kusta, necessarily, the situation is diVerent. Though he accepts Harun’s argument that a ‘poet’s thought . . . springs from the body and in body falls’ (VP 463), he is doubtful of his own capacity for the sort of sexual renewal that comes, as it were naturally, to Harun the man of action. Even with the miraculous advent of a love that is physically mutual and brings with it the amazing bonus of his wife’s sleeptalking wisdom, there is still anxiety about its continuance: Were she to lose her love, because she had lost Her conWdence in mine, or even lose Its Wrst simplicity, love, voice and all, All my Wne feathers would be plucked away And I left shivering.

(VP 469)

Nowhere in Yeats is there a more extreme aYrmation of the identity of soul and body, knowledge and being, than in the lines that follow: All those abstractions that you fancied were From the great Treatise of Parmenides; All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things Are but a new expression of her body Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.

(VP 469)

The abstruse symbology of A Vision is not some learned cerebral system remote from the loving congress that produced it; the one is the manifestation of the other. Yet even the moment of orgasmic satisfaction is bitter as well as sweet. The prophetic wisdom that the woman utters in her trance is an ominous one. ‘A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed

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banner’ (VP 469), Kusta concludes, reminding us of the opening description of ‘the great gallery of the Treasure House j Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured j But brilliant as the night’s embroidery, j And wait war’s music’ (VP 461). It is an unillusioned understanding of the terrors of a world order to come that his wife’s mystic knowledge has enabled him to understand: I alone— Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone— Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost In the confusion of its night-dark folds, Can hear the armed man speak.

(VP 469–70)

The bitter sweetness of the body, even at the moment of its greatest satisfaction, generates a vision of a deterministic and destructive universe. FINDING THE HONEYCOMB As his version of being more Catholic than the Pope, Yeats took evident pleasure in being able to quote St Thomas Aquinas against the clerically inspired Irish censorship legislation of 1928: ‘anima rationalis est tota in toto corpore et tota in qualibet parte corporis’ (UP II 478). The soul is not separable from the body, St Thomas aYrms, but is diVused throughout its every part. Yet in ‘A Dialogue of Soul and Body’, as we saw in the previous chapter, Soul is completely silenced in the second part of the poem to allow Self to have his say. And it is his say. The Self who has chosen for emblem sword and scabbard is emphatically masculine. Where women in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ have the potential to live in ‘uncomposite blessedness’, the male Self proclaims a blessedness that represents only one side of the composition, the embodied life of the passions at the expense of the contemplative soul: When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness Xows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

(VP 479)

This is a diVerent sort of ecstasy from that represented in ‘Demon and Beast’. Instead of a passive lapsing out of hatred and desire, this is a willed ‘casting out’ of remorse, a willingness to ‘follow to its source j Every event

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in action or in thought; j Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!’ (VP 479). The beatiWc state of ‘Vacillation’ is diVerent again. The discursive source for this is given in an extended passage of Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which needs to be quoted in full: At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when at hazard I have opened some book of verse. Sometimes it is my own verse, when, instead of discovering new technical Xaws, I read with all the excitement of the Wrst writing. Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything Wlls me with aVection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time. (Myth 365)

Although the verse Yeats here reads may be his own, the experience is by no means narcissistic. It is a rediscovery of the joy of creation and the sense of harmonious perfection that answers to the deepest harmony in the world itself, the images from Anima Mundi. Though in ‘Vacillation’ there is no reference to what is in the ‘open book’ the poet has been reading, the emotions of the prose passage underlie the sudden transWguration in the poem: My Wftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blesse`d and could bless.

(VP 501)

This is section IV of ‘Vacillation’. In the Wnal section VIII the poet talks through, in imagined one-sided dialogue with the Catholic theologian Von Hu¨gel, the relations between the two forms of sweetness, that of the unregenerate body and that of the ascetic soul. Despite the title, there is no real vacillation here. The form of the opening question, ‘Must we

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part, Von Hu¨gel’, implies its own answer; whatever their shared beliefs in the ‘miracles of the saints’, the poet plays a ‘predestined part’. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said? So get you gone, Von Hu¨gel, though with blessings on your head. (VP 503)

There is irony in the secular poet blessing the man of God; but it is a deliberately poised irony, a claim to sanctity for the blessedness of the man in the teashop set against that of the saints and martyrs. What has Scripture said about the lion and the honeycomb? The answer, of course, is Samson’s riddle, ‘out of the strong came forth sweetness’ ( Judges 14.14): the honeycomb is lodged in the decayed body of the dead lion. The allusive reference elides the notion of corruption, but the sweetness the poet elects here has its origins in the physical which, unlike the miraculously undecomposing body of St Teresa referred to some lines earlier, is susceptible to death and decay. At one end of the spectrum for Yeats, bodily being may be ‘sweetened by death’, by the sharpness of the sense of its own corporeal transience. But there is also an alternative perspective that idealizes the disembodied state. In the immediate afterlife of the dead Robert Gregory in ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, the soul is imagined replaying its life back into infancy: Knowledge he shall unwind Through victories of the mind, Till, clambering at the cradle-side, He dreams himself his mother’s pride, All knowledge lost in trance Of sweeter ignorance.

(VP 343)

In ‘Among School Children’ such a soul is ‘betrayed’ by the ‘honey of generation’ (VP 444) into painful reincarnation and the wearisome life of the Xesh. The idea of ‘honey of generation’, as Yeats explains in a note (VP 828), he derived from the Neoplatonist Porphyry who held that the pleasure of the sexual act draws in the as-yet unborn soul from its happy oblivion.14 The disincarnate soul thus, in its ‘sweeter ignorance’, is trapped into the world again by a physical countersweetness, the ‘honey of generation’. ‘Among School Children’ ends with its famous 14 Yeats’s note is quite cryptic; for a fuller exposition of Porphyry’s ideas see his essay on ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ in E & I 82–6.

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double image of an integrated unity of being, dancer and chestnut tree. But the troubled meditation of the poem as a whole must call in question whether such integration is achievable in this life and this world. The spectacle of the young children, his own caricatured life as a ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’, the dream of a supernaturally beautiful ‘Ledaean body’, all contribute to a reverie on mind and body, spirit and Xesh. The physical decrepitude of the ageing human form provokes discouraged doubts about the value and meaning of the individual life: What youthful mother . . .


Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? (VP 444)

Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, each with his diVerent philosophical doctrine of what constituted ultimate reality, are alike brutally reduced to ‘Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird’ (VP 445). Humans are haunted by an imagination of what they are not nor cannot be in the body: Both nuns and mothers worship images But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother’s reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts

(VP 445)

Both sets of images are alike unsatisfactory, both alike breaking hearts in their failure to correspond to the actuality of the lived life: the iconic statues of the nuns’ worship in their deathlike stillness, the mothers’ hopeful vision of their children’s imagined future in the disillusioning contrast with their grown-up selves. And yet these delusive images are not mere delusions. At this point in the poem’s seventh stanza, the syntax breaks oV into a disjunctive apostrophe, what Helen Vendler calls ‘odal address’,15 before proceeding into the enunciations of the eighth and Wnal stanza: —O Presences That passion, piety or aVection knows, 15 Helen Vendler, ‘The Later Poetry’, in Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 84.

