In 1896 Yeats met Lady Augusta Gregory, the widow
of a former Governor-General of Ceylon (Shri Lanka) who had an
Irish country estate at Coole Park near Galway. There, after his
death - she married him at 28 when he was 63 - she entered Irish
writers and laid took the first steps towards creation of the
Abbey Theatre. Yeats visited Coole Park annually and wrote many
of his finest poems there. As the century drew to a close, however,
the Land-League agitation against landlords and rents intensified
and Yeats found himself defending the aristocratic world in which
he had now found a niche.
His poem Upon a House Shaken by the Land
Agitation is characteristic of the eugenic theory he invariably
advanced in this context - an argument which rather improbably
alleges that the owners of great houses are essentially
better-qualified to lead a nation culturally than people from
mean roof-trees (i.e., cottages and cabins). The poem
argues that hereditary land-owners are a kind of eagle,
a superior order of human being that comes of the best knit
to the best (i.e., selective breeding) and therefore equipt
to perpetuate the highest form of culture. It its own time, or
any time, it is a dangerous form of political nonsense.
A curious feature of the poems rhetoric
is its elbow-nudging use of the demotic term luck
in place of the more elevated word fortune, as if
the poet were attempting to persuade the peasants in their
own language that their animosity to the landlords is misguided.
The same argument is made, for instance, in Ancestral
Houses (first section of Meditations in Time of Civil
War in The Tower Collection) where he attempts to
balance the violence of the Norman and Cromwellian conquerors
of Ireland with the excellence of the cultural that they supposedly
sustained through their patronage as Anglo-Irish grandees:
- What if, in other words, history writes down
the beauty of the Palladian mansions of Ireland and their expensive
artistic contents as mere expressions of the rapacious character
of their first occupants? The poet who writes in this vein is
identifying closely with a colonial élite which, at the
time of writing, is rapidly passing into extinction; and to
this extent, W. B. Yeats founds his own imaginative lexicon on the
idea of a doomed nobility which others - notably the mass of
Irish nationalists - were more likely to regard as a tyrannical
class whose death-knell had been justly sound.
Once the Free State had been established and
Yeats had been appointed Senator, he had an opportunity at the
passing of the anti-Divorce Act of 1927 to speak out sonorously
for the Anglo-Irish in a speech objecting to what he saw as a
sectarian Catholic measure directly aimed against the Protestants
of Ireland: [O]n behalf of that small Protestant band which
had so often proved itself the chivalry of Ireland [...] I think
it tragic that within three years of this country gaining independence
we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation
considers to be grossly oppressive. He then went on: I
am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority.
We against whom you have done this thing
are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of
Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people
of Grattan, we are the people of Swift, the people of
Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature
of this country. We have created the best of its political
intelligence. Yet I do not altogether regret what has
happened. I shall be able to find out, if not I, my children
will be able to find out whether we have lost our stamina
or not. You have defined our position and given us a popular
following. If we have not lost our stamina then your victory
will be brief, and your defeat final, and when it comes
this nation may be transformed. (Speech of 11 June, 1925,
in Donald Pearce, ed., Senates Speeches of W. B. Yeats,
1960, p.99.)
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In 1913 Yeatss pseudo-aristocratic antipathy
to the rising Catholic middle class in Ireland - which controlled
the Dublin Council that rejected his plan for a gallery to house
Sir Hugh Lanes donated Impressionist paintings - took the
form of a brilliant poetic diatribe which invoked the memory of
the - mainly Protestant - Irish patriots of 1798 in order to castigate
the mean-minded spirit of those for whom they might be supposed
to have died. (Yeats had met John OLeary, the patriot named in the refrain,
in the final decades of was that vernerable, old Fenians life.)
There is a good deal of sectarian finger-pointing
in the allusion to the thrifty habits of the shop-keepers of Ireland
(whom Yeats liked to call hucksters) while amassing
expectations of eternal reward by an analogous religious process:
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:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave. |
There is also, however, a resonant celebration
of the special temperament of the self-sacrificing patriots, so
different from the men on the Dublin Corporation that the poem
so bitterly castigates. (Actually, they were not as philistine
as he makes them seem.) In citing the names of Lord Edward Fitzgerald,
Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, Yeats gives a name to their common
passion: All that delirium of the brave. It is a name
very like the idea of excited reverie that he elsewhere
identifies as the characteristic humour of the poetic mind in
the act of artistic creation.
