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Content STATES OF SIEGE, STATES OF MIND:
YEATS AND THE RHETORIC OF REBELLION
by
Frank J. Gaik
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1988
UMI Number: DP23131
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This dissertation, -written by
Xf#* h 0-6 . i j L
under the direction of h.Ls . Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H ILO S O P H Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
_ August 2, 1988
D a te..............
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
y.
f . A Chairperson
. 2 C 1 . Q s U .
Ph.D.
E
*88
QI37
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .......................................... 1
Chapter
I. "EASTER 1916": THE RESURRECTION OF RHETORIC
AND THE RHETORIC OF RESURRECTION............. 20
II. PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE:
ANIMA HOMINIS AND THE GHOSTS OF RHETORIC . . 72
III. PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE:
ANIMA MUNDI AND THE RHETORIC OF GHOSTS . . . 107
IV. THE RHETORIC OF TITLES:
HISTORY, RHETORIC AND IDEOLOGY
IN "NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN" ........ 150
V. "MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR":
THE DENIAL OF RHETORIC
AND THE RHETORIC OF DENIAL...................200
VI. "THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT":
THE RHETORIC OF NOBEL OBLIGE.............. 232
VII. THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT, STAGE RIGHT:
OEDIPUS AND THE CIRCUS ANIMALS............ 274
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 319
1
INTRODUCTION
The poet's enemies are those industries that
make a good citizen. A poet is a good citizen
turned inside out.
W. B. Yeats Journal (1909)
When the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Irish Free
State Senator W. B. Yeats on November 23, 1923, it capped
his reputation as national poet and international man of
letters. Three responses to this event represent the
attitudes of readers towards Yeats's dual career as poet
and politician. The first, from A. C. Benson, denies the
public aspect of that career altogether:
I am sure you differ from all writers of
the time in having the best sort of
detachment -- the detachment from the
urgent present which ends by bringing an
artist, if he is a great artist, into line
with the great spirits of the past and
future.1
jThis image of Yeats has endured: the detached and
meditative poet in the tower who only occasionally desired
his anti-self, the man of action, and who claimed such
Jdesire was antithetical to poetry ("All things can tempt
1 Cited in Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865-1939
(London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 56.
me from this craft of verse"). Such is also the self- j
presentation (or ethos) that Yeats explored in Per Arnica i
j
Silentia Lunae (1918), justified and delineated in A j
' Vision (1926) (the man of Phase 17 "hates crowds, parties,
and propaganda"), and perfected in the meditation poems,
• "Thoughts on the Present State of the World" (1921) and
"Meditations in Time of Civil War," which both appeared in 1
I !
the London Mercury, probably the source of Benson's
characterization.2
i
Another view finds Yeats less detached and aesthetic
but more active and political; it is typified by Lord \
I
Gleneavy's remark after Oliver St. John Gogarty commended j
I
I
Yeats in the Irish Senate on the occasion of his Nobel j
1
Award: 1
We take the greater pride in it on account ;
of the courage and patriotism which induced
him twelve months ago to cast in his lot j
with his own people here at home, under i
conditions which were then very critical j
and called for the exercise of great moral
courage. (SS 155) j
2 It is also an image that has been substantially
challenged by scholars like Conor Cruise O'Brien, Daniel
Torchiana, and Elizabeth Cullingford. Yet even critics
like these who are aware of the "masked" quality of
Yeats's protestations about public life, continue to
discuss the discrepancies between Yeats's stated desire
for contemplation and his actual performance as an
internal tension. This tension places the poet firmly in
the group of writers who were also public officials, such
as Montaigne, Bacon, Boethius, Marcus Aurelias, and
Cicero, but it perhaps causes us to lose Yeats's specific
contributions to this conflict, as well as the historical
tensions that created it.
"3 ' I
i !
Yeats is praised here as a political animal, consciously |
and conscientiously shaping the direction of the new Irish i
State, engaged in what he himself called "the slow
exciting work of creating institutions” (SS 3).
Finally, a third view of Yeats emerges, bringing
together the detached artist and the active politician,
I
much to Yeats's disfavor. It appears in an unsigned j
review in the London Observer, which finds Yeats's
selection as Nobel winner to be "very surprising in the
circumstances," questions the poet's universality ("His j
writings are not the sort which one would have expected to !
I
'get across' to a foreign committee,") and then |
i
criticizes him, with a scathing reference to Yeats's
historical situation:
l
More recently, almost any one in Dublin has
seen the poet upstairs brooding over ,
astrological signs while downstairs a
gentleman with a machine gun has guarded
the hall of the Free State senator against
his political opponents (November 18,
1923).
i
Who was Yeats when he entered the Senate and won the
Nobel Prize? A classical artist detached from the present
to commune with the best that has been thought and said?
A courageous patriot and diligent politician? A narrow
mystic hiding from his enemies? If all three, how did
Yeats balance these different states of being on different
occasions? What was the rhetorical effect of this act of
balancing and combination? What does the accumulation of
these various rhetorical acts suggest about Yeats's
politics? What do these different versions of Yeats have
to do with the way that critics have read his poetry? And
how did he negotiate the public's different views of him?
iThese are some of the questions to be explored in these
pages.
i
Yeats's own answers mask the questions altogether.
In "A General Introduction to My Work" (1932), cited as
his most complete presentation of his beliefs, he avows,
I hated and still hate with an ever growing
hatred the literature of the point of view.
I wanted, if my ignorance permitted, to get
back to Homer, to those that fed at his
table. I wanted to cry as all men cried,
to laugh as all men laughed, and the Young
Ireland poets when not writing mere
politics had the same want, but they did
not know that the common and its befitting
language is the research of a lifetime and
when found may lack popular recognition.
(Essays 511).
Yeats's project to define his personality for posterity
cannot be taken uncritically. It tells us little about
the critical years of Yeats's political and aesthetic
development, when his negotiation between literature and
politics took place, the years from the Easter Rising
(1916) to his departure from the Senate (1928). During
this period, which Bernard Krimm says witnessed "the
emergence of the new Irish state," Yeats could not easily
distinguish the political force of his poetry from that of
Young Ireland, even if he sought contrary political ends.
How could Yeats try to "get back to Homer" while other
Irish poets tried to return to the heroic Yeats of
Cathleen Ni Houlihan? How could Yeats laugh and cry as
did "all men" following the Easter Rising, when men and
women laughed and cried at very different events and were
ioften arrested for doing so? How could he claim to "lack
popular recognition" when the Easter martyrs were
themselves inspired by Yeats's call for a return to
romantic Ireland or when, during his early Senate years,
he became the only modern poet whose critical approbation
was matched by political and increasingly partisan
scrutiny and attacks? Finally, - how could he continue to
portray himself as a detached and contemplative poet when
he was shadowed by a gunman to protect him from political
enemies?
"Ego Dominus Tuus," a poem written just before the
Easter Rising, asserts that "Those who love the world
serve it in action / Grow rich, popular and full of
influence, / And should they paint or write, still it is
action" (Myth 322-23). Yet what happened to such an ideal
when Yeats's own beliefs were implicated in the political
world after the Easter Rising or when, as a Senator, his
desire for action was matched by opportunity? If the
literary work of those who love the world must become
action, what is the goal of such action? In sum, What
happened to Yeats's belief in the clear and distinct j
!
separation of poetry and politics when that distinction
became increasingly blurred after the Easter Rising; how
did Yeats transform his beliefs, how did he articulate
them during highly charged political events, and what were
the rhetorical and ideological consequences of these
articulations?
i
To pursue these questions, this dissertation traces
the interplay of rhetoric and ideology in selected major j
works of poetry and prose written in response to political I
events following the Easter Rising. I focus in particular |
t
I
on Yeats's most explicit war poetry, ("Easter 1916," j
"Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," and "Meditations in Time
of Civil War"), though I also attend to prose works, j
speeches, and dramatic projects that have not been !
I
considered as political texts (Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, j
"The Irish Dramatic Movement," and the productions of the j
Oedipus plays). Two issues stand out: the first is how j
Yeats's situation as literary patriot and public official !
complicated and contradicted his elegant ideological
distinctions between rhetoric and poetry, action and
thought, and politics and art (distinctions that have been
part of the western literary ideology for centuries but
which Yeats re-figured in his own way). The second
7
problem is how this situation influenced, or perhaps
determined, his stylistic choices.
When Gogarty recommended Yeats to the Senate he
averred that without Yeats there would not be an Irish
Free State. Yeats took this line more seriously than his
readers have. Yeats's rhetorical position was double-
edged. As the writer of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, he had the
authority to promote his vision of Ireland's political and
cultural future. Opportunity matched authority after he
was appointed to the Senate and won the Nobel. At the
same time, however, his growing intolerance of rebellion
and his terror of revolution--along with his deliberate
alliance with the Anglo-Irish ascendancy— put him at odds
with both the Sinn Fein patriots who admired his early
work and, eventually, to the Catholic majority.
Besides putting himself and his family in political
danger during the Civil War, Yeats's move to reactionary
politics also opened his literary work and public
pronouncements to increasingly political readings by the
Irish. In response Yeats adopted various strategies
(rhetorical stances, aesthetic allusions, shrewd editing
and publishing practices) to mask his political
commitments to Anglo-Irish and (increasingly) English
values, to reaffirm his public stance as essentially
contemplative, and to secure for his poetry a primarily
aesthetic interpretation. My study identifies these j
strategies and tries to explain their rhetorical effects.
I
The years following the Easter Rising were a time of I
rigorous ideological testing. Critics have tended to j
>
i
dismiss such readings of Yeats's work as the very kind of j
narrow nationalism that Yeats's own critical work seemed I
I
to rise above. The value of the heavy ideological j
i
criticism that Yeats faced is not the topic here. What is j
most important is the way this climate forced changes in !
his own writing and the way that Yeats, often .
unconsciously, played out these ideological struggles in I
his own writing. By studying the interplay of Yeats's j
ideology (those private statements of beliefs not intended J
for publication) and his rhetoric (the public statements
J
i
of those beliefs on particular occasions), I hope to
elucidate Yeats's rhetorical project during these years.
What I hope to show is that Yeats's anti-nationalist j
i
stance appeared much earlier in his career than his J
[
readers have believed, and that Yeats's proto-fascism, |
which most critics have discussed only in the later poems, j
was incipient not only in his politics but in his j
aesthetic project for an arhetorical art, through which !
I
the poet could articulate knowledge and power without j
I
concern for an audience or for contrary voices.
9
II
My first chapter argues that the Easter Rising is the
critical turning point not only in the history of modern
Ireland but in terms of Yeats's literary ideology. I read
"Easter 1916" as a deliberate attempt on the poet's part
to repudiate what has been called the "Imagination of an
Insurrection" and to offer an antidote to the outbursts it
inspired. Analysis of the poem outlines the logical unity
of Yeats's anti-rhetorical rhetoric. In "Easter 1916"
Yeats sets the thematic terms in which he will discuss the
Easter martyrs, as well as their heroic forebears and
legacy, for the rest of his life. In chapter 2 I read Per
Arnica Silentia Lunae in the context of the turbulent years
following the Easter Rising, when the Sinn Fein party was
gaining ideological force and when literary and political
images of Ireland's history were becoming for Yeats
uncomfortably mixed. The Anima Hominis section suggests
that Per Arnica is not so much a forerunner to A Vision,
but rather a highly mystified revision of the political
ideology of "Easter 1916." This chapter also provides an
explanation of the rhetorical potential (and ideological
consequences) of Yeats's self-portrayal as the meditative
poet removed from the world, who by nature must devote
more attention to the conflicts of the spheres than to the
sublunar struggles of nations and classes. Chapter 3
further analyzes Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, but focuses on
10
the rhetoric of Yeats's spiritual investigations,
including his ideological project to marshal his own
phantasmagoria to chase away the spectre of Communism and
revolution haunting both Europe and Ireland. In Chapter
4, I demonstrate the shrewdness of Yeats's textual and
bibliographical strategies by analyzing "Nineteen Hundred
and*Nineteen" in two different rhetorical contexts.
Originally written at the height of the Anglo-Irish war
and titled "Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World,"
the poem's title, date of composition, and— I will
suggest--political sentiments were substantially revised
in 1928, when Yeats edited the poem for The Tower volume
upon leaving the Senate. Chapter 5 turns to "Meditations
in Time of Civil War," as a way of demonstrating more
precisely the rhetorical impact of Yeats's stance as an
isolated, contemplative poet and the contradictions that
arose when such a stance is portrayed in a published poem.
Chapter 5, "The Irish Dramatic Movement: The Rhetoric of
Nobel Oblige," reads Yeats's Nobel Prize speech in light
of the contradiction between Yeats's emerging conservative
ideology and the Nobel committee's expectations of Yeats's
as the nationalist writer of Kathleen-ni-Houlihan. In my
last chapter, I analyze Yeats's attempt to rewrite the
history of his work in the Abbey theater through the
production of the Oedipus plays and in the last three
11
poems of his life, including "Circus Animals’s Desertion,"
"Politics," and "The Man and the Echo."
Ill
To make my argument, I shall have to change the terms
in which Yeats is discussed from those of aesthetics to
those of rhetoric. Yeats’s poetry, in particular, has
usually been described more in terms of architecture and
iconography than of discourse. Though these commentaries
are important for elucidating Yeats's own theoretical
discussions of his work, they tend to ignore the
rhetorical aspects of Yeats's art, especially the
rhetorical aspects that he denied. Indeed, when the word
"rhetoric" does appear in critical discussions, it refers
typically to features of text than of context;3 rhetoric
for the page rather than the public--something that could
be eradicated or altered from a poem as easily as the
imagist manifestos claim.4 These commentaries remain true
3 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (London:
Macmillan, 1954), 116-145 (Hereafter Identity; references
in text); T. R. Henn, "The Rhetoric of Yeats," in A. N.
Jeffares and K. G. V. Cross, Excited Reverie (1965), 102-
122 (Hereafter Reverie; references in text); Donald
Pearce, The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats (1960), 23-24
(Hereafter SS; references in text.); and Paul de Man, The
Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), 145-238.
4 For a discussion of the rhetoric behind the Imagist
ideals, see John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The
Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana
State University Press, 1981).
to the ideas about rhetoric that Yeats developed in the
nineties, when he campaigned vigorously to rid Irish
i
patriotic verse of stylistic effusion. But Yeats's i
struggle against rhetoric was not the same as Pound's. In j
fact, Yeats's struggle against the "rhetorical" in his own !
work and that of his contemporaries had, as I shall
illustrate, less to do with features of syntax than with
i
the artist's stance toward the audience. Yeats's famous j
distinction between poetry and rhetoric, which I shall j
return to throughout, makes this clear: "We make from the
quarrels with others, rhetoric, but from the quarrels with ;
ourselves, poetry." I shall challenge this aphorism in a
number of ways, specifically by showing how the major
texts written after the Easter Rising constitute a
continuous quarrel with the rhetoric of rebellion and
revolution. What makes this quarrel more remarkable than
Yeats's one in the nineties is that it is a quarrel not
only against Young Ireland but also Young Yeats. Contra
Yeats's own views, Yeats's quarrel with the Easter
martyrs--and their rhetoric of rebellion, self-sacrifice,
and martyrdom--was also a quarrel with works like the
Cathleen plays and poems like "September 1913."
Though Yeats's attempts to eschew rhetoric and
appeals to the crowd are famous, his major stylistic
changes have occurred precisely at those moments when he
cites his audience, particularly his enemies, most
-Ul
I
directly. Yeats's stylistic development has less to do j
with eschewing rhetoric, that is, the awareness of an
1
audience, than fully embracing it. "Adam's Curse," for
example, traditionally cited as a turning point in
t
Yeats's style, achieves its rigorous and forthright style !
j
by actually naming the enemies of the poet: i
For to articulate sweet sounds together ,
Is to work harder than all these, and yet j
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world. (CP 78)
!
i
Though Yeats claimed that the best poetry is that which I
J
quarrels with the self, this poem marks itself as !
significant in that it is not afraid to quarrel with
others. The same device is found in "The Fisherman," in
i
which Yeats refers to the "living men I hate, the dead men j
j
that I love." The development of Yeats's style— what Paul
de Man has called the central enterprise in Yeats studies- |
-cannot be studied separately from the other voices that j
i
Yeats's struggled with while perfecting that style.
Just as Yeats's stylistic development requires a
I
careful analysis in terms of his struggle with others,
Yeats's symbolic and philosophical structures must be
examined in their rhetorical moment of formation. We need j
i
to reconsider the pattern, well-drawn by years of Yeats
l
scholarship, that turns Yeats's numerous "performative
,utterances," to use J. L. Austin's terms, into
14
"constitutive truths."5 To return to the performative and
strategic qualities of Yeats's writings does more,
however, than to deconstruct his (and his critics') "vast
designs,"6 symbolic architecture,7 or poetic persona.8
Such a move is undertaken to resituate Yeats's poetic and
irhetorical talents in their proper context and to restore
jtheir cultural politics. Yeats's symbolic structures and
Jbelief systems must be studied temporally. Thoor
Ballylee, for example, is aptly described in Yeats
jcriticism as a complex symbol and monument with a variety
of personal, literary, historical, and political
^associations.9 Yet Thoor Ballylee did not accumulate its
5Ellmann's pioneering scholarship on Yeats perhaps
earns him the right of the following statement: "His
themes and symbols are fixed in youth, and then renewed
with increasing vigor and directness to the end* of his
life. . . . the more one reads Yeats, the more his works
appear to rotate in a few orbits." (Identity, 1). Yet the
sense of Yeats's inclusiveness may very well come from
reading Yeats more and more intensely without comparing
his texts to other ones of his time. When Yeats's themes
are analyzed for their rhetorical purposes at the moment
of articulation, those "orbits" become wider and wider.
5 See Edward Engleberg, The Vast Design: Patterns in
W. B. Yeats's Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1974).
7 See Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art:
Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
8 See Gale C. Spricker, A New Species of Man: The
' Poetic Persona of W. B. Yeats (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1982).
! 9 See T. R. Henn's Introduction to Mary Hanley and
|Liam Miller, Thoor Ballylee: Home of William Butler Yeats
[(Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1965 [1977]).
15
symbolic charge all at once, as a magnet attracts iron
filings ("Has thou seen the rose in the steel dust?"), but j
I
historically, like the layers of an archaeological site. I
To avoid being seduced by a symbolic meaning, and away j
from rhetorical and political meanings, we must also j
understand its rhetorical meanings— that is we must
carefully delineate the tower's transformation from the :
ideal dwelling place far from the city it represented in j
1916 (L 624) to "a place to influence lawless youth with
its severity and antiquity" it constituted in July 1918 (L
651), from a symbol "befitting emblems of adversity" in
the summer of 1922 to "a powerful emblem" that Yeats would
declare his symbol in "Blood and the Moon" in 1932. It is
true, of course, that the tower was always a symbol of the
poet's antithetical modus vivendi, sensibility, and
vision, but to what the tower was antithetical changed
again and again over the course of Yeats's life. In other
words, to recognize--and criticize--the antithetical in
Yeats we must realize the dynamics of the primary world 1
that he struggled against.
During Ireland's most rhetorically explosive moments,
Yeats's most efficient strategy for appearing non-
rhetorical was to assert ideology. Thus, his ideology and J
rhetoric must be separated. Rather than appearing to be J
I
arguing with or appealing to an audience, Yeats adopted
,the stance of a true believer asserting those beliefs for
posterity. Nevertheless, Yeats's philosophical writings,
( no matter how abstract they appear from a distance, were
i
always intended for a local rhetorical purpose. He
i
revised his Autobiography 1920, for instance, to turn the
Memoirs from a recollection to "a political and literary
i
itestament," as he wrote Lady Gregory, "intended to give
jphilosophy to the movement. Every analysis of character,
j
{of Wilde, Henley, Shaw & so on builds up my philosophical
i
nationalism--it is nationalism against internationalism,
l
|the rooted against the rootless people."10 Here is Yeats
^at his most ideological, asserting a philosophical
nationalism in the place of a rhetorical one, forcing an
abstract and ahistorical conflict. Who are the "rootless
.people" at the time that Yeats wrote this, and what does
.this imply about Yeats's practical politics at the time?
Yeats had similar goals for A Vision, which was meant not
! only to articulate his beliefs and provide metaphors for
poetry but also to give him a foundation and ammunition,
as it were, for political reform: "I would like to get my
system together and then bring it to Ireland to be put
into practice" (my italics; L 138).
To understand the polemical nature of Yeats's
philosophy requires a careful analysis of the works in
jtheir historical moment. Yeats not only responds to and
10Unpublished letter (December 30, 1920), cited in
Ellmann MM, 242.
'comments upon historical events in particular ways with
{definable intentions, but his works are entangled with
Ithose events (and the arguments about them) regardless of
^intentions. Studies that focus on the ideology (whether
!
aesthetic, Anglo-Irish, fascist, or liberal-humanist) of
i
jYeats's poems sometimes reify that ideology--ignoring the
jspecific occasions that brought it into play and the ways
in which its articulation either masked (or was masked by)
!other rhetorical purposes.11 The shortcomings of this
Ipurely ideological approach are brought to the fore by
I
{Oliver St. John Gogarty during a Senate debate. The topic
jof the debate is Judge's Costumes, its bone of contention
11 The tendency to see ideology as "background"
instead of something intertwined with the production of
language and meaning, especially the very act of
production, is exemplified by Donald T. Torchiana, W.B.
Yeats and Georgian Ireland (Evanston, 1966). Torchiana's
work is invaluable; it documents Yeats's associations to,
and his visions of, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. It is not
concerned specifically with how Yeats used the Georgian
iideals as rhetorical tools in his struggle against the
ideals of the Easter Rising and rebellion in general. The
work of C. C. O'Brien ("Passion and Cunning: An Essay on
the Politics of W. B. Yeats" in Reveries, ed. Jeffares and
Cross (1965), 207-78) and, recently, Elizabeth Cullingford
Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (New York and London: New York
University Press, 1981) both move too quickly over Yeats's
ideology. The first tries to transform Yeats's strategic
political maneuvers into a coherent narrative of his
proto-fascist ideology, whereas the second adopts the same
tactics to prove that Yeats is actually liberal humanist,
somewhat in the mode of J.S. Mill or Edmund Burke.
Because of their focus, both studies are forced to take
many of Yeats's own representations of his views at face
value, ignoring the mediating effects of either poetic
'texture, textual and bibliographic strategies, or
jrhetorical situations. Despite the importance of their
{work, their reading strategies make any judgement on
Yeats's essential political vision premature.
j 18
i
Yeats's proposals for new designs, and the speaker is Sir
John Keane:
When we go further into the matter I
confess I was interested in the quarter
from which this proposal came. My memory
at once went back to a recent speech
delivered by Senator Yeats in this House on
the subject of the Lane pictures, when he
used these words. "You will forgive me if
I forget that I am occasionally a
politician and remember that I am always a
man of letters, and speak less
diplomatically and with less respect for
institutions and great names than is,
perhaps, usual in public life." Following
up that trend of thought I remember
certain verses of the Senator's in which
his words seem to me rather inconsistent
with the remarks that I have just quoted.
He writes:
"All things can tempt me from this
craft of verse;
One time it was a woman's face, or
worse—
The seeming needs of my fool-driven
land."
Dr. Gogarty: What is the date?
Sir John Keane: I do not know.
Dr. Gogarty: It is all-important. (SS 128)
Together Keane and Gogarty perform ideological criticism.
They both begin with the same problem— the contradiction
between Yeats's self-portrayed stance toward Ireland and
toward politics in one situation and his actions in
another. Keane's intention is to read this contradiction
as evidence of ideology: If Yeats was once so unconcerned
|about the politics of a country that he called foolish,
jbut now seeks to actively lead that land and determine its
aesthetic and judicial future, what are his true
[purposes? Gogarty, however, seeks to explain this
; contradiction not in terms of ideological cunning, or even
|
by the marvelous contradictory nature of the poetic mind;
! rather, he sees it as evidence of rhetoric: If Yeats held
'one stance toward Ireland at one point in his life, he
(implies, and another at a different time, obviously it is
|Ireland that has changed, not Yeats. By studying the
J
junity of Yeats's ideology after the Rising and,
simultaneously, marking the strategies by which Yeats put
ithis ideology into practice, this study hopes to bring
jKeane's and Gogarty's insights into a coherent whole.
"EASTER 1916": THE RESURRECTION OF RHETORIC AND THE
RHETORIC OF RESURRECTION
Behind all Irish history hangs a great
tapestry, even Christianity had to accept
it and be itself pictured there. . . .St.
Patrick came to Ireland not in the fifth
century but towards the end of the second.
The great controversies had not begun;
Easter was still the first full moon after
the Equinox.
W. B. Yeats (1937)
Any study of the interplay of poetics, ideology, and
rhetoric in Yeats's writing must pay special attention to
his writings about the Easter Rising. For this event not
only drastically altered the social and political
landscape in which Yeats wrote and published— as he said,
"A world seems to be swept away" (L 614)— , but it also
brought Yeats's to a crisis in his aesthetic and political
beliefs, forcing him to seriously reconsider the clear
distinctions he had asserted since his early reviews
between rhetoric and poetry, politics and art, the life
of action and that of vision or private reveries. Even
though Yeats would return to claiming these distinctions
after the Rising— indeed, more vigorously— the rhetoric by
which he presented his anti-rhetorical ideology would be
transformed, becoming both more complex and at the same
time deliberately partisan. What would appear to be an
anti-rhetorical stance no different from the mainstream of
21 !
modernist aesthetics would serve a more local and
rhetorical function, simultaneously repudiating the stated
i
ideals (and methods) of the Easter Proclamation and j
promoting modes of being and thinking that implicitly
valorized the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. How Yeats exercised !
i
this ideological project, depending on the genre and
rhetorical occasion, is the subject of subsequent j
chapters. In this chapter I want to describe the roots of
Yeats's anti-revolutionary rhetoric in "Easter 1916."
I
Although "Easter 1916" provides the most famous
intersection of political action and poetic reaction in
the Yeats canon, and few critics would analyze the poem j
without some mention of the political events that inspired
it, the local meaning of the poem, that is, its degree of
sympathy with the rebellion itself, remains curiously open
to debate. Though some readers do take the poem as
overtly patriotic, or at least sharing features of
patriotic verses at the time, most readers have noticed !
I
its ambiguity and ambivalence.1 Yet these ambiguities do
not arise merely as by-products of New Critical readings:
Yeats's acquaintance with the rebels, his admiration for j
i
|
!
1 The best readings of the poem include Terry j
Eagleton, "History and Myth in Yeats's 'Easter 1916,'"
Essays in Criticism, 21:3 (July 1971), 248-60; and
Marjorie Perloff, "Yeats and the Occasional Poem: 'Easter
,1916'” Papers on Language and Literature, 4:3 (Summer
,1968), 308-28, which is the first study to point up the
poem's ambiguous stance toward the Rising. j
22
their "wild geese"-like heroism, his suspicions of John
MacBride, his awareness that Cathleen Ni Houlihan served
as an inspiration for the rebels--such are the typical
reasons cited for the poem's lack of clear partisanship,
for its rhetoric of neutrality and complexity. Though the
poet's letters and other comments about the Rising do
point to his mixed feelings, the poem itself, in
particular when examined in light of the symbolic dynamics
and rhetorical context of Easter Week, reveals an
ambivalence that can only be called strategic: a purposive
purposelessness, as it were--even a highly mediated (and
perhaps unconscious) ideological project to separate Yeats
and the Irish Dramatic Movement from the romantic idealism
of the rebels.2 As I shall argue, "Easter 1916" is
(neither patriotic nor ambiguous but rather is an elegy for
the loss of England's cultivating and Arnoldian influence
in Ireland, an influence that Yeats's believed to be
served in Ireland as long as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
and the Irish Literary Revival remained the dominant
force in cultural politics. To investigate this
2 My project is perhaps a continuation of the one
suggested by Terry Eagleton. Of the line "A terrible
beauty is born," he says, "One thing I dislike about the
line is that it is extremely vague: It at once
rhetorically flourishes and cavalierly withdraws an object
of knowledge. (One can show, by a rhetorical and
ideological analysis of the whole poem, just how precisely
vague it has to be, just how determinate its indeterminacy
is.)" Formations of Pleasure, 63. Eagleton did not
motivate my study, but he reads the poem shrewdly.
23
ideological project, and the rhetoric by which it was
mediated, I shall begin by analyzing Yeats's prose
statements about the rebellion, using them as a clue to
his ostensible public intentions for the poem; then I
shall demonstrate how the poem attempts— through various
formal and traditionally poetic devices— to repudiate the
imagination of the rebellion and to dissipate the
exceedingly rhetorical aftermath; finally, I shall attempt
to clarify the poem's own explicit rhetoric (which can be
found, in particular in the poem's (mis)-representation of
historical events) and its implicit rhetoric, or ideology,
which is suggested by the poem's disdain for the motley
and heterogenous revolutionary alliance that inspired the
Easter Rising.