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Bitter/Sweet And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise; Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul (VP 445)

The punctuation is peculiar here; an early manuscript draft, quoted by Thomas Parkinson, makes plainer what must be the grammatical sense, that ‘self-born mockers’ are in apposition to ‘Presences’.16 These are real Presences, known rather than merely imagined by the lovers, mothers, nuns as the terrestrial manifestation of heavenly glory; and yet they are simultaneously ‘self-born mockers of man’s enterprise’, mediated through the human imagination, necessarily at odds with the contingencies of being in the world. That is why the images of unity of the last stanza are images of an unrealizable ideal. The holistic integration of form and content, part and whole, emblematized by the dancer and the chestnut tree, is exactly what is denied to us caught between the intuition of eternal verities and the shifting experience of the actual. That is why even the sweetest of visions are tainted by bitterness. ‘Towards Break of Day’ supplies an example. The poet’s dream was of his dearly loved Sligo waterfall and the sense of despair at being unable to take possession of this cherished phantasm of memory: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch. (VP 399)

This excess of yearning is matched in the complementary dream of his wife, even though it is of a quite diVerent mythical order of things: she that beside me lay Had watched in bitterer sleep The marvellous stag of Arthur, That lofty white stag, leap From mountain steep to steep. (VP 399)

Both dreams are bitter: the wife’s is only more so because the magical Arthurian image represents the sublime on a more epic scale than Yeats’s 16

And yet they too break hearts—the Presences That love, or piety or aVection knows And dead or living statuary symbolize Mock every great man and his enterprize. Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), 105.

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own Wordsworthian cataract. It is always thus in the contemplation of beauty and the forms of the imagination. The narrator in the story ‘Rosa Alchemica’ tells how, like Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours, he arranged for himself an exquisitely composed living environment, believing that ‘it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death’. But then the very contemplation of the magniWcent artefacts that surrounded him ‘would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the one watching with heavy eyes the other’s moment of content’ (Myth 269). This passage was written long before the explicit articulation of the concept of the anti-self, much less its elaboration in the lunar cycle of A Vision. Man in Yeats is always haunted by an otherness all the more painful because apparently his own self-generated creation. That is why creativity, most satisfying of all activities for the poet, is driven by need and so often accompanied by the embittering sense of falling short. Early in the introduction to this chapter I quoted Daniel Albright’s question in relation to ‘The Tower’, ‘Why is the human soul bitter in its creating act?’ One more general answer may now be oVered: it feels its own Wniteness in face of the inWnite vision it seeks to adumbrate. In ‘Byzantium’ this feeling is transferred from artiWcer to artefact: Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.

(VP 497–8)

By deWnition the crafted bird of ‘changeless metal’ cannot know bitterness. The embitterment can only be that of the poet/seer—‘before me Xoats an image’—watching beneath the moon that is the territory of the imagination. The kinetic emotions of the passage—‘by the moon embittered’, ‘scorn aloud’—are the overspill of the human watcher attributed to the object that is perfect in its lack of any such emotions. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth, Yeats recalled how as a young man he had tried in vain to train himself in the self-possession he so desperately lacked. At that stage, he says, ‘I did not discover that Hamlet had his self-possession from no schooling but from indiVerence and

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passion-conquering sweetness, and that less heroic minds can but hope it from old age’ (A 94). ‘Demon and Beast’ and ‘Vacillation’ reveal something of the ‘passion-conquering sweetness’ that Yeats himself was to experience as he moved towards old age. He was to return to the more heroic Hamlet in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ as one of the types of the assured tragic persona: ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay j Gaiety transWguring all that dread’ (VP 565). In the last phase of his work, the idea of tragic gaiety seems to take the place of bitter sweetness as preferred oxymoron. In ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ it is the honey-bee that is invited to ‘Come build in the empy house of the stare’ (VP 424). In ‘Lapis Lazuli’, he contemplates a much wider sweep of history than the Irish civil war and generalizes on the destined cycle of destruction and re-creation: All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay. (VP 566)

The emphasis falls here on the performative rather than the creative. Where previously the sweetness of artistic creativity was characterized as bitter in its driven neediness, now it is the composed assurance of the Wgures within the artefact that is stressed despite the terrible nature of the destinies they act out. The Chinamen in the lapis lazuli sculpture are the culminating example of the poem: There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished Wngers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

(VP 567)

It may be that there is a late transmutation of bitter sweetness into tragic gaiety as preferred vehicle for Yeats’s coiled emotional antitheses. But in the kind of investigation of poetic language I have been attempting here, there is also a felt need to discover some such developmental perspective. If nothing else the linear design of any discursive analysis prompts one towards a logically dynamic sequence. It is certainly possible to construct a coherent scheme for Yeats’s changing application of the words ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’. His early beliefs in a cultural sweetness and light, which might bring Ireland Unity of Being, were challenged by his experience of the historically conditioned bitterness of political rancour. His somewhat later association of such sweetness and light with an aristocratic elite

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was disturbed by a wartime awareness of the energies of violence below. The sense of bitter sweetness in his long unrequited love was developed into a complex doctrine of the passions, gender identity, and the objects of desire. The occasional, exceptional moments of blessed sweetness of being, experienced in later life, only helped to deWne more sharply the tormented disequilibrium of feeling to which they were exceptions. The sweet perfection of aesthetic apprehension and artistic form was shadowed always by the bitter awareness of the gap between creator and created, self and anti-self. The Wndings of this chapter can be so summarized in terms of a conceptual sequence registered in a changing use of language. And of course it is a measure of Yeats’s extraordinary achievement as a poet that he did continue so to change and develop both in thought and practice. But it has not been the main aim of this chapter, or indeed this book as a whole, to trace such developments as such. My concern is with the way in which ordinary words, ‘bitter’, ‘sweet’, in their varied usage take on diVerent colouring, diVerent coding from poem to poem. The emotional and intellectual play around the bitter/sweet node cannot be reduced to one or other conceptual trajectory. It is as it inheres within the poetic practice itself, as it creates its own network of resonances across the body of the Collected Poems, that it takes on its full meaning.

Conclusion: But Half In ‘Prelude’, Synge’s little tribute to Wordsworth, he celebrates the poet’s escape into the language of nature: I knew the stars, the Xowers, and the birds, The grey and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember human words, In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.1

Yeats misquotes a phrase from this poem, as he contemplates the portrait of Synge in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’: And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man, ‘Forgetting human words,’ a grave deep face. (VP 603)

This creative re-writing of Synge is the more striking because in the original lines Synge, knowingly or unknowingly, appears to be mimicking two of Yeats’s own common linguistic preferences: the use of a disjunctive ‘but’ ¼ ‘only’, ‘except’, and of ‘half’ ¼ ‘partly’, ‘not altogether’. Both usages appear almost routinely in the poetry, several times in conjunction as in Synge’s poem. ‘Your strength’, Yeats tells Gonne in ‘Old Memory’, is ‘but half yours’ (VP 201); in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, modern artists bent on selfexpression, ‘are but critics, or but half create’ (VP 368). Yeats works ‘but’ hard through the poems both in its usual function as adversative conjunction and in this specialist quasi-adverbial form. We Wnd the two uses close together in Michael Robartes’ exposition of the early parts of the lunar cycle in ‘The Phases of the Moon’: From the Wrst crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full (VP 373) 1 J. M. Synge, Collected Works, I. Poems, ed. Robin Skelton (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 32.

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The approximation in the one monosyllable ‘but’ of two distinct grammatical and semantic eVects resembles the dual-purpose ‘that’ used as relative and demonstrative adjective looked at in Chapter 2. However, where ‘that’ in its indeterminacy facilitates the Xow of Yeats’s syntax, ‘but’ acts as a mini-barrier, as it were a sluice gate, turning his meaning in the direction it must go. Take one further example from ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’: What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair?

