94 Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry

vy a pa Autumn. &

A touch of cold in the Autumn night— I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. ks

5 I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children,

fe 1912 e 6 The Embankment (The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, in the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy,

5 Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That'I may fold it round'me and in comfeért lie.

Conversion

Lighthearted I walked into the valley wood In the time of hyacinths, ‘ Till-beauty like a scented cloth Cast over, stifled me. I was bound,

5 - Motionless and faint of breath By loveliness that is her own eunuch.

Now pass-I to the final river : . Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound, As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus.

These three poems fitst appeared in book form in an appendix to Ezra Pound’s Ripostes (1912), “The Com- plete Poetical Works of TE. Hulme.”

Conversion: wf Ik was the alleged practice of the Turks to dispose of unwanted wives or concubines by tying them in a sack and throwing them in the Bosphorus at night. :

2390 William Butler Yeats

en ee

William Butler Yeats 1865-1939

Beginning his career as a poet during the languid 1880s and 1890s, William Butler Yeats fought, as Ezra Pound said of T.S. Eliot, to modernize himself on his own. Ata time when Irish poetry seemed to be in danger of ossifying into a senti- mental, self-indulgent luxury, Yeats instead forged a verse that would serve as an exacting instrument of introspection and national inquiry. As a consequence, all modern Irish writing—most clearly poetry, but prose, drama, and literary nonfiction as well—is directly in his debe. Yeats was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandymount, but his spiritual home, the land of his raother Susan Pollexfen and her people, was the countryside of County Sligo. His father, John Butler Yeats, was an amateur philosopher, an insolvent William Butler Yeats, e, 1933, painter, and a refugee from the legal profession; his grandfa- ther and great-grandfather were both clergymen of the Church of Ireland, Through his mother’s family, Yeats traced a close connection with the coun- tryside of Ireland, and the myths and legends of the Irish people. Both parents belonged to the Anglo-lrish Protestant ascendancy, a heritage Yeats temained fiercely proud of al] his life; but the success of his poetry, in part, lay in his ability to reconcile the British literary tradition with the native materials of the Irish Catholic tradition, As he tells it in his autobiography, Yeats's childhood was not a happy one; in 1915 he wrote: “I remember little of childhood but its pain.” Elis father, though a talented painter, lacked the ability to turn his gifts to profit; he would linger over a single portrait for months and sometimes years, revising ceaselessly. When Yeats was three, his father moved his family to London in order to put himself to school as 4 painter; their existence, though intellectually and artistically rich and stimulating, was quite straitened financially. The young Yeats found Lon- don sterile and joyless; fortunately for his imagination, and his future poetry, portions of each year were spent in the Sligo countryside, where Yeats spent time gathering the local folklore and taking long, wide-ranging walks and pony rides. The family remained in London until 1875, and had four more children ( though one brother died in childhood), All his surviving sib- lings were to remain important to Yeats in his artistic life: his brother Jack B. Yeats became an important Irish painter, and his sisters Lily and Lolly together founded the Dun Emer Press, later called the Cuala Press, which published limited-edition volumes of some of Yeats’s poetry. Tn 1880 the family returned permanently to Ireland, settling first in Howth, in Dublin Bay; the city of Dublin, with its largely unsung history and tradition, fueled Yeats’s imagina- tion in a way that London never had. When the time for college came, Yeats was judged un- likely to pass Trinity College’s entrance exams, and he was sent instead to the Metropolitan School of Art, apparently in preparation to follow in his father’s footsteps. His true gift, it soon appeared, was not for drawing and painting but for poetry. He steeped himself in the Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Keats, as well as the English poet of Itish residence Edmund Spenser. His first poems were published in the Dublin University Review in March 1885, Yeats’s early work ig self-evidently apprentice work; it draws heavily on the late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite ambience so important in the painting of his father and his father’s colleagues, He also began to take an active interest in the various mystical movements thar were then finding « foothold in Dublin and London, and with friends formed a Hermetic Society in Dublin as an anti dote to the humanist rationalism to which his father Was So passionately attached. At the same

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Willlam Butler Yeats 2391

time—almost as a self-administered antidote to the teachings of mystics like the Brahmin teacher Mohini Chatterji—Yeats began to attend the meetings of several Dublin political and debating so-

cieties, and became increasingly interested in the nationalist artistic revival that would become

known as the Irish Renaissance or Celtic Revival. Unlike most of his debating society comrades, Yeats imagined this political and cultural renaissance as resulting from a marriage of Blakean oppo- sites: “I had noticed that Lrish Catholics among whom had been born so many political martyrs had not the good taste, the household courtesy and decency of the Protestant Ireland I had known, yet