On Easter Monday, 24 April, 1916, Patrick Pearse, the
commander-in-chief of the Military Council of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood and its chief orator, stood on the
steps of the General Post Office in Dublin--above which
flew two tri-color flags and a large green banner
inscribed in golden letters "Poblacht na hEireann"
(Republic of Ireland)--and proclaimed to confused passers-
by the birth of the Provisional Government of the Irish
Republic:
Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of
God and of the dead generation from which
she receives her old tradition of nationho-
24
od, Ireland, through us, summons her
children to her flag and strikes for her
freedom. . . . In this supreme hour the
Irish nation must, by its valour and
discipline and by the readiness of its
children to sacrifice themselves for the
common good, prove itself worthy of the
august destiny to which it is called.
(Lyons, Famine, 368)
Elsewhere in Dublin over 700 rebel soldiers occupied
various city buildings and factories, a move guided by
James Connolly's idea that the British imperialists would
never destroy their own property. Connolly was mistaken.
Within a few days a British ship on the Liffey skillfully
lobbed eighteen-pound bombs over the houses and onto the
Post Office. By Friday, most of what is now O'Connoll
street was demolished and the rebel outposts were
surrounded. On Saturday, primarily to avoid further
civilian casualties, Pearse surrendered. Total
casualties totaled about 1,306. By all accounts, the
rebellion was a failure.3
3 I have drawn my historical accounts from these !
sources: F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London,
1971) (which itself provides an excellent bibliography)
and Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939 (Oxford, j
1979); F.X. Martin, Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising: ;
Dublin 1916 (1967); Alan Ward, The Easter Rising: t
Revolution and Irish Nationalism (1980); Nicholas 1
Mansergh, The Irish Question: 1840-1921 (1965); Desmond 1
Williams (ed.) The Irish Struggle 1916-1926 (1966); D. G.
Boyce Englishmen and Irish Troubles (1972); George
Dangerfield, The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish
Relations (1976); Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse:
The Triumph of Failure (1978); Richard M. Kain, Dublin in
the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce; and
several others. Because of the controversial nature of
the causes and consequences of the Easter Rising, I have
When Yeats read the London Times version of the
Easter Rising, he was staying with Sir William Rothenstein
in Gloucestershire. According to his host, he condemned
I
the rebels as "innocent and patriotic theorists, carried i
away by their belief that they must put their theories
into practice." "They would fail," he said, "and pay the j
j
penalty for their rashness."4 Yeats's reaction was not
only prophetic but remarkably in tune with the majority of j
the Irish, who first denounced the rebels as foolish, j
impatient, and treasonous to the thousands of Irish
forces fighting the Germans in France. But sentiments
i
would soon change, as the British Army, commanded by j
I
General Maxwell, followed with harsh retribution. Blaming '
the insurrection (mistakenly) on Sinn Fein, the British
authorities arrested nearly 3000 suspected rebels (nearly j
1800 were imprisoned without trial), enforced a strict j
curfew, confiscated seditious literature, and even
arrested for inciting riots those who whistled patriotic ‘
songs. Maxwell established courts-martial, and in trials ;
t
lasting about ten minutes apiece, over 75 rebels were |
j
condemned to death. On May 3 the executions began with
i
Thomas James Clarke, Patrick Pearse, and Thomas j
i
tried to glean my chronology of events from a variety of
sources; thus, I take responsibility for the ideology of
my story.
I
4 Stephen Gwynn, ed., Scattering Branches (New York; t
1940), p. 46-47. !
26
MacDonough; on the next day four more were shot, including
Pearse"s brother Michael. With these events, public
sentiment began to change. Objections to the executions
began to be heard in the newspapers and in Parliament.5 '
Simultaneously, British atrocities against civilians came
i
to light,6 and the heroic gestures of the rebels at their j
trials and before the firing squad became well known.7
i
As outrage at the rebels turned to pity, pity turned to j
patriotism. Pictures of the executed were placed in j
nearly every Dublin shop; tri-color buttons were j
I
everywhere. Romantic Ireland, suddenly, was here and now. J
E
Yeats's response to the executions and their i
I
t
aftermath is recorded in a famous letter written to Lady
Gregory on May 11. His primary regret seems to have been
i
the rebellion's impact on the ideals of the Irish Literary |
5 Liberal newspapers began to call the acts atrociti
es; George Bernard Shaw argued for political status for
the rebels; several liberal MP's raised their protest.
Dr. O'Dwyer, Catholic Bishop of Limerick, called the
actions wanton and cruel, and priests soon began praising
the piety of the leaders (Lyons, Famine, 358-380).
6: Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, noted Irish pacifist
and socialist, was executed by a military man later deemed
to be insane; a score of civilians were killed in a Dublin
basement (Lyons, Famine, 372).
7 All the rebels proclaimed they were dying for their
country; Pearse wrote two emotional poems; Eamonn Ceant
got married the night before his death; John MacBride,
executed May 5, refused a blindfold, having faced British
rifles before (in his fight alongside the Boers). On May
12, Connolly and MacDermott were executed though neither
could walk to the firing squad; the first crippled by
rheumatoid-arthritis; the second had a foot amputed and
faced the rifles in a wheel chair (Lyons, Famine, 372ff.)
27
Movement, whose goals--to keep the classes together and
keep literature and politics apart--have rarely been so
clearly articulated:
I had no idea that any public event could
so deeply move me— and I am very despondent
about the future. At the moment 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 (May
11; Lett 613)--
Yeats's despair for the future was certainly justified.
Almost immediately, Ireland erupted with a rebirth of old
political songs and the reappearance of Young Ireland
poems, quickly revised for the occasion and republished,
copied by hand, or sung on street corners.8 The tune that
once asked "Who dares to speak of '98" now asked "Who
dares to speak of Easter Week?"9 Within a year the Young
Ireland began publishing and Arthur Griffith, the man who
led the riots against the Playboy, would republish
Nationality. Yeats's reaction against this rebirth of the
8After the rising a ballad said "...But this they
knew, and knew it well,/They would not die in vain./Their
blood would save our country's cause/and give her life
again." "The Men of Dublin" cited in Songs and Poems of
the Rebels Who Fought and Died for Ireland in Easter Week
(Dublin, n.d., p. 27).
9 A Sinn Fein pamphlet of 1919 titled Two Years of
English Atrocities in Ireland gives the names of thirteen
men and women who were arrested in 1917 and 1918 for
"disloyal songs and expressions," "singing seditious
choruses," and so on." (Georges-Denis Zimmerman Songs of
the Irish Rebellion [Hatboro, Penn. 1967], p. 72).
28
Young Ireland movement in letters would produce Per Arnica
Silentia Lunae. But Yeats’s immediate concern was not
that literature had become political, but that politics
had become literary: For the Easter Rising combined Real
and Irreal Politik in ways that Yeats had either condemned
or never thought possible.
Although the stated goals of the rebellion included
victory over England, the Easter rebels were actually, as
Yeats once said of Lady Gregory, "bred to a higher thing
than triumph." They walked into the Post Office with full
knowledge of their military weakness.10 (James Connolly
is reported to have said, "We are going into a
slaughter.”) Nevertheless, they also realized that their
heroism, even in failure, would stoke the patriot fervor
of Ireland.11 And in fact their eventual victory, what
10 Several events had a part in producing this
weakness. Aud, a German ship carrying 20,000 rifles and a
million rounds of ammunition was intercepted by the
English on a tip from American intelligence. A car meant
to rendezvous with an arms shipment took a wrong turn and
crashed into the Liffey. Roger Casement arrived at Kerry
in a German submarine and was immediately arrested. On
Saturday, Professor Eoin MacNeill cancelled military
maneuvers for the Irish Volunteers when he learned that
Pearse and his fellows were planning a genuine revolt and
not merely a parade. His announcement, while it did not
sway Pearse and his comrades, did confuse about 2,000
soldiers. (Lyons, Famine, 368-380).
11 The Plan of the Rising, known only to about a dozen
men, included the possibility of victory only if large
numbers of Irish Volunteers would enter the fray after a
week or so; the leaders all realized the possibility of
less fortunate contingencies, however, and saw
justification for proceeding just the same: "Defeat might
follow; but the repression, with the fact that an attempt
29
Desmond Ryan called the "The Triumph of Failure,Hl 2
derived from the way their executions reminded the Irish
of previous sacrificial heroic acts like those of Tone and
Emmett. As W.H. Thompson puts it, they deliberately chose
"to image themselves as sacrificial heroes taken from the
old mythologies of torn gods" (Thompson, Imagination p.
139.) Such goals were explicitly expressed in the
writings of MacDonagh, Plunkett, and Connolly in the
months preceding the rebellion (used by Yeats as the
source of "The Red Rose Tree" 13 )— most plainly and
clearly in the work of Pearse, the official orator of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.). At the funeral of
the old Fenian O'Donovan Rossa in the middle of 1915,
Pearse inspired the crowd with the following sacrificial
ideal:
Life springs from death and from the graves
of patriot men and women spring nations. .
. . The Defenders of the Realm have worked
well in secret and in the open. They think
had been made, would reawaken and revivify the National
aspiration for Republican Independence." (T.A. Jackson,
Ireland Her Own, New York: International Publishers,
1970, p. 391).
12 Desmond Ryan, The Rising, Dublin 1969, p. 257.
13 In February 1916, James Connolly wrote: "Ireland
has become so degraded that only "the red tide of war on
Irish soil will ever enable the Irish race to recover its
self-respect. . . . Without the slightest trace of
irreverence, but in all due humility and awe, we recognize
that of us, as of mankind before Calvary, it may truly be
said 'without the shedding of blood thee is no redemption'
(C.D. Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly
(London, 1961, 318-19); cited in Lyons Culture, 90.
30
they have pacified Ireland. They think
they have purchased half of us and
intimidated the other half. They think
they have foreseen everything, thing they
have provided against everything; but--the
fools! the fools! the fools! They have
left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland
holds these graves, Ireland, unfree, shall
never be at peace!14
Pearse's last play, The Singer, ends with the hero heading
out to face certain death. His exit line: "One man can
free a people as one Man redeemed the world." With the
Easter executions, Pearse's ideal of imitatio Christi was
realized; in James Stephens's words, "The blood of brave
men had to sanctify such a consummation if the national
imagination was to be stirred to the dreadful business
which is the organizing of freedom." (Insurrection, p.
11). This stirring of the "boiling pot," as Yeats called
it, only intensified as the clergy increasingly recognized
the heroes for their piety and sacrifice and held
commemorative masses in their honor.15
Yeats could not help but be shocked by the Easter
Rising, for the ability of the rebels to combine politics
and art challenged severely Yeats's longstanding arguments
that they must be kept separate. As early as 1897, in his
Introduction to A Book of Irish Verse, Yeats drew a sharp
14Pearse, P.H. Political Writings and Speeches,
Dublin, n.d., 39.
15As F.S.L. Lyons, Famine (1971, 381) puts it, the
Easter Rising was followed by a "cult of the dead leaders."
31
distinction between the "poets who gathered about Thomas
Davis," whose work was of "practical and political, not of
literary importance," and the "genuine artists, removed
from the public," who wrote almost wholly for the small
beginning of that educated and national public, which is
our greatest need and perhaps our vainest hope." And as
recently as December 1915, in "Ego Dominus Tuus," Yeats
had articulated the difference of the man of action and
the man of letters:
Ille
For those that love the world serve it in
action,
Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is
action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?
Although Yeats might have written these lines in response
to his father's warning, written 18 August 1914, to never
forget "That the poet is the antithesis of the man of
action,"16 Yeats had always argued that political
16J. B. Yeats, Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and
others, ed. Joseph Hone (London, 1944), 187. It would be
worthwhile to explore the psychological effects on Yeats
following the rising in terms of his father's dicta that
art and politics were essentially opposed. I would
suggest that, inasmuch as the Easter Rising was a perfect
synthesis of poetry and action that J.B. Yeats thought
impossible, and inasmuch as that event was partially
motivated by Yeats's own plays, that W. B. Yeats would
agitation ruined the spirit, fixing the mind on
abstractions, making one "bitter and restless," "kill[ing]
i
intellectual innocence," and destroying the sensitivity to
■beauty and sweetness (Essays, 314ff.). In this Arnoldian
: formulation, to be active was to become abstract and
ibitter; to be literary was to remain sweet and innocent.
! But the project of the Easter rebels exploded these
i
^dichotomies: Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett were not
professional politicians but writers whose work Yeats had
'admired and promoted; they were, indeed, part of the
|
| "educated and national public" in which Yeats placed his
hopes. Contrary to what Yeats believed, they combined
vision and action, putting their vision of an Irish
Republic into action on the Post Office steps— and far
from keeping politics and literature apart, they entangled
literary and military ideals as the interlacing of the
venerable Celtic manuscripts.
This intricate interweaving of the literary and the
political challenged more than Yeats's theory of rhetoric;
it challenged his own rhetorical practice as well. No
longer could he painlessly inspire the Irish Paudeens by
have felt that he had betrayed his father's ideals. Such
speculation finds its support in the fact that Yeats wrote
J. B. Yeats (14 June 1917): "Much of your thought
resembles mine in An Alphabet but mine is part of a
religious system more or less logically worked out, a
system which will I hope interest you as a form of
poetry." (L, 627). An Alphabet, of course, became Per
Arnica Silentia Lunae, one of whose central themes is that
the poet and the hero are antithetical.
calling upon the heroic ideals of Celtic romanticism--for
it was precisely those ideals that motivated the rebels
i
I
and constituted what W.H. Thompson calls the "Imagination
of the Insurrection." Yeats's immediate awareness of the
t
symbolic politics of the rebellion and his complicity in
I promoting it appears in a letter written to John Quinn on
i
j 23 May:
!
^ We have lost the ablest and most fine-
natural of our young men. A world seems to
, have been swept away. I keep going over
! the past in my mind and wondering if I
! could have done anything to turn those
young men in some other direction. (May 23;
; Lett 614).
The sense of responsibility Yeats expresses here cannot be
lightly dismissed as a dramatic gesture. Nor can it be
properly glossed, as most critics have thought, by Yeats's
later doubts about the patriotic impact of Cathleen Ni
iHoulihan:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
For though the later poem expresses guilt over commission-
-What have I done?--the immediate letter expresses remorse
over omission: What could I have done? Such a difference
is important, for it suggests that Yeats might have seen
"Easter 1916” as a second chance to "do something" and
;turn "young men in some other direction." Furthermore, we
i
[would be wrong to assume that the political messages of
Yeats’s writing is to be discovered only in the dramatic
works. For, though Yeats himself always insisted that
i
such was the case17, his contemporaries thought otherwise.
|John Eglinton, for instance, when blaming "Yeats, and the
literary movement in which he was a commanding figure,"
for "conjur[ing] up the armed bands of 1916,"18 aimed his
[attack not on Kathleen Ni Houlihan but on the mixture of
i
jrhetoric and blarney in the refrain from "September 1913":
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with 0'Leary in the grave.
While Eglinton's position may be a bit exaggerated,19
his comments reminds us that Yeats's poetic ideology had
remarkable resonance with the ideology of the Easter
rebels, and especially that of Pearse, which was obvious
,to anyone who knew both men. The connection has been
17 When Yeats accepted the Nobel Prize, for example,
he carefully separated his dramatic work--which deserved
the award--from his lyrics, which he said were of no
consequence (a distinction the Nobel Committee had not
made). His famous 1935 statement makes the same claim:
"I have been always a propagandist though I have kept it
out of my poems ..." (Essays, 487).
18 John Eglinton (W.K. Magee) Irish Literary
Portraits, p. 26 > . ;
19Nicholas Mansergh does, in fact, dismiss Eglinton's
claim, though he admits that Ireland's romanticism was a
major force in its eventual independence (Mansergh, The
Irish Question (Toronto, 1965), 245.
i 35
I
^icely delineated by Joan Towey Mitchell20: Both men
developed and promoted a mystic romanticism to counter the
I
older romanticism of the Young Ireland movement, they were
both influenced by the heroic sagas and the Celtic
i
i
movement in letters, and they both chose Cuchulain as a
jhero. More specifically, they both blamed the new moneyed
jclasses in Ireland (the Paudeens) for Ireland's fall from
!
jheroic nobility, by perpetuating the materialism of the
English industrial class.21 Hence it is no accident that
Yeats's work in the Irish Literary Revival was later
!
praised by the Nobel Committee for its "ever aiming at the
ideal." (Nobel Awards, 64). Indeed, Yeats's own
arguments for the unique and idealistic qualities of the
Celtic spirit in his early writings differed only slightly
( from the arguments in the works of Arnold, Renan, and
20 Joan Towey Mitchell, "Yeats, Pearse and Cuchulain,"
Eire-Ireland (11:4), 51-65.
21 Yeats's "September 1913" and Poems Written in
Discouragement, 1912-1913 are obvious attacks on the
Paudeens, but Cathleen Ni Houlihan itself is perhaps
Yeats's most serious indictment of the Irish for
preferring material comforts to heroic idealism and
action. The main character, Michael, must leave his
comfortable home and future wife (who brings a fine dowry)
to go off to fight in the rebellion. Pearse himself
learned much from this play; he wrote: "The gentry . . .
have been corrupted by England and the merchants and
middle-class capitalists have, when not corrupted, been
uniformly intimidated, whereas the common people have for
jthe most part remained unbought and unterrified. . . . Let
no man be mistaken as to who will be the lord of Ireland
when Ireland is free. The people will be lord and
Imaster." ("The Sovereign People") Quoted in A. C. Hepburn
(ed.) The Conflict of Nationality in Modern Ireland
(London, 1980), 70-71
other Celticists, including Pearse.22 In 1897, for
instance, the same year that Yeats published "The Celtic
Element in Literature" (1897, Essays, 173), Pearse
expressed quite similar ideas: "The Gael is not like
other men," he said, "the spade and the loom and the sword
are not for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of
i
Rome, more glorious than that of Britain, awaits him: to
, become the savior of idealism in modern intellectual and
social life."23 Finally, and most important, Yeats shared
with Pearse the desire to inspire Ireland to heroic
action. As Alex Zwerdling puts it, "'September 1913' is
Yeats's most vitriolic attack on the way in which the
modern Irishman so easily forgets the heroic deeds of the
patriots and public man of past and present."24 And as
that poem shows, Yeats was not afraid to inspire by
calling upon the great English dead. Lyons, in trying to
explain what motivated Pearse, stresses the idea of his
religious beliefs: "his mysticism is the essential key"
(Culture, 87). The description applies to Yeats as well,
as he once admitted: "The mystical life is the centre of
22 See Matthew Arnold, "English Literature and Irish
Politics," volume 4 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew
Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1973). On Renan, see
"The Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies, tr. W.
G. Hutchinson (London, 1896).
I
23 Patrick Pearse, Political Writings, p. 32 .
24Alex Zwerdling, Yeats and the Heroic Ideal (New
York: New York University Press, 1965), 111.
; 37
all that I do and all that I think and all that I write"
(L 211). In sum, when it came to the imagination and the
rhetoric that inspired the rebels, Yeats stalked the Post
Office as much as Cuchulain and Emmet.
I provide this background to show that Yeats wrote
i"Easter 1916" in a situation already saturated with
rhetoric--the rhetoric of heroes, sacrifice, and piety, a
jrhetoric in which Yeats's own poetry was enmeshed. His
letters of the period express the same idea: "A world
seems to have been swept away"; "I am very despondent
about the future." The world lost had been one where
i
Yeats could keep a cordon sanitaire between his literary
and political ideals, and where his desire to articulate
the vision of the Celtic heroes was an enterprise of
innocence and sweetness. And while that world was gone,
it was not too late to try to recapture some of its
emblematic power in "Easter 1916." But to do that, the
poem would have to accomplish the following rhetorical
tasks: (1) to distance the poet from the imagination of
the insurrection, especially from the ideas of Pearse, (2)
to separate the poem stylistically from the patriotic
rhetoric that the rebellion inspired, (3) to valorize the
aesthetic of the Irish Literary Renaissance now severely
in decline, and (4) to repudiate what Yeats thought to be
the dominant strain of Irish patriotism, Sinn Fein
i
I
I
separatism. Having specified these intentions, I shall
now turn and identify them in the poem itself.
i2. Quelling the Wild Limbs: The Anti-Rhetoric of "Easter
1916"
Because Yeats's affinity for the thought and rhetoric
i
jOf Pearse was well known, it should not seem strange to
!
jfind several references to Pearse's writings in "Easter
1916." And though many of these have been noted before,
what has not received proper attention is Yeats's purpose-
-to appropriate these lines in order to question their
premises, thereby separating the poet's imaginative vision
from that of the insurrection. Perhaps the most subtle
reference to Pearse's language comes in stanza three when
Yeats refers to the "the horse that comes from the road, /
the rider." In Pearse's famous prison poem Renunciation
the image of the road also appears.
I have turned my face
To this road before me,
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die.
The poetry is in the piety. The difference between the
two attitudes towards the straight road could not be more
marked. In a note to "Meditations in Time of Civil War"
Yeats distinguishes the "straight road of logic, and so of
;mechanism, and the crooked road of intuition" (CP 455).
i
(But while Yeats found "turning from the road" evidence of
spontaneity, intuition, and sweetness, Pearse used the j
figure of "turning to the road" to represent his
dedication to Irish independence. A second, more direct
allusion is Yeats's use of the mother figure in stanza
three—
That is Heaven's part, our part
* To murmur name upon name.
As a mother names her child
i When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild--
which refers to Pearse's other famous prison poem,
"Mother," which includes the lines:
I do not grudge them; Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break themselves and die, they and a few.
In bloody protest for a glorious thing.
I
Once again, "Easter 1916" borrows a figure from Pearse
only to overturn its rhetorical consequence. Pearse's
"mother" is both a repository of heroic memory and a
vehicle for another terrible birth of patriotism. Yeats's
"mother," by contrast, seems more interested in putting
that memory to bed, to calming its visionary eyes; she
calms the "limbs that have run wild" and, one assumes, the I
hearts that have been "bewildered" (made wild) by "excess
of love." While Pearse's mother addresses God, Yeats's
neither prays out loud nor climbs upon a wagonette to
scream; to the contrary, her voice is sweet and low,
nearly silent. She murmurs to herself a meditation we can
40
barely hear; a meditation no hear exactly but overheard.
And it thus her part (the part of the writer of poetry, as
Mill would have it) that, Yeats says, should be "our
part," and which he exemplifies himself by not "singing a
song” for the rebels that anyone can hear but by writing
out a verse as quietly as a long-legged fly upon the
water.
Since the rhetorical question is the most common
feature of the writings of Pearse and other patriots, the
i
iseries of questions with which Yeats ends "Easter 1916"
deserves close attention.25 Only one of these questions
is allowed full rhetorical resonance: "And what if excess
^of love / Bewildered them till they died?" It is a direct
allusion to Pearse's favorite line from Colmcille: "And
j
if I die it will be from the excess of love I bear the
Gael." By turning this initially patriotic assertion into
4
a rhetorical question, Yeats provokes the reader to wonder
about something that Pearse and his fellow martyrs took as
25 Seamus Deane summarizes Pearse's rhetoric thus: "A
vocabulary deeply dyed by real feeling, a syntax of simple
and repetitive structure, well-designed for purposes of
oratory, a determination to heighten the sentimental
appeal while minimalizing the rational cogency of an
argument or discussion -- these are the easily identified
features of Pearse's writing .... The purpose of such
writing and speaking is that of provoking feelings which,
it is assumed, are always there. It does not create or
interrogate a complex of experience. Feeling is referred
to en bloc, as something which is atmospherically shared
by all. Argument is at a minimum; rhetorical
intensification is the chosen model of progress." Seamus
Dean, Celtic Revivals (London: Faber & Faber 1985), 63-74.
41
self-evident: That there cannot be excess love of
country. Yeats implies there can be.
Yeats deconstructs the other three rhetorical
questions in the stanza by an interesting device--treating
them as empirical, not rhetorical, questions, to which
wise men have the answer. "O when may it suffice?" is an
echo of the calls to sacrifice that Pearse made in his
poem "The Fool" (1915) and which were quite common among
patriotic tunes. The proper patriotic answer should be,
of course, "Not until Ireland is free" or something of the
kind. But Yeats knows asking the hard question is simple.
By distinguishing "Heaven's part" from "our part," as Pope
does in "Essay on Man," Yeats questions what later critics
have called Pearse's blasphemy, his assertion that he can
distinguish between a meaningful death and a meaningless
one. The second question "What is it but nightfall?" is
the beacon of the resurrection rhetoric in patriotic
writings, for, by its lights, the death of patriots is not
death but sleep. These dead heroes will be awakened again
i
[in the bodies of the younger patriots or, finally, when
liberty comes to Ireland. (It is no coincidence that
jMacDonagh's Abbey production was titled The Dawn Is Come
or that Joyce named his work Finnegans Wake.) Yeats's
goal is quite different, however. He answers "What is it
but nightfall?" not with a rhetorical flourish but with a
plain unlovely fact: "No, no, not night but death." This
42
line reiterates denial with its repeated n's
(night/naught) and stresses closure with its plosives (t,
t, t, th) and sprung meter (/ / // / v /); the tomb
has been tightly shut. The line thus enacts its own
repudiation of promises of resurrection; snuffing out the
mythos of Easter in a poem supposedly celebrating it. The
third question, "Was it needless death after all?"
similarly plays a part in the casual rhetoric of
sacrifice; when asked in the context of a patriotic
oration, the phrase would taunt the audience, reminding
them that the death of many heroes of the past is
needless, and not worth the price, unless new persons
jjoin the struggle. As a corollary, then, no one who died
Jby the hands of the English, would die needlessly if they
died struggling for Ireland's independence. But Yeats
complicates this device profoundly by changing the topic,
shifting the focus from the long history of Irish
struggles, where every atrocity of the English becomes
emblematic of the same oppression, to the local and
pragmatic question of Home Rule: "For England may keep
faith / For all that is done and said."
i Just as Yeats repudiates the rhetoric of sacrifice
j
that led to the rebellion, he distinguishes "Easter 1916"
from the kind of patriotic rhetoric that the rebellion
returned to circulation, and he does this by the use of
several formal elements that would disappoint the
43
patriotic rhetor. The title itself does part of this work
by intersecting the cyclical and pagan events ("Easter")
with the specific historical and Catholic action
("1916"). Moreover, in this title resides an objectivity
and distance not to be found in titles like "The Rising,"
"The Rebellion," or even "The Men of Easter Week." The
opening lines also counter the expectations of patriotic
poems, especially those in the resurrection genre:
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses ....
By focusing on the difference between "X" and "them"
(repeated later: "Certain that they and I/'), these lines
contradict the typical "Come gather around me" openings of
political songs. While the Easter celebration referred to
in the title symbolizes the opening of day, the poem
starts with the "close of day." (The rebels have not
risen; their vivid faces are in the past.) Meter and
{rhyme also disappoint. One cannot march to the opening
lines because their meter defies expectation, changing, as
jit were, minute by minute:
! v v / v v / v /
/ V V / V / V
V / VV / V V /
/ V / V V / V
44
The slant feminine rhymes in the b positions deflate
expectations, much the way the same device functions in
Wilfred Owen's poems, written about the same time, to
mirror the disappointment of those who had believed some
ardent glory might be found on the battlefields of WW I.
The combination of numerous substitutions, slant rhymes,
and the feminine endings makes it impossible to sing these
lines over somebody's grave; they won't allow it. The
i
poetry is in the inappropriateness.
i
3. Culture and Anarchy: The Rhetoric of "Easter 1916"
i Although the formal elements of "Easter 1916"
{distance the poem from both the imagination that led to
the rebellion and the rhetoric that ensued, the poem
practices a rhetoric of its own, which is both explicit
and implicit. The explicit rhetoric, as several scholars
have pointed out, is dependent upon the conceptual
oppositions in stanza three between the natural and the
historical world.
i
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to stone
To trouble the living stream
* * *
I Too long a sacrifice
) Can make a stone of the heart ....
|
! "Alone" functions not only adverbially, as "only" might,
but in apposition: "Hearts with one purpose--alone,"
45
which echoes the Sinn Fein slogan: "Ourselves, Ourselves,
Alone!" The point of the comparison between the stone and
the living stream is the essential difference between two
kinds of change: the change in nature is moment by moment,
gradual, productive, and, in a way, cyclical ("The hens'
to moor-cocks call") while the political change
represented by a rebellion is unnatural; it is an attempt
at overthrow. Nature prefers erosion; the rebels,
( explosion.
But nature in Yeats's poetry is rarely natural; it is
carefully selected and the product of sophisticated
t
(husbandry. One notes that no plant images appear among
Yeats's litany of nature in stanza three. Could this be
to avoid the suggestion of the seeding cycle, a quite
itypical resurrection metaphor used by Socrates and Christ
1
alike and obviously available to rebel rhetoric? Or is it
any coincidence that the "moor hen" mentioned here is the
only bird in Yeats's aviary which hides itself under
^ater whenever danger appears? Inasmuch as Yeats's poetry
I
often contains many elements of medieval animal
allegories, we can ask quite plainly: Is Yeats comparing
•a certain kind of culture to nature or is he comparing two
Ikinds of culture to each other? Thomas Edwards2 6 points
Jout that in stanza three "things come in pairs— horse and
t
^ __________________________
26 Thomas Edwards, Imagination and Power: A Study of
Poetry on Public Themes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971).