(VP 369)

The two long unpunctuated lines of the rhetorical question, held back for an instant at the start of the third line, issue in their inevitable end. The determined necessity of this tragic telos, as well as the exceptional nature of the poe`te maudit, is enforced by that exclusionary ‘but’. For others the world may hold more; this is all the unillusioned creator can expect. The futility of eVort against the fatedness of things is emphasized by the reductive ‘but’. In ‘Under Ben Bulben’, the physical task of burial is made meaningless in the light of the principles of reincarnation: Though grave-diggers’ toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscles strong, They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again.

(VP 637)

The tendency towards delusion is often stressed by contrast with its implied opposite. Kusta Ben Luka in ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ gestures scornfully to later generations who will mythologize his life: ‘In after time they will speak much of me j And speak but fantasy’ (VP 462). Despite the best eVorts of the poet in ‘A Woman Homer Sung’, the memory of the actuality of the woman’s youthful beauty makes ‘life and letters seem j But an heroic dream’ (VP 255); the downturn on ‘but’ points us towards the more sceptical valuation of dream.The limiting eVect of this sort of usage is a marker for human helplessness. The blocked writer of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ is driven to going back over the subjects of his previous work: ‘What can I but enumerate old themes?’ (VP 629). What feels like a dropped main verb here—‘What can I [do] but’—only emphasizes the sense of depletedness in the poet’s creative powers. Yet ‘but’ can be used to express acceptance as well as frustrated impotence at the losses age brings, as in the ending of ‘The Tower’. The Wfteen-line sentence needs to be quoted in full in order to appreciate the Wnal eVect:

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Conclusion: But Half Now shall I make my soul, Compelling it to study In a learned school Till the wreck of body, Slow decay of blood, Testy delirium Or dull decrepitude, Or what worse evil come— The death of friends, or death Of every brilliant eye That made a catch in the breath— Seem but the clouds of the sky When the horizon fades, Or a bird’s sleepy cry Among the deepening shades.

(VP 416)

In the willed resolution of the opening the poet forces himself to face the whole humiliating catalogue of degenerative ailments piling up line by line, and the greater anguish of losing loved ones. It is all of this as subject, all these corporeal complaints and inward pain, which are made to ‘seem but the clouds of the sky’, distanced and dematerialized into the spectacle of sunset. This book has been written out of a conviction that Yeats’s poetic codes, his stylistic practices down to the minute particulars of his use of ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, his manipulations of tense and mood, are meaningful in themselves. ‘But’ may be taken as a limiting case, open to the suspicion that it is no more than a mannerism or a metrical convenience. The same cannot be said about Yeats’s predilection for ‘half ’; it is multiply and distinctively signiWcant.2 In the early poetry it is used as part of the atmospherics and the ideology of the Celtic Twilight. In the signature poem of the period, ‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, the spanned spectrum from day to night comes to rest on the in-between time which the French call entre chien et loup: The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light

(VP 176)

It is appropriate that the druid, in ‘Fergus and the Druid’, should be evoked as ‘a thin grey man half lost in gathering night’ (VP 102). The dimming memory of the archaic pagan Wgure is only to be barely glimpsed in the darkened modern world of the late nineteenth century. 2 I am grateful to Lucy McDiarmid who Wrst drew my attention to how often the word appears in the poetry.

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With the elaboration of Yeats’s cyclical conception of time in A Vision came a diVerent re-application of the motif. The Irish of ‘Hound Voice’, originally and essentially hunter–gatherers, do not belong in the ‘settled ground’, the ‘boredom of the desk or of the spade’ to which they have been transplanted by modernity: though slumber-bound, Some few half wake and half renew their choice, Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name—‘Hound Voice.’

A day will come, with a new turn of the cycle, when once again fully roused ‘we shall get up before the dawn j And Wnd our ancient hounds before the door’ (VP 622). That state between sleep and waking is a metaphor for the drowsed consciousness of an older, other state of being. It is to be reached only by a lapsing out of normal modes of perception and expression. In the invocatory poem to The Shadowy Waters, the poet is limited in what he can say of the spirits that he invokes: for they that cleave The waters of sleep can make a chattering tongue Heavy like stone, their wisdom being half silence. (VP 218)

This is the aural equivalent of the Celtic Twilight. The state of reverie or trance may be deliberately induced by a partial shutting out of the world. ‘He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved’ starts with the poet’s injunction to the beloved as to how she may move her mind out of the reach of calumny: Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair, And dream about the great and their pride (VP 166)

The blessed dead are imagined enjoying in perpetuity this sort of state of sensuous meditation. The afterlife to which Yeats imagines Mabel Beardsley going in ‘Her Courage’, from the sequence ‘Upon a Dying Lady’, is promiscuously peopled with heroes from Celtic and Greek mythology and the Renaissance grandees of Castiglione— some old cardinal Pacing with half-closed eyelids in a sunny spot Who had murmured of Giorgione at his latest breath (VP 366)

Such liminal situations are privileged by Yeats as they Wgure the threshold of awareness of previous, deeper forms of knowledge. But the

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half-full glass can also of course be half-empty. This is the emphasis in Yeats’s ‘mockery’ in ‘Blood and the Moon’ of ‘a time j Half dead at the top’ (VP 480). It is only, he implies in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, the exceptional person who is prepared to face the desolate realities of destruction around him, ‘who can read the signs nor sink unmanned j Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant j From shallow wits’ (VP 429). Confrontation with that vision of annihilation, however, brings with it an angry reaction against the inadequacy of the very art designed to express it: a rage To end all things, to end What my laborious life imagined, even The half-imagined, the half-written page (VP 431)

Yeats could thus use semi-states negatively as well as positively. He had, however, an imaginative investment in the compounded hybridity of things and beings that were half one thing, half another. If the Sphinx-like creature of ‘The Second Coming’ is monstrous, Edmund Dulac’s Black Centaur, like other marvellous and mythical beasts, is an exemplary model of art, opposed to the green parrots of realism. The Gonne of ‘Against Unworthy Praise’, in her magniWcent self-suYciency, is imagined as ‘half lion, half child’ (VP 260). The fatally wounded Diarmuid/Adonis in ‘Her Vision in the Wood’ is intimately associated with the boar that has gored him and with the woman in whose vision he appears: That thing of blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck, Half turned and Wxed a glazing eye on mine

(VP 537)

The emphasis here is on the alienated physicality of the image that can nonetheless look out and implicate the human observer by its gaze. The second section of ‘Vacillation’, by contrast, makes of the compounded vision an icon for ecstatic contemplation: A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering Xame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene

(VP 500)

Unity of Being, as Wgured here, is no organic integration but a mystical emblem that brings together the natural and the spiritual, the antithetical elements of earth and Wre.