But if the aristocratic posture, fuelled by an
innate fear and hatred of the tradition of Catholic democracy
in Ireland which originates with OConnell, drew powerful
sustenance from Yeatss association with Lady Gregory - herself
by no means so foolish in her view of modern history - then it
also fostered some of his greatest lyric poetry in pieces such
as The Wild Swans at Coole, a meditation on human
passion and age which takes the legend of The Children of
Lír as its point of imaginative departure. Hence
the swans which he counts on the still waters of the lake are
more than ornithological and even, perhaps, more than merely human:
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
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It is therefore, aside from its aristocratic setting, a poem to
the human soul. Another swan poem, and one which takes
up the theme of historical cycles and the advent of new spiritual
dimensions by means of a kind of divine intervention, is Yeatss
meditation on the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan.
Here, disguised as a swan, Zeus rapes and impregnates Leda with
the result that Helen is born and the destruction of the city
of Troy rendered inevitable as a consequence of her beauty, which
will cause Paris to abduct her from her royal Greek husband. Yeats
characteristically poses a series of unanswered questions regarding
Ledas awareness (or the lack of it) of the meaning of that
momentous - and brutal - moment:
[...]
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
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The Second Coming - a poem of 1920 much instilled
with feelings of danger and insecurity at the time of the Civil
War in Ireland - has become the anthem, almost, of conservative
paranoia about social anarchy of all kinds:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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The poet follows this dramatic statement of his
misgivings about the tendency of history at the time with a visionary
moment in which he purports, like a prophet, to see the form of
the new historical dispensation:
[...]
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?
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Not surprising, both Yeats and many readers
have interpreted this visionary as a forecast of European
fascism - especially in its suggestion that the Christian era
of Western Civilisation is about to be superceded by a more ruthless
but not less glorious world-order. (Others - such as Brenda Maddox
- have seen in the poem a trace of Yeatss anxiety about
the pregnancy of his young wife Georgie and the imminent arrival
of an little ego in the household even more superdominant than
the poets!)
Leda and the Swan is another poem
in which the idea of a new historical era, launched by the brutal
intervention of a supernatural being in human time is starkly
epitomised by the rape of Helen of Troys mother by Zeus
in the guise of a swan. What is envisaged here is the conception
of Helen of Troy which would result, through her sheer beauty
(to be compared, of course, with Maud Gonnes) in the destruction
of the city around which Homer told his epic tale in The Iliad.
The order that Yeats actually aspired to was
to be not embodied in any political ideal, but rather in a state
of intellectual and emotional plenitude which he identified with
the capacity of the human imagination to engender what he calls
the artifice of eternity in Sailing to Byzantium,
a poem that posits a journey away from Ireland - or, at
least, some realm of youthful fecundity which impels the poet
to feel his own mortality all the more acutely - towards an ideal
and timeless realm, here symbolised by the holy shrines of Byzantium
(now Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the Eastern capital of
the Christianised Roman Empire).
In this poem, the poets personal anxiety
about age and death of passion finds brilliant embodiment in a
fantasy of travel to a realm where monuments of undying
intellect enjoy a permanence immune from the usual effects
of time - for which encroaching personal decrepitude (a
tattered coat upon a stick), or else the ruins described
by Shelley in Oxymandias, a chiliastic poem about
the ruined monument of an ancient king (around the colossal
wreck nothing beside remains. Boundless and bare, the lone and
level sands stretch far away).
Among School Children, written about
the occasion when Yeats, as an Irish senator, made a visit to
a Dominican convent school in Waterford, takes the form of an
intense reflection on the process of age and its possible spiritual
significance. In the foreground are the children who remind the
poet of Maud Gonne in her childhood and also of her present form,
an old woman who - contemporaries remember - was peculiarly ravaged
by the facial marks of old age. (Yeats compares her in one place
to a marble sculpture of an aged merchant by a Quattrocento Italian
artist to be seen in the Irish National Gallery.)