(Hereafter Edwards; references in text.) ______
46
rider, bird and air, hen and cock— and the pairings
suggest intimate mutuality in productive effort"
(Edwards, 191):
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
But "the rider," as much as he may seem to be "at one"
with nature, as Edwards implies, is actually not only
"nature" and thus cannot be understood without referring
back to the cultural realm. For the horse does not merely
"come" from the road; it is directed there. If we see the
horse here as an emblem of culture, however, what kind of
idealized behavior and lifestyle does the horse represent?
The horse that "comes from the road" is, for example,
quite similar to--if not precisely the same as--the one
ridden by Constance Markievicz in Yeats's memory:
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
iThis idea is elaborated in the first published version of
i
the poem, in the Clement Shorter edition:
That woman at while would be shrill
In aimless argument;
Had ignorant good will;
All that she got she spent,________ _
47
Her charity had no bounds,
Sweet voiced and beautiful,
She had ridden well to hounds.
Lost and out of control in the labyrinth of politics,
where she is ignorant and aimless, Markievicz is
jremembered as keeping control only in playful horse-
riding, and whether it is "to hounds" or "harriers" seems
not to matter--in both sports the rider has the freedom to
come from the road and cross boundaries and property
I
lines. Yeats's memory is hardly politically neutral;
indeed, his valorization of riding to hounds and
harriers, perhaps the quintessential symbol of English
I
I
;colonialism, would have shocked the Irish patriot. For
the Irish Republican Brotherhood was closely connected to
the Gaelic Athletic Association, which began in the 1880s
Jto call for engagement in primarily national sports: a
i
repudiation of the "feminine" sports of the English, such
as lawn tennis, polo, and cricket, in favor of sports more
j"racy to the soil," for example hurling and football.27
27 The Gaelic Athletic Association was co-founded by
Michael Cusack ("Citizen Cusack" in Ulysses) and Maurice
Davin. The GAA served as a front for the physical force
I.R.B. and was regarded as such by the Royal Irish
Constabulary. Its goals were stated by Thomas Croke in a
letter to the Association in December 1884: He decried
the fact that Ireland was "importing from England not only
her manufactured goods, which we cannot help doing, since
she has practically strangled our own manufacturing
appliance, but together with her fashions, her accents,
her vicious literature, her music, her dances and her
manifold mannerisms, her games also and her pastimes, to
the utter discredit of our own grand national sports and
to the sore humiliation of every son and daughter of the
48
That Yeats chose to recall this detail of Markievicz's
life implies a loss of an entire lifestyle and attitude--
one that brought together Irish and English customs--and
the poet regrets that loss.
The poem contains a whole stable of horses. The
second horse mentioned— "our winged horse"--also refers to
a lifestyle and attitude dedicated to bringing the Irish
and English together— the Irish Literary Renaissance. It
is a horse Homer once rode, now stabled at the Abbey
jTheatre:
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
The reference to Pearse's connection with the Abbey is
leven more direct in the Clement Shorter version: "This
I
I man had managed a school / An our winged troublesome
jhorse" (italics mine). In both versions, it is implied
|that the talent for "keeping" or "managing" horses and
[that of managing a school or a theater are related.
[Through their respective cultural duties and the mere
old land. ... If we continue travelling for the next score
years in the same directions that we haye been going in
for some time past, condemning the sports that were
practiced by our forefathers, effacing our national
(features as though we were shamed of them, and putting on,
with England's stuffs and broadcloths her masher habits,
and such other effeminate follies as she may recommend,
we had better at once, and publicly, abjure our
nationality, clap hands at the sight of the Union Jack,
and place England's "bloody red" exultantly above the
"green." (Cited in John O'Beirne Ranelagh, A Short History
of Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1983, p. 153).
49
example of their modus vivendi, both Pearse and Markievicz
had served as a force to manage, control, and keep the
|Irish in the right direction in the past. That talent for
jproducing culture— the one in a school, the other on an
estate— is presented as in tune with the productive
activities of nature. But now things are "changed
utterly." Rather than producing sweetness and light,
Pearse and Markievicz have produced a strange bastard, not
ian enlightened and autonomous beauty but a terrible one.
Where is the sweetness of yesteryear? It is the "Ubi
jSunt?" theme of "Easter 1916" that produces the tragic
I
I tone of the poem, as W. H. Thompson has noted, though he
I
has not pursued the rhetorical (and ideological)
implications. Like Oedipus, the poem implies, Pearse and
jMarkievicz had once been responsible for saving a
I
culture; now their foolishness is about to destroy it.
i
Yet the tragic view does not merely mourn for the
past, it implicitly valorizes those heroic actions and
I
recommends them for the future. Contrary to most elegies
i
that followed the rebellion, however, the Easter rebels
are eulogized for their poetic thought, not their
political action:
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
! He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
50
It is MacDonagh's potential that is mourned for. He is
said to have been "coming into his force" in the literary
world, which may be a pun on the idea that he had entered
the "physical force" branch of the I.R.B. The pun
implies, moreover, that the literary world would have
allowed room for MacDonagh's desire for both "force" and
"fame," but he merely misplaced his energy, took the wrong
path, took the wrong step, hamartia. This is, of course,
ihardly how MacDonagh himself saw matters: in his
Literature in Ireland, printed in 1916 and reprinted four
times in the next three years, he claims a more complete
( and sound unity between his poetics and politics:
] Irish patriotism is an inspiration. It is
never far off. Many strong workers in the
| national movement are good poets too; no
j Irish poet or dreamer knows the day when he
! may be called into action in the ancient
1 fight. More than that, nearer here than
! elsewhere seems the day that Ruskin
desired for his own country when her
soldiers should be her tutors, and the
captains of her army, captains of her
mind; for here the professional barriers do
: not keep life and letters apart, and the
I national cause survives politics. (15-16)
"Easter 1916,1 1 then, would separate, distinguish, and put
asunder what Markievitz, Pearse, and MacDonagh had joined.
The goals for the Irish Literary Revival as Yeats had
sketched them for Lady Gregory--"the separation of
literature and literary criticism from politics"--was
being enacted in the poem itself.
51
As we have seen, however, Yeats not only separates
literature from politics, he valorizes the former by
depicting the fall of the literary lifestyle and frame of
mind in tragic terms. Another part of that valorization
is accomplished by presenting the rebels as active and
lively only in their past lives; they rode, managed,
thought, even got drunk. Their part in the Easter
Rebellion, though, is treated only passively: "Changed,
changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born." What has
changed them? The lines suggest a magical force rather
than their own efforts, those of the Irish who supported
them, or even the rifles of General Maxwell. By ignoring
the patriots' (or even the British) actions, Yeats reduces
itheir fame to the by-product of other forces, forces which
t
i
are never named: They are, simply, "transformed."
It is precisely this transformation, however, and
especially in its magical aspect, that most attracted
Yeats. Let us consider MacBride's appearance in the poem.
I
It may at first reflect another aspect of the Irish
Literary Revival that Yeats mentions to Lady Gregory:
"the bringing together of classes"; the poem now combines
scholar, soldier, and horseman, simultaneously
demonstrating Yeats's largess, his ability to share from
the horn of plenty, and perhaps noblesse oblige. Yet
including MacBride also substantially complicates the tone
of the poem, as critics have mentioned. Edwards points
52
out that the word "dreamed" suggests that Yeats had
actually made a mistake in his early impressions and was
now admitting it (Edwards 187?), an interpretation that
fits in well with the critical interpretation of the poem
as a palinode to "September 1913." While that thesis is
interesting because it implies the uncertain nature of all
"dreaming," even the dreams of the patriots, and suggests
that we should keep awake ("We know their dream; enough /
To know they dreamed and are dead"), it is complicated by
the popular views of MacBride outside the poem. What
Yeats considers his "dream impression" (MacBride as
"drunken, vainglorious lout") was both the image of him
jpresented in Maud Gonne's divorce case against MacBride
jand the that re-presented in the newspapers after the
rebellion. (MacBride, like Yeats, was not one of the
I insiders of the event; he joined the rebellion
I spontaneously; he was probably executed by the British not
I
|so much for the rebellion but for revenge for his fighting
i
alongside the Boers.) According to many contemporary
accounts, MacBride was kept in the dark about the
rebellion because of his irresponsible and untrustworthy
drunkenness. Maud Gonne tried to counter this version in
her numerous letters to Irish, English, American, and
French newspapers during the summer of 1916, when Yeats
was staying with her in Calvados. What this points to is
that once again, MacBride--like the others— was not
53
"changed" and "transformed" into a hero by some mystical
or miraculous means but by the actions of individuals who
identified and promoted that heroism. The rebellion was
both a literary and political event, but Yeats treats it
primarily as a text— a literary act whose intentions are
wide open to interpretation. By reading the rebels as
passive in their transformation, rather than active agents
of it, Yeats removes the significance of human action,
reducing its importance, and thus, diminishing its
heroism.
How does Yeats regard these heroes? How does he
'stand vis-a-vis them? For an answer we must turn to the
! complicated and dramatic first stanza.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The poet meets the rebels at close of day, a significant
jtime for Yeats, when the frustrated desires of the day
i
often become manifest in symbolic activities, above all,
dreams and visions. Their faces are vivid, presumably
because they walk into the sunset while Yeats has his back
to it. It _is^ almost as if they carry the sun--and their
54
objective personalities?--into the evening. They are the
fire of the present— and perhaps the future, while Dublin
burns--in contrast to the ancient fire at the club. But
vivid here is ambiguous, meaning either lively, alive or
brilliant and (too) colorful, like motley. Yeats and the
rebels hardly communicate. Yeats's "companions" are at
the club; to the patriots he speaks only politely. But
I
while these words may be "meaningless," they are not
insignificant in the poem's rhetoric. They are, for
example, consciously opposed to the political language of
patriots, which might be considered "impolite and
.meaningful." While "they" are full of passionate
i
intensity, Yeats lacks all conviction, a stance conveyed
\
,in the very repetition of the phrase "polite meaningless
jwords," which serves no other purpose than to fill out the
line; there is not even the need for a new rhyme to
jsuggest some semantic import. The repetition of the
iphrase is an act of self-indulgent redundancy, which is a
far cry from the language of the counter or desk— where
words are the currency of exchange; or the language of
Irish political oratory, where the referent is always the
same: the "England" of one age is the "England" of
janother; to be a "hero" in '98 means the same as being a
i
"hero" in *16. Yeats lingers in the stanza as he would
jlinger with the patriots; he has time on his hands. What
' ~ ’ 3 polite (or politic) than that? And while
"they" have come from counter or desk, from where has he
come? We can only assume from producing poetry, a
I
jpractice that Yeats argued in "Adam’s Curse" was a noble
and excruciating toil, despite the accusations of the
priestly set. Now things have changed. Yeats no longer
asserts his toil but his idleness--which is a far better
thing in these circumstances. Otium cum dignate. In
j"Easter 1916," the poet clearly rides the horse that Homer
jrode, and not the one that drags road metal (or a wagon
P
*
|full of weapons).
| Though Yeats's hands are idle, his mind outruns the
I
(horse's feet. Stanza one enacts the kind of moment-by-
'moment "daring" thinking that constitutes the delicate
movement of the living stream: Even before Yeats can
jfinish his polite words to the rebels ("And thought before
I had done"), his thoughts leap to "a mocking tale or
jgibe." How should we take this gibe? On the one hand it
|obviously echoes the patriots' motley state, their
i
I
;clownish nature; they are the jesters for the British
i
King. (The poet himself is without fools cap.) Yet, on
the other hand, behind this resonance lurks the other
meaning of "jest" (geste), a notable deed. Finally, the
mocking jibe is not only a joke but also a change of
direction; a shift in the direction of a ship--shifts that
would be quite appropriate in the thought of a man who
sails back and forth between Dublin and London and has yet
56
to consider Byzantium as an alternative. And while all
these resonances certainly imply ambivalence toward the
rebels on Yeats's part, what matters rhetorically is that
this very ambivalence implies the kind of changing nature-
-some might call it a lack of commitment--that clearly
associates him with the living stream and the rebels
before Easter, when they were still "sweet voiced," "rode
the winged horse," and had "delicate and sweet thought"
and at the same time separates him from their present
existence as military heroes. To call "Easter 1916"
Yeats's palinode for "September 1913" implies that Yeats
imust feel closer to the rebels in 1916 than he did in
i
!l913. But the opposite is the case. They are how
I
I
jenchanted to a stone, to silence in the tomb. Yeats, by
jcontrast, still shows his ability to "live moment by
I
jmoment” and to shift his thoughts as quickly as the flames
i
of the Heraclitean turf fire at his club.
4. Sailing to Parliament: "Easter 1916” and History
!
Having identified the parts of the poem where Yeats
implies his lack of sympathies for the rebellion and its
aftermath, I now turn to the task of demonstrating how the
i
poem’s representation of historical events takes this
idisavowal one step further -- by attempting to appropriate
!
the Rebellion for Parliamentary politics. Let me begin
with lines already cited:
57
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
As already discussed, "Easter 1916" challenges the
conventions of patriotic literature, especially, in this
case, its habit of vilifying England. It is indeed hard
jto overemphasize the degree to which Irish political
Jrhetoric was organized around an "anti-England" stance.
In Yeats's Nobel speech, for example, he mentions that
during the 90s, and before the literary movement,
children of Ireland were taught one simple catechism:
i"What is the source of evil in the world?" "England."28
|Yet although Yeats's mention of England in "Easter 1916"
{is intended to dilute some of the highly charged political
j
sentiment rising in the wake of the rebellion executions,
it in itself carries a potent rhetorical charge.
i
j In the first place, it is historically inaccurate,
lit may be true that in the early days after the rebellion
Yeats believed, as many did, that the rebellion was
motivated by the fact that Home Rule negotiations were
2 8 This "Anti-English" stance in the Irish political
rhetoric often created some strange bedfellows. During
the labor lockouts of 1913, for instance, the Catholic
church condemned the labor movement because it was funded
by the English, while Yeats himself worried that labor
'unrest sprang from a hatred of things English. Yeats,
Pearse, and others, of course, condemned the petit-
bourgeois classes of Ireland for being over influenced by
the English, while Arthur Griffith could mobilize opinion
against the Abbey Theatre for being too Anglophilic.______
58
being held up by the war. But by the time he wrote the
poem in the late summer, he would have known that such was
not the intention. In short, by the time Yeats's composed
the poem. Home Rule was a dead horse.29 Poetry may be
more philosophical than history, but in Yeats's case, it
is also more ideological: the attempt to fasten the
spirit of the rebellion to the call for Home Rule signals
Yeats's own desire to reaffirm the parliamentary methods
of Parnell, O'Leary, and others, like the Irish Party,
which were quickly becoming supplanted by Sinn Fein style
activism.
Yeats goes even further than ignoring the true
|
: intentions of the rebels, however, or even of supplanting
|those intentions with his own. He heightens the
rhetorical impact of such a move by paying an inordinate
amount of attention (even a sort of nursing care) to the
lintentions of England:
l
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
Yeats is the matchmaker; England, the sincere suitor;
Ireland, one presumes, must play the patient Griselda. By
^affirming the good intentions of England, Yeats denies the
I 29"The essential political factor behind the Rising
of 1916 was the rejection of the Home-Rule-with-partition
package which Redmond had accepted and for which Redmond--
most unwisely--had advised Irishmen to go and fight in
Flanders." (C. C. O'Brien, States of Ireland (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1972), 88. __________________
| 59
!significance of the consequences of its response to the
[Easter Rebellion. If anything, Yeats seems more concerned
i
iwith excusing these consequences than bemoaning them, as
can be seen in the letter to Lady Gregory on 11 May, part
of which is printed here:
The Dublin tragedy has been a great sorrow
and anxiety. ... I see that an old friend
Henry Dixon--unless there are two of the
name--who began with me the whole work of
the literary movement has been shot in a
barrack yard without trial of any kind. I
have little doubt there have been many
miscarriages of justice. . . . The wife of
a Belgian Minister of War told me a few
days ago that three British officers had
told her that the command of the British
army in France should be made over to the
French generals, and that French generals
have told her that they await with great
anxiety the result of the coming German
attack on the English lines because of the
incompetence of the English Higher Command
as a whole. . . . I see therefore no reason
to believe that the delicate instrument of
Justice is being worked with precision in
Dublin. I am trying to write a poem on the
men executed--"terrible beauty has been
born again."30 (L 612-13).
The juxtaposition of Yeats’s "birthing images" in
this passage reveals his partisanship. His focus on the
30 Why did the exact line, as proposed, not end up in
the poem? First, it has four stresses, and a poem with
that meter would have made it easy for patriotic
iappropriation, something, we have seen, that Yeats wanted
[to avoid. Second, the word that was cut--"again"--is also
Isignificant; Maud Gonne's trope for Easter Week, cited in
I the same letter, one recalls, was "tragic dignity has
returned to Ireland" (L 613), a phrase which calls into
play the resurrection motif that, as we have also seen,
Yeats worked to repudiate.
| 60
irebel action is its consequence: the "terrible beauty"
i
jthat is born, the English are spoken of in terms
(intentions alone: "I have little doubt there have been
many miscarriages of justice." The English have conceived
a germ of justice that is still-born; the Irish have
brought a monster to full term. What is more striking is
the convoluted prose by which Yeats relates a story whose
only purpose seems to be excusing the British acts--
ascribing them to the "incompetence" of the military,
rather than the policies and strategies of the British
Empire. According to Yeats, England's "instrument of
i
i
iJustice" (which must mean the courts martial, mass
,arrests, firing squads) are like fine scalpels whose
i
precision can only be vitiated by clumsy handling. In
isum, Yeats condemns the Emperor's drunken soldiery while
i
exonerating the Empire itself. The same goal is implied
in "Easter 1916": "England may keep faith"--their
I
jintentions are the key to their actions--but the rebels
engender a "terrible beauty"; they should be judged by
the consequences.
The comfort that Yeats took in the intentions of the
Empire suggests that the sympathies of the poem would have
(pleased few Irish at the time, save perhaps the Anglo-
I
(Irish. It is this sensitivity to the political views of
his audience that explains the poem's interesting
publication history. On 8 October 1916 Maud Gonne, then
— — — — --------------------------------6r
living in Paris, enclosed at Yeats’s request a copy of
"Easter 1916" in a letter to John Quinn, because he hoped
the French censors would be more lenient than the English.
Maud writes, "I don't think he need fear either in the
very least." She then explains why she thinks the poem is
unworthy of the rebellion or of Yeats's talent: "England
and Ireland are too far apart for a writer to be able to
keep one eye on one and the other on the other without a
squint."31 But Yeats continued to feel anxious about the
reception in store for the poem. Sometime in 1916 he gave
an early version to Clement Shorter for publication among
his friends.32 Shorter, editor of the Illustrated London
News and Sphere, was part of the circle of artists and
patrons that both Yeats and his father traveled with, and
I
Yeats might indeed have allowed Shorter to publish the
poem to help J. B. Yeats.33 But while Shorter printed
only 25 copies of an elegantly bound edition, dated "25
31 Nancy Cardozo, Lucky Eyes and a High Heart: The
Life of Maud Gonne (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-
Vlerrill, 1978), 315. Hereafter Cardozo in text.
3 2 Knowing that Shorter would only distribute the poem
among the "insiders" of this movement may explain why the
jShorter version is so intimate about the details of
Constance Markievicz's life ("All that she got she spent,
/ Her charity had no bounds") and so willing to claim
Pearse for "our winged troublesome horse," lines that were
substantially revised for the next published version.
33 In 1899 JBY, who had completed some sketches of
Shorter, writes to Yeats urging him to submit something to
Shorter's new literary magazine Sphere: "If we help him
he will help me--not us but me," he writes. (cited in PF,
212) .
I 62
'September, 1916," he apparently did not distribute all of
the copies at once. . Yeats writes him on 28 March 1917:
Please be careful with the Rebellion poem.
Lady Gregory asked me not to send it to you
until we had finished our dispute with the
authorities about the Lane pictures. She
was afraid of it getting about and damaging
us & and she is not timid.34
In both cases, Yeats is highly concerned with upsetting
the British authorities. The question is, in what way?
i
Was it that the poem was so incendiary and partisan?
Probably not. What seems more plausible is that Yeats
jworried about the association the poem implies between the
I
^rebels and "our winged troublesome horse," feared the
jdamage that would come to the image of the Irish Dramatic
Movement, which had made its English reputation by being
inon-political and following the Arnoldian path to sweeten
and enlighten the Irish philistines and barbarians.
i
j But Yeats's early concern about the British
'readership seems contradictory in light of the later
publication history of the poem. It first became a poem
for "general readership" in 1920, when the Anglo-Irish war
was at its height. Conor Cruise O'Brien, in fact, in an
I 34 Unpublished letter in the Berg collection, New York
[Public Library, cited in Torchiana, 78. While Finneran
[suggests that this letter implies that Shorter did not
publish the poem until 1917, there is no clear evidence of
that. Yeats had been "asked" by Lady Gregory not to send
it; the tone implies that he did so but was now warning
Shorter not to compromise his position with her. ___________
63
essay short on praise for Yeats's character, actually
{praises him for publishing the poems at this time— "when
jthe pot had boiled over"--as "probably one of the boldest
i
1 [moves] in Yeats's career."35 But this praise must be
|tempered by noting the publication details. O'Brien
{considers the Rebellion poems to be essentially patriotic,
and they may have been in 1916, when a poem like "Red Rose
iTree" or "Sixteen Dead Men" would have heightened the
{intense regret over the death of the patriots. Their
^publication in 1920 would hardly have inspired the Irish,
jhowever, because none of the poems was published in
i
Ireland. "Easter 1916" was published alone on October 23
in The New Statesman, a British liberal paper, and again
;in the American Dial in November along with several other
poems, including "The Red Rose Tree," "Sixteen Dead Men,"
"On a Political Prisoner," "Towards Break of Day," "Demon
iand Beast," and "The Second Coming." "Easter 1916" was
^also published alongside "The Rose Tree," "On a Political
Prisoner," "Towards Break of Day," and "The Second Coming"
in the London Nation on 6 November 1920. Considering the
fact that Yeats worried about the response of the English
authorities to "Easter 1916" in 1917, it seems
contradictory that he would publish it so freely before
jtheir very eyes three years later.
35 O'Brien, Passion, 239
64
But this contradiction can be explained. What
O'Brien misses here, as do all critics who try to secure a
i
patriotic voice for "Easter 1916" and its companion poems,
1
jis that by 1920 Yeats--like so many conservative Irish,
and most English--could now clearly witness the by-product
of the Rebellion in all of its horror. "The terrible
beauty," as Sean O'Casey puts it, "had begun to lose its
good looks." (Is it any accident that "Easter 1916"
iappeared in several places beside "The Second Coming,"
!
jwritten in 1919 at the height of the republican energies,
[when the "terrible beauty" has become a "rough beast"?)
fIn this context, "Sixteen Dead Men" and "The Red Rose
Tree" can be seen as attempts to explain the root of the
!lrish troubles to non-Irish readers, but that explanation
i
,is a limited and reductive one, inasmuch as the historical
(
^dynamics of the Rebellion are blamed exclusively on the
i
mystic, sacrificial ideals of the doom-eager rebels. To
whom, for instance, does the "our" in the last stanza from
"Sixteen Dead Men" refer?
How could you dream they'd listen
That have an ear alone
For those new comrades they have found,
Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,
Or meddle with our give and take
; That converse bone to bone?
i
i
jThe lines imply that the politeness of "our give and
take," the Parliamentary politics of Home Rule, which was
i 65
jnow being demolished, is in sharp contrast to the path of
Pearse and Connolly:
"0 plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree."
i
t
Seen from the perspective of the Irish nationalist reading
the poem in 1916 or 1917, this may be taken as a radical
verse; but seen from the eyes of the Parliamentarians of
|1920, these lines can only remind them of the fanatical
i
jobjectives--drenched in mystic Catholicism--of the rebels
|and their equally bloody consequences, which included the
I
■Irish loss of faith in their existing Parliamentary party.
I
<
js. The Terrible Beauty: The Fear of Motley in "Easter
1916"
The question can now be asked whether the famous line
I"a terrible beauty is born" is actually oxymoronic, as
i
many readers have claimed, or whether it only appears so
for those readers who are not aware of the rhetorical
dynamics and political implications of "beauty" and
"terror" for Yeats and his circle. I would like to close
by considering this question, which I must do by first
examining the ways that the poem deals with other
»
i
"mixtures."
As many critics have pointed out, the phrase "where
motley is worn" in the opening stanza becomes transformed
... 66
by the closing stanza into "Wherever green is worn,1 1 a
transformation that is meant to suggest a change in
Yeats's own thought about the rebels, who have been
"transformed utterly" before his eyes, divested of their
motley and clownish qualities into true heroes.
"Wherever green is worn," then is to be seen as a
patriotic echo of many Fenian tunes, especially "Green on
my Cape" and "The Wearing of the Green."36 Yet other
readings of these lines are possible. While the final
line may imply a purification, from motley colors to
Ijreen, it may also suggest a simplistic reduction. That
is, the rebels will be remembered "Now and in time to be /
Wherever green is worn"— and only where green is worn. Or
only those who "where the green," only those with Fenian
sympathies, will be expected to cheer for the rebels. In
other words, wherever there is true patriotism, these
heroes will be remembered. That this reading was dominant
in Yeats's mind in 1916 is suggested by the fact that in
the Shorter edition of the poem, circulated among the
English and Anglo-Irish, the line "Wherever green is worn"
does not appear. This suppression not only damages the
jtight symmetry (and numerology) of the poem— four stanzas,
jtwo of 24 lines and two of 16 (an echo of the date of the
Rebellion, 24/4/16), it leaves the final line without its
resonant rhyme, a crucial element of closure. Despite
36 Zimmerman, 167-70; cited in Jeffares, Commentary.
j 67
jthis formal and ideological hazard, the suppression seems
: valuable rhetorically: To claim that only true patriots
Iwill be moved by the executions, as the line suggests,
i
iwould hardly have seemed politically neutral (polite and
I
meaningless) to the English readers.
Nonetheless, if the same reduction is seen as a
gesture of exclusion, rather than inclusion, the line can
be turned against the patriots. What if this reduction is
ia mistaken and dangerous part of the rebel strategy, to
!
|try to capture Ireland only for those who wear the green
jwith pride, and excluding all others? What if Sinn Fein
I
separatism would mean a suppression of the Protestant
minority? This reading is supported by the general tone
I
of the poem toward the Sinn Fein project: "Hearts with
one purpose alone / ... / Trouble the living stream."
In this view, Yeats is castigating the rebels for wanting
Ito be alone and separate while the living stream,
especially represented by the Literary Revival, wants "to
bring the classes together."
That the same line can blame both those who do not
mourn the rebels and those who do can certainly be taken
as a sign of Yeats's poetic genius. But history provides
I the other complicated meanings that reverberate throughout
|the poem. For example, the Easter Proclamation was not
originally part of the Sinn Fein project— even though it
was eventually taken up by that party. (The attempt to
I 68
■identify it with the aims of the Sinn Fein party was, as
;mentioned, originally an English ploy to Justify the
arrest of 3000 patriots.) Furthermore, the Easter
I
iProclamation was clearly more heterogeneous in its aims
i
than Yeats makes it out to be in "Easter 1916.” The
jproclamation of the rebellion, addressed to "Irishmen and
jlrishwomen,H called for the removal of the oppressor that
jhad separated groups in Ireland (Catholics and
i
Protestants) that need not be separated. Naively,
i
•perhaps, the rebels saw the cause of the interreligious
\
1
tension to be the by-product of colonialism, a thesis not
by itself unsophisticated.37 Thus, the Republicans
dreamed of a heterogeneous state, a state where the
hierarchies inherent in colonialism would be removed and
where different groups--like the poor, the working class,
and women--would be represented and treated to an Irish
governance more equitable than the British one. That
sense of coalition was also evident in the rebellion
itself, which did a great deal more than the Irish
Literary Movement to "bring the classes together."
Standing trial for treason against England was a strange
mixture of classes (from Countess Markievicz to John
MacBride) and political ideologues (from the nationalist
Pearse to the internationalist Connolly). Such a mixture
i 37 This issue is treated in the final chapter of C. C.
[o^Brien, States of Ireland. ________________
{was also manifest in the Republican flag, the tri-color.
And it is this same vision that the Republicans
4
maintained when they rejected the English offer to a
i
[limited Home Rule, excluding the Ulster counties, in the
;summer of 1916. Indeed, during this debate it was hardly
the Republicans who cheered "Ourselves, ourselves, alone";
it was in fact the Ulster Brigades who organized in order
i
{to secure--by revolution if need be--the separate entity
|of the Ulster counties from any unifying plan of the
>
Catholic republicans. They wanted no part in the tri
color rebellion or in a motley-colored state. In those
i
places where only orange is worn, the Easter Rebellion
meant only terror; there was nothing beautiful about it.