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Synge, dutiful Wordsworthian that he was when he wrote ‘Prelude’, was proud to proclaim that he did ‘but half remember human words j In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens’. Yeats was not a Wordsworthian, and never aspired to such forgetfulness of language in favour of an unmediated apprehension of nature. He was closer to the spirit of Blake’s maxim in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Where man is not, nature is barren’.3 The natural in Yeats is always inXected by the various sorts of voices that articulate its eVects, shaped towards the symbolic by those that observe it. Yet it is not true, as he claims in ‘Her Courage’, that ‘I have no speech but symbol’ (VP 365). It has been one burden of this book that Yeats moves continuously in and out of symbolic speech, and that his poems reXect a phenomenal as well as a noumenal world. The nine-and-Wfty swans he claims to have counted in ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ may be there largely for Wgurative purposes, but he did habitually count swans on Coole Lake and moor chicks on the stream by Ballylee. The dates and places with which he situates his poems in the concreteness of time and space are manipulated in the interests of artiWce, yet still retain much of their objective exteriority. His poetic vocabulary, words invested with a loading of special signiWcance, such as dream, bitterness, or sweetness, keeps its openness to ordinary as well as symbolic connotations. Yeats’s ‘half ’ modiWers are expressive of the in-between states of his poetry: between belief and disbelief, the perceptual and the symbolic, the empirical and the transcendental. The inability to commit unequivocally to one order or another produces the recurrent sense of existential deWcit Wgured most fully in the need of self for anti-self, the endemic psychological deprivations of the Vision cycle. The end of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ accepts with rueful resignation the inadequacies of the poet’s engagement with the world. The spectacle of the war has moved him once again with envy of the life of action in the public sphere, an awareness of the impotent inwardness of the poetic imagination. I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth In something that all others understand or share

Nonetheless, he must make do with being the poet he is and always has been: 3 William Blake, Poetry and Prose, ed. GeoVrey Keynes (4th edn, London: Nonesuch Library, 1961), 185.

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Conclusion: But Half The abstract joy, The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, SuYce the ageing man as once the growing boy. (VP 427)

The ‘abstract joy’ of a merely aesthetic observation is complemented by an only half-comprehended visionary interpretation. If this is but half of what the poet longs for, it is enough for the poetry he writes.

Bibliography I.

UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL

John Kelly (ed.), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (InteLex Past Masters), http:// library.nlx.com National Library of Ireland MSS 21,862 and 13,590. II.

WORKS BY YEATS

Always Your Friend: the Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938, ed. Anna McBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (London: Hutchinson, 1992). Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955). Collected Letters: I. 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly with Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Collected Letters: II. 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Collected Letters: III. 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Collected Letters: IV. 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). The Early Poems: II, ‘‘The Wanderings of Oisin’’ and Other Early Poems to 1895: Manuscript Materials, ed. George Bornstein (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961). Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962). In the Seven Woods. Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1903). John Sherman & Dhoya (Dublin: Lilliput, 1990). Last Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. James Pethica (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954). Letters on Poetry to Dorothy Wellesley (London: Oxford University Press, 1964 [1940]). Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972). Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959). Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936). ‘‘Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems’’ from ‘‘A Full Moon in March’’: Manuscript Materials, ed. David R. Clark (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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OT H E R P UB L I S H E D S O URC ES

Adams, Joseph, Yeats and the Masks of Syntax (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). Albright, Daniel, The Myth against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination in Old Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Allingham, William, Poems, ed. John Hewitt (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1967). Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). ‘Art and Aristocracy’, Irish Times, 11 January 1913, 7. ‘The Art Gallery, Irish Times, 8 September 1913, 6. Barrington, Jonah, Personal Sketches and Recollections of His Own Times (Dublin: Ashfield Press, 1997). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992). Blake, William, Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (4th edn, London: Nonesuch Library, 1961). Bornstein, George, Material Modernism: the Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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Index of Poems [Wgures in bold indicate pages where poems are discussed in detail] ‘Adam’s Curse’ 37–9, 164, 169–170, 195, 208 ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ 60, 224 ‘All Souls’ Night’ 35–6 ‘Alternative Song for the Severed Head in ‘‘The King of the Great Clock Tower’’ ’ 100, 101 ‘Among School Children’ 66, 178, 200, 208, 214–15 ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ 11, 106 ‘Ancestral Houses’ 34, 54, 155–6, 186, 202–3 ‘Another Song of a Fool’ 123–4, 124 ‘Aodh to Dectora’ 174 ‘Appointment, An’ 12–13, 107 ‘At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death’ 111 ‘Attack on ‘‘The Playboy of the Western World,’’ The’ 18–19 ‘Baile and Aillinn’ 114, 125, 127, 195 ‘Ballad of Earl Paul, The’ 9–10 ‘Ballad of Moll Magee’ 180 ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’ 38, 117 ‘Beggar to Beggar Cried’ 115, 174 ‘Blood and the Moon’ 124, 224 ‘Broken Dreams’ 69–70, 145, 182, 186 ‘Bronze Head, A’ 46, 136–7 ‘Byzantium’ 132–3, 135, 137, 217

‘Cat and the Moon, The’ 119–120 ‘Choice, The’ 32–3 ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion, The’ 55, 192–3, 221 ‘Closing Rhymes’ 63 ‘Cold Heaven, The’ 40, 160, 208 ‘Coole Park, 1929’ 8, 20–1, 43–4, 52, 102, 110–111, 143 ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ 8, 21–2, 47–8, 128–9 ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’ 178–180 ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ 115–116 ‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’ 194 ‘Danaan Quicken Tree, The’ 84–5 ‘Death of the Hare, The’ 120–1 ‘Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists’ 198–9 ‘Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus, The’ 45 ‘Demon and Beast’ 108, 209–210, 212, 218 ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul, A’ 40, 186–190 ‘Double Vision of Michael Robartes, The’ 73–4 ‘Dream of Death, A’ 55, 64 ‘Easter 1916’ 19–20, 32, 52, 54, 61, 68, 159 date of 5–8, 28 MacBride in 36–7, 57

234

Index of Poems

Easter 1916 (cont.) Markievicz in 36, 39, 112, 206, 207 names in 36, 37, 39 ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ 40, 55, 119, 165, 166, 194, 220, 221 ‘Empty Cup, The’ 176 ‘Ephemera’ 107 ‘Fallen Majesty’ 201 ‘Fascination of What’s DiYcult, The’ 130 ‘Fergus and the Druid’ 116, 148, 167, 222–3 ‘Fiddler of Dooney, The’ 82–3, 93, 174 ‘Fisherman, The’ 44, 145–7, 160 ‘Folly of Being Comforted, The’ 168–9, 184 ‘Friends’ 196, 204 ‘Friend’s Illness, A’ 38 ‘Friends of His Youth, The’ 175 ‘From the ‘‘Antigone’’ ’ 204 ‘Gift, The’ 14–15 ‘Gift of Harun Al-Rashid, The’ 181, 196, 210–2, 221 ‘Grey Rock, The’ 205 ‘Hawk, The’ 122–3 ‘He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World’ 129, 138 ‘He remembers Forgotten Beauty’ [‘O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell’] 40–1, 174 ‘He tells of a Valley full of Lovers’ 174 ‘He tells of the Perfect Beauty’ 174 ‘He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved’ 223

‘He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ 54–5, 222 ‘He wishes his Beloved were Dead’ 155 ‘Her Courage’ 223, 225 ‘Her Courtesy’ 136 ‘Her Dream’ 63 ‘Her Vision in the Wood’ 177–8, 205, 224 ‘High Talk’ 115 ‘His Dream’ 55, 64–5, 205 ‘His Memories’ 176 ‘His Phoenix’ 118, 119 ‘Host of the Air, The’ 58–60, 62, 64, 76–7, 79 ‘Hosting of the Sidhe, The’ 9, 57, 77–8 ‘Hound Voice’ 223 ‘Hour before Dawn, The’ 93 ‘Image from a Past Life, An’ 116–17, 172, 196, 208–9 ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’ 99–100 ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ 34, 35–7, 46, 52, 54, 94–6, 147–50, 163, 194 ‘In the Seven Woods’ 13–14, 35, 90–2, 196 ‘Indian to His Love, The’ 11 ‘Indian upon God, The’ 11 ‘Into the Twilight’ 184 ‘Irish Airman Foresees his Death, An’ 96 ‘King and No King’ 69, 153–4 ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree, The’ 44, 79, 85–7 ‘Lapis Lazuli’ 218