Protestant Ireland seemed to think of nothing but getting on in the world. I thought we might

bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory,

and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” The Yeats family moved back to London in 1887; finances were difficult as ever, and Yeats

contributed to the family's upkeep by editing two anthologies, Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland

(1888) and Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). His own first collection of poems,

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, was published in the following year; the poems are res-

olutely romantic, Yeats himself describing his manner at the time as “in all things Pre-

Raphaelite.” The poems were well received, but the praise of one reader in particular caught

Yeats’s attention. The statuesque beauty Maud Gonne appeared at Yeats’s door with an introduc- tion from the Irish revolutionary John O’Leary, and declared that the title poem had brought her

to tears. It was a fateful meeting; throughout five decades Yeats continued to write to Gonne, for

Gonne-——the critic M. L. Rosenthal has suggested that “virtually every poem celebrating a

woman’s beauty or addressing a beloved woman has to do with her.” Rosenthal might have

added, every poem decrying the sacrifice of life to politics, including No Second Troy, Easter

1916, A Prayer for My Daughter, and others, all of which lament Gonne’s increasing political fa-

naticism. This fanaticism, which Gonne considered simply patriotism, made impossible the spir-

itual and emotional consummation that Yeats so fervently desired. He proposed marriage, but she declined, marrying instead an Irish soldier whe would later be executed for his role in the

Easter Rising of 1916. Yeats is, among his other distinctions, a great poet of unrequited love.

The 1890s in London were heady times for a young poet. Yeats becarne even more active in his studies of the occule, studying with the charismatic Theosophist Madame Blavatsky and attending meetings of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a Christian cabalist society. The practi- cal upshot of these activities for his later poetry was a confirmed belief in a storehouse of all

human experience and knowledge, which he called variously the Spiritus Mundi and Anima Mundi, invoked in later poems like The Second Coming (1920). In 1891 Yeats, together with

Ernest Rhys, founded the Rhymers’ Club, which brought him into almost nightly contact with such important literary figures as Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, and Oscar

Wilde; during this same period, he established the Irish Literary Society in London, and the

National Literary Society in Dublin. Clearly, something of a program for modern Irish poetry was beginning to emerge, even if Yeats himself wasn’t yet quite ready to write it. Yeats also

spent the years from 1887 to 1891 studying the writings of that most mystic of English poets,

William Blake; working with his father’s friend Edwin Ellis, he produced an edition of and ex-

tended commentary on Blake’s prophetic writings. Summing up the lesson of Blake’s writings,

Yeats wrote: “I had learned from Blake to hate all abstractions.” Romantic abstraction was easier to abjure in principle than in practice; Yeats's poetry of the

1890s still hankers after what one of his dramatis personae would later call “the loveliness that has long faded from the world.” As one critic has written, “Early Yeats was the best poetry in English in late Victorian times; but they were bad times.” Yeats began the process of throwing off the false manners of his Pre-Raphaelite upbringing with his play The Countess Cathleen, first performed by the Abbey Theatre, funded by subscriptions collected by his good friend Lady Augusta Gregory.

Yeats’s play, like Synge’s Playboy of the Western World years later on that same stage, offended Irish

sensibilities; in it, Cathleen sells her sou! in order to protect Irish peasants from starvation. Yeats’s

volume The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) closes out the 1890s quite conveniently; it is ethereal,

beautiful, and mannered. With this volume, Yeats’s early phase comes to a close.

2392 William Butler Yeats

The early years of the twentieth century found Yeats concentrating his energies on the writ.