Which vision--the motley or the separatist— does
t"Easter 1916" commend? One certainly wonders why Yeats
did not claim that the rebels would be remembered "Where
the tri-color is worn." Could it be that Yeats himself
j
{was more terrified by the motley mixture that the
Rebellion demonstrated than he was by the purity of
separateness? It is here, I contend, that the alleged
oxymoron "terrible beauty" acquires its full social
meaning. As we have seen, Yeats's primary worry about the
rebellion was its dangerous mixture of literature and
ipolitics. The ambivalence of "Easter 1916," then, is
Iprobably the result of Yeats' mixed emotions, but not the
i
(mixture that critics have claimed, arising out of his
70
contrary allegiances. The mixture comes instead from an
ideological contradiction and a paradoxical desire:
abhorrence at the motley coalition that constituted the
force of the rebellion and a simultaneous attraction to
the purifying process of the executions that unified that
motley group into a coherent and heroic whole. The chaos
jof life became orderly. (Even the "drunken, vainglorious
lout" MacBride becomes heroic through this process.)
Although Yeats was obviously attracted to the alchemical
features of the executions, he could not--or would not--
ijoin in the patriotic fervor that such an attraction
demanded. Instead, he appropriates the purifying process
of the rebellion aftermath, for his own ideological
purposes; he replaces the national memory of heroes with
lis own personal memory of rebels, and projects the pure
state of the rebels not toward the future--where they will
oecome saintly, heroic martyrs without flaw--but to the
past, when they were sweet, delicate, and purely literary.
The historical memory of the Irish simplifies the rebels
in one way, the aesthetic memory of Yeats simplifies them
in another. Thus, while the famous refrain seems to
create an oxymoronic mixture of "terror" and "beauty,"
the poem actually enacts an alchemical process that keeps
them quite distinct. And by doing that, the poem also
displays Yeats's disdain for heterogeneity, heteroglossia,
and coalitions--mixed or crane bags of any kind. Yeats
71
simply could not abide any genuine bringing of classes
together, especially in an Ireland where Ulster and the
Counties would be mingled. For Yeats in 1916, pied beauty
is terrible beauty.
In its implicit desire for a clear separation of the
green from the motley, the literary from the political,
and personal memory from historical memory, the rhetoric
of "Easter 1916" actually shares more with that of the
Ulster royalists than it does with County Republicans.
And in its sanctifying elegy for the rebels in their pre
revolutionary state, "Easter 1916" becomes an dirge for "A
world . . . swept away," a world where the cultivating
influences of England could continue in Ireland through
the conduit of the Anglo-Irish houses and the Abbey
Theatre. The "Easter Rebellion" not only engendered a
"terrible beauty" but, according to Yeats, a "fabulous,
formless darkness," an intermingling of political,
religious, and literary desires, a "blood-dimmed tide."38
3 8 It was precisely this mixture that Yeats would
resist for the rest of his life. In 1937, he writes, in
what must be a chilling passage for anyone who knows what
jthe next years would bring to Europe: "When I stand upon
O'Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that
discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where
modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague
hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that
wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead
others the same vague hatred arises . . . . " (Essays,
526).
i ....... —
72
PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE: ANIMA HOMINIS AND THE GHOSTS OF
RHETORIC
Trojans, never trust that horse.
Aeneid II
1. Per Arnica Silentia Lunae and The Masking of History
When W. B. Yeats completed the manuscript of Per
Arnica Silentia Lunae, then titled An Alphabet, he wrote
his father to explain that the "little philosophical
book," was intended to be a "a kind of prose backing to my
poetry" and was addressed, he specified, especially to
reviewers, "who find it easier to write if they have ideas
to write about" (12 August 1917; L 624-5). One should be
dubious of this description, not only because Yeats's
father suspected his son's magical diversions, but also
because few contemporary critics found Per Arnica a useful
guide. Most reviewers, in fact, concurred on three
points: that the book was dreamlike and mystifying;1 that
1 Current Opinion (May 1918) called it "strange and
obscure . . .the entire argument moves in an atmosphere
that seems to oscillate between consciousness and
dreaming. Yeats at times leaves the reader in a state of
complete mystification." Edward Shanks said, "And I
sometimes wonder whether Mr. Yeats is not mistaken in
supposing that is mystical by nature, and whether the
mystical element in his writings is not merely a
magnificent pretense to which he has fallen the first and
most complete victim." The Dial (28 March 1918), 286-287.
73
it was a confusing hodge-podge of poetry and prose;2 and
finally, that it illustrated the cloudy mind-set of the
Celtic race.3 T. S. Eliot spoke for many when he called
the book, "a constant source of bewilderment and
distress." As Richard Ellmann's apt comment reveals,
later readers have tended to find the work just as
bewildering; "[It] is built," he says, "out of evasion so
skillful that the reader is never sure whether he is being
presented with a doctrine or with a poem in prose"
(Ellmann, MM, 223).
Although such complaints suggest that Per Arnica
failed as a philosophical guidebook and moreover did
little to elucidate The Wild Swans at Coole with which it
was paired, they point, nonetheless, to the work's success
as a rhetorical performance. For Per Arnica demonstrated--
as much in its presentation as in its argument (and for
2"The line between poetry and prose wears thin in
days when the former often suggests prose without the
rhythm. William Butler Yeats, in the two essay-sketches
iput together under that most poetic title, "Per Arnica
jSilentia Lunae," illustrates the opposite conditions. His
prose is touched with the same wistful sensitiveness, the
same quality of lyrical expression, that make him the
typical Celtic poet." The Nation, 106:275 (28 March
1918), 326
3"Where we can follow him, he is a guide to be
trusted, and then suddenly he leaves us in a cloud.
jSuddenly he talks a language we do not understand; we do
not know whether it is a language at all or gibberish. Is
that but one instance of the eternal difficulty between
the Irishman and the Englishman?" ("Reality by Moonlight",
iTimes Literary Supplement (7 February 1918). Unsigned
jreview of Per Arnica Silentia Lunae Reprinted in W.B.
jYeats: A Critical Heritage, pp. 206-210 (p. 209).
74
most critics once and for all)--that Yeats in 1917 was a
poet attuned more to the other world than this one, more
interested in dreaming than communicating, and more likely
to be found pursuing magical figures in his tower than
pursuing political influence in the Commons.4 It is
indeed this ethos that one discerns in most of Yeats's
writing during the years following the Easter Rebellion,
an ethos that would later be enacted in the "meditation"
poems, delineated in A Vision, and that would become
complicated (and perforce revised) when Yeats entered the
Free State Senate. Per Arnica, then, not only introduces
readers to the idea of the mask, but it realizes the
mask's rhetorical potential.
Perhaps Yeats's most cited but least analyzed texts,
Per Arnica has earned its popularity among critics
iprimarily on account of the following passage, with its
elegant Kantian dichotomy between rhetoric and poetry:
We make from the quarrels with others
rhetoric, but the quarrels with ourselves,
poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a
confident voice from remembering the crowd
they have won or may win, we sing amid our
uncertainty; and, smitten even in the
presence of the most high beauty by the
knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm
shudders (Myth 331).
4 That Yeats was interested in the rhetorical
functions of the work can be seen by the fact that 1800
copies were published, the most volumes of any works
outside of Autobiography and The Tower after the Rebellion.
75
Besides enacting the stylistic difference that Yeats
intuits between the "confident voice" of the orator and
the "shuddering" rhythms of the "smitten" poet, and
exemplifying the mixture of styles that reviewers found so
unwieldy, these lines also culminate Yeats's habitual
attacks on rhetoric (and rhetors) that commenced with his
earliest critical essays. Although Yeats's famous
dichotomies do open themselves to deconstructive reversal,
perhaps the most apposite procedure is to follow the
reading method that Yeats himself suggests would do the
most damage. That method appears if we read backward from
the famous passage. The distinction between the poet and
rhetor is not the opening to an argument; rather, it is
the aphoristic conclusion to Yeats's theory about the
artist's compensatory relation to the world. Before Yeats
elaborates that theory, however, he offers an important
caveat:
When I think of any great poetical writer
of the past (a realist is a historian and
obscures the cleavage by the record of his
eyes), I comprehend, if I know the
lineaments of his life, that the work is
the man's flight from his entire horoscope,
his blind struggle in the network of stars.
(my emphasis; Myth 328)
The historian is bracketed here for good reason: Only as
"realist" and "historian" can one expose Yeats's
ideological project in Per Arnica and, consequently,
resolve the cleavage (and ultimately heal the breach) that
76
Yeats posits between a poet's life and work--alternatively
formulated as the struggle with the world versus the
struggle with the self and as the division between
rhetoric and poetry.
Partly because of the difficulty of decoding Per
Arnica, and partly because they have read the work through
the lens of Yeats's later philosophical and religious
systems, earlier commentators have preferred to read the
book as the germ of a complete work rather as the thing
itself. Most typically it is discussed as a Paterian
forerunner to A Vision; a rough draft of Yeats's notions
about the mask, the anti-self, and the Daimon; or the
guidebook to the honeymoon reveries of Mrs. Yeats.5
Although such readings are accurate and justified as far
as they go, by focusing on the state of Per Arnica as a key
to Yeats's future mythologies, they obscure its importance
as a rhetorical performance in its own right. Per Arnica
has been studied as doctrine more than desire, as dogma
and theory more than argument; critics have gleaned from
its pages an explanation of the mask and the anti-self
without seeing how Yeats aligned these ideas or for what
historical, as well as aesthetic, purpose he did so.6
Per Arnica is not only a record of Yeats’s religious
history, it is a public display of that record. Yeats's
5
6 See in particular Bloom, Levine, Langbaum, and Lipinsky.
77
introspection is performed before hundreds of journal
reviewers. Critics are partially right when they note
that Per Arnica contains a number of insightful
generalizations about the poet's situation in the world,7
that it is marked by an "overly theoretical character,"
and that its insights into the human spirit are as
universal as Jungian psychology.8 Yet the very structure
of the book itself suggests the need for a historical and
contextual reading to supplement these other approaches.
Per Arnica, in the first place, is riddled with dates.
The poem "Ego Dominus Tuus," which opens the book, is
dated December 1915. The first half of the book, Anima
Hominis, is dated 25 February 1917, and the second, Anima
Mundi, 9 May 1917. On 11 May Yeats added a Prologue and
an Epilogue, addressed to "My dear Maurice," Yeats's pet
name for Iseult Gonne. But this plethora of dates masks
history as well as reveals it. When Yeats opens Per Arnica
with the poem "Ego Dominus Tuus" as a kind of epigraph,
he suggests that a continuity existed in his beliefs about
literature and politics from late 1915 to the spring of
1917. Yet nothing could be more misleading. Even Harold
Bloom, who does not typically focus on biographical
7Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme
in Modern Literature.
8 James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The
Perennial Philosophy--Yeats and Jung (Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1980), passim.
78
detail, suggests the significance of this period when he
notes: "Future and still better-informed criticism of
Yeats than we have had should focus itself upon the two
years from late 1915 to late 1917, for these were the most
important in Yeats's imaginative life" (198). To this
astute comment I would add only that Yeats's imaginative
life and political life are profoundly meshed.
The year that is conspicuously absent from Per Arnica,
1916, was the annus terribilis of the Easter Rising,
which, as I argued in the previous chapter, profoundly
challenged Yeats's early dreams about the poet's public
role as a promoter of heroic mythologies. The continued
influence of that event is suggested by the fact that
Yeats completed Per Arnica during the one-year anniversary
of the week of the Easter executions. Is it an accident
that Yeats dreams of "eyelids that do not quiver before
the bayonet" (Myth 325) given that what was remarkable
about Sean MacBride's execution is that he refused a
blindfold?9
9 I would thus disagree with Levine when he says "Per
Arnica is thus one of the few places in Yeats's work where
he is willing to dispense with the primacy of nationalism
(though not with his Irish ghosts)" (84). Levine compares
this stance to that in The Dreaming of the Bones, which he
finds explicitly nationalist. Yet whereas Per Arnica was
published in 1800 copies. The Dreaming of the Bones was
published in a private edition by the Cuala Press, and
this in 1919. It was not performed at the Abbey until
1931. Thus, it is hard to find that poem evidence of
Yeats's nationalism at the time, for Yeats was not afraid
of producing the plays that he thought would inspire (or
deflate) the Irish.
79
Scholars who do not read Yeats historically tend to
claim "Ego Dominus" to be a guide, precis, or motto to Per
Arnica.10 These readers have perhaps been led astray by
Ezra Pound's joke that Hie and Ille should be called Hie
and Willie, which suggests that Ille's ideas and Yeats's
ideas in the late months of 1915 were interchangeable.
But things had changed utterly since the Easter Rebellion.
Per Arnica does not simply enumerate the old themes of "Ego
Dominus"; it questions, subverts, and ultimately rejects
them. In "Ego Dominus" Ille represents a Coleridgean and
cosmic alternative to Hic's Wordsworthian sincerity; Ille
insists on the mediation of mind over matter, he rejects
the idea that an artist "finds" his material rather than
"makes" or "fashions" it, and he rejects as absurd Hic's
desire to "find [him]self and not an image" (Myth 321).
Ille emulates instead Dante's pursuit of "the apple on the
bough most out of reach"; he seeks "an image not a book"
and quests not for himself but for the "mysterious one who
yet shall . . . look most like me, being indeed my
jdouble." Robert Langbaum argues that "Ego Dominus Tuus"
presents "Hie, the poet Yeats started out as, and Ille,
the poet he was in the process of becoming" (Langbaum,
163). But the Yeats of Per Arnica is much closer to Hie
than Ille. In what appears a direct rejection of Ille's
beliefs, Yeats has quit the pursuit of the "unconquerable
10 Both Bloom (178) and Levine (5) read it this way.
80
delusion"; he rejects the guest for the anti-self as being
misconceived; he warns that the pursuit of the anti-self
is not one-sided (the anti-self also quests), and finally
now argues that to pluck the mask from the tree of Dodona
is not as simple as selecting one from the shelf of a
costume shop. The anti-self, he argues, is actually a
Daimon, with intentions and will of its own, and it is not
attracted to its likeness--as Ille naively believed and
Yeats himself claimed in "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the
Desolate Places (1914)"--but to its opposite. Moreover,
the Daimon seeks as vigorously as it is sought.11 By the
closing pages of Per Arnica, then, the Yeatsian persona
seems identical to Hie: "I begin to study the only self
ithat I can know, myself, and to wind the thread upon the
pern again." The pern metaphor suggests that Yeats may
become unwound once again, but as Per Arnica closes, Yeats
is clearly the solitary poet, venturing up and down his
spiral stair, oblivious to the ghosts, much less the
world, hovering outside his door. It is an ethos
exemplified by the image of the poet we find in "Phases of
the Moon," whom Robartes describes thus:
11 Thus I would disagree with critics like Herbert J.
Levine who hold that "The central conviction of Per Arnica
jis that a man finds and improves himself by searching for
his opposite, which Yeats calls either mask, anti-self, or
'at its most mythological, Daimon" Yeats's Daimonic Renewal
|(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 4. (Hereafter
Levine; references in text. ) ___________________________ _
81
[T]hat shadow is the tower,
And the light proves that he is reading still.
He has found, after the manner of his kind,
Mere images; chosen this place to live in
Because, it may be, of the candle-light
From the far tower where Milton's Platonist
Sat late, or Shelley's visionary prince:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;
And now he seeks in book or manuscript
What he shall never find. (CP 160-1)
To understand Yeats's antithetical retreat to the tower,
however, we must refer not only to his poetry but to the
primary world from which he withdrew.
Yeats wrote Per Arnica during one of the most
convulsive moments of European history. On 13 November
1916, Europe was shocked when the Somme offensive came to
an end, leaving over a million casualties and no
substantial change in the Western Front. In February of
the next year Germany began unrestricted submarine
warfare, making the trips between Ireland and London
especially dangerous. One month later, the United States
entered the war against Germany and, most significantly
for Yeats's thinking, the Russian Revolution began. In
sum, the primary and objective cycle of civilization,
inspired by mechanism and the French Revolution, as Yeats
would later explain, was reaching its perihelion. Viewed
in the light of this world-historical upheaval, Ireland's
political situation seemed particularly grave: The
terrible beauty engendered by the Easter Rising had
become a restless adolescent.
82
The beginning of 1917 marked a radical turn in Irish
politics. The parliamentary nationalism of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Party--which Yeats
had supported in its heyday and had come to consider even
■more forthright and profound in hindsight--was being
quickly supplanted by the republican and separatist
•nationalism of Sinn Fein. This process began in January
1917 when the Sinn Fein candidate Count George Plunkett--
the father of Joseph Plunkett, who had been executed in
1916--ran as an independent in the North Roscommon by-
elections, defeated the Irish party candidate, and refused
to take his seat.12 Similar victories by Sinn Fein--with
attendant refusals to serve--recurred in February, May,
and July. By the spring of 1917, as Yeats was composing
'Per Arnica--as Sinn Fein was being repressed again by the
Jauthorities, to the outrage of Maud Gonne--the Irish
began electing prisoners of these raids to seats; all of
them then refused to take their seats in the House of
Commons.13 As the London Times could report by 12 July
1917, "Unfortunately the constitutional Nationalists are
feeble and disunited." Romantic Ireland was alive and
12 Ward, 115.
13 During this time, even John Redmond of the Irish
Party turned down a Home Rule Bill that gave Ulster the
choice of exclusion, saying "If he had walked out of the
House of the Commons years ago it would have been better .
. . " (Cardozo, 317.)
83
well, but pragmatic and parliamentary Ireland was with
O'Leary in the grave.
What did Yeats think of this turn of events? One
answer is suggested by a passage in the Memoirs, written
in 1917, that recounts his early reactions to political
cycles in Ireland:
I had begun to dread Fenianism. Hitherto,
whenever the constitutional party had been
weakened, Fenianism had revived, and we
spoke always of the swing of the
pendulum, using a phrase used in England
for a mere change between Conservatism and
Liberalism. But with us that swing brought
death, defeat, and long discouragement.
(Mem 84)
Yeats's vision of Ireland's future was crystal clear.
There was no place for Yeats to stand among these
wars and rumors thereof. He spent the summers of 1916 and
1917 with Maud and Iseult Gonne in France. During the
first visit, he proposed to Maud, trying to convert her
from a patriot to a Paterian, offering to help her "forget
the stone and its inner fire for the flashing, changing
joy of life" (Cardozo, 312). He had promised himself
before leaving England that he would marry her only if
she "renounced all politics, including amnesty for
political prisoners" (Cardozo, 312). He also spent time
with Iseult, whose disagreements with her mother's
politics delighted him and whose interest in the French
Catholic mystics Yeats shared. They spoke of returning to
Ireland and promoting these writers to "civilize Dublin
84
Catholics," a project that Yeats worked hard to achieve.14
The Prologue, which is addressed to Iseult, asserts that
Per Arnica *s purpose is to supplement a "conversation,
often interrupted before, upon certain thoughts so long
habitual that I may be permitted to call them my
convictions" (Myth 319). Once again, Yeats claims to be
writing his beliefs as a way of masking his local
rhetorical intention. I, however, would argue that it
also constitutes a supplement to conversations with Maud,
namely those concerning his proposals of marriage and her
jcriticism of his general politics and, most recently, the
■poem "Easter 1916," which she had found unworthy of his
talents or of the event itself. Per Arnica, indeed, is
■perhaps more of a prosaic revision of that poem than it is
the poetic rough draft of A Vision.
Most important, Per Arnica supplements Yeats's
propaganda work with the Irish Literary Renaissance. That
project was reintroduced to Yeats by an excoriating letter
jfrom Lady Gregory in September 1916, in which she faulted
Yeats for wasting time in Calvados when his talents were
needed in Ireland:
14 Yeats wrote a letter to MacMillan, his publisher,
which stated that he wanted to have translations of the
Catholic mystics published in Ireland, and he also
promoted these writings in his essay "If I were Four-and-
Twenty (1919)" and in an interview with the Irish Times in
1923 while he was a Senator. The political impact of this
campaign will be considered in the next chapter.___________
85
I had been a little puzzled by your
apparent indifference to Ireland after your
excitement about the Rising. I believe
there is a great deal you can do, all is
unrest and is discontent, there is nowhere
for the imagination to rest; but there must
be some spiritual building possible just as
after Parnell's fall, but perhaps more
intense. (312 Cardova)
Lady Gregory seems more keen on the cycles of history than
Yeats himself? What, then, did she mean by "spiritual
building"? What parallels did she find between Ireland
after Parnell and Ireland after the Post Office? Yeats's
writings provide several answers to this question. He
spoke plainly, for instance, in 1934;
The fall of Parnell had freed imagination
from practical politics, from agrarian
grievance and political enmity, and turned
it to imaginative nationalism, to Gaelic,
to the ancient stories, and at last to
lyrical poetry and to drama. (Expl 343)
In 1917, however, Yeats was more tentative about the
meaning (and the consequences) of his earlier days as
propagandist. It was Parnell's death, he recalls in the
Memoirs, that enlivened Yeats's dream of "returning some
day [to Ireland] to begin some movement like that of Young
Ireland, though less immediately political." He explains:
"I knew by a perception that seemed to come into my mind
from without, so sudden it was, that the romance of the
Irish public life had gone and that the young, perhaps for
many years to come, would seek some unpolitical form for
86
national feeling" (50). The goals, however, are clear:
Parnell's difficulty was poetry's opportunity. The Gaelic
movement was to absorb the excess political energies by
cultural activities, and to transform rebellious energies
into Gaelic and Anglo-Irish sensibilities. Another clue
to the literary/political project that Yeats sought to re
animate in Per Arnica is to be found in his letters from
the nineties.15 Three distinct dreams are there
reiterated: The Irish must "formulate vague feelings"
(CL, 191); they must realize their Gaelic spirit and de-
Anglicize Ireland of that materialism of the Anglo-Saxon
(CL, 338-340); and, most important, they must "eschew
rhetoric" (CL, 432). Per Arnica argues for all of these
projects, but I shall begin by focusing on the most
important purpose of Anima Hominis--to embody Yeats's
dream of expelling rhetoric, once and for all, from the
emerald isle.
2. Per Arnica and the Eclipse of Rhetoric
Harold Bloom is the first major critic to take Per
Arnica seriously as literary philosophy. He calls it
Yeats's "great achievement in prose" and (contra Vendler)
ranks it above A Vision because it is
15 John Kelly (Ed) and Eric Domville (Assoc. Ed.) The
Collected Letters of W. B Yeats, Volume I, 1865-1895
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). ___________
87
closer to an aesthetic treatise, with
poetic influence a more major concern than
the vagaries of ghosts. Or rather, its
ghosts are poetic ghosts, imprisoned
imaginations and influences, like
Shelley's, that linger and haunt and will
not permit themselves to be lost. (Y, 185)
Though Bloom's commentary1 6 importantly recuperates Per
Arnica as a poetic, and not merely a mystical, text, it
misses a crucial point. In his rush to read the Per Arnica
as a theory of the poetic self, a forerunner to Yeats's
famous "Introduction," or as an example of Yeats's debt to
the Romantic withdrawal from the world in favor of the
antithetical quest, Bloom ignores that Yeats is always as
interested in escaping the primary vision as he is
pursuing the antithetical one. Per Arnica is just as
concerned with eclipsing rhetoric as with unveiling
poetry--even more so, in fact. To pay attention to the
"poetic ghosts" that Bloom mentions does not mean we
should forget the important "rhetorical ghost" in Per
Lmica--namely, the consummate statesman poet, Cicero--who
■is the real subject of these lines (ostensibly written
about Dante):
Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,
Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;
Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,
French and Italian vengeance on such pride
May fall like Antony on Cicero.
1 6 Like that of Herbert Levine.
88
That Cicero's execution is mentioned in the work
whose primary goal is to mask, eclipse, or silence
rhetoric (and which contains Yeats's most famous rhetoric
for doing precisely that) may be unconscious, but it is no
accident.17 An excerpt from an early unpublished draft of
An Alphabet expresses Yeats * s pronounced intentions to
escape rhetoric and the public acrimony it causes:
Could I not found an Eleusinian Rite, which
would bind into a common symbolism, a
common meditation, a school of poets and
men of letters, so that poetry and drama
would find the religious weight they have
lacked since the middle ages and perhaps
since Greece? I did not intend it to be a
revival of the pagan world, how could one
ignore so many centuries, but a
reconciliation, where there would be no
preaching, no public interest.
(cited in Ellmann, Identity, 305)
Yeats's explicit goal here is to "reconcile" pagan and
Christian influences in Ireland, to "Hellenize the
island," as Yeats's friend Gogarty might put it. (It was
a challenge that engaged Yeats continually over the next
decade, until he abandoned the idea and instead embarked
on a solo voyage to Byzantium.) Yeats's implicit aim--to
17 Yeats once stated that "no edition of Cicero" could
be counted among essential books of Irish reading (cited
in Marcus, 120). The Memoirs record another attempt at
suppression, which apparently Maud Gonne also noted:
"Presently Maud Gonne and I had a serious quarrel. . . .
It was the old issue. I had objected, I think, to the
great number of books of Irish oratory selected by him for
the country libraries, and in his [Taylor's] presence had
pressed my objection against rhetorical writing in a way
jthat seemed to touch upon his own gift" (Mem 66).__________
89
find a place "where there would be no preaching, no public
interest"--is the more daunting project, however, for it
means searching for a civilization where language is
always disinterested and no longer practical, political,
or persuasive--where language, in short, is no longer
action:
For those that love the world serve it in
action,
Grow rich, popular, and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is
action:
The struggle of the fly in the marmalade.
(CP 158)
Per Arnica indeed must be read in the long tradition
of philosophical attacks against rhetoric and
rhetoricians. This tradition has its roots in Plato, but
its most important fruit is probably Kant's Third
Critique, which marks the first time a philosopher beats
rhetoric with the stick of poetry. Kant views rhetoric as
a deceptive imaginative activity that holds the attention
but which proves, ultimately, to be a delusion, a mere
copy, a simulacrum. Poetry, by contrast, while showing
its hand as illusion, ultimately surprises the reader with
a new understanding of truth.18 Deceit/Truth;
18 The germane passages follow: "Rhetoric is the art
of transacting a serious business of the understanding as
if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of
conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a
serious business of the understanding." "Rhetoric, so far
as this is taken to mean the art of persuasion, i.e. the
art of deluding by means of a fair semblance . . . is a
90
Delusion/Illusion; Copy/Imitation; Rhetoric/Poetry; These
powerful Kantian dichotomies--filtered through Coleridge,
Arnold, and Pater— remain fully operative in Yeats's post-
Rebellion prose. The Memoirs, for instance, includes the
argument that the paucity of worthy Irish literature can
be blamed on the tendency of Irish writers to imitate,
emulate, and copy, rather than strive for organic
creation:
An imitation of the habits of thought, the
character, the manners, the opinions - and
those never at their best - of an alien
people was preventing the national
character from taking its own natural form,
and this imitation was spread by what I
called a system of bribery. Appointments,
success in all kinds, came only to these;
the springs of national life ran dry. (Mem
84)
Yeats remains Kantian even at his most nationalistic.
Imitation, emulation, mere copy, rhetoric— these arts have
no place in Yeats's aesthetic. By incurring a debt to
(and being bribed by) the world outside the poem and
outside of Ireland, these arts (and their artists) have
traded away their organic links to the Irish soil, dried
( dialectic, which borrows from poetry only so much as is
necessary to win over men's minds to the side of the
'speaker before they have weighed the matter, and to rob
jtheir verdict of its freedom. . . . In poetry everything
'is straight and above board. It shows its hand . . . it
jdoes not seek to steal upon and ensnare the understanding
with a sensuous presentation" (The Critique of Judgement,
jtr. J.C. Meredith [Oxford, 1928, 1973], p. 184.). _____
91
the national spring, and disqualified themselves from
honor.