He too had pretty feathers once,
and now he wonders what any mother would think to find her child
grown up into a sixty-year old smiling public man
such as the children now see walking in their classroom. The precise
manner in which he poses the question is intriguing:
What youthful mother, a shape upon her
lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
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?
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Carefully read, that conveys the idea that the
child, not the mother, has been betrayed into life by the
lure of sexual pleasure which led its parents to conceive it.
The child, likewise, struggles to escape under the impulsion of
recollections which can only be those of another world
in which its soul existed before its mortal life began. Yeatss
poem, therefore, engages with Platonic ideas of spiritual existence
in an ideal world of which the physical world is but a shadow.
Yet he certainly does not take this ancient comfort
very seriously. What he seeks to find at the end of the poem is
a more complex and dynamic resolution to his present intimations
of immortality (the famous title of a poem by William Wordsworth).
He therefore conjures up the idea that spirit and matter are so
utterly intertwined that neither can be separated from the other
and hence the dance of life and death is of such a
kind that none can tell the dancer from the dance.
Much more practical questions - though not without
reference to mortality and its opposite and their respective modes
of being - were triggered in Yeatss mind by the Easter Rebellion,
which occurred in Dublin while he was in England having his portrait
made and dining with his literary friends. His poem Easter
1916 weighs his previous dismissal of the nationalist
revolutionaries with their present condition, having been transformed
by patriotic sacrifice in such a way that - according to the intensely
memorable oxymoron of the refrain - a terrible beauty is
born.
Predictably, Maud Gonne hated the poem; yet it
embodies powerfully too different currents of Yeatss thoughts
about the event. Firstly, the belief that the rebellion was practically
uncalled for since it seemed certain that Home Rule would be granted
at the end of the war with Germany, in keeping with the Parliamentary
Act of 1914. Secondly, the recognition that a heroic gesture of
this scale elevated its subjects beyond all such practical considerations.
At the still centre the tension between empirical
and imaginative considerations which characterises the argument
of the poem - citizen and bardic poet vying for the upper hand
- stands a predication about the effect of political conviction
(or even fanaticism) on the individuals who are maddened
by them - a condition explicitly identified with the delirium of the brave in September 1913. In the second section
Easter 1916, Yeats writes:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
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It is an argument that he also conducted with
women who take to ideas and who give all to an opinion as
if it were some terrible stone doll - having Maud Gonne
and Countess Markievicz chiefly in mind. By contrast, he desires to see young women following his preferred aristocratic pattern of high laughter, loveliness, and ease - Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation, and to
content themselves with dispensing round / Their magnanimities
of sound a little like biscuits at a tea-party, as he says in A Prayer for My Daughter where he yearns to see her married to the proprietor of a great house where alls accustomed, ceremonious,
there to remain thoughout her lifetime in one dear perpetual
place.
This is not a conception with which we can easily
agree today but it nevertheless encapsulates one pole in the dialectic
of Yeatss mind which allowed him to contemplate a traditional,
ordered society, founded on ancient colonial violence and a world
of cataclysmic upheavals which
yet threw up the flowers of mortal beauty and immortal art as
a sort of evolutionary consequence. All art, by collolary, is founded ultimately on violence and he was not slow to instance the contribution of the great mercenary soldiers of Italy to the European Renaissance.
Much of Yeatss poetry in the middle period is effectively informed by a spirit of elegy for the Anglo-Irish class which he sees as being swept away by the filthy modern tide of democracy in Ireland. Whether that process was tragic or comic is the final question that faced him as a a philosophical poet. By comic I do not mean funny but rather that transcendence of the tragic mood which involves, in Yeats's terminology, an access of tragic joy or gaiety that permits him to say: Hamlet and Lear were gay (Lapis Lazuli). In the next
lecture, which takes Philosophy and Magic
as its topic, I will consider this issue together with the question of his ultimate beliefs.