Index of Poems

235

‘Leda and the Swan’ 126–7, 142–3, 160 ‘Lines Written in Dejection’ 130–1 ‘Long-Legged Fly’ 33, 158–60 ‘Lover asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods, The’ 9, 174 ‘Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’ [‘Aodh to Dectora, The’] 56

‘New Faces, The’ 20, 164 ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ 45–6, 133 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ [‘Thoughts upon the Present State of the World’] 8, 22–5, 26–8, 32, 62, 125, 127–8, 203, 224 ‘No Second Troy’ 41–2

‘Madness of King Goll, The’ 80, 194 ‘Man and the Echo, The’ 100, 191–2 ‘Man who Dreamed of Faeryland, The’ 57, 79, 83–4, 108 ‘Man Young and Old, A’ 120, 174–5, 175, 176 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ 47, 54, 74, 155–6, 186, 187, 202, 218 date of 24–5 end of 225–6 hawks 122 moor-chicks 108, 126 ottava rima 178 sense of place 26–7 ‘Meeting’ 177 ‘Memory’ 119, 119 ‘Men Improve with the Years’ 67–8 ‘Meru’ 160 ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ 130, 167–8, 172, 184, 208, 212–13 ‘Miserrimus’ 11, 53, 156 ‘Mohini Chatterjee’ 158 ‘Municipal Gallery Revisited, The’ 35, 52, 131, 143, 220 ‘My Descendants’ 74 ‘My House’ 47 ‘My Table’ 47, 187

‘Old Age of Queen Maeve, The’ 116, 182–4 ‘Old Memory’ 220 ‘On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’ 131–2, 224 ‘On a Political Prisoner’ 100, 112–13, 206 ‘On those that hated ‘‘The Playboy of the Western World,’’ 1907’ 8 ‘On Woman’ 151–2, 154, 170–1 ‘O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell’ 40–1, 174 ‘Owen Aherne and his Dancers’ 118–19, 165, 184–5 ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ 92, 136 ‘Paudeen’ 18, 113 ‘Peace’ 41 ‘People, The’ 118, 143–5, 146, 164, 170 ‘Phases of the Moon, The’ 73, 119, 166, 180, 220–1 ‘Politics’ 30–2 ‘Prayer for my Daughter, A’ 24, 26, 46–7, 150, 206–8 ‘Prayer for my Son, A’ 150–1, 154 ‘Realists, The’ 129 ‘Red Hanrahan’ 89 ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’ 78, 79, 88–9, 194

236

Index of Poems

‘Reprisals’ 23 ‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’ 181 ‘Ribh in Ecstasy’ 181 ‘Road at My Door, The’ 47 ‘Romance in Ireland (on reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery)’ 15–16 ‘Rose of the World, The’ 41, 44, 54, 137, 138–9 ‘Rose Tree, The’ 171 ‘Running to Paradise’ 93, 174 ‘Sad Shepherd, The’ [‘Miserrimus’], 11, 53, 156 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 24, 25, 49–51, 107, 132 ‘Second Coming, The’ 26, 27, 28, 104–6, 131, 143, 224 ‘Secrets of the Old, The’ 175–6 ‘September 1913’ [‘Romance in Ireland (on reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery)’] 6–8, 15–16, 18, 19, 28, 32, 41, 44, 61 Shadowy Waters, The 11–12, 71–3, 89–91, 89–91, 108, 113–14, 115, 155, 223 ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ 110, 149–150, 166, 214 ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ 57 ‘Solomon and the Witch’ 117, 172 ‘Solomon to Sheba’ 171–2 ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd, The’ 11, 53, 156 ‘Song of Wandering Aengus, The’ 116 ‘Stare’s Nest at My Window, The’ 47 ‘Stolen Child’ 44, The’ 80–2, 83, 86, 107 ‘Street Dancers’ 61

‘Sweet Dancer’ 196, 209 ‘That the Night Come’ 158 ‘These are the Clouds’ 20, 42 ‘Thoughts upon the Present State of the World’ 24, 26, 27 ‘Three Beggars, The’ 93, 174 ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’ 38, 164, 182 ‘To a Shade’ 18, 115, 164, 201–2 ‘To a Wealthy Man, who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’ [‘The Gift’] 17–18, 156–8, 201 ‘To an Isle in the Water’ 106 ‘To be Carved on a Stone on Thoor Ballylee’ 43 ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ 55, 139–42, 195, 199 ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ 107, 158 ‘Tom O’Roughley’ 121–2, 123, 124 ‘Towards Break of Day’ 55, 65, 100, 130, 216–17 ‘Tower, The’ 25–6, 125, 127, 165, 196, 217 date of 24 Wnal section 33, 47, 55–6, 75, 191, 221–2 opening 185 sense of place 96–8, 100 ‘Two Kings, The’ 114–15, 130, 205 ‘Two Songs of a Fool’ 120 ‘Two Trees, The’ 205–6 ‘Two Years Later’ 56 ‘Under Ben Bulben’ 75, 101–3, 202, 221 ‘Under Saturn’ 99, 172 ‘Upon a Dying Lady’ 136, 223

Index of Poems ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’ 20, 201 ‘Vacillation’ 190, 213–14, 218, 224 ‘What Then?’ 190–1 ‘When You are Old’ 69 ‘Whence Had They Come?’ 161 ‘Where My Books Go’ 10 ‘White Birds, The’ 112 ‘Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?’ 61

237

‘Wild Swans at Coole, The’ 46, 48–9, 125–6, 127, 128, 135, 225 ‘Wisdom’ 35 ‘Wisdom and Dreams’ 74 ‘Withering of the Boughs, The’ 57–8 ‘Woman Homer Sung, A’ 41–2, 67, 221 ‘Woman Young and Old, A’ 174–5, 176–8 ‘Words’ 7

General Index Abbey Theatre 18–19 Adams, Joseph 135 Adonis 178, 224 Agamemnon 142 Aherne, Owen 73, 165, 166, 180, 184–5 Albright, Daniel 12, 22, 49–50, 61, 78, 97, 115, 179 n., 196, 217 Algeciras 111 Allgood, Molly 7–8 Allingham, William 80–1 Anglo-Irish 62 culture of 197–203, 218–19 Anima Mundi 213 animals 104–9 dreaming 60–1 marvellous and mythical 129–34 private codes 117–21 self-conscious symbols 121–9 shape-changers 113–17 Annals of the Four Masters 84 Annunciation 126 Antaeus 131 Aoife 205 Aphrodite, birth of 73 Aquinas, St Thomas 212 Ardilaun, Lord 14, 17–18, 157 Aristotle 215 Ark of the Covenant 12 Arnold, Matthew 195, 200, 202, 204 Culture and Anarchy 197–8 Arthur, King 130, 216 Arts Club, Dublin 163 Athenaeum Club, London 163 Augustine, St 179