ing of poetic dramas, including, The Pot of Broth (1902) and On Baile’s Strand (1904), for his fledg-

ling Irish National Theatre. In 1903, the small Dun Emer Press published his volume of poems In the Seven Woods. These poems, including Adam’s Curse, show Yeats working in a more spare id-

iom, the cadences and rhythms closer to those of actual speech—a consequence, some have ar

gued, of his years writing for the stage. New poems published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) display Yeats as an increasingly mature and confident poet; his treatment of Maud Gonne

in No Second Troy, for instance, shows a tragic acceptance of the fact that he will never have her, nor master her indomitable spirit. In A Coat, the poem that closes the 1914 collection Responsibil-

ities, Yeats writes of the embroidered cloak he had fashioned for himself in his early poems, whose

vanity is now brought home to him by the gaudiness of his imitators: He resolves, in the volume’s closing lines, to set his cloak aside, “For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.” This sense

was strengthened by his close work, during the winter of 19121913, with Ezra Pound, in a cottage

in. rural Sussex. Both studied the stripped-down Japanese Noh drama and the Orientalist Ernest Fennollosa’s work on the Chinese ideogram, and both men no doubt reinforced one another’s in- creasing desire for a poetry that would be, in Pound's phrase, “closer to the bone.”

The Easter Rising of 1916 took Yeats by surprise; he was in England at the time and com- plained of not having been informed in advance. A number of the rebel leaders were personal friends; he writes their names into Irish literature in Easter 1916, an excruciatingly honest, and

ambivalent, exploration of the nature of heroism and nationalism. Yeats’s mixed feelings about the revolution derived in part from a concern that some of his early writings, like the national- ist Cathleen ni Houlihan, might have contributed to the slaughter that followed in the wake of

Easter 1916; as he wrote many years later, he couldn’t help but wonder, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”

The intricacies of Yeats’s emotional and romantic life would require an essay of their own. His first marriage proposal to Maud Gonne in 1891, politely refused, set a pattern that was to re- main in place for many years; though a number of poems try to reason through the affair, Yeats re-

mained tragically attracted to this woman who did not return his affection, and multiple proposals

were turned down as routinely as the first. He would have done as well, he was to write years later,

to profess his love “to a statue in a museum.” In the surmmer of 1917 things reached such a pass that Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne’s adopted daughter Iseult; here, again, he was refused. Then,

hastily, in October 1917 he married a longtime friend Georgiana (“George”) Hyde-Lees. For all

the tragicomedy leading up to the marriage, Yeats could not have chosen better; George was intel-

ligent and sympathetic, and she brought the additional gift of an interest in mysticism and a facil- ity in automatic writing that Yeats was soon to take full advantage of. Since early childhood, Yeats

had heard voices speaking to him, and when he was twenty-one a voice commanded him “Ham-

mer your thoughts into unity”; this charge had weighed on his mind for years, and his various ex-

periments in mysticism and esoteric religions were intended to discover the system wherein his

thoughts might be made to cohere.

With George, Yeats finally created that systern on his own; its fullest exposition is found in A Vision (1928), though elements of it turn up in his poems beginning as early as No Second Troy. The

system is complicated enough to fill out over 300 pages in the revised (1937) edition; at the heart of

the system, though, is a simple diagram of two interpenetrating cones, oriented horizontally, such

that the tip of each cone establishes the center of the base of the opposite cone. These two cones de- scribe the paths of two turning gyres, or spirals, representing two alternating antithetical ages which make up human history. Yeats saw history as composed of cycles of approximately 2,000 years; his apocalyptic poem The Second Coming, for instance, describes the anxiety caused by the recognition

that the 2,000 years of Christian (in Yeats’s terms, “primary”) values were about to be succeeded by

an antithetical age—the “rough beast” of a time characterized by values and beliefs in every way hos-

tile to those of the Christian era. For Yeats, however, as for William Blake, this vacillation and ten-

sion between contraries was not to be regretted; Blake taught that “without Contraries is no progres- sion,” and Yeats, that “all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being.”

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree 2393

Yeats’s greatest phase begins with the poems of Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).

Llis mytho-historical system: informs a number of the poems written in the 1920s and after;

it explains, for instance, why Yeats saw the brutal rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a

swan as a precursor of the traditional Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary “visited” by

God the Father in the form of a dove. A logical corollary of Yeats’s belief in historical re-

currence was the philosophy, articulated best in his late poem Lapis Lazuli, of tragic joy:

“All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay.” Ina letter

inspired by the gift of lapis lazuli that the poem celebrates, Yeats wrote to a friend: “To me

the supreme aim is an act of faith or reason to make one rejoice in the midst of tragedy.”

The influence of the writing of Nietzsche, whom Yeats had been reading, is apparent in

these formulations.