Per Arnica's Virgilian title bears more significance
than critics have allowed, especially in light of the
work's heritage as an anti-rhetorical tract. In the
opening to Anima Mundi, Yeats claims that his title
represents a certain path of learning: "I have always
sought . . . to put myself to school where all things are
seen: A Tenedo tacitae per arnica silentia lunae. It is
true that the line whispers, as Ille must do to avoid
revealing his secrets to the ears of blasphemous men, and
it is also true that its exotic connotations suggest the
Yeatsian persona of the moon-struck wizard who cannot
endure the blazing sun.19 Nonetheless, Book II of the
Aeneid, where the line appears, suggests that Yeats's
secret and private studying cannot avoid or allay
political ends: The Greek ships, which Virgil describes
as moving from Tenedos by the safe and silent light of
the moon, are not stargazing but preparing themselves to
attack Troy, while within the city walls, Sinon is about
to unlock the secret doors of the Trojan horse. The sense
of doom that shadows these lines in their context no doubt
evokes Hugh Lane's dangerous sea journey on the Lusitania,
Yeats's own surreptitious voyages across the Irish Sea
*
with Maud and Iseult, and a sense of foreboding that must
19 See Memoirs p. lOOf. _______________
92
have mirrored the poet’s own mood about the state of
Ireland and the world. But the ghosts of Troy are
summoned not only for the sake of Romantic nostalgia;
Yeats also seeks to remind his readers of the catalyst of
their ruin— not Helen's beauty, but the rhetoric and
deception she launched. In the early days, Yeats could
cast Maud as Helen because her destructive power remained
local, not global; "Was there another Troy for her to
burn?" (my italics). When Yeats writes Per Arnica in the
wake of the Easter Rebellion, destruction is manifest. The
decision to change his original Greek title--An Alphabet--
to the Latin one also signals that Yeats no longer casts
himself as Paris seeking Helen, but Aeneas trying to
escape the burning towers with his family. Finally, by
citing Virgil's rather than the Greek versions of this
story, Yeats borrows Virgil's own rhetorical strategy,
convincing his reader to sympathize not with the heroic
Greeks but with the pious Trojans, whose capitol has just
been burned.
Aeneid II is indeed the most famous story in
classical literature that describes how a civilization can
be utterly destroyed by rhetoric. Its central passage
recounts how the wily Sinon tricked the Trojans with his
rhetorical powers into accepting the Wooden Horse as a
gift of the Gods. As Pope translates the popular lines:
Thus did the perjured Sinon's art prevail.
93
Too fondly we believed the study'd tale;
And thus was Troy, who bravely could sustain
Achilles' fury, when he swept the plain,
A thousand vessels, and a ten years war,
Won by a sigh, and vanquished by a tear.
By what rhetorical means did Sinon accomplish this task?
His primary strategy is not sophistry but ethos: "Trust
not the Greeks," he begins, and then recounts his own sad
tale of being deceived by the double talk of that most
famous Greek word warrior, Ulysses. It is, indeed, the
Trojans' sympathy for Sinon as a fellow victim of
deception that leads to their ruin.
It is important to bear in mind Sinon's ethical
argument, portraying himself as one more deceived than
deceiving, as we approach Per Arnica, because Yeats borrows
this rhetorical strategy wholesale. There is indeed
nothing less desirable to the poet of Per Arnica than
deception, whether it is deception in the material world
(Anima Hominis) or in the spiritual (Anima Mundi). In the
remainder of this chapter, I shall try to exorcise the
"ghost of rhetoric" that haunts Anima Hominis, and in the
next chapter, to analyze the "rhetoric of ghosts" in Anima
Mundi.
3. Anima Hominis; The Worldly Deceivers
"Ego Dominus Tuus" revolves around a famous passage
in which Ille asserts that the artist, unlike the
94
rhetorician and the sentimentalist, is neither deceiver
nor deceived:
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?2 0
Yeats opens Anima Hominis by portraying himself as the
Kantian reflector who has finally awakened from the
deceptions of the "common dream" and is now ready to list
those deceptions as a warning for his fellow poets. The
opening paragraphs, for example, narrate a double
deception: Yeats tells the story of how his dinner
companions are deceived by his uncharacteristic hostility
and overstatement (these outbursts, he implies, do not
represent him). Further, Yeats himself is mistaken to
believe that by retiring from their company and worshiping
at the "marmorean Muse" he will find "[him]self and not
[his] antiself": "How could I have mistaken for myself an
heroic condition that from early boyhood has made me
superstitious?" (Myth 325). Things are not what they
seem. Who is the poet, who the person? Which is the true
identity, which is the anti-self? Such knowledge comes
2 0 In the Memoirs this quality is granted only to
Aubrey Beardsely ("there was no fury, nothing but an icy
passion for all reality" [Mem 92]), but the articulation
of this ideal is elaborated throughout Per Arnica.
95
dearly, and only to those, artists or otherwise, "who are
no longer deceived":
The other self, the anti-self, or the
antithetical self, as one may choose to
name it, comes but to those who are no
longer deceived, whose passion is reality.
(Myth 331)
It is no easy task to awaken from this common dream,
however. For the world is filled with delusions. Even
Dante is reproached by Beatrice because "he followed, in
spite of warning dreams, false images" (Myth 330). And if
false images do not trap the poet, "false beauty" will:
"Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false
beauty as our offering to the world" (Myth 332). One
species of false beauty to which poets are especially
prone is allegory, in which the presentation of good and
evil fails to show a "mixed humanity": "How should I keep
my head among images of good and evil, crude allegories?"
(Myth 325). Allegory is a particularly dangerous pitfall
of pursuing the anti-self. As Yeats explains:
When I had this thought I could see nothing
else in life. I could not write the play
I had planned, for all became allegorical,
and though I tore up hundreds of pages in
my endeavor to escape from allegory, my
imagination became sterile for nearly five
years and I only escaped at last when I had
mocked in a comedy my own thought. (Myth
334)
96
The deep romantic roots of Yeats's rejection of allegory
notwithstanding, most critics assume that Yeats is here
repudiating one specific play, The Player Queen, on which
he had worked from 1907 to 191221. Considering the
political and rhetorical context of the work, however, I
would propose instead that Yeats is also repudiating his
early political allegories, The Countess Kathleen and
Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The rejection of allegory in Per
Arnica thus signals Yeats's nagging doubts about the impact
of his patriotic plays on the Easter rebels. Such an
interpretation is reinforced, I think, by Yeats's parallel
rejection of originality:
It is not permitted to a man who takes up
pen or chisel, to seek originality, for
passion is his only business, and he cannot
but mould or sing after a new fashion
because no disaster is like another. He
is like those phantom lovers in the
Japanese play who, compelled to wander side
by side and never mingle, cry: "we neither
wake nor sleep and, passing our nights in a
sorrow which is in the end a vision, what
are these scenes of spring to us?" (my
emphasis; Myth 339)
The general aesthetic is clear: Whatever appears to be
totally new--be it a new poem, a new political system, or
a new nation--is not the concern of the artist. As Yeats
would write in 1937, when aesthetic and political doctrine
became further intermingled: "Talk to me of originality
21 See Langbaum (148) and Levine (154).
97
and I will turn on you with rage" (E&I 522). The rhetoric
of the passage, nevertheless, is subtle: At the same
time that Yeats warns his fellow artists about the
deceptive appeal of writing allegories, he masks the fact
that he now lives in the wake of the historical effect of
allegorical writing; moreover, while he exposes the
absurdity (for genuine artists) of the typical Republican
rhetoric of "renewal," "morning," and "the dawn," he
ignores the significance (for the Irish nation) of the
recent "scenes of spring." The phrase "No disaster is
like another" directly contradicts the Republican appeal
to see all English atrocities as visitations of the same
suppression in different guises. One can assume the
"scenes of spring" that Yeats would will himself to ignore
are those surrounding the Easter Rising.
The cover art of Per Arnica is a Rosicrucian rose with
the thorns turned downward--a symbol of Yeats's two great
temptations in the world: "One time it was a woman's
face, or worse-- / The seeming needs of my fool-driven
land." Yet Per Arnica should not be taken as a revision of
"All Things Can Tempt Me." In that poem, and earlier ones
like it, Yeats typically linked amorous and political
pursuits (are they not both acts of courtship?). And in
the early poems Yeats implies that both pursuits seem
equally worthy (albeit troublesome) distractions from
literature. In Per Arnica, however, a different position
98
is presented. Yeats casts himself as one who has finally
seen through the "conjuring tricks" of politics; he has
been deceived but now comes to aver he will not be fooled
again.
Toward establishing himself as a master of revealing
deceptions, Yeats reifies his own historical conflicts
with Irish politics (conflicts that are directly referred
to in poems like "Adam's Curse," "All Things Can Tempt
Me," and "The Fascination of What's Difficult") into a
theory of poetic temperament that seems to guarantee the
poet's eternal disqualification from political life. The
pursuit of political influence is perhaps the most
dangerous deception for the poet:
When life puts away her conjuring tricks
one by one, those that deceive us longest
may well be the wine-cup and the sensual
kiss, for our Chamber of Commerce and the
Commons have not the divine architecture of
the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened
by the sun. The poet, because he may not
stand within the sacred house but lives
amid the whirlwinds that beset its
threshold, may find his pardon (Myth 333).
The poet will not "find his pardon" within the walls of
judicial institutions, but without, in the phantom-like
winds. To be caught helplessly within the Zeitgeist of
the historical cycle is not displeasing; it is, rather,
comforting, because it disbars (read: excuses) one from
political action. It thus makes sense that Yeats would
99
quote the lines from Dante which courageously reject the
summons of King and court:
The King, by whose rich grave his servants be
With plenty beyond measure set to dwell.
Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,
And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory.
(Myth 330-31)
Yeats’s respect for such an attitude entails a
particular irony, inasmuch as he would soon serve within
the great Consistory of the Free State Senate and within a
year praise unequivocally the "plenty beyond measure" of
ceremony's rich horn. Per Arnica is not A Vision, however,
and Yeats makes no claims to prophecy; its task, as we
have seen, is not to predict the future but to rebuke the
past. Yeats's most important rhetorical stance is that of
someone who has now, after years of following delusions,
become clearheaded enough to instruct his fellow poets in
his new found wisdom. His repeated stories of his own
deceptions, then, paradoxically declare his present
clearheadedness. The poet is a man speaking to men,
trying to convince them to stop speaking altogether.
Perhaps the best signal of Yeats's new stance in Per
Arnica is one already mentioned--the rejection of the
conscious pursuit of the mask, which Ille describes in
"Ego Dominus":
Some years ago I began to believe that our
culture, with its doctrine of sincerity and
self-realization, made us gentle and
100
passive, and that the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance were right to found theirs
upon the imitation of Christ or of some
classic hero. Saint Francis and Caesar
Borgia made themselves overmastering,
creative persons by turning from the
mirror to meditation upon a mask. (Myth
333)
This belief, which appears to be absolute, is then put
into perspective: In the past, he "was always thinking of
the element of imitation in style and in life, and of the
life beyond heroic imitation" (Myth 334). Now, things are
different. This reversal can be noticed in two ways:
First, by reading rhetorically, one can discern Yeats’s
change of perspective; in this passage he clearly marks
his current position by distancing it from previously held
ones. The second signal is not textual but historical: A
contemporary reader cognizant of Patrick Pearse's idea of
imitatio Christi and its destructive consequences in
Ireland would have been clued in to Yeats’s refusal here.
The pairing of Saint Francis and Caesar Borgia in this
rhetorical context, then, is not, a mere witticism; to the
contrary, it is a conscious rhetorical juxtaposition that
implies the tyranny that Yeats believes is latent in the
sacrificial ideal of the Easter martyrs.
Per Arnica explains Yeats’s rejection of the heroic
ideal, however, in cosmological, not historical, terms.
What the poet discovered, in sum, is that the pursuit of
101
"active virtue--as distinguished from the passive
acceptance of a code"— is a mutual pursuit:
Now I add another thought: the Daimon
comes not as like to like but seeking its
own opposite, for man and Daimon feed the
hunger in one another's hearts. Because the
ghost is simple, the man heterogeneous and
confused, they are but knit together when
the man has found a mask whose lineaments
permit the expression the man most lacks,
and it may be dreads, and of that only. . .
When I think of life as a struggle with
the Daimon who would ever set us to the
hardest work among those not impossible, I
understand why there is a deep enmity
between a man and his destiny, and why a
man loves nothing but his destiny. In an
Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is called,
as though to call him something that summed
up all heroism, "Doom eager." I am
persuaded that the Daimon delivers and
deceives us, and that he wove that netting
from the stars and threw the net from his
shoulder. (Myth 335)
Yeats's explanation of the deception of pursuing heroic
masks is more than personal. Indeed, Yeats's analogic
rhetoric has never been so clear. Yeats's insistence on
the power of the Daimon, or destiny, to pull a hero
inexorably toward destruction, willy-nilly, not only
anticipates A Vision's deterministic and despairing view
of history, it also shifts to a new level his ambiguous
position vis-a-vis the Easter rebels that began in the
poem "Easter 1916." The theory of the Daimon suggests
that the rebels were passive objects of fate, rather than
people who actively shaped Ireland's destiny. Yeats in
Per Arnica is no longer concerned with trying to persuade
102
those "hearts with one purpose alone" to take up delight
in the quotidian "flashing, changing joy of life." He is
now seeking the answer to the question "Who stalked the
Post Office?" His answer: the Daimon.
Yeats's rhetoric can be shown to be at least
partially successful in a recent study by Herbert J.
Levine. Levine does an admirable job of connecting
Yeats’s aesthetic and philosophical ideals in Per Arnica to
those in his other works. But by reading the book in
light of Yeats's texts instead of Irish contexts, Levine's
study uncritically adopts and reproduces Yeats's
ideological view of the Daimon. Of the Daimon, he
explains:
How does a character who has entered into
the struggle with his Daimon appear to
other human beings? Probably, he would
seem to us a monomaniac, obsessed with and
limited to one idee fixe, like the "doom
eager" heroes of "Easter 1916." (Levine,
42)
Yeats mentions the Easter rebels nowhere in Per Arnica,
but he obviously does not have to, because anyone reading
the work in the aftermath of the Rising would have
connected the phrase "doom eager" to those rebels, just as
Levine has done fifty years later. Levine is not only a
victim of Yeats's rhetoric, but he transforms that
rhetoric into one of the entrenched ideological positions
about the Rising. Yeats's rhetorical project in Per
103
Arnica--to separate himself (and all true poets) from those
poets who put their ideals into action on the steps of the
Post Office--is, at least with one reader, a profound
success.
On 6 September 1916, Yeats received a letter from W.
T. Horton that stated: "I gather from you that one cannot
be a Poet & and Hero: in other words to be a Hero you
must be a Zero. Well I prefer the Heroic Zero to the
Olympian Poet on his sham Olympus for it is a sham.”22
This letter reveals that Yeats's project to separate the
poet from the hero must have begun in the early months
after the Easter Rising. The goal of Per Arnica, then, is
to explain further— to Horton and people like him--why
the poet must remain on that "sham Olympus." Per Arnica
thus explicitly challenges the notion--popular in 1916
among Dublin writers such as Pearse, MacDonagh, Plunkett,
and A. E.--that a poet could be more than a poet, but
could be also a soldier, scholar, horseman, . . . even a
politician.23 Yeats's response to these beliefs and the
2 2 Letters Written to W. B. Yeats: Volume Two,
Richard Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M.
Murphy (eds.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977),
326.
2 3 The literary-political ideals of Pearse and
MacDonagh have been noted in the previous chapter. As a
clue to that of Plunkett, and for A.E. himself, see A.E.,
The National Being, published in 1916, and reprinted in
1917, 1918, and 1920, especially its dedication: "To the
Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett: A good many years ago you
grafted a slip of poetry on your economic tree. I do not
know if you expected a hybrid. ... This book is a
104
social practices they inspire is to develop a remarkable
theory of poetic temperament that attempts to separate—
once and for all, it seems--poet from hero, from sage, and
from saint. The different types are to be distinguished
by their characteristic responses to the seductive ploys
of the Daimon: The poet moves gingerly toward the anti
self and touches it only tentatively, and if deceived by
the Daimon, responds with discouragement (or a book of
poems titled Poems Written in Discouragement [1913]?).
"Saint and hero," however, "cannot be content to pass at
moments to that hollow image and after become their
heterogenous selves, but would always, if they could,
resemble the antithetical self" (Myth 333). Saints and
heroes, that is, lose themselves in their heroic quests.
"The poet," in contrast, as Yeats states in his most
aphoristic passage:
The poet finds and makes his mask in
disappointment, the hero in defeat. . . .
The saint alone is not deceived. . . .
For a hero loves the world till it breaks
him, and the poet till it has broken faith;
but while the world was yet debonair, the
saint has turned away, and because he
renounced experience itself, he will wear
his mask as he finds it. (Myth 337)
consequence of your grafting operation, and so I dedicate
it to you" (New York: MacMillan, 1930). It was
precisely this type of hybrid that Yeats tried to kill at
the roots.
105
Yeats— indeed, any poet qua poet--is neither hero, nor
saint, nor sage.
Yeats's cosmological theory of the poet's incapacity
to deal with political matters functions both
ideologically and rhetorically. Ideologically, Yeats's
i
theory of the essential and unchanging character of the
poet both justifies his own withdrawal from the world's
stage and condemns as unnatural those who shoot the arrow
"straight ahead" and do not follow the same "winding
movement of Nature." Yeats limits the choices: one is
either part of the "living stream" or one is the "stone in
the midst of all" that troubles this stream. It is time
for Irish poets to make a choice. Rhetorically, Yeats
performs an even more remarkable feat: The more intensely
he argues how unfit is the poet for heroic tasks or
saintly duties, the more heroic and saintly he himself
appears in answering Lady Gregory's mission for some
"spiritual building in Ireland." The less political he
claims that poets must be, the more political his quasi-
poetic text becomes. The more unfit and untimely argument
Yeats appears, the more his own argument hits the mark.
Yeats remains one who quests here, to be sure, but he
quests not for Utopia or the holy grail but for a place,
in Lady Gregory's words, "for the imagination to rest." 24
2 4 Yeats's argument stirred the following debate in
the pages of the Literary Review of Chicago. As reported
by the reviewer for Current Opinion Shan F. Bullock, an
106
Irish poet writing from Flanders, finds Yeats's argument
untimely: "It is no time for moonshine and theories and
jargon," he says, "I cannot say how beastly the whole
thing is. There is about it a smell of rottenness that I
had hoped this war would dispel forever-more. One need
not pose as a purist or a prig. But surely in these days
of purification through suffering it seems horrible to
have preached a gospel of indulgence in the interests of
art as against the claims of health and cleanliness and
manhood." It was, of course, precisely this ideal of
"purification through suffering" that Yeats was working to
destroy, a project that would culminate in his Oedipus
plays, which offer an alternative ideal of purification
through self-realization. Nonetheless, Bullock's blast at
Per Arnica allowed an eloquent defense of Yeats to be
written by Llewllyn Jones, a defense which ultimately
gives the aesthetic imprimatur to Yeats's text: "the fact
of the matter is that the separation of morals and art is
not only justified because their fields are actually
different, but it is 'safe'--if one insists on safety--
because artistic creation is essentially a moral and
innocent activity." Yeats could not have described his
rhetorical intentions better himself.
107
PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE:
ANIMA MUNDI AND THE RHETORIC OF GHOSTS
1. The Ghostly Deceivers
Yeats’s 1901 essay "Magic" shows that his early
interests in the spiritual world were imaginative, not
religious or political. Magic for Yeats was as Poetry was
for Kant; a playful and imaginative activity that we
approach skeptically but that often surprises us by
revealing the truth--a world of wonders that mysteriously
works serious business. Yeats found spiritual
investigation to be the perfect antithesis to rhetoric and
politics, and the ideal antidote to their debilitating
effects on the soul. The practice of hermetic symbolism
is praised in the Memoirs, for instance, because it
entails "no exhortation to alarm one's dignity, no
abstraction to deaden the nerves of soul."1 Unlike the
orators, who would ensnare by the ingenious contrivances
of logic, MacGregor Mathers tells the young Yeats that
"We [magicians] only give you symbols because we respect
your liberty" (Mem 27). Whereas Yeats’s politics only
Lrked Maud Gonne, his spiritualism--because her mind was
"without peace" (Mem 42) and her soul was "so incapable of
1 Unlike the rhetoricians who would restrain one's
liberty, forcing it through the machine of logic, "We only
give you symbols," MacGregor Mathers told Yeats, "because
we respect your liberty" (Mem 27).__________________________
108
rest" (Mem 47)--was a "great comfort to her" (Mem 47).
Yeats recounts in the Memoirs how Maud Gonne and George
Pollexfen, "an extreme Unionist" could peacefully analyze
each other's symbols (Mem 48), implying that magical
practices, not political or even literary ones, might be
the key to reconciling Ireland's fractious political
tendencies. Magic is held to bring peace, not a sword.2
In the Anima Mundi section of Per Arnica, however,
magic no longer preserves its status as innocent play or
diversion. Yeats warns his readers explicitly about the
potential treachery of the spiritual world, and his own
narrative of magical practices gathers increasing
rhetorical and ideological force. Anima Mundi is not a
"ghost story," as were Yeats's earlier writings about the
spirit world, and it does not delude us the same way that
ghost stories do. It is, rather, a story about ghosts--in
particular, a story about the growth of the poet's mind in
the spiritual world.
Stories of this kind can be equally as deceptive as
conventional ghost stories, as Freud argues in his 1919
essay "The Uncanny":
2 That magic brings peace and not a sword also seems
to be the general assumption of most of the critics of
jVeats's magic. Yeats magic has often been linked to his
poetry, and sometimes linked to his politics (for
•instance, Fahmy Farag, The Opposing Virtues [Dublin: The
Dolmen Press, 1978])--though such a study is definitely
needed--but never, as far as I know, to his rhetoric.____
109
The situation is altered as soon as the
writer pretends to move in the world of
common reality. . . . He takes advantage,
as it were, of our supposedly surmounted
superstitiousness; he deceives us into
thinking that he is giving us the sober
truth, and then after all oversteps the
bounds of possibility. We react to his
inventions as we should have reacted to
real experiences; by the time we have seen
through his trick it is already too late
and the author has achieved its object; but
it must be added that his success is not
unalloyed. We retain a feeling of
dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against
the attempted deceit .... (Freud, Studies
in Parapsychology, (New York: Collier
Books, 1963), p. 57-58).
Freud's description of the feeling of a reader who has
been deceived by an ostensibly true story of psychic
phenomena is remarkably similar to Kant's account of how
he typically reacts to finding himself deceived by an
orator:
I must admit that a beautiful poem has
always given me a pure gratification, while
the reading of the best discourse, whether
of a Roman orator or of a modern
parliamentary speaker or of a preacher, has
always been mingled with an unpleasant
feeling of disapprobation of a treacherous
art which means to move men in important
matters like machines to a judgment that
must lose all weight for them on quiet
reflection.3
This similarity is no accident. Both passages reveal Kant
and Freud as rationalists who are trying to identify the
dangerous effects of deception and superstition. In the
3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, cited in
Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 399.
110
first section of Per Arnica, , Anima Hominis, Yeats purports
to be one of this group, reminding his audience of the
dangers of deception by orators and mountebanks. But
Yeats1s status as a rationalist becomes dubious in the
Anima Mundi section. Freud identifies the ways by which a
story of magic such as Yeats's can deceive:
The writer has then one more means he can
use to escape our rising vexation and at
the same time to improve his chances of
success. It is this, that he should keep
us in the dark for a long time about the
precise nature of the conditions he has
selected for the world he writes about, or
that he should cunningly and ingeniously
avoid any definite information on the point
at all throughout the book (Freud, 58).
Freud delineates some of the ways by which Yeats turns Per
Arnica--a purportedly personal essay--into a rhetorical
jenterprise with a level of deception that would vex both
Freud and Kant. Anima Mundi "keep[s] us in the dark”
about the political conditions of the historical world in
jwhich Yeats writes, and it even obscures the "definite
■information" about Yeats's metaphysical pursuits that one
jfinds in earlier essay or in the Memoirs, written during
jthe same time. If the rhetorical (and deceptive) power of
Anima Mundi is to be realized, these conditions and
information must be pulled out from behind Yeats's stage
curtain and placed on center stage.
As I argued in the last chapter, despite Yeats's
efforts to deny and suppress rhetoric and elevate poetry,
Ill
Anima Homlnis should be read as a highly rhetorical text.
The same strategy is followed here. I shall argue that
Yeats's consorting with ghosts, spirits, phantoms, images
from the Anima Mundi, is not an escape or withdrawal from
the material world; it is rather a primary means of
attaining replenishment for struggles in the— a gathering
of forces, a marshalling of power and energy. Yeats's
phantasmagoria is deployed in Anima Mundi for three
distinct rhetorical purposes: (1) to counter the extreme
materialist and idealist epistemologies that Yeats
thought underlay the revolutionary upheavals of the modern
world; (2) to explain (and explain away) the historical
memory of the Irish Republicans; and (3) to valorize
submission, passivity, and purity as the essence of the
proper religious attitude, implicitly downgrading heroic
martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and the union of religion and
politics in Ireland. Each of these points will be
addressed in turn; afterward I shall analyze the questions
of rhetoric and power that underlies the ghostly poetic
mystique that Yeats presents as he concludes the book.
Harold Bloom is right to notice that Anima Mundi has
its roots in works such as the 1914 essay "Swedenborg,
Mediums, and Desolate Places." But if the politics of
Anima Mundi are to be understood, the difference between
the works must be recognized. In "Swedenborg ..."
112
Yeats shows his first signs of suspicion about the
playfulness of spirits, and he begins to consider the
dangers of their tricks and deceptions. He remarks, for
instance, that if the spirits "identify themselves with a
man’s affection or enthusiasm they may drive him to ruin"
(Exp 41). In Anima Mundi Yeats focuses and develops his
suspicion. Marshalling a number of random tales about the
deceit of spirits, he generalizes from them a coherent
doctrine about the danger of phantasmagoria:
How did it follow that an ignorant woman
could, as Henry More believed, project her
vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare
that horse and hound and huntsman followed
with the bugle blowing? Is not the problem
the same as of those finely articulated
scenes and patterns that come out of the
dark, seemingly completed in the winking of
an eye, as we are lying half asleep, and of
all those elaborate images that drift in
moments of inspiration or evocation before
the mind's eye? (my emphasis; Myth 350).
"Is not the problem the same?" The problem, just as in
Anima Hominis, is deception, false and misleading images,
and perhaps the impossibility of "finding a place for
imagination to rest.” In the same ways that Anima
'Hominis identified the deceptions of material objects such
jas the "wine-cup and the sensual kiss," or material
practices like political action, Anima Mundi discloses the
trickery of the spiritual world.
To keep his argument coherent as he shifts from one
world to the next, Yeats performs a remarkable move: He
113
deliberately obscures the difference between images of the
objective world (Kantian phenomena) and images of the
psychic world (magical phenomena). It is reasonable that
readers who try to determine whether Yeats is a mystic or
a poet are seriously vexed by such conflation,4 but its
rhetorical impact is clear: Neither kinds of images are
to be trusted. A mystified skepticism is the order of the
day. Nor can we reason ourselves out of deception, Yeats
further argues, for even logic--which may be thought to be
abstract and thus separate from the danger of false
images--is actually an inflowing of images that already
pre-exist with "body and period”:
If all our mental images no less than
apparitions (and I see no reason to
distinguish) are forms existing in the
general vehicle of Anima Mundi, and
mirrored in our particular vehicle, many
crooked things are made straight. I am
persuaded that a logical process, or a
series of related images, has body and
period, and I think of Anima Mundi as a
great pool or garden where it moves through
its allotted growth like a great water-
plant or fragrantly branches in the air
(Myth 352).
4"Vision comes only as the reward of severe mental
discipline, after study as vigorous as that demanded by
[any of the so-called exact sciences. But there is no
trace of this in Yeats, who cannot properly be described
as an intellectual poet. . . . Mysticism to Yeats is not
[an intellectual belief, but an emotional or artistic
refuge. His visions do not convince us, because they are
obviously literary rather than spiritual. The concepts
.which are realities to Blake, or to Yeats's contemporary,
"AE," are to him symbols, nor do they strike the readers
[as being anything more." E.A. Boyd, Ireland's Literary
Renaissance (London, 1916), 43. ______
114
The rhetorical force of this passage becomes clear once we
notice how Yeats’s rhetorical designs contradict his
ostensible ideology. The line "many crooked things are
made straight" marks the importance of Yeats's conclusion
that "all our mental images . . . are forms existing in
the general vehicle of Anima Mundi." The line suggests a
euphoric conclusion. Ideologically, however, this line
contradicts one of the controlling and repeated beliefs of
the book Per Arnica, which is that the poet's path is not
the straight one, but the winding one, "from desire to
weariness and from desire again."5 As a contradiction in
the rhetoric of a passage points to ideology, a
contradiction in ideology points to rhetoric. What is
clear from this passage is that when Yeats states that he
is persuaded that "a logical process, or a series of
related images, has body and period," he desires that the
5 "Only when we are saint or sage," Yeats writes,
"and renounce experience itself, can we ... leave the
sudden lightning and the path of the serpent and become
the bowman who aims his arrow at the centre of the sun."
(Myth 340). And saint or sage are distinct types from the
ipoet. In "Easter 1916," one recalls Yeats had praised the
|"horse that comes from the road." The same rhetorical
goal can be seen in the Blakean epigrams in "Tom
jo'Roughley," written in 1918: "'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 butterfly/And not a gloomy bird of
,prey'" (CP 139-140). Tom's aimlessness rescues him from
the waves ("surges") of crowds deceived by the (Jesuit)
” logic-choppers. " __________
115
reader be equally convinced. The question now is: Why is
this idea so important?