Ballisodare, Co. Sligo 58, 82 Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal 80 Barrington, Jonah 96–7 Battle, Mary 82, 102 Beardsley, Mabel 223 Beare, Old Woman of 78 Beaumont, Francis and Fletcher, John 153–4 beggars 175, 176–7 Ben Bulben, Co. Sligo 66, 74, 79, 83, 98, 100–3, 202 Benjamin, Walter 203 Berkeley, Bishop 55, 74 Bible 151–2, 214 Luke’s Gospel 87 birds 104–5, 106, 109–13, 134, 152 private codes 117–21 self-conscious symbols 121–9 shape-changers 113–17 Birrell, Augustine 13 bitter/sweet 194–219 bitter sweetness 204–12 Wnding the honeycomb 212–19 sweetness and light 197–204 Black and Tans 22–3 Blake, William 53, 65, 70, 179, 225 boar 130, 137, 138, 224 Bookman, The 76 Bornstein, George 16, 53–4 Bradford, Curtis 9 Brown, Terence 5–6, 200 Browning, Robert 51 butterXy 106, 121–4 Butts, Thomas 65 n. Byzantium 50–1, 183

Bacchantes 178 ballads 174, 180

Cabbalistic symbolism 205 Cailleac Bare 78

General Index Callanan, J. J. 80 Campbell, Matthew 141 n. Cashel, Hill of 73 Castiglione, Count Baldassare 223 Castle of Heroes 170 Castle Taylor, Co. Galway 95 cat 106, 119–20 Catholicism 17, 35, 69, 154, 212 cattle egrets 111 Celtic Twilight 42, 138, 184, 222, 223 Celticism 197 censorship 50, 212 centaur 106, 130–2, 134, 224 Charlemagne, emperor 161 Chaudhry, Yug Mohit 16–17 Christ, Incarnation of 35, 143, 151 Christianity 113, 152, 173, 179, 198 civil war 24–5, 203 Clan-na-Gael 19 Cloone Bog, Co. Galway 97 Clooth-na-Bare, Co. Sligo 77, 78, 103 cockerel 117 Coleridge, S. T. 46–7, 159 Colgagh Lough 88 Collooney, Co. Sligo 83 Comintern 31 Comyn, Michael 129 Confucius 63 Congested Districts Board 94 Connacht 80, 88 Connolly, James 171 conscription 200 Coolaney, Co. Sligo 76, 77 Coole Park, Co. Galway 13, 95, 96, 97, 182, 204 defence of 201 poems set in 20–2, 43–4, 45, 47–9, 110 Seven Woods of 11–12, 13, 89–93, 98–9, 103 swans 125–6, 225

239

threat to 42 Cope’s Mountain, Co. Sligo 83 Crazy Jane 164, 165, 178–80 Creation myth 139 Cruachan 93 CruciWxion 125 Cuala Press 17, 19, 21, 24–5 Cuchulain 101, 115–16, 194 cuckoo 110 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler 31, 61, 127, 172, 179, 207 Cummen Strand, Co. Sligo 78, 89, 194 curlew 113 Dante Alighieri 194 dates 5–29 creative misdating 20–9 dating poems 9–14 strategic dating 14–20 Davis, Thomas 140, 142, 199 de Medici, Cosimo 157 Dead Man’s Point, Sligo Bay 82 Deane, Seamus 149 deer 129–30 deictics 39–44, 137 Deirdre 101, 138, 139 Devoy, John 19 Dial, The 5 n., 24 ‘Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ (Marvell) 186–7, 212 Diarmuid and Grainne 79, 224 Dionysus 132 divorce 50 Dr Faustus 187 Doggett, Rob 22 dolphin 106, 132–3, 134 Donegal, County 80, 81 Donne, John 51, 171 Donnelly, Charles 30 Donoghue, Denis 7 Dooney Rock, Lough Gill 82–3, 98, 103

240

General Index

dragon 84, 130, 167–8 dream 52, 53–75 illusion 56–60 imagination 63–71 revelation 71–5 utopian vision 60–3 Dromahair, Co. Leitrim 78, 83, 84, 88 DrumcliV, Co. Sligo 79, 82, 83, 102 Drumease, Co. Sligo 88 Dublin 13, 113, 115, 158, 164, 192 lockout, 1913 16 museum 13 nationalism 146 Yeats’s life in 92, 163, 203 Dublin Corporation 15 Dulac, Edmund 122, 131, 224 Dun Emer Press 12 Dunguaire, Co. Sligo 93 eagle 124, 201 Earle, Ralph Earding 142 n. Early, Biddy 90 Easter Rising 1916, 5–6, 19–20, 28, 36–7, 62, 63, 200, 207 executions 57 Edain, wife of Eochaid 114–15, 205 Eden, garden of 74, 84, 91 Edward VII, King 12–13, 91 Ellmann, Richard 22, 35, 92, 153 Emain Macha 80 Emmet, Robert 16, 41 English, Richard 31 n. Enlightenment 53 Eochaid, King 114–15, 205 Ercole, Duke 157 Esserkelly, Co. Galway 95 Faeryland 57–60, 62, 79–80, 82–3, 101–3, 126, 164 femininity 130, 151, 167–8, 195, 212 ideal of 205–8

and sexuality 60 Fenians 16 Fergus mac Rioch 116, 148, 164, 167 Ferguson, Samuel 80, 140, 142, 199 First World War 6, 26–7, 57, 62 Wsh 108 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward 16, 41, 57 Flight into Egypt 151 Florence 157 Foster, R. F. 30, 31, 120 Fox, Linda 126 French, Mrs 47, 96–7 Frustrators 151 Galway, County 49, 88–9, 95; see also Coole Park Co. Galway Garsington 202 Gautier, The´ophile 134 geese 115 George, St 130, 167 Germany 57 Gibraltar 111 Gilmore, George 31 n. Glasnevin Cemetery 136 Glen/Alt 100 Glencar waterfall, Co. Sligo 44, 82, 86 Gnosticism 196 God, as Creator 138, 150, 161, 196 Goll, King 80 Gonne, Iseult 37, 67–8, 99, 121, 173, 184 bird imagery 109, 118–19 as hare 106, 120–1 Gonne, Maud 63, 136–7, 141, 174, 203 family of 37–8 letters to 111 marriage 36–7, 57 platonic friendship 153–4 Tara protest 13 voice of 170–1

General Index in Yeats’s poems 38–9, 45, 67, 71, 117–18, 143–5, 167–8, 220 bird imagery 109, 112, 115, 118, 125 as Helen 41–2, 61, 66–7, 142, 173 as lion 224 as Maeve 183–4 as old woman 69–70 Yeats’s unrequited love for 56, 92, 99, 121, 204–5 Gore-Booth, Eva 61, 63, 182 Gore-Booth family 100 Gort, Co. Galway 93, 179 grammatical mood 136–7, 154–62 Great Archer 92 Great Memory 65, 98 Greece, ancient 62, 126–7, 138, 139 Gregory, Lady 47, 79, 98, 110–11, 119, 131, 204 death of 20–2, 42 death of son 23, 95 folklore gathering 89, 93–4, 97 help with stories 98 illness 48–9 Kiltartan murder 22–3 letters to 23–4, 26, 118, 192, 200 Municipal Gallery controversy 13, 15–16, 17 in Yeats’s poems 11, 38, 89–90, 164, 182 Gregory, Margaret 94–5 Gregory, Robert 23, 93, 110, 214 elegies for 54, 94–6, 148–50, 163, 194 Gresham Hotel, Dublin 31 Guaire, king of Connacht 93 Haldane, Lord 200 Hardy, Thomas 64 n. hare 106, 108, 119–21, 173 Harris, Daniel 35, 91, 95 Hart Lake 58–9, 76–7, 79, 103