While continuing to push at the boundaries of modern literature and modern poetry, Yeats

also enjoyed the role of statesman. In the fall of 1922, Yeats was made a senator of the new Irish

Free State; in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first Irish writer ever to re-

ceive the award. The 1930s also saw Yeats flirt briefly with fascism, as did other writers like

Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Yeats’s belief in the importance of an aristocracy, and his disap-

pointment over the excesses of revolutionary zeal demonstrated in the Irish civil war, for a time

during the 1930s made the fascist program of the Irish Blueshirt movement look attractive, He

composed Three Songs to the Same Tune as rallying songs for the Blueshirts, but the poems were

too recherché for any such use. He soon became disillusioned with the party.

Yeats continued to write major poetry almost until his death; his growing ill health seems

only to have made his poetry stronger and more defiant, as evidenced in such sinuous and

clearsighted poems as Lapis Lazuli and the bawdy Crazy Jane poems. In the work published as

Last Poems (1939), Yeats most satisfactorily put into practice what he had much earlier discov-

ered in theory: that he must, as he wrote in The Circus Animals’ Desertion, return for his poetry

to “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” After a long period of heart trouble, Yeats died on

28 January 1939; he was buried in Roquebrune, France, where he and George had been spend-

ing the winter. In 1948 he was reinterred, as he had wished, in Drumcliff churchyard near

Sligo, where his grandfather and great-grandfather had served as rectors. Again according to

his wishes, his epitaph is that which he wrote for himself in Under Ben Bulben:

Cast a cold eye On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

For additional resources on Yeats, go to The Longman Anthology of British Literature Web

site at www.ablongman.com/damroschbritlit3e.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree!

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

Anda small cabin build there, of clay and wattles® made: woven twigs

Nine bean-trows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s° wings. song bird

1. A small island in Lough Gill outside the town of Sligo, near the border with Northern Ireland.

William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, ot on the pavements grey, [hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Who Goes with Fergus?!

Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen® cars, brass And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

No Second Troy!

Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

The fascination of what’s difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There’s something ails our cole! That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt

1. The poem is a lyric from the second scene of Yeats’s I. Yeats here compares Maud Gonne to Helen of Troy; E yl

F y play The Countess Cathleen. Fergus was an ancient Irish the Trojan War began from two kings’ rivalry over Helen. king who gave up his throne to feast, fight, and hunt. L. Pegasus, winged horse of Greek mythology.

September 1913 2395

As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day’s war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, rnanagement of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again Pll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

September 1913}

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.

Yet they were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O'Leary in the grave. Was it for this the wild geese} spread The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all the blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald? died, And Robert Emmet’ and Wolfe Tone,¢

All chat delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You'd cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’: 30 They weighed so lightly what they gave.

Holen of Troy;

ey over Helen.

1. Yeats wrote the poem on 7 September 913, and it was published the following day in the lish Times. 2. John O'Leary (1830-1907) was involved first in the

nationalist Young Ireland movement, and later went on

to cofound its successor, the Fenian movement. After

serving nine years of penal servitude for his republican activities, he was exiled in Paris for 15 years, before being

allowed to return to Dublin in 1885. O'Leary was a friend of Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats.

3, The “wild geese” were those Irishmen who fled Ireland in the wake of the Penal Laws of 1691; many of them

fought as soldiers in the French, Spanish, and Austrian

armies. About 120,000 “wild geese” are thought to have left Ireland between 1691 and 1730. 4, Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763-1798) was a leader of

the nationalist United Irishmen. and died of wounds he received while being taken into custody by authorities. 5. Robert Emmet (1778-1803) led an unsuccessful revolt

against the British government in {803 and was hanged.

6. Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) led a friendly

French force to Ireland to help oust the British in the ill- fated “year of the French” uprising in 1798, He was ar- rested and committed suicide while in prison awaiting ex- ecution.

2396 William Butler Yeats

But let them be, they’re dead and gone, They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

The Wild Swans at Coole!

The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October ewilight the water Mirrors a still sky;

5 Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count;

I saw, before | had well finished, 10 All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings.

[have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. . 5

iS All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover, 20 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.

15 But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool 20 Delight men’s eyes when | awake some day

30 To find they have flown away? 1916 (917

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death!

I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love;

L. Coole Park was the name of the estate of Yeats's patron Robert Gregory (1881-1918), only child of his dear Lady Gregory in Galway. friend Lady Augusta Gregory, who was killed in action in 1, The particular airman Yeats had in mind was Major Italy during World War 1.