It is a mistake to believe that Anima Mundi
transforms logical categories into animate images only to
privilege the poet over the logician. This magical
transformation is rather part of Yeats’s project to
undermine both the materialist epistemology, which Yeats
saw as the foundation of both the Industrial Revolution
and the Bolshevik one, and idealist epistemology, which,
he believed, had fueled (and continued to inspire) the
idealism of Irish Catholic Republicans.6 Anima Mundi
makes this intention quite clear:
All souls have a vehicle or body, and when
one has said that with More and the
Platonists one has escaped from the
abstract schools who seek always the power
of some Church or institution, and found
oneself with great poetry, and superstition
which is but popular poetry, in a
pleasant, dangerous world. Beauty is
indeed but bodily life in some ideal
condition. (Myth 349)
6 Perhaps one of Pearse's famous lines demonstrate
jwhat Yeats was up against: "They have conceived of
nationality as a material thing, whereas it is a spiritual
jthing. . . . They have not recognized in their people the
limage and likeness of God. Hence the nation is not to
■them holy, a thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that
( a man [can] sell or dishonour on pain of eternal
perdition." (Pearse, Political Writings (Dublin, n.d.),
j223-24. Between this kind of spiritualism and Marxism,
"the spear-head of materialism . . . leading to inevitable
murder" (L 656), Yeats was, ideological speaking, between
a rock and a hard place.____________ ________________________
116
To escape from the abstract schools is also to escape from
the political consequences of the ideas they promulgate.
Yeats probably had in mind A. E.'s mystic socialism, which
he challenges in the Memoirs;
[A.E.] has the religious genius, and it is
the essence of that genius that all souls
are equal in its eyes. Queen or apple
woman, it is all one, seeing that none can
be more than an immortal soul. Whereas I
have been concerned with men's capacities,
with all [that] divides man from man. 1
seem to him harsh, hypercritical,
overbearing even, and he seems to encourage
in all the arts the spirit of the amateur.
(Mem 130)
Yeats's apparent discovery in Anima Mundi that all souls
are unique, therefore, is not truly a discovery. The
rhetoric of pseudo-empiricism masks a conscious rhetorical
intention--to counter the propagandistic effect of A.E.'s
egalitarian mysticism. Yeats's "escape" from the abstract
schools (and their politics) is not merely an added
benefit of his meditation; it is its primary rhetorical
intention. The intention to link the ideology and
political consequences becomes unmasked Yeats's later
works, such as the "Introduction to 'The Resurrection,'":
We may come to think that nothing exists
but a stream of souls, that all knowledge
is biography, and with Plotinus that every
soul is unique .... Such belief may
arise from Communism by antithesis,
declaring at last even to the common ear
that all things have value according to the
clarity of their expression of themselves,
and not as functions of changing economic
117
conditions or as preparation for some
Utopia. (Expl 397)
Thus, Yeats’s attack against both idealism and materialism
(in particular, supplanting logic with images from the
Anima Mundi) is not a Blakean blow against the iron mills,
nor is it simple anti-communist rhetoric, nor even Yeats’s
contribution to a "two cultures debate." The ultimate
rhetorical function of Yeats's attacks against logic--both
in Per Arnica and elsewhere--is not to quibble with logic
per se, but with logic-in-action, logic in the service of
rhetoric, especially revolutionary rhetoric.7 Yeats saw
"logic" as identical with "rhetoric." In "If I were Four-
and-Twenty," written soon after Per Arnica and published in
1919, he prophecies:
Logic is loose again, as once in Calvin and
Knox, or in the hysterical rhetoric of
Savonarola, or in Christianity itself in
its first raw centuries, and because it
must always draw its deductions from what
every dolt can understand, the wild beast
cannot but destroy mysterious life (Expl
277).
7 The Memoirs describe the mechanical nature of
O'Leary's disciple, J. F. Taylor, a man, Yeats says,
"whose mind was perpetually occupied with an impassioned
argument," who saw the world in mathematical forms, "and,
being incapable of compromise, hated and would always hate
the actual leaders of Ireland. . . . He had a mystical
jfaith, derived from Catholic orthodoxy, in logic to its
extreme. . . . He understood alone eloquence, an
'impassioned pleading. He sometimes gave me an impression
'of insanity" (Mem 53)._____________ _________________________
118
Here Yeats seems to return to "the day's war with every
knave and dolt," but what makes Anima Mundi different from
"The Fascination of What's Difficult" is a change of
stance. Yeats no longer casts himself as a partner in
these wars (that is, quarrels). He is now a victim.
Logic, rhetoric, deception— all of these are destructive
by Yeats's lights, not only of imagination, mystery, and
beauty, but of the "mysterious life" (including Yeats's)
on which these abstractions depend.
Yeats claimed in his 1901 essay "Magic" that if the
evidence for psychic phenomena were credible, it would be
necessary to rewrite history. He apparently decides that
it is, for in Anima Mundi he follows his own advice. His
first move in writing this re-visionary history is to
argue that what appears to be a historical repetition or
pattern is actually the recurrence of our own personal
jbattles and passions as they attract images not from
history but from the Anima Mundi:
Spiritism ... will have it that we may see
at certain roads and in certain houses old
murders acted over again, and in certain
fields dead huntsmen riding with horse and
hound, or ancient armies fighting above
bones or ashes. We carry to Anima Mundi
our memory, and that memory is for a time
our external world; and all passionate
moments recur again and again, for passion
119
desires its own recurrence more than any
event. (Myth 354)8
Equally deceived are those who try to judge an event
(especially a political event) by its historical
counterparts and those who try to posit some objective
pattern in history. Ironically enough, Yeats throws into
doubt here the validity for historical prophecy that he
will later claim for A Vision; But this seeming
contradiction can be explained by the realization that Per
Arnica, though many scholars see it as a stepping stone to
the later work, is less concerned with prophecy than with
challenging the Irish Republican rhetoric, which
traditionally linked all Irish acts of heroism to those of
dead Irish heroes. Tone, Emmet, Pearse— all like
Cuchulian fought the ungovernable seas, all fought the
Cromwellian genocide. In terms of the long-term struggle
6 Yeats's idea of passionate recurrence is remarkably
similar to Freud's notion of the repetition-compulsion in
the unconscious mind. "It must be explained that we are
able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion
in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity
and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts-
-a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-
principle, leading to certain aspects of the mind their
daemonic character .... Taken in all, the foregoing
prepares us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of
this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny.
(Freud, ibid, 44). Yet a crucial difference remains.
■Freud is interested in the uncanny resemblances that one
|finds between events, a link that derives from the
personal unconscious. (Jung might have said the same
'connections between events and his notion of the
collective unconscious.) Yeats, however, has in mind the
particular historical consciousness of the Irish citizen.
120
for Irish independence, all heroes had a thousand faces
to the Irish patriots.9
Though Yeats consciously rejected such a belief after
the Easter Rising, it is important to note that before
that event he shared the rhetorical device with the
patriotic orators, and he was never afraid to call forth
the great Irish dead to shame and instruct the Irish
living. It is in fact Pearse's own definition of
patriotism, for instance--"a memory of heroic dead men and
a striving to accomplish some task left unsatisfied by
them" (Political Writings, 66)— that Yeats personifies in
his elegy for Parnell:
Mourn--and then onward, there is no returning
He guides ye from the tomb;
His memory now is a tall pillar, burning
Before us in the gloom!
And though Anglo-Irish figures such as George Moore argued
‘ repeatedly that "It is the plain duty of every Irishmen to
disassociate himself from all memories of Ireland,"10
Yeats continued to evoke the images of the dead in Poems
Written in Discouragement (1913), which included both
I__________________________
9 Canon Sheehan, The Graves of Kilmorna, written in
1912-13, has characters who use phrases like this: "The
country is sinking into the sleep of death; and nothing
can awake it but the crack of the rifle. . . . We may also
have to teach from our graves." (cited in Lyons, Ireland,
91).
10George Moore, Hail and Farewell, 3 vols (Ebury
edition, London 1937), Vol I: Ave, pp. 220-1; cited in
Mansergh, 260.__________________________ ■ ______
121
"September 1913" and "To a Shade." In the former, Yeats
tried to inspire the Irish with a vision of O’Leary's
ghost guiding them from the grave, and in the latter, he
pretended to be conversing with--and taking counsel from--
the ghost of Parnell as it wandered around the streets of
Dublin, in dismay at current events. Yeats, indeed,
shared the same rhetoric as Pearse. In his 1915 pamphlet
Ghosts Pearse evoked "the pale and angry ghost of Parnell
to stand beside the ghosts of Tone and Davis and Lalor and
Mitchel," while ridiculing the lack of heroism in his
contemporaries: "Does the ghost of Parnell hunt them to
their damnation?" he asked. Yeats, like Pearse, had
assented to the rhetorical power of these ghosts, these
"illustrious dead men"--whether Emmet, Parnell, or
whoever— who could inspire patriots to great heights.
After the Easter Rising, however, when Pearse summoned
Cuchulian and a host of Fenian dead to the Post Office
steps, Yeats’s days of innocent credulity in following the
ideals of dead heroes were over. In his 1915 funeral
speech of a Fenian comrade, Pearse declared:
They think that they have foreseen
everything, provided against everything;
but the fools, the fools, the fools I--
they have left us our Fenian dead, and
while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland
unfree shall never be at peace. (Cardozo,
297)
122
Yeats may have agreed in his early days, but his position
is now reversed. Anima Mundi, indeed, is written to
finish the job that the English had started; it seeks to
seal the graves of the Irish dead once and for all. Such
a goal becomes clear in the Memoirs. The following
passage documents Yeats's perspective on the Irish
nationalists of his youth, but since the lines are written
in 1917, they can be equally applied to his memory of the
Easter Rebels:
But looking back now after many years, and
knowing how hard it [is] to keep men in
their graves, I will put an inscribed stone
over their heads that they may not plague
another generation. Their patriotism was
exceedingly great, and they were by that
undone, driven to form opinions on matters
beyond their experience. One is not always
at one’s best when one says, "I must
consider the reputation of my country" (Mem
57).
Sfeats comes not to praise these heroes but to bury them.
"No disaster is like another," he asserts in Anima Mundi.
If history appears to be repeating itself, and ghosts of
jthe past seem to be appropriate to the present state of
jthe world, such visions are to be dismissed; they are
merely a projection of our own passions and memories and
have no objective reality.11 To make political judgments
11 It was this precise strategy of denying the
objective reality that an anonymous critic complained
about in his review of Per Arnica: "Is [this work] but one
instance of the eternal difficulty between the Irishman
and the Englishman? . . . We believe that the thing itself
123
based on one’s intuition of ghosts, therefore, is, for
Yeats, to be terribly deceived.
Thus, Yeats concludes, it is the Daimon that makes us
mistakenly repeat historical struggles, emulate dead
heroes, or take counsel from ghosts:
The Daimon, by using his mediatorial
shades, brings man again and again to the
place of choice, heightening temptation
that the choice be as final as possible,
imposing his own lucidity.upon events,
leading his victim to whatever among works
not impossible is the most difficult (Myth
361).
The Daimon clears the path amid this heterogenous and
terrestrial forest in which we live, simplifies events,
and inspires difficult, if not impossible, choices.
Yeats's Daimon (his own version of the "Great Deceiver")
covers a multitude of sins, for finally, and perhaps most
disturbing, Yeats argues that the Daimon is to be blamed
for the political ambitions of complete nations (or
races):
Each Daimon is drawn to whatever man or, if
its nature is more general, to whatever
nation it most differs from, and it shapes
it to its own image the antithetical dream
jWill show itself to us if we try hard enough; for we
believe that the thing itself is there. But they seem to
believe that it is not there at all, that all reality
wears masks, that in all things there is an anti-self.
('Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1918), Reality by Moonlight,1
"Times Literary Supplement', 7 February 1918; cited in A.
Norman Jeffares, The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge
|& Kegan Paul, 1977, 209-210).___________________________
124
of man or nation. The Jews had already
shown by the precious metals, by the
ostentatious wealth of Solomon's temple,
the passion that has made them the money
lenders of the modern world. If they had
not been rapacious, lustful, narrow, and
persecuting beyond the people of their
time, the incarnation had been impossible;
but it was an intellectual impulse from the
Condition of Fire that shaped their
antithetical self into that of the classic
world. . . . So always it is an impulse
from some Daimon that gives to our vague,
unsatisfied desire, beauty, a meaning, and
a form all can accept. (my emphasis; Myth
Yeats asserts that nations, too, have antithetical selves,
and that an entire nation can be deceived by the Daimon's
projections. Yeats's conflation of nation and race, not
uncommon in his day and not always put to racist ends, is
especially important to his rhetoric about Ireland, and
will gain importance for the rest of his life. With such
a theory, he can claim that just as the Jews are "out of
phase" when they are money-lenders instead of rapacious,
the Irish are equally disjointed when they follow
materialist theories and tendencies and ignore their
mystical and religious roots. The Paudeens remain--for
Yeats as for Pearse— incontrovertibly defiled.
Yeats's mystification of public oratory, political
projects, or social transformations is nearly complete.
Thoughts and images are a sequence of animated images
from a pool or garden; logic is merely a delusory sequence
of these images; and the subjective sense that one has
125
existervtial--or political--choice is simply a trick of the
Daimon. Yeats has now convinced his readers that they
cannot know, nor can they judge. Simply put, Yeats's
cosmology posits a highly mediated relation between object
and thought and between thought and action, and this
mediation is phantasmagorical and untrustworthy. Yeats
does not have to execute Cicero, as he attempted in Anima
Hominis; he refines him into the metaphysical attenuation
of ectoplasm. Yet one begins to wonder if Yeats is not
silencing Cicero (and things Ciceronian) for Antony's
ends: to preserve an Empire from those articulate voices
that call for a Republic.
Yeats's animation of logical and rhetorical arguments
is a necessary part of his rhetorical project to
contradict the epistemologies at the base of revolutionary
actions. The doctrine that the Daimon influences both
particular heroes and entire nations significantly
explains (and explains away) much of the political
upheaval in Ireland— and perhaps in the world.
Nevertheless, Yeats does not allow everyone to be equally
deceived by either the images of the Anima Mundi or the
Daimon's "mediatorial shades." Poets, for example, do not
suffer as badly as heroes and saints, and someone, it
seems, can stand aloof and watch an entire nation be
deceived by its Daimon. The obverse of Yeats's explicit
126
argument that the phantasmagoria is a dangerous influence
on individual and nation is, as we shall see, the implicit
argument that some people are less deceived than others.
The Daimon is poisonous, but there is an antidote.
Yeats's antidote to the Daimon's enchantments and to
the delusory images of the Anima Mundi is quite simple:
One must become gentle and passive (the precise qualities,
one recalls, that Yeats had despised in the unheroic age
of his youth, and which he had rejected in favor of the
conscious, dramatic mask). If the images of the Anima
Mundi are received purely, Yeats writes, and there is "no
interference from our memories or desires," no danger
arises. One must, therefore, avoid the role of medium,
for such a role can only be taken "when the vehicle is
coarse," and it can lead to dangerous deceptions. Yeats's
earlier desire to become like a medium (Myth 343) is now
rejected in favor of the pursuit of purity; the goal is to
become a conduit of spiritual impressions, to reach a
■state where our own emotions neither filter images, nor
pollute, nor overmaster them (Myth 363). In sum, the only
way to avoid being deceived by the spirits is to become
pure, quiet, and passive.
This is the third primary rhetorical purpose for the
ghosts in Anima Mundi. Whereas Mallarme sought to purify
jthe language of the tribe, Yeats seeks to purify the tribe
itself: "The purpose of most religious teaching, of the
127
insistence upon the submission to God's will above all, is
to make certain of the passivity of the vehicle where it
is most pure and most tenuous." Yeats answers Lady
Gregory's call for spiritual building quite admirably; he
provides a rather elaborate Paterian and Theosophical
scaffold to reach the pietist notion that the basis of all
religious feeling is obedience and passivity (Myth 362).
Yeats's famous romanticism, abundantly demonstrated by
Kermode, Hough, Bloom, and others, is not English but
German; in it, Shelley counts less than Schliermacher.
How is the vehicle purified? How is this passive
state achieved? Yeats points us a step closer to that
ideal state of being with this advice:
The soul cannot have much knowledge till it
has shaken off the habit of time and of
place, but till that hour it must fix its
attention upon what is near, thinking of
objects one after another as we run the eye
or the finger over them. (Myth 358)
The goal, one notices, is to shake off not only time and
place but the habit of time and place, to avoid not only
Councils and Committees but all that comes from them, that
is, the internalization of their conflicts and questions.
Until that state of purity is reached, one can prepare
oneself by focusing on one object after another,
considering each separately, and avoiding the temptation
rto see them in groups, or to categorize, generalize, or
abstract:
i____________________________________________ _— ... — -------
128
Only in rapid and subtle thought, or in
faint accents heard in the quiet of the
mind, can the thought of the spirit come to
us but little changed; for a mind that
grasps objects simultaneously according to
the degree of its liberation does not think
the same thought with the mind that sees
objects one after another. (Myth 362)
One object after another: To "count the half-pence with
the pence?" Though Yeats does want to Irish to begin to
"pray and save," his meditative ideal is neither the cash-
register aesthetics of the Paudeens, nor is it monk-like
contemplation that comes from telling beads. It is,
rather, something closer to aristocratic appreciation, a
kind of Paterian positivism: Each object must be treated
like a delicate vase--granted its own integrity, but
touched only lightly. Though Yeats does not identify
precisely which kinds of objects can serve as focal
points in this meditation, we can assume that they are
local--even domestic--objects, not the "distant objects"
that every boy and girl marked in "Tom O'Roughley." We
can assume, moreover, that the meditation requires the
kind of objects listed in Yeats's poem "Meditations In
Time of Civil War," in which the poet catalogues "my
house, my table, my pen, my paper, my sword," and so on.12
12 This meditation is a form of aristocratic
positivism; Yeats's version, I would suggest, of Pound's
jwarnings, such as his famous "Go in fear of abstractions"
[and "The thing itself is always the adequate symbol."____
129
In "If I were Four-and-Twenty," Yeats argues, as I
mentioned, that "the wild beast [of logic] cannot but
destroy the mysterious life" (Expl 277). It is
significant in terms of Yeats’s ideology that "Logic" does
not destroy mystery per se but the "mysterious life,"
which is, we might presume, the practical lifestyle in
which mysterious pursuits find room for development, or
the social practices from which abstract concepts arise
and where they find their origins. A line from Anima
jHominis demonstrates that Yeats is sensitive to the
material and practical foundation of abstractions:
"Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition"
(Myth 349). As these lines imply, Yeats knew that all
abstractions are the by-products of certain kinds of human
activities. More important, the lines imply that some
conditions of production are more conducive to producing
art, mystery, and meditation than others. This idea is
nothing new. But it gathers meaning in the context of Per
Arnica because it severely contradicts Yeats's earlier
I
jtheory, stated in Anima Hominis, about the relation
between the artist and his or her circumstance. For some,
Yeats says, art is "less an opposing virtue than a
compensation for some accident of health or circumstances"
(Myth 327). But what happens when one’s circumstances are
not destructive but productive? Must one still continue
;o struggle against them? The answer seems to be "No, to
130
the contrary”: Art Is compensatory only if one's accident
of circumstances is dominated by scarcity, like Keats's
was, as Yeats believed. If, by contrast, one's
circumstances are blessed by abundance and leisure, Art
grows within them quite organically. In the Memoirs, for
instance, Yeats praises Lissadell, the home of the Gore-
Booths, for calling to mind "a life set amid natural
beauty and the activities of servants and labourers who
seemed themselves natural, as bird and tree are natural"
(Mem 102). Within such delicate circumstances, where the
difference between nature and culture is erased, one
quarrel neither with others, nor with oneself: "Nor but
in merriment begin a chase, / Nor but in merriment a
quarrel." Shelley claimed that poetry should come as
easily as leaves to the tree; Yeats, that it should come
as easily as trees to the estate.
What is most unfortunate about Yeats's insights into
the materialistic basis of the artistic life, then, is not
that he valorizes the productive lifestyle over others,
but that he only sees this lifestyle in narrow terms. In
"To a Young Beauty," addressed to Iseult Gonne (and which
may serve as a Monarch's Notes trot to Per Arnica), Yeats
writes:
Dear fellow-artist, why so free
With every sort of company.
With every Jack and Jill?
Choose your companions from the best;
Who draws a bucket with the rest
Soon topples down the hill. _____________________
131
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne.
(CP 138)
Lines such as "We are no longer a virtuous nation, and the
best of us live by candlelight," written by Yeats at the
height of the Civil War, can only be fully understood if
juxtaposed with lines from "The Leaders of the Crowd,"
written in 1918: "How can they know Truth flourishes
where the student’s lamp has shone, / And there alone,
that have no solitude?” (CP 182). Yeats appears to be
aware of the material restrictions on artistic, mystical,
or meditative practice faced by certain groups in society,
and insofar as he points this out, he is dealing with
■reality. But Yeats's materialist theory quickly becomes a
class theory: His social insights are quickly over
shadowed by his ideological project to valorize those who
jean maintain self-possession and have the leisure and
study to do it. The productive modus vivendi that Yeats
praises at Lissadell is reified into a simplistic division
I
between classes of persons, regardless of social class.
Although Yeats appears to argue that his ideal form of
consciousness and meditative practice is available to all,
ie seems to realize as well that only certain people are
capable of developing the proper contemplative stance.
Eventually, he will fight to protect them; Some people
must be fed to the Daimon, others must be saved.
i_________________________________________ :__________________________________ _______
132
It is this special group who, by practicing the
careful meditation on objects Yeats prescribes, can reach
the ultimate goal of Anima Mundi: attaining the Condition
of Fire. "All power is from the terrestial condition,"
Yeats writes, but "the condition of fire is all music and
all rest." He explains:
When all sequence comes to an end, time
comes to an end, and the soul puts on the
rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body
and contemplates all the events of its
memory and every possible impulse in an
eternal possession of itself in one single
moment. That condition is alone animate,
all the rest is fantasy, and from thence
come all the passions, and, some have
held, the very heat of the body (Myth 357).
Here Yeats is his.most Coleridgean. For Yeats as for
Coleridge, the goal is a form of eternal self-possession,
an independence, an internal heat, a spontaneous
combustion whereby one may filter impressions and thoughts
autonomously— without the need for conversation or
discussion with others.13 The heat of the body, then, an
13"A debility and dimness of the imaginative power,
and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate
^impressions of the sense, do, we well know, render the
'mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a
jdeficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of
|this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in
pommon, which they do not possess singly. . . . But where
jthe ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections
blend more easily and intimately . . . the mind is
affected by thoughts, rather than by things . . . ." That
( Coleridge is being rhetorical here can be seen by the fact
jthat his idea that some people rely on "immediate
Impressions of the sense" is a direct contradiction to his
133
internalized alchemy, becomes a mental state where the
heat of argument and social conflict is rolled like the
universe into a ball: a state of siege becomes a state of
mind. When this self-possession is attained, the
integrity of the poet matches that of the poem: "All the
rest is fantasy" -- that is, fancy, wit, mechanics,
stereotypes, allegory, sententia, rhetoric . . . vexation,
false images, deception. Further, the Condition of Fire
is not only a momentary flash of wisdom but a state of
being (or becoming) that all should seek: "But certainly
it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is
not brought to any sudden stop, where there is neither
wall nor gate, that we would rise . " (Myth 364).
Yeats's praise of the Condition of Fire also makes
him his most Paterian, but not, I would argue, in the ways
that previous critics have maintained. When most critics
apply the term "Paterian" to Per Arnica, they usually mean
to describe the style of the work or to point out the
similarity between Yeats's praise of the "Condition of
Fire" and Pater's ideal of burning always with a hard
gemlike flame. Yet this epithet raises more questions
jthan it answers, chief among them, Why did Yeats return to
Pater's style in 1917? Responsibilities and "Swedenborg .
numerous chapters that argue for a Kantian mediation
between sense and idea. Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria, Edd. James Engel1 and W. Jackson
Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp.
30-31.
134
. (1919), certainly were not written in Paterian style;
Wild Swans at Coole (1917;1919) demonstrates many
Jonsonian figures and turns; and the Memoirs written at
the same time seems quite straightforward in its
presentation. I would argue that what is Paterian about
Per Arnica is not its ideal of the flamelike
consciousness, but rather the ideological project that
underlies this ideal, and that project is both personal
and public.
Personally, Yeats turns to Pater's Marius the
Epicurean, notably the "Animula Vagula" chapter for
ideological comfort and self-criticism. Yeats refers to
this chapter three times in the Memoirs: "Marius was, I
think, our only contemporary classic," he says of his 1891
days with Arthur Symons (Mem 36); when he first talked to
Maud Gonne, who, at the'time, "spoke of her desire for
power, apparently for its own sake," he thinks of a key
line from that chapter "'Only the means can justify the
end.'" (Mem 42); and, finally, writing about Johnson's
"gloomy silence," he explains: "I think he had applied in
too literary a form the philosophy of Pater in the
Epilogue to the Renaissance and in the 'Animula Vagula"
chapter . . . ." (Mem 95). It is clear from following
jSfeats's references to "Animula Vagula" that the ideas
articulated there were seen by Yeats as being not only
antithetical to but an antidote for the political zeal of
135
Maud Gonne. As he wrote both the Memoirs and Per Arnica,
that chapter was a touchstone--representing not only an
idea of life but a modus vivendi. Indeed, Yeats shares
many aspects of Marius's personal situation in "Animula
Vagula": Marius has just witnessed the death of Flavian,
the young aesthete, which turns him to a meditation upon
death; he is tempted by "enervating mysticism" but now has
a "hatred of what was theatrical." Instead, he becomes "a
^materialist, but with something of the temper of a
devotee." The object of his devotion is now Heraclitus,
and his "'doctrine of motion,'" or "continual change"—
what Yeats in 1916 called the "living stream" and "the
flashing joy of life." Thus, as Marius turned to
■Heraclitus for comfort, Yeats turns to Marius.
But Yeats's turn, like Pater's in the first place, is
intended not only for consolatory purposes but rhetorical
ones as well. Pater himself makes this clear when he
shifts from the role of the chronicler of Marius's times
to an ideological critic of his own time:
To be absolutely virgin towards such
experience, by ridding ourselves of such
abstractions as are but the ghosts of
bygone impressions--to be rid of the
notions we have made for ourselves, and
that so often only misrepresent the
experience of which they profess to be the
representation--idola, idols, false
appearances, as Bacon calls them later--to
neutralize the distorting influence of
metaphysical system by an all-accomplished
metaphysical skill: it is this bold, hard,
sober recognition, under a very "dry_______
136
light," of its own proper aim, in union
with a habit of feeling which on the
practical side may perhaps open a wide
doorway to human weakness, that gives to
the Cyrenaic doctrine, to reproductions of
this doctrine in the time of Marius or in
our own, their gravity and importance.14
When Yeats refers to Marius in his Memoirs and when he
elaborates the "Cyrenaic doctrine" in Per Arnica, his
ideological purposes are clear. For the "reproductions of
this doctrine," Pater says, possesses "gravity and
importance"--no matter when it occurs. And the primary
goal of these purposes is to supplant the consciousness
open to pure fact and pure theory and thus open to
revolutionary inspiration--a project that links Coleridge,
Arnold, Pater, and Yeats in a tightly-knit chain. As
Pater puts it again in the famous "Conclusion":
With this sense of the splendor of our
experience and of its awful brevity,
gathering all we are into one desperate
effort to see and touch, we shall hardly
have time to make theories about the things
we see and touch. What we have to do is to
be forever curiously testing new opinions
and courting new impressions, never
acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte
or of Hegel, or of our own. . . . The
theory, or idea, or system, which requires
of us the sacrifice of any part of this
experience, in consideration of some
interest into which we cannot enter, or
some abstract morality we have not
identified with ourselves, or what is only
conventional, has no real claim on us. (my
italics; cited in Adams, 645).
14 All references are from Walter Pater, Marius the
Epicurean ed. Ian Small (Oxford, 1986), 71-82.
137
Those who constantly seek new experiences will never have
time to reflect on their past experiences, much less their
historical and social circumstances. I have already
mentioned that one of Yeats's ideological intentions in
Per Arnica was to counter the sorts of thinking that
motivated rebellion and revolution in Ireland (and,
perhaps, on the continent as well). The exhortations to
burn with a gemlike flame or to reach the Condition of
Fire can be read to have similar intentions. Yeats's
return to Pater in Per Arnica, then, was not merely an
escape from the political to the aesthetic; it was a means
of returning to the aesthetic in order to be political.
In the nineties, Yeats's aestheticism was a reaction to
literary politics, but in Per Arnica that same aesthetic
stance is meant to counter the arguments of political
literature.