241

hawk 106, 109, 121–3, 124 Heald, Edith Shackleton 30 Heaney, Seamus 199 n. Helen of Troy 139, 159 Gonne as 41–2, 61, 66–7, 118, 138, 142, 173 Henley, W. E. 79 Henn, T. R. 184 here/there 137 deictics 39–44 illusion of space 44–52 heron 109, 111, 124, 125 High School, Dublin 158 n. Hitler, Adolf 31 Home Rule 15, 62 Homer 41, 61, 67, 156 Hone, Joseph 15 honeycomb 214 Howes, Marjorie 50 Howley, James 82 Hughes, Cora 30–1 Huysmans, J. K. 217 Hyde, Douglas 12 n., 43, 79, 110 Hyde-Lees, George, see Yeats, George Hynes, Mary 97, 98 India 11 Innes, C. L. 180 Innisfree, Lough Gill 84–7, 163 Instructors 151 Ireland, personiWed 55, 140–2 Irish Free State 50 Irish Independent 15 Irish language 79, 197 Irish Review, The 18–19 Irish Times, The 14, 15–17 Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) 16 Irish Weekly Independent, The 9–10 JeVares, A. N. 22, 49, 120 Johnson, Dr Samuel 148, 149

242

General Index

Judas 125 Julius Caesar 159 Keats, John 70, 126 Kee, Robert 22 Kelleher, John V. 78 n. Kenner, Hugh 86, 87 Kiberd, Declan 36 Kilbecanty, Co. Galway 97 Kiltartan, Co. Galway 22–3, 96 Kinvara, Co. Galway 93 Kirby, Sheelah 100 n. Knocknarea, Co. Sligo 77, 78, 79, 89, 100 Kushner, Tony 28 Kyle-na-no, Coole Park 90, 92–3 Lake Mareotis 101–2 Land Purchase Acts 94 Lane, Hugh 13, 43, 110, 201 Art Gallery controversy 14–19 pictures controversy 18, 28 Larkin, James 16 Larrissy, E. 161 Latin 158 n. Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover 179 n. Lazarus 125 Leader, The 197, 198 Leda 66, 126–7, 142–3, 215 Leitrim, County 83 linnet 109, 206–7 lion 224 Lisadell House 99 Lissadell peninsula 83, 84 Literary Revival 200 Loizeaux, Elizabeth 131 London 85, 92, 163, 199 London Mercury, The 24 Longenbach, James 34 Lough Aghree 76 Lough Dagee 77

Lough Gill 44, 77, 81–2, 83, 103 Inishfree 84–7, 163 Lough Ia 77, 78 Lough Minnaun 77 Loughrea, Co. Galway 89 Lugnagall, Co. Sligo 83 Lutyens, Sir Edwin 14 Mc Cormack, W. J. 30 MacBride, Major John 36–7, 39, 57, 144 MacDonagh, Thomas 37, 39, 207 McGarry, J. P. 77, 81–2, 82–3 mackerel 49, 50 Macmillan 19 MacNeice, Louis 32 Maddox, Brenda 30 Maeve, Queen 79, 80, 93, 116, 182–3 MahaVy, J. P. 15 Mallarme´, Stephane 194 Malory, Sir Thomas 130 Mangan, James Clarence 80, 140, 142, 199 Mann, Thomas 32 Manning, Ethel 195 Mantegna, Andrea 178 manuscript notebooks 7, 9 Markiewicz, Constance 63, 101 in Yeats’s poems 37, 39, 61, 100, 112–13, 182, 206, 207 Marvell, Andrew ‘Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ 186–7, 190, 212 masks of syntax 135 Mathers, McGregor 104 Melchiori, Giorgio 125 mice 107 Michaelangelo 159, 160 Middleton family 99 Milton, John 139, 158 n. Minnaloushe 120

General Index Monet, Claude 202 mood, use of 136–7, 154–62 possibility and purpose 154–62 Mooneen, Co. Galway 95 moor-hens 108, 225 Moore, George 12 n. Moore, Sturge 132–3 Moran, D. P. 197 Morel, Lady Ottoline 202 Munich crisis 32 Municipal Art Gallery, Dublin 113, 136–7, 202 controversy 14–19, 28, 146, 156–7, 182 Murphy, William Martin 15, 16, 18 Mussolini, Benito 31 mythology Celtic 79–80, 130, 138, 139, 164, 223 Greek 41, 139, 223 Naoise 101, 138 Nation, The 23, 64 National Gallery of Ireland 209 National Observer, The 79, 88 nationalism 15, 17, 146, 198–200 Nativity story 105, 143 Neoplatonism 214 New Republic, The 179 New York 199 Niamh 57, 83, 85, 101, 166 Noh plays 23, 192 Oates, Joyce Carol 207 O’Donnell, Peadar 30 O’Donovan, John 84 O’Grady, Standish 78, 200 Oisin 83, 101, 164, 165–7, 178, 186 old age 61, 67–9, 176, 196, 204, 208–10, 215, 221–2 O’Leary, John 16, 19, 20, 80, 139 Order of the Golden Dawn 170 O’Sullivan, Owen Rua 88, 173–4

243

overheard reverie 37, 52 Ox Mountains 76, 77 Pairc-na-lea, Coole Park 90–1, 92 Panthea 153 parenthood 150–1 Paris 142 Parkinson, Thomas 125, 216 Parnell, Charles Stewart 18, 19, 28, 92, 164, 201 Parrish, Stephen 33 parrot 131–2 Patrick, St 164, 165–7, 178, 186 peacock 106, 124 Pearse, Patrick 36, 37, 39, 171, 207 Pegasus 130 Persse family 95 Peterswell Co. Galway, 96 Philistinism 113, 146, 198, 200 philosophy 74 phoenix 118 Pilcher, Kathleen 37–8 place, sense of 44–52 place names 76–103 home places in Sligo 79–87 moving to Galway 88–93 Sligo synecdoches 98–103 views from the Tower 93–8 Plato 55–6, 74, 161, 185, 191, 215 Republic, The 72 Symposium, The 73 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge) 8, 18–19, 28, 200 Plotinus 45–6, 52, 55–6, 74, 185 Plunkett, Count George 13 politics 13–20, 28, 62–3, 156–7, 200, 218–19 Pollexfen, George 82, 99, 148 Porphyry 45, 214 Pound, Ezra 120, 166 prayer 150–4 Protestantism 17, 35 Pythagoras 45, 215

244

General Index

rabbits 106–7, 108 Raftery, Anthony 47–8, 93–4, 97, 98 Rajan, Balachandra 189 Ramazani, Jahan 64 n. Rapallo 203, 209 raven 116 Red Branch 80, 167 Red Hanrahan 88–9, 98, 164, 173–4, 180, 194 Redmond, John 57 Renaissance 42, 74, 157, 178, 223 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 202 Republican Congress 30–1 reverie 52, 66 overheard 37, 52 Ricketts, Charles 18 Rising 1798, 63 Robartes, Michael 73–4, 130, 166, 172, 208, 212 on lunar cycle 73, 220–1 women’s education 167–8 Yeats as 164, 173, 180, 184 Roman empire 161 Romanticism 53 rook 109 Roscommon, County 93 Rose of the World, see Rosicrucianism Rosicrucianism 139–42, 158, 161, 199 Rosses, Co. Sligo 44, 79, 81, 82 Roxborough, Co. Galway 95 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) 22 Ruddock, Margot 209 Russell, T. W. 13 Saddlemyer, Ann 120 St Enda’s School 36 St Otteran’s Montessori School 66 St Stephen’s Green 209 Salkeld, Cecil 131 salmon 49, 50 Samson 214 San Marco Library 157