2. The Rhetoric of Ghosts
The final paragraphs of Anima Mundi describe in some
detail the benefits of attaining the Condition of Fire;
innocence, the cessation of hatred, the attainment of
universal sympathy. They recount a "spot of time" that
Yeats enjoys among strangers in a coffee shop:
At certain moments, always unforeseen, I
become happy, most commonly when at hazard
I have opened some book of verse. _____________
138
Sometimes It Is my own verse when, instead
of discovering new technical flaws, I read
with all the excitement of the first
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 fills me with
affection, 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. It may be an
hour before the mood passes, but latterly I
seem to understand that I enter upon it the
moment I cease to hate.... I have something
about me that, though it makes me love, is
more like innocence." (Myth 364-365)
I have argued that such a meditative moment (or "spot of
time") represents a rejection of the Illean pursuit for
worldly fame or ghostly wisdom, as expressed in "Ego
Dominuus Tuus," in favor of a return to a personal and
local piety, similar to Hie's. A careful reading of this
passage, however, suggests that Yeats's moment in the
Condition of Fire does not totally "burn up time"; to the
contrary, traces of the Terrestial Condition remain,
namely the desire for power, conflict, and rhetoric. He
seems to have turned his alchemical lamp down low.
Yeats's stated intentions for Per Arnica were to bring
about a "reconciliation" between pagan and Christian and
to find a place with "no preaching, no public contact."
139
The scene In the passage above does allow a moment of
reconciliation, and it does so with "strangers"— perhaps
the precise sort of people who had overmastered Yeats at
the dinner party that he mentions in the opening
paragraphs of the book. This reconciliation, however, as
I shall argue in closing, exacts a heavy price: Yeats's
fellow diners must forgive him, but expect no forgiveness
in return, and they must keep quiet.
Throughout Per Arnica Yeats mentions ways by which the
poet can become "innocent" and can "find his pardon."
Yeats hardly feels innocent and forgiven in 1917; He still
jregrets his part in promoting the Easter Rebellion through
his allegorical plays and his ghostly and idealistic
rhetoric in Poems Written in Discouragement (1913). Some
friends accuse him of being too active politically;
jothers, of not being active enough. Finally, he broods
over the consequences of the Bolshevik revolution,
^especially the significant question: "Can the bourgeois
be innocent?" (L 656). Not only does Yeats the person
lack "innocence," Yeats the poet, indeed all Irish poets,
must be redeemed, which they can be only if they
distinguished, once and for all, from the political
activist, the orator, and even from the magician. For the
Doet to regain innocence in the restaurant, however, his
audience must enter into an unfair exchange. As in the
passage implies, in return for being forgiven, the poet
140
promises the strangers a few special moments— rare though
they be and "always unforseen"— when he will forgive them,
when he can reconcile with them, and, for a moment, "cease
to hate." The implicit argument can be paraphrased thus:
"If you allow me the freedom from judgment, no longer hate
me, and leave me to my solitary ways, I promise that I
shall attain such a state of self-possession that you,
too, will occasionally be forgiven." The poet promises
occasional love in return for permanent love. In this he
is being true to his poetic nature; he is trying to exact
tpromises from the world, promises of fidelity: "For a
I
hero loves the world till it breaks him, and the poet till
it has broken faith." The world in which Yeats writes has
^disappointed him; Ireland has discouraged him; and even
Maud has broken that "Deep Sworn Vow." Promises have been
broken. To prevent further discouragement, Yeats is now
establishing "sincerity conditions," in John Searle's
phrase. The world must keep faith, must no longer offer
jfalse images, deception, or rhetoric. Unless it meet
these conditions, the world receives no affection.
Yeats's second exacting demand is that the people
around him be silent and do not try to communicate with
lim. "It seems strange that I cannot speak to them," he
writes. Actually, it is not strange at all. Yeats can
"cease to hate" only when others cease to talk. What
?exes him? The "ill-breeding of Carlyle, or the rhetoric
141
of Swinburne, the woman who murmurs over the dinner-
table the opinion of the daily paper" (Myth 365)— even the
spaniel who pursues the partridge, the trout that stole
the bait without being hooked, even "Minnaloushe,"
Iseult's Persian cat, who had interrupted Yeats's
conversation by hunting after a bird in the woods. All
who hunt, pursue, seek, chase, desire, woo— in short,
anyone who practices rhetoric (it is no accident that
Socrates referred to the Sophists as wolves)--these are
the objects of Yeats's hatred; these make hatred "the
common condition of life."15 Yeats can only feel
affection for the people in the crowded restaurant when
they have become silent as statues, when he has
transformed from human beings with memories, desires,
intellect, and language into static and disinterested
aesthetic objects. Joyce, in the Laestrygonian chapter of
Ulysses, transforms the customers at a crowded restaurant
into sows, but at least he leaves them their hunger,
energy, and their capacity to bite. In Aeolus the Irish
Nationalists are turned into windy-breathed sirens and
spendthrifts of coined phrases, but their language
*
remains. Yeats, by contrast, turns his fellow customers
15 But if the fugitive should live, as I think Russell
does at times, as it is natural for a Morris or a Henley
or a Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art
surrenders itself to moral or poetical commonplace, to a
repetition of thoughts and images that have no relation to
experience (Au 107). _______________________________
142
into silent death masks. No wonder: As "All Soul's
Night" (1920) puts it, "For Meditations upon unknown
thought / Make human intercourse grow less and less" (CP
126). Yeats still worships at the marmorean Muse, who
inspires all art to move toward the condition of
sculpture:16 When he raises his head from his book of
poetry, time is burned up; silence reigns; the restaurant
becomes a museum--still, hushed, and breathless.
We should remember, however, that while Yeats's
fellow customers at the restaurant are silenced, and their
human intercourse must grow less and less, his own voice
rings loud and clear. He has retained the power to write,
persuade, and summon. What kind of Condition has Yeats
now attained? I would like to suggest that it is the
rhetorical condition of ghosts and the eminent dead. It
is not mere coincidence, for instance, that the state of
self-possession that Yeats attains for himself and enjoys
in the final pages of Per Arnica is precisely the same
state reached by the "illustrious dead men" just before
passing on:
Were our masters right when they declared
so solidly that we should be content to
know these presences that seemed friendly
and near but as 'the phantom' in
Coleridge's poem, and to think of them
perhaps as having, as Saint Thomas says,
16 See Michael North, The Final Sculpture: Public
Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 43-99. ______
143
entered upon the eternal possession of
themselves in one single moment?
All look and likeness caught from earth,
All accident of kin and birth,
Had passed away. There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Upraised beneath the rifted stone,
But of one spirit all her own;
She, she herself and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.
(my emphasis; Myth 347)
Indeed, to those around him in the coffee shop, Yeats
appears much like these phantoms--"friendly and near" but
ultimately unknowable, silent like the death mask or the
statue-like lineaments of the woman described by
Coleridge: "There was no trace / Of aught on that
illumined face." Yet one remembers that part of Yeats's
project is to show that the passive death mask, like the
mask of the anti-self that one may consciously seek, is
not passive and admirable, but rather possesses intentions
and will of its own. Yeats is therefore less like a
statue than like the phantoms ("those amorous shades in
the Japanese play") whose condition he says resembles that
of poets, and who hover in the Condition of Air voicing
the following lament:
That we may acquire power
Even in our faint substance,
We will show forth even now,
And though it be but in a dream.
Our form of repentance.
(Myth 357)
144
The phantoms desire both "repentence” and "power." Here,
as in Yeats's restaurant scene, there is a paradoxical
tension between the desire for innocence, repentance,
forgiveness, and pardon and the desire for power and
influence.
Can this tension be resolved? One resolution occurs
within Yeats's remarkable belief that makes ghosts
(regardless of their phantom state or ahistorical
condition) out to be the actual movers and shakers in the
world:
Communication with Anima Mundi is through
the association of thoughts or images or
objects; and the famous dead, and those of
whom but a faint memory lingers, can still
--and it is for no other end that, all
unknowing, we value posthumous fame--tread
the corridor and take an empty chair. . . .
Surely of the passionate dead we can but
cry in words Ben Jonson meant for none but
Shakespeare: 'So rammed,' are they 'with
life they can but grown in life with
being.' (Myth 360)
These "mediatorial shades" are the "illustrious dead men,"
"most wise dead" who, "living in our memories" are the
source of our instinct, love, and desire, "and it is their
love and desire, all unknowing, that make us drive beyond
our reason, or in defiance of our interest it may be”
(Myth 359). Yeats's rhetorical status in the coffee shop
is that of the ghost, the shade who may rock the cradle or
comfort the child, and do so silently, without being
judged (or controlled) by common people. In "Magic, "_____
145
Yeats made the argument that ghosts--and the imaginative
men who can summon them--are truly the unacknowledged
legislators of mankind:
If all who have described events like this
have not dreamed, we should rewrite our
histories, for all men, certainly all
imaginative men, must be for ever casting
forth enchantments, glamours, illusions;
and all men, especially tranquil men who
have no powerful egotistic life, must be
continually passing under their power (E&I
40).
The imaginative power of the ghosts is interdependent with
the ghostly power of the poet. Ghosts and images from
Anima Mundi--whether acting through mediatorial shades,
the Daimon, or just imaginative men (as in "The Second
Coming?")--can still "cast forth enchantments." Magic can
empower the imaginative men over the "tranquil men."
Types such as the Easter rebels are "enchanted to stone,"
types such as Yeats do the enchanting. "I keep going over
the past in my mind and wondering if I could have done
anything to turn those young men in some other direction,"
Yeats wrote after the Rising (L 614). Perhaps he wished
to summon the power, as he records in the Memoirs, that he
once felt over Maud Gonne: "I, who could not influence
her actions, could dominate her inner being" (Mem 124).
It is the memory of this internal domination, I would
claim, that links "Leda and the Swan" and "Among School
Children" as being expressions of Yeats's subconscious
146
desires to dominate Ireland, especially to dominate the
revolutionary consciousness that followed in Maud Gonne's
legacy and continually challenged the authority (and
safety) of Yeats the Senator poet. Per Arnica, then, does
not signal a retreat of Yeats's desires to influence
Ireland's politics; it merely displaces those desires into
a variety of personal and cosmological realms.
Yeats's magical pursuits, therefore, do not merely
help him attain peace and autonomy from rhetoric; they
grant the poet a certain kind of rhetorical status and
political influence that is denied in Ireland's
increasingly republican atmosphere. The connections among
"magic," rhetorical power, and political clout are made
most explicitly in the Epilogue to Per Arnica. It is
there that Yeats recounts what made the aestheticism of
the nineties so alluring, and we can imagine that by
returning to those days in May 1917, he somehow seeks to
recapture some of that allure;
The movement of letters had been haughty
even before Magic had touched it. Rimbaud
had sung; 'Am I an old maid that I should
fear the embrace of death?' And
everywhere in Paris and in London young men
boasted of the garret and claimed to have
no need of what the crowd values. (Myth
368)
The boasting of the artist in the face of the disapproving
bourgeoisie and the boasting of the Easter Rebels before
the firing squad are profoundly different, and that_______
147
difference has to do with their rhetorical stance. The
artists could be "haughty" before the crowd because they
could be successful even without the crowd; the rebels, by
contrast, were "haughty" because they believed the crowd
would pick up their gauntlet. The "haughtiness" of the
French poets, therefore, significantly reverses the
dynamics of any rhetorical situation: Instead of the
speaker pursuing the crowd, the crowd must pursue the
speaker. Though Yeats’s reversal of rhetorical dynamics
appears to be anti-rhetorical, it is both rhetorical and
political. For "haughty” was not only Yeats's epithet for
the French poets but also his favorite description of
Parnell.1 7
Yeats's ideological ideal for the rhetorical position
of both poets and politicians now becomes clear. He would
have both speakers acquire the rhetorical freedom of the
dead.18 The poem and political speech would take on the
17 The Memoirs, for instance, quotes Henley's comment
that "[Parnell] had been eighteen years before the country
and we knew nothing of his character but that he was
haughty" (Mem 39).
18 Yeats often sought this state, the rhetorical power
of the noble dead; he desired to be entombed and honored
as a statue, who like that in "The Statues" could stand
indifferent and still and never need to pursue an
audience. The statue in Yeats's poetic is similar to the
fisherman, who patiently awaits his prey and does not,
like the hunter, go after it. Thus, in the middle of the
Divorce Speech, after Yeats had looked to Parnell as a
model, he was rebuked by a fellow Senator with the line
"Do you think we might leave the dead alone?" His reply:
"I am passing on. I would hate to leave the dead alone"
(SS 98). Yeats, being an Irishman, knew how powerful the
148
qualities of the magical or sacred text. Such a
transformation is profound: Whereas the rhetorical text
(since it pursues its reader) is judged by the world, and
opens itself to criticism and debate (even, in Yeats's
terms, ''hatred,”) the religious or hermeneutical text, to
the contrary, judges the reader; it demands respect and
piety--the reader must pursue its meanings through
labyrinthine paths. The implicit argument of Yeats's
epilogue is that one should pursue the meanings of
Parnell's rhetoric and oratory as one pursues a poem, that
is, long after its rhetorical situation and historical
dynamic has passed. Poetry, in Yeats's view, should not
only aspire toward the condition of statuary, which
"speaks" or signifies without being spoken to; it should
aspire equally to the condition of mystical secrets and
hermetic symbolism, in that only the initiated can
understand. Oratory in turn should strive toward the
condition of poetry, a sacred text, and both arts should
aspire to the silence of the crypt. Per Arnica Silentia
Lunae.
Yeats's attacks on rhetoric, then, turn out finally
to be attacks on negotiation and dialogue--that is, an
attack on the rhetoric of others while protecting his own
-rhetoric from attack through mystical authority, the
authority of magicians, haughty poets, and aloof
jdead can be. See also "Under Ben Bulben," (CP 341)._______
149
politicians. And it is precisely this latter rhetoric
that Yeats practices throughout Per Arnica, which has
always appeared to critics to be a personal, dreamlike
meditation rather than a clear statement of doctrine.
That doctrine, as I have pointed out, does exist, but it
is masked, mediated, and displaced. Nevertheless, it is
Yeats’s very ability to mask that doctrine, while at the
same time bewildering critics into deeper and deeper
readings of the work, that makes Per Arnica a rhetorical
and ideological success. By denying any explicit purpose,
and by avoiding both the style and structure that would
communicate to reviewers, Per Arnica has become a work that
does not pursue, but rather demands pursuit.
150
THE RHETORIC OF TITLES: HISTORY, RHETORIC, AND IDEOLOGY
IN "NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN"
"Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" is a poem critics
have found nearly impossible to explicate without
reference to the political world outside of the poem.1
The meaning of the poem has come to depend a great deal
on to which level of reference critics have chosen to
j
direct their attention, whether it be local (Ellen Quinn,
the Kiltarten "mother, murdered at her door" [CP 205]);
national (the Irish republicans versus the English Black
and Tans); international (World War I and the Bolshevik
Revolution); global (the rise of anti-democratic rule,
Communist or Fascist); or cosmological (the whirling of
the "Platonic Year").
But locating the references of a poem is not the same
as providing a historical understanding of the poem.
Standard commentaries tend to obscure or confuse history
as well as illuminate it. This confusion has been caused
primarily by the difficulty entailed in situating the poem
in its historical, or rhetorical, moment--the place and
1 Even the standard critical reading of the poem
(Thomas Parkinson's entitled "The World of Yeats's
'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,'" in B.H. Lehman, The
Image of the Work, University of California English
Studies, 11 (1955)) must include the world in the title,
as if to remind us that if the historical world is
ignored, some kind of world must be the object of
reference.
151
time in which we are to locate and understand specific
lines of "presence," for example the line, "Now days are
dragon-ridden." Though deconstruction admonishes us that
such a particular moment can never be ultimately located,
such chidings do not prevent one, I think, from wondering
whether that "now" refers to a local and rhetorical moment
or instead to a vague epoch in the Platonic year. That
is, in Yeats's terms, does the "now" compass a period of
political upheaval that is changing history, or does it
merely reflect the apogee of some cycle of history, a
cycle that implies that any attempt at change is doomed
from the start? Only by answering these crucial
questions, I believe, can one come to identify and
understand the rhetorical and ideological projects of
"Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen."
The difficulty of accurately situate the writing of
"Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" is primarily the result of
the poem1s ambiguous and complicated textual and
publication history. The manuscript of the poem was
completed in the spring of 1921, at the height of the
Anglo-Irish War,2 and the poem was first titled "Thoughts
Upon the Present State of the World." It appeared in the
2 Though Richard Ellman, on evidence from Mrs. Yeats,
indicates that the poem existed in many versions from 1919
to 1921, George Saul notes that the manuscript of
"Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World," the early
title for the work, dates from early 1921. (Saul, 1957,
126-7).
152
American Dial in September 1921, after the Anglo-Irish
truce of 11 July, and in The London Mercury in November
1921, during the negotiations for the Treaty, which was
signed 6 December 1921.3 In both publications, Yeats
dated the poem "May 1921.” In 1922, the poem appeared
under the same title in a Cuala Press limited edition
called Seven Poems and a Fragment. But in 1928--when it
was published in The Tower volume, with a few minor
revisions--Yeats made two significant alterations.
First, he changed the title from "Thoughts Upon the
Present State of the World" to "Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen." The oddness of this title (why not simply
"Nineteen Nineteen"?) does suggest the possibility that
Yeats was more interested in cosmological symmetry (based
on a theory of numerology4 ) than historical specificity.
31 am indebted to Toby A. Foshay out the context of
these publication dates, though I disagree with his
interpretation of their coincidence. "Yeats's 'Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen': Chronology, Chronography, and
Chronic Misreading," The Journal of Narrative Technique,
13:2 (Spring 1983), 100-108, 102
4 By the lights of numerology, the dating of 1919
might be seen as a way of focusing on the eternal conflict
between the quality of 1 (individuality) and 9 (unity),
which, in Yeats's terms would also mean the eternal
(yin/yang) conflict of individualism and humanitarianism,
self-delight and self-sacrifice, and so on. If so,
Yeats's is providing an even more elaborate ideological
cloak to cover the historical exigencies of the poem; the
"masterful images" are grown in "pure mind," and the "rag-
and-bone shop" in which they began is forgotten. What
makes such a cosmological reading of the poem interesting,
however, is that by such lights, 1919 is not a signature
but a numerological marker (19) (19), which indicates two
jseparate yin/yang conflicts, one in England and one in
153
Yeats's second editorial maneuver, changing the signatory
date from "May 1921" to "1919," casts doubt on such an
interpretation. One hardly needs Althusser's compelling
thesis that the "'ideas' of a human subject exist in his
actions"5 to understand that Yeats's material actions here
have rhetorical— as well as ideological--potential and
significance. Clearly Yeats's intention in redating the
poem was to situate its historical moment as 1919, and
not, as he had done earlier, as 1921.
Why did Yeats do this? As I shall argue in this
chapter, Yeats's retitling and redating of "Thoughts Upon
the Present State of the World" constitute a deliberate
alteration of the political sentiments of the poem. It
accomplishes this by changing the poem's point of
reference from the context of the Anglo-Irish War (an
international struggle in 1921) to the state of Ireland,
and the struggle between revolutionary and conservative
ideologies, in 1919. In other words, when Yeats wrote and
published the poem in 1921, it brought (or purported to
bring) condemnation equally on English oppression and the
Ireland. That is, in 1921, Yeats saw the conflict between
the individualist British and the humanitarian (and thus
revolutionary) Irish, but in 1928; when the 1919 marker
appeared, he saw clearly that both countries were marked
by the same eternal struggle, though it manifested itself
in different ways. Within these dichotomies, then,
Yeats's valorization of the qualities of the 1 (or
individual) after 1921 casts his whole rhetoric into a
Pro-English stance.
5 Althusser, 1971, 168.
154
Irish republican frenzy. When titled "Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen" and published in 1928, however, the poem's
context is only Ireland, and the poem thus condemns the
the Irish republicanism of 1919 whose legacy which, Yeats
thought, had motivated the assassination of his friend
Kevin O'Higgins, the Free State's Minister of Justice, and
continued to corrode the established honor and social
power of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. "Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen" not only furthers Yeats's argument against
the dangerous consequences of the Easter Rising, but it
transposes his poetic theory, expressed in Per Arnica, to
the level of politics: By changing the context of
"Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World" from an
international to a national scene, Yeats seems now to
assert that one he makes out of the quarrels with other
countries, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with his own
country, poetry.
Although a number of readings have ignored the
textual problems of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,"6 or
have noticed them but failed to pursue their interpretive
consequences,7 two commentaries have faced the problem
squarely. The author of the first of them, Toby A.
6 Hone, W. B. Yeats (1942), 329; Jeffares Man and Poet
(1949), 221; Henn, Tower (1950), 17; Saul (1957), 126-7;
Whitaker "The World" (1964) 222; Lentricchia Gaiety
(1968), 108; Bloom Yeats (1979), 356; Harris Coole Park
(1974), 153.
7 Tuohy, Yeats (1978), 171.
155
Forshay, upbraids earlier commentators for attempting to
read "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" in light of the Irish
context in 1919. Though Forshay marshals evidence both
textual and historical for his argument, his best evidence
consists in the fact that the historical event to which
Yeats refers in the line "mother, murdered at her door"
took place not in 1919 but (according to Lady Gregory's
journal) at least a year later, on 5 November 1920.
Moreover, Forshay points out, the infamous Black and Tan
raids, which most critics mention as the crucial military
background accounting for the sense of despair expressed
in the poem, did not even begin until 1920.8 So Forshay
is correct in pointing out that to read the poem in light
of Yeats's historical position in 1919 is insufficient.
Yet his alternative reading, which hygienically removes
the poem from politics altogether, disappoints: "My
argument is that "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" is not
primarily a political poem. That is, though Yeats is
responding as an Irishman to the Irish situation during
this period, he is seeing events not primarily in their
8Forshay writes: "There was a qualitative difference
between the ideological struggle of the nationalist,
largely Catholic, IRA and the loyoalist, largely
protestant, Royal Irish Constabulary in 1919, and the
brutal the brutal and frustrated reprisals of British
soldiers against the guerilla tactics of the IRA in 1920
and 1921." He is indorrect to reduce the Irish side of
the conflict with the IRA, insofar as the split between
De Valera and the IRA did not occur until 1923, but his
general point is well-taken (Forshay, 101).
156
political implication but in their most universal sense”
(103). What the poem takes as its subject, he says, then,
is that "Time itself eventually asserts itself against
human attempts to create an orderly world by demonstrating
the vulnerability of creativity to destruction" (104).
Forshay's reading ultimately results in an uncritical
reproduction of the poem's ideological massages: Just as
Yeats argues that to find comfort in the face of the
historical contradictions one must believe in a
cosmological order underlying the disruptions of history,
Forshay seems to find a way out of the contradiction
between the poem's textual history and its reception
history by executing a similar leap of faith: The poem is
thus not about "Yeats's involvement in the political or
even cultural events of the time," he concludes, but
rather it is "an attempt to come to terms with the very
nature of time and 'the present' itself." (104) Forshay's
reading thus excises from the poem the local and
rhetorical import, while universalizing its ideological
message ("Time wounds all heels?"). Forshay uncritically
adopts and hence reproduces and perpetuates the ideology
behind Yeats's poetic revisions: She implies that a true
poem must give up its rhetorical force to keep its poetic
integrity.
A more critical reader of the relations among
157
history, culture, and ideology is W.J. McCormack,9 who
reads "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" in the context of
Anglo-Irish sensitivity to the concept of "Public
Opinion," thus providing a rich cultural and ideological
context for the line "Public opinion ripening for so long
/ We thought it would outlive all future days." He seems
'to understand, moreover--as Forshay does not-- that
critical misreadings of the poem are not merely errors,
but signals that point to ideological blind spots: "To
read the poem solely in terms of the year 1919 is a
simple-minded historicism, to read it in eighteenth-
century terms is an exercise in myth" (314). McCormack
takes a critical view of attempts to situate the "voice"
of the poem in specific historical moments; he argues,
instead, that the "speaker is multivocal, historical as
well as contemporary," and in support of this view
highlights the fact that, in the final section of the
poem, "the speaker, the I-personae in any variation," is
eliminated (McCormack, 315).10 McCormack is certainly
right to question the attempt to identify the various
9 W. J. McCormack, Ascendacy and Tradition in Anglo-
Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford, 1984).
10McCormack criticizes Torchiana's reading of the
opening lines of the poem, "We too had many toys when
young" for assuming the "the speaker of the poem may be
identified with Yeats himself" (310). Daniel Harris's
view of the speaker ("Reiterating the public pronoun 'we,"
the speaker makes himself the scapegoat of an entire
coterie" [Harris, p. 156.]) is taken more seriously.
158
first-person personae in the poem as (versions of) Yeats,
and he is equally right to question any attempt to grant
them a logocentric presence. Yet though speech itself, as
Austin and Searle have shown, is also an act or
performance, it is a mistake to think, as McCormack seems
to, that a poet needs to use a voice to perform a
rhetorical act. To the contrary, a poet's conscious
changes in titling, dating, and publishing a poem are
also actions, and these acts must be interrogated for
their rhetorical intentions and ideological consequences.
McCormack is also correct to argue that "the various
levels of historical allusion in Yeats's poem posit a
choice of historical moments at which bourgeois politics
might be seen as emerging in Ireland." He makes a
mistake, however, in my view, when he continues by saying
that "None of these [levels] can be chosen . . . ." (316).
For such a conclusion masks the assumption that the
ideological meanings of the poem must be determined by
reference to the historical context outside of the poem
without taking into account the rhetorical acts performed
by Yeats himself at specific historical moments. Though
McCormack argues that "the evolution of title and
signatory date is an admission of historical focus
combined with a falsification of compositional history,"
he never tries to explain the rhetorical intentions behind
that "falsification." Indeed, he passes over, without
159
comment, Yeats's historical situation in 1928, the year
in which he consciously attempted to falsify the
"compositional history." Faced with the difficult
question of ascertaining and evaluating the poet's
rhetorical stance in 1928, McCormack runs into the same
interpretive difficulties Forshay encountered. More
unfortunately, for he is otherwise a shrewd reader,
McCormack reiterates Forshay's answer to solving the
riddle: He too tries to account for the contradictions in
the poem by appealing to Yeats's cosmological theory:
"Repetition, like the vast planetary monotony of the
Platonic Year, implodes throughout 'Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen'." McCormack is convinced that "The poem is felt
to shift in history but hardly to move with it." I,
however, would argue that whereas the poem itself may not
"move with history," the text itself did. It moved with
Yeats from 1919 to 1928, and as his revision shows, his
rhetorical acts of titling and dating also moved (i.e.,
shifted) with history. The key to understanding those
rhetorical acts, then, is to locate the relevant history
in which they took place--not in 1919 obviously, since the
poem was not written then, but in 1921 and 1928.11
11 For the distinction between poem and text which
informs my discussion, see Jerome J McGann, The Beauty of
Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method
& Theory (Oxford, 1985), 114-115. ____
160
History and Rhetoric In 1921
Yeats wrote Olivia Shakespeare on 9 April 1921 that
"I am writing a series of poems ('thoughts suggested by
the present state of the world' or some such name). I
have written two and there may be many more" (L 668). The
next day he wrote to Lady Gregory about the same poems,
saying "I am writing a series of poems on the state of
things in Ireland and am now in the middle of the third."
(L 668). Critics have generally been split over which of
these two representations of the poem to accept; is it
primarily about the "state of the world" or about the
"state of Ireland?" What is important to notice, however,
is that in 1921 both representations were available to
Yeats. To his English readers, reading the poem in the
London Mercury, the poem might be seen as an attempt to
deal with international conflicts, the "state of the
world"; to his Irish friends, who would read the poem in a
privately printed Cuala Press edition, it was written in
response to the intranational conflicts between forces in
Ireland. Yet both accounts tend to blur the fact that the
historical conflict with which Yeats was engaged as he
wrote his "series of poems" was actually inter-
nationalistic. That is, it concerned a conflict between
Ireland's emerging nationalism and England's declining
imperialism. "Thoughts upon the Present State of the
World" was completed, according to Yeats's first dating,
161
in "May of 1921." However, inasmuch as the poem did not
appear in the Dial until September— and in the London
Mercury not until December, it seems possible that Yeats
could have revised the poem during the summer months of
1921, after the Truce was signed between the British Army
and the I.R.A. (9 July) but before the signing of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty (6 December). Yeats thus wrote the
bulk of the poem in the middle of the most bloody
conflicts between the Irish and English, when neither the
truce nor the Treaty could be foreseen. The situation of
1921 was predominately, then, the war between Ireland and
England. Yet 1921 also marked a crucial turning point.
Although 1920 was a year of attacks and reprisals between
the Irish republicans and the Black and Tans and Auxiliary
Troops, it was not until January 1921 that British
government-authorized reprisals began. It was not until
1921, that is to say, Britain was engaged in the war
against the Irish in earnest: Houses were burned;
prisoners were executed by firing squad, or hanged. The
Irish response to these events was equally as indignant:
One hundred twenty-four Sinn Feiners and four independents
were returned unopposed to illegal Irish parliament.