Sappho 204 Sartre, Jean-Paul 32 Sato, sword of 187–8 Savile Club, London 163 Scripture 214 seabirds 108, 111–13, 112–13, 113–14, 206 Second Coming 104–6, 143 Second World War 7 Servant of the Queen, A (Gonne) 37–8 sexuality 60, 130, 175–6, 178–80, 205 Shakespear, Olivia 23, 24, 94, 178, 179, 203 love aVair 56, 119, 174, 176, 204 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 87, 217–18 King Lear 195, 218 Othello 155 Richard II 194 Romeo and Juliet 114 Sonnet LXXIII 205 Sonnet XVIII 42 Troilus and Cressida 42 Shawe-Taylor, John 43, 110 Sheba 119, 151–2, 170–1, 172, 173 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 52, 87, 102 Shorter, Clement 5 n. Sidney, Sir Philip 192 Sinn Fein 18 Sistine Chapel 159, 202 Skreen, Co. Sligo 76, 77 Sleuth Wood 81–2 Slieve Daeane 77 Slieve Echtge 89 Slieveleague, Co. Donegal 81 Sligo, County 10, 11, 13, 62, 96, 98 Hart/Heart Lake 76–7 home places 79–87 waterfall 216–17 in Yeats’s poems 44, 46–9, 58–60, 76–9, 88–9, 93, 98–103

General Index Slishwood Island East, Lough Gill 81–2, 86 Socrates 73 soliloquy 164–5, 186–93 Solomon 117, 119, 151–2, 170–1, 172, 173 Spanish Civil War 30, 31 sparrow 109 Sphinx 104–5, 224 Spiritus Mundi 65, 104, 143 squirrel 107 stag 216 stanza, Yeatsian 34 Stevens, Wallace 70 Stevenson, Robert Louis 86 Stuart, Francis 120, 121 suVragism 61 swallow 109, 110–11 swan 21 n., 106, 109, 115, 124–8, 126, 225 sweet, see bitter/sweet Swift, Jonathan 197 symbolism 194 Synge, J. M. 34, 35, 43, 52, 110, 131, 148, 220 death of 18 Playboy of the Western World, The 8, 18–19, 28, 200 ‘Prelude’ 220, 225 Well of the Saints, The 176–7 Ta´in Bo´ Cuailgne 79 Tara excavations 12–13, 91 tense, use of 135–54 dramatic moment 160–1 prayer and desire 150–4 present, past, future 143–50 Teresa, St 214 this/that 32–9, 51–2, 137 deictics 39–44 Thoor Ballylee, Co. Galway 26, 43, 46–7, 49, 93–8, 99, 103, 150, 187

245

butterXies 124 damaged 23 name of 94, 103 Thoreau, Henry David Walden 85, 86, 87 time spans 143–50 Times, The 31 Tı´r na nO´g 50 Trinity College Dublin (TCD) 15 Troy, fall of 41, 52, 61, 138, 142, 159 Tuatha de Danann 80, 138 Tubberscanavin, Co. Sligo 83 twilight 222–3 unicorn 106 United Irishman 12 United States of America (USA) 18–19 Unity of Being 218, 224 Upas tree 205 Usna, children of 52, 138 Vendler, Helen 5, 94, 136n, 215 Victoria, Queen 12 voices 163–93 addresses and apostrophes 181–5 dialogues and conversations 165–73 personae 173–81 talking to oneself 186–93 Von Hu¨gel, Baron Friedrich 190, 213–14 War of Independence 22–3, 26, 62 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 27 weasel 116 Wellesley, Dorothy 30 n., 31 White, Larry 30 n. Wilson, Eileen 37 Wolfe Tone, Theobald 16, 41, 57 Wood-Martin W. G. 84

246

General Index

words use of ‘but’ 222 deictics 39–44 ‘half ’ 222–6 illusion of space 44–52 relatives and demonstratives 32–9 this/that, here/there 30–2 Wordsworth, William 64 n., 180, 217, 220, 225 Prelude, The 139 worms 107, 108 Yeats, Anne 23–4, 26, 126, 150, 206–7 Yeats, Elizabeth 12 Yeats, George 7, 9, 99, 122, 147–9, 150, 172, 184 automatic writing 109, 119, 122n, 173 bird imagery 109, 118–19 as cat 106 and Collected Poems 21n, 22, 102 and Innisfree 86 mediumship 65, 116–17 pregnancies 23 and Thoor Ballylee 43, 94 Yeats, Michael 150–1, 154 Yeats, W. B. and Easter Rising 5–6, 19–20 Wght for culture 197–204 marriage 93, 99, 116, 120, 122, 184, 210–12 middle age 67–70, 130 and politics 13–20, 28, 62–3, 156–7, 200, 218–19 as public man 66 works, for individual poems, see Index of Poems Autobiographies 7–8, 100, 104, 122, 131 ‘Bounty of Sweden, The’ 164, 192 Calvary 125 Celtic Twilight, The 48, 58, 77, 79

Collected Letters 197 Collected Poems (1933) 20–2, 28–9, 32–4, 71–3, 182, 190, 219 1950 edition 5 n. Countess Cathleen, The 10–11 Countess Kathleen, and Various Legends and Lyrics, The (1892) 6 Crossways 11, 156 Death of Synge, The 7–8, 89 ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye’ 48, 97 Estrangement (1926) 7–8 Green Helmet, The 63 Hour-Glass, The 123–4, 136 Irish Fairy Tales 10 Island of Statues, The 166 John Sherman 80, 85 Land of Heart’s Desire, The 11 Last Poems (1939) 6, 7, 32, 101, 102–3 Memoirs (1972) 7, 18 Michael Robartes and the Dancer 99, 117 Mosada 166 October Blast 24, 25, 175 Oxford Book of Modern Verse 11 Per Amica Silentia Lunae 108–9, 120, 163, 213 Poems (1895) 6, 10–11, 53–4 Poems Written in Discouragement, 1912–1913 17–18 Poetical Works (1906) 174 Representative Irish Tales 198–200 Secret Rose, The 88–9, 103, 180 ‘Supernatural Songs’ 89 Responsibilities 14, 41, 92–3, 129, 146, 156–7 beggar poems 174 elite values 201–2 epigraphs 63 Playboy 18–19 Resurrection, The 104

General Index Reveries over Childhood and Youth 52, 85, 86, 217–18 Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club, The 76 Seven Poems and a Fragment 24 In the Seven Woods 6, 13, 63, 92 Stories of Red Hanrahan 98 Tower, The 22, 24–5, 174–5, 187, 203 Trembling of the Veil, The 85, 99, 200 Variorum Poems 109 Vision, A 70, 73, 123, 151,175, 188 aliases 180 conception of time 223 dreams 56 lunar cycle 196, 217 symbolism 126–7, 134, 211–12 Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems, The (1889),

247

106, 115, 129–30, 138, 165–7, 190 Wanderings of Usheen, The 10 Wild Swans at Coole, The 63, 118, 119–20 Wind Among the Reeds, The 60, 76, 82, 173–5 decadence 205–6 notes on place 77–8 revisions 180 Winding Stair, The 21, 124, 174–5, 187 Words for Music Perhaps (1932) 21–2, 174–5, 178–9 Words upon the Window-pane, The 136 youth 32, 176, 196 Zeus 126–7