Although the conflict between Ireland and England
seemed to have reached an intense pitch during the time
Yeats wrote the poem "Thoughts," he demonstrated his
ambivalence with respect to this conflict in two other
162
documents. The first was the text of a fiery speech
delivered to the Oxford Union in February 1921. In that
speech, according to the report in the Freeman's Journal,
Yeats uttered a "scathing denunciation on England's
treatment of Ireland." Though the article (whose
conscious attempt to portray Yeats as a patriot cannot be
taken uncritically) emphasizes Yeats's defense of the
radical Irish farmers, it also includes the following
jpassage, which suggests that Yeats's denunciation of
England's actions was at least in part justified by his
admiration for their ideals:
Mr. Yeats said he did not know which
lay most heavily on his heart — Ireland or
England. Ireland would come out
strengthened by suffering, but England -- .
[Yeats argued] We still speak of liberty
and law, but there is truth in the jibe that the
war "made the world safe for hypocrisy." It is
untrue that the Black and Tans were hardly-tried
men, whose nerves gave way. This might be said
of the soldiers, who have for the most part
behaved well. Who sent the Black and Tans? If
England were the England of Victoria she would
find out who sent them and indict them.12
Though Elizabeth Cullingford cites this passage as proof
of Yeats's unfailing Irish patriotism, and comments that
"Yeats's fierce speech left his hearers in no doubt as to
where his sympathies lay" (113), the rhetoric by which
Yeats makes his appeal complicates matters considerably.
12"Reprisals Condemned," Freeman's Journal, 19 Feb.
1921, 5 (cited in Cullingford, 113)._____________________
163
First, Yeats actually calls upon the King himself to
"indict" those who sent the Black and Tans. In addition,
just as he did in the "Irish Dramatic Movement" speech
before the Nobel audience, Yeats continues to downplay the
historical conflict between Ireland and England by
localizing the Anglo-Irish war in terms of a few
personalities, a reductio ad triviatum: If only the King
could find them! Second, as Yeats clearly expressed, he
felt dual allegiances to England and Ireland. Yet at the
same time that he tries to position himself between the
two nations, equidistant from them both, his rhetoric
implies that he mourns England's loss rather than
celebrate Ireland's gain: He implies that Ireland has a
long way to go toward greatness, but England can only fall
from it; Ireland would be strengthened by the violence;
England would be weakened. Yeats positioned himself in a
similar way in a letter written to Lady Gregory during the
fiery debates over the Anglo-Irish Treaty:
I am in deep gloom about Ireland for though
I expect ratification of the treaty from a
plebiscite I see no hope of escape from
bitterness, and the extreme party may
carry the'country. When men are very
bitter, death and ruin draw them on as a
rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the
dancing of the fox. In the last week I
have been planning to live in Dublin--
George very urgent for this--but I feel now
that all may be blood and misery. If that
comes we may abandon Ballylee to the owls
and rats. and England too (where passions
will rise and I shall find myself with no
answer), and live in some far land. Should
164
England and Ireland be divided beyond all
hope of remedy, what: else could one do for
the children's sakes, or one's own work? I
could not bring them to Ireland where they
would inherit bitterness, nor leave them in
England where, being Irish by tradition,
and by family and fame, they would be in an
unnatural condition of mind and grow, as
so many Irishmen who live here do, sour and
argumentative, (my italics; Letters, 675)
Yeats seldom allows his Arnoldian slip to show so
obviously as he does here, with his rhetorical opposition
of the "bitter, 1 1 "sour” "argumentative" Irishmen to those
who could, with only a tincture of English culture, become
sweet and light. But though Yeats describes himself here
as a poet caught between culture and anarchy, he is also a
man caught between two countries. Now that we have
considered the rhetorical situation that Yeats faced in
1921, let us turn to the other, and more important,
rhetorical moment that must be considered if we are to
understand "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"--1928.
History and Rhetoric in 1928
When Yeats changed the title of the poem from
"Thoughts" to "Nineteen" in 1928, he performed a
significant maneuver in a nearly impassible rhetorical
situation. Although Yeats had continued to argue for his
artistic projects during his entire Senate career (1922-
1928), he was gradually disappointed by the shift of
political power in Ireland from the predominately Anglo-
165
Irish Senate to the predominately Catholic Dail; his
infamous divorce speech had alienated himself from both
Catholics and many Southern Unionists; his proposal that
the design of Irish coinage follow Greek models had been
subverted by marketing consideration of the the Ministry
of Culture; the proposed Copyright Law had forced him to
threaten to "move to the border" and "become exceedingly
eloquent"; and just before he left the Senate, he was
infuriated further by Ireland’s first major Censorship
Bill, about which he wrote an excoriating article in The
Spectator condemning the dangerous mixture of church and
state in literary affairs (SS 175-180). Indeed, by the
time Yeats left the Senate, he was already moving beyond
the obvious bitterness of 1928 The Tower volume to the
Saeva Indignatio of The Winding Stair poems. In 1927,
Kevin O'Higgins, whom Yeats called Ireland's one great
statesman, had been assassinated by the I.R.A., and Yeats
had written "In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con
Markiewicz," "Death," "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," and
"Blood and the Moon. These are poems that either
explicitly praise the Anglo-Irish tradition that has been
"convicted of guilt" by the republican voices, or that
dissolve the conflicts between the quarrels with others
and the quarrel with self by bringing into the tower the
"soldier's right" to engage in conflict. Yeats's
retitling and redating of "Thoughts . . . , " then, is one
166
more volley in his war with the knaves and dolts who vexed
him in the Senate.
The advantage--indeed necessity--of reading "Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen" from the perspective of 1928 (as
well as that of 1921) can be best demonstrated by turning
to Section IV:
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.
(CP 235-6)
Of this passage McCormack comments, "What is crucial here
is not so much the fixing of a 'setting' in time for the
poem, as it is the acknowledgement of time passing with
man's alteration as its measure." I would argue, quite
the contrary: that the stanza demands to be read in light
of the settings of both 1921 and 1928. Indeed, the line
"We who seven years ago" raises three questions: (1) Who
is meant by the pronoun "we"? (2) When is the "we"
speaking? (3) What happened seven years before that
date? The answer to the first question depends on the
answers to the second and third.
Traditional readings of Section IV have situated the
speaker of these lines in either 1921 or 1919, and thus
critics have located the "seven years ago" in the context
of the English Parliament's debates over Home Rule between
167
1912 and 1914.13 The year 1914, however, seems to be the
more probable point of reference: Although it is true
that Home Rule legislation was put forth in 1912, it was
in May of 1914, precisely seven years before Yeats's first
signatory date for "Thoughts . . . ." that Home Rule
passed the House of Commons for the third time (25 May
1914). Other readers have pointed to the year 1914 for
another reason— to situate Yeats's reference in the
Edwardian calm that preceded the first World War. This
reading, which tries to place Yeats's despair over the
state of the world in a European context, gathers support,
of course, from stanza three, in which Yeats gives us a
picture of pre-War military status:
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks
unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
13 T. R. Henn argues that "'Seven years' bring us to
1912." Yet this reading is difficult to believe, if only
for the fact that Yeats never wrote the poem in 1919, that
is, there was no point in which Yeats's perspective was
that of a poet looking back to 1912. It is for this reason
that Henn must refer back not to any specific historical
events in 1912, but instead to a vague ideological period:
"It is clear from the poem that, though Yeats was emerging
from a kind of dark night of the soul into the bitter
clarity of Responsibilities, and though there were
political controversies, detractions, and slanders too
familiar to quote, he saw the time, in retrospect, as one
of comparative tranquility, justice, a progress toward
civilized behaviour." Henn in fact adopts the English
reading of the year 1914 and projects it onto the Ireland
of 1912.
168
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not
prance. (CP 205)
Though no socialist utopia had arrived, the Empire was at
least drowsy. To read the poem with the context of the
World War, however, has several shortcomings. Not only
does it require that one adopt a particularly English view
of history (Ireland and other countries in Europe were not
experiencing such an Edwardian calm), but it conflates the
difference between the respective world-views of Yeats and
of the War poets like Owen and Sassoon— a distinction
Yeats himself sought to maintain.
Despite these difficulties, however, it seems clear
that when Yeats composed the poem in 1921, this stanza
referred to 1914. Thus, we can assume that the we "who
seven years ago / Talked of honour and of truth" refers to
those members of the English Parliament who were leading
the fight for Home Rule. Though Yeats in 1921 uses the
plural form "we," implying a group to which Yeats is also
a member, the rhetorical force of the passge implies that
the poet is using "we" as a revised form of "you," as in
"So we think we're going out the door, do we?" or "We
think we're very cute, do we?" Other evidence
corroborates this reading. Yeats's Oxford Union speech in
February, for example, expressed the same distinction as
Section IV does between the high-minded abstractions of
English politicians and their later actions: "We still
169
speak of liberty and law, but there is truth in the jibe
that the war 'made the world safe for hypocricy [sic].'"
The discrepancy between words and actions, and hence the
charge of hypocrisy, is certainly meant, in 1921, to refer
to England alone- As interpreted from the perspective of
1921, the line with "we" could also be meant to refer to
the British soldiers who exhibited the same hypocrisy of
British politicians. These were the same soldiers who
fought for King and country in 1914 and for the cause of
saving small nations like Belgium from the imperialism of
the Germans but, it turns out, were now, in 1921, the
members of the Black and Tans who showed the "The weasel's
twist, the weasel's tooth" in their efforts to maintain
their own Empire. That the pronoun "we" in 1921 refers to
primarily English hypocrites is also supported by natural
history, for as T. R. Henn reminds us, "there are no
weasels in Ireland."14 Furthermore, Yeats's own writing
traditionally used the image of the "weasel" to refer to
someone in the role of the oppressor. The Countess
Cathleen, for instance, includes the line "--though the
whole land squeal like a rabbit under the weasel's
tooth."15 "We who" and "Weasels," then, are linked not
14 See "The Weasel's Tooth," Last Essays, p. 26ff.
15I am in debt here to Henn (26). McCormack
mentions that "Thomas Kinsella's 'Nightwalker' will also
use the weasel as allegorical of Ernest Blythe, sometime
Free State minister for finance and inheritor of Yeats's
Abbey Theatre (p. 312)--which points, I would suggest,_____
170
only by their assonantal echo but by their historical
significance. In 1921, Section IV is primarily addressed
to the hypocricy of the English, the sharp gap between
their high-minded ideals and their weasel-like brutality.
In 1928, however, when Yeats changed the title and
date of "Thoughts . . . ," his ideological position on the
status of Ireland and England had profoundly shifted.
Turning to edit his poems for the 1928 Tower volume,
defeated and disappointed by Ireland’s turn toward a
primarily Catholic state, it seems highly likely that the
line "We who seven years ago / Talked of honour and of
truth" reminded him not of 1914 (now 14 years ago) but of
1921 and the major political event of that year— the
establishment of the Irish Free State. The distance
between word and deed, then, and thus the charge of
hypocrisy, is now, it seems, much more applicable to
Ireland than to England. Yeats will now turn to implicate
the "we" of the stanza as being primarily Irish, those who
spoke the ideals of the Free State Constitution
guaranteeing the equal rights to all Irish citizens,
including the minority Anglo-Irish.
How, then, should we read the word "weasels"? How
can the weasels be Irish in 1928 when they were clearly
English in 1921? Once more we must turn to T. R. Henn,
that the tradition is to associate the weasel with the
]English, and those who act like them.
171
who argues that: inasmuch as weasel is sometimes used to
describe the Irish rodent (the stoat) and, further,
inasmuch as Yeats’s knowledge of natural history was
minimal, it seems quite plausible that the word weasel in
Yeats's writing could be applied equally as well to the
Irish incendiaries as to the English soldiers. It is
ironic that although Henn’s elaborate exegesis of "weasel"
had the purpose of portraying Yeats as rersponding to the
onslaughts of the Catholic ideologues, it also has the
residual effect of laying bare Yeats's own ideology.
Henn's most telling example--especially as far as
identifying Yeats's ideological shift in 1928--is the line
from Henry V (I, 3, 107):
For once the eagle England being in prey.
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs .
• • •
In Shakespeare's rhetoric, the eagle is England, and the
"weasel" is any dangerous colony that lies beyond the
pale. Given that Yeats described the Irregular soldier in
"Meditations ..." as "Falstaffian," it seems probable
that Yeats also adopted the Shakespearean view of the
relation between the eagle and weasel for "Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen." The weasels are now the rebel
Irish; the eagle, the Anglo-Irish.
Yeats often used the eagle to symbolize the nobility
172
and haughtiness of the Anglo-Irish. In 1912 we find Yeats
appealing to Hugh Lane (in "To a Wealthy Man . . . ) to
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!
(CP 106)
On 7 August 1909, in a journal entry that was the
precursor of the poem "Upon a House Shaken by the Land
Agitation," Yeats asked, "How should the world be better
if the wren’s nest flourish and the eagle's house is
scattered?"16 It the perspective of this haughty eagle
that Yeats adopts in this stanza from "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;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. (CP 205)
To read that "now" in the context of both 1921 and 1928 is
to become attuned to the important rhetorical shifts that
Yeats could effect through re-situating his poem in 1919
instead of 1921. From the perspective of readers in 1921,
the lines refer to the Black and Tan raid in Kiltartan in
which Ellen Quinn was shot. The word "dragon," pronounced
16 Cited in Donoghue, We Irish 1986, 51.
173
in an Irish brogue, cannot help but remind Irish readers
of "dragoon," an armed mounted soldier, like a Black and
Tan. (Yeats probably also had in mind the dragoon of
Blake1s nightmares or the one who tormented Byron in
Italy.) The phrase "scot-free," therefore, speaks of the
"drunken [English] soldiery" who are now free as the
Scots, that is to say, not only outside of English legal
jurisdiction but also outside England's noble ideals. In
addition, the "we" who "planned to bring the world under a
rule" is meant to refer to English imperialism and
colonialism. But in 1928, the members of the "drunken
soldiery" who can leave someone "murdered at [the] door"
would likely remind Yeats of the Irish Republican Army and
to those who assassinated Kevin O'Higgins. In 1928 it is
not only the English soldiers who can get off "scot-free"
for this crime, but the entire state of Ireland itself,
which, after the Treaty, has become an island unto itself,
free of England's cultural influence. The we "who pieced
our thoughts into philosophy" now implicates Yeats more
directly, but the Yeats of a much earlier time, when he
had high hopes for the Irish Free State. Thus the "we who
pieced" implicates the Anglo-Irish, whose philosophy, as
Donald Torchiana shows, had been literally pieced and
patched together by Yeats's idiosyncratic readings of
Burke, Swift, and Berkeley; and whose historical force as
subjective (eagle) personalities in Ireland (and the
174
world) had been clearly delineated by Yeats in A Vision.
By 1928, then, at the peak of his disappointment with the
Irish Free State, Yeats clearly adopts the Shakespearean
version of the weasel trope. The weasels are now those
leaders of Ireland who, like the Scots, are completely
outside English jurisdiction and thus pose a constant
threat to the princely eggs. The dragon has become a
reptile, not a soldier. Yeats himself had pieced his own
thoughts into a philosophy by 1928, and that philosophy
seemed to prove, once and for all, that he should stay in
the eagle's nest and take no count of the "world," who are
to Yeats nothing but weasels fighting in a hole.
II
Beyond History and Rhetoric; The Ideology of 1919.
I have argued so far that "Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen" is a poem that must be read historically and
rhetorical from two perspectives, 1921 and 1928, and I
have noted that Yeats's rhetorical intentions are to be
found primarily in the material acts of titling, dating,
and publishing the poems. As should be evident, I
largely agree with McCormack when he says that to read the
poem only "in light of 1919 is a simple-minded
historicism" (314). I would, however, go further: To
read the poem in terms of 1919 may not be "historicism" at
all, insofar as the year 1919 never existed as a
175
historical-rhetorical moment in the history of the poem's
production. For Yeats neither wrote the poem in 1919, nor
titled nor published it then. The year 1919, then, does
not exist as a rhetorical moment for the poet or the poem.
Why then does Yeats refer the reader to 1919? One
way to answer this question is to return briefly to the
historical context of 1919. Such a move would be
motivated not by the desire to recapture or reconstruct
the events of those years, but to point out Yeats's
attitude toward them. We are more concerned with Yeats's
own representation of the events than we are with the
actual events themselves; Yeats composed his rhetoric
based on a vision of historical events— his own story, as
it were--not out of newspaper headlines.
Yeats's writings in 1919 reveal his profound fear of
communism and of Irish revolution. In 1919 Yeats
published his first explicit repudiation of the Abbey
Theatre, a repudiation he articulated in "A People's
Theatre: A Letter to Lady Gregory," published in The Irish
Statesman. The ostensible goal of this letter-cum-essay
is to explain "certain thoughts that have made me believe
that the Abbey theatre can never do all we had hoped"
(Expl 244). But it is clear that his attacks on the
representational and realistic theater of the day is no
longer made on aesthetic grounds, but rather because of
their dangerous rhetorical impact upon the audience. The
176
essay complains about the mis-representation of the rich
and wealthy in the popular media that not only destroys
the theater but threatens to "justify some Red Terror"
(Expl 244).17 The dramatist’s need to portray "emotion
and intellect at their moment of union and at their
greatest intensity" (Expl 246) had not changed, nor had
imagination changed; neither had the playwright’s ability
to accurately portray a variety of social classes changed.
What had changed utterly for Yeats, however, was the
sympathy of the poor and the half-poor for the rich.
Yeats had plenty of evidence to hand for such a
change in 1919. Jacobin frenzy, as he would call it,
seemed to be on the rise. One month after Lenin and
Trotsky had achieved power in Russia (6-7 November 1917),
1 7
All exploitation of the life of the
wealthy, for the eye and ear of the poor,
in plays, in popular novels, in musical
comedy, in fashion papers, at the cinema,
in Daily Mirror photographs, is a travesty
of the rich; and if it were not would all
but justify some Red Terror. (Expl 244)
Yeats turns momentatily to literary history, claiming that
Shakespeare, for instance, "could only write his best . .
. when he wrote of those who controlled the mechanism of
life." He then returns to his polemic:
Shakespeare’s groundlings watched the stage
in terrified sympathy, while the British
working-man looks perhaps at the
photographs of these lords and ladies, whom
he admires beyond measure, with the
pleasant feeling all will be robbed and
murdered before he dies. (Expl 246)
177
Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to flee to the Netherlands
and Germany became a republic. To many observers, it
seemed that Ireland would follow the same pattern.
The terrible beauty engendered by the Easter Rising had
matured into a willful and powerful youth.
The year 1919 was significant for Yeats, then, not
because of the conflict between the Irish and the English
troops. The Black and Tan troops did not arrive until
January 1920. The key events of the year were the acts of
rebellion by the Irish republicans, acts which led to the
Anglo-Irish war, the Treaty, the establishment of the Free
State, and the Civil War. It witnessed I.R.A. ambushes of
police wagons, the first meeting of the Dail Eireann, the
escape of De Valera from Lincoln jail and his election as
president of the Dail, the establishment of "Limerick
soviet," and the declaration by the Dail that clergymen
could serve as ex-officio justices.18 The "war" in 1919,
then, was strictly intranational, a war between the Irish
Republican Army and the Irish Constabulary Forces. The
year 1919 was the year of Irish republicanism.
By situating the sentiments of his poem in 1919,
Yeats dramatically altered his rhetorical stance. No
longer does he blame the English and Irish equally for
the destruction around him. For in referring the reader
18 Yeats's nightmare--a Catholic Republic led by the
same patriots who had tried to censor the Abbey Theatre in
1907--seemed an incipient reality. _________________
178
to 1919 as a context, the "Violence upon the roads:
violence of horses" and the symbolic return of "Herodias*
daughters" and medieval inquisitions could be attributed
only to the Irish rebels. The British soldiers had not
yet begun their attacks or reprisals. "Many ingenuous
lovely things are gone," but the responsibility must lie
squarely on the soldiers of the Irish incendiaries;
neither the English nor return of the Platonic year is to
blame.
The 1928 revision of the poem signifies Yeats's
feelings about Irish republicanism in 1919. It is clear
from the letters in 1919 that Yeats viewed the recent
outbursts of republicanism not in light of the Platonic
year, as the poem may suggest, but in the context of the
rise of Bolshevism. His letter to A. E. in April shows a
poet fearful that Irish republicanism would turn from
green to red:
What I want is that Ireland be kept from
giving itself (under the influence of its
lunatic faculty of going against everything
which it believes England to affirm) to
Marxian revolution or Marxian definitions
of value in any form. I consider the
Marxian criterion of values as in this age
the spear-head of materialism and leading
to inevitable murder. From the criterion
follows the well-known phrase "Can the
bourgeois be innocent?" (L 656)
Yeats shows himself to be a shrewd critic of both Irish
rhetoric and Marxian ideology: in the first place, he
179
notes Ireland's "lunatic faculty" of opposing England and
things English at every turn; second, he identifies the
enemy as ideological and cultural as well as military: it
is not the workers that are dangerous, but "Marxian
values." Thus, since it is ideology that must be
attacked, it is with ideology that Yeats fight back.
Although this passage nicely points out the double gesture
of Yeats's own rhetorical project (to identify the cause
of social upheaval as ideological so it could be attacked
on that level), Yeats's attempt to associate the Irish
republicans with "Marxian criterion of value" was
premature rhetoric, as well as immature history. The Sinn
Fein party, especially when led by de Valera and Griffith,
was not communistic; it argued for a basic issues shared
by most laborers in Ireland: a decent wage and separation
from England.19 Pearse himself, moreover, argued for the
significance of private property rights.20 Furthermore,
by the time Yeats wrote this letter to A. E., Sinn Fein
itself was no longer a potent and homogenous revolutionary
force; its unity was twisting apart into two factions,
represented by two different rhetorics: the one adopted
19 Alan J. Ward, The Easter Rising: Revolution and
Irish Nationalism (Arlington Heights, IL: ANH Publishing
Corporation, 1980; and Ronnie Munck, Ireland: Nation,
State, and Class Struggle (Boulder and London: Westview
Press, 1985),121.
2 0 F.S. L. Lyons Ireland (1971), 344.
180
the language of class antagonism and radical agrarianism
and the other, the slogans of self-determination.21 Thus
Yeats's attempt to represent the Irish rebellion (on 11
July 1919) as a regression to the middle ages ("We are
reeling back into the middle ages without growing more
picturesque") cast the republican energies into the mold
of Catholic (and thus Bolshevik) inquisitors; Yeats and
his family would thereby become Protestant (and
capitalist) martyrs (CP 210). In sum, his rhetorical
project in his letters of 1919 was to identify the
extremist elements of the Sinn Feiners with the Bolsheviks
and medieval inquisitors, in order to scare the middle
class away from supporting them. In the nineties, Yeats
had appealed to the Irish middle classes to exchange their
Anglo-Saxon materialism for Irish spiritualism and
heroics; by 1919, when the rebellious energies had become
a challenge to middle class hegemony, Yeats pulled in his
'
green flag and began to shout warnings against the any red
ones.
Although an investigation of Yeats's rhetoric about
the republican acts of 1919 (of which this is only a
shadow) suggests much about his rhetorical project of
1919, and indeed points to Yeats's world view out of which
this project grew, it does little to aid our understanding
21 See Lyons Ireland (1971), 344 and Munck, Class
(1985), 121.
181
of Yeats's rhetorical intentions in 1928, when "Thoughts .
. . " was redated and retitled as "Nineteen . . . . ' *
Perhaps a better way to treat Yeats's 1928 act of
referring back to 1919, then, is to read the year 1919 not
as a reference to a historical period or a rhetorical
moment but rather as a reference to an ideological moment.
Yeats indexes 1919 as the crucial background for
understanding the poem not so much to call attention to
the state of Ireland at that time as to remind us of the
state of Yeats's mind about Ireland at the time. By
backdating his vision, Yeats seems to prove his prophetic
ability. The year 1919 does not, indeed cannot, exist as
a rhetorical moment; Yeats did not write the poem in that
rhetorical situation. The year 1919 exists for the poem
only trans-historically, as ideology. What Yeats
attempts to do by dating and titling "Thoughts..." as
"1919" is to assert the correctness of his belief system;
His political insights about the dangers of growing
republicanism in Ireland are thus transhistorically true,
whether written in 1919 or 1928. By implying that his
poetic despair about the "state of the world" remains
true regardless of the historical moment in which it is
composed, Yeats appropriates the belief that poetry
embodies transhistorical truths as a way of asserting the
eternal truths of his ideology of Ireland.
182
To fully understand the truths that Yeats hoped to
embody in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" we must turn for
a moment to their most passionate expression, in the 1919
essay, "If I were Four-and-Twenty."
The counter-factual mood of Yeats's title "If I were
Four-and-Twenty" leads one to suspect that the essay was
originally meant to be paired with "The People's Theatre,"
written shortly before. In the latter, as mentioned,
Yeats regrets the fact that his plans for the Irish
Dramatic Movement have turned out a profound failure--the
lower and middle classes are portrayed too nobly; and the
wealthy and self-productive, too foolishly. Thus anyone
who cared about the Movement reading this essay in The
Irish Statesman in 1919 might wonder; "What, Mr. Yeats,
would you have done differently?" The answer to this
hypothetical question appears in the unpublished essay "If
I were Four-and-Twenty." The fact that this essay was not
published in 1919 (but in 1940) does not challenge my
argument but enables it, for it allows us a reading of the
work as a purely ideological project, a utopian act of
wish-fulfillment, and not as a rhetorical project. The
subjunctively framed title implies that the answers that
Yeats proposes to a hypothetical question about his past
are to be considered neither political or rhetorical. The
essay is a statement of belief. The hypothetical question
to which Yeats replies in his title ("What would you have
183
done differently, Mr. Yeats?") is not framed as a
political one (e.g., "What is to be done?"), nor as a
rhetorical one (e.g., "Who should do it and why?") but,
rather, as a purely ideological one ("What should you have
done when you were four-and-twenty?"). Yeats's essay is a
reply to an inquisitor, someone interested more in testing
one's ideological salt than in evaluating the pragmatic
benefits of a political exigency or a rhetorical
situation. Yeats's recurrent theme of self-questioning
and self-interrogation, as many critics have noticed, is
never so obvious as it is here. Yeats writes "If I Were
Four-and-Twenty" to castigate himself for the unforeseen
rebellious consequences of his earlier patriotic work in
the Abbey Theatre.
What, then, should Yeats have done? "If I were Four-
and-Twenty" explains quite clearly Yeats's intense desire
for all of Ireland to.join him in his struggle to "hammer
[his] thoughts into unity." Such a unity would bring more
than a personal benefit; it would allow Ireland to end its
recurrent and debiliating conflicts between "our priests
and politicians."22 To attain this fruitful nationalism,
Yeats says, Ireland must develop unity of being on three
fronts: emotional, logical, and literary. Let us
consider each of these in turn.
2 2 Inasmuch as the Dail had recently drafted priests
as ex-officio justices, it was the agreement, and not the
quarrels, between these two forces that worried Yeats.
184
Ireland first needs emotional unity, Yeats avers.
This unity will serve as an antidote to the interminable
arguments that constitute Irish political life:
"Intellectual agreements, propagandas, dogmas, we have
always had," Yeats says, "but emotional agreements, which
are so much more lasting and put no constraint upon the
soul, we have long lacked" (Expl 266). What Yeats objects
to in Irish politics is not the grounds of their arguments
with the British but the very fact that they argue with
them at all. (Yeats's implies that to eliminate public
rhetoric, especially that of the partisans, would be to
eliminate political struggle altogether.) An emotional
unity would sweeten and enlighten the Irish soul,
embittered and confused by excess argument. To achieve
this unity, Yeats would recommend that the Irish must read
the French Catholic mystics, specifically Claudel and
Peguy. Yeats prescribes them, it seems, because their
style of Catholic worship retains an important connection
(which the Irish seem to have lost) between the worship of
sacrificial symbols and the respect for land and property:
"The Eucharist in a continually repeated symbols makes
them remember the wheat-fields and vineyards of France . .
. " (264). And though Yeats explicitly describes these
writers as "men in whom an intellectual patriotism is not
distinct from religion," (265), their nationalist
chauvinism seems to be the perfect ideological antidote to
185
the very mixture of radical politics and religion that
Yeats abhorred. The French brand of 'unanisme' that
provides an "emotional agreement" through a mutual pride
and celebration "not of oneself but of one’s neighbors"
is, Yeats admits, the antithesis of the "individualism"
(read: democracy) of the nineteenth century, which "now
seems less able in creation than in criticism" (266). The
Irish--who have always been good at criticism, "like a
pack of hounds dragging down some noble stag" (Mem 163),
who have "hurled the little streets upon the great" (CP
89) at Easter 1916, and who are now about to "pull down
established honour" (CP 182)--need to get respect for "the
countryside or street where one lives" (266). The
sectarian conflicts among the Irish and the rebellious
acts against the English empire must be subsumed into a
chauvinistic unity that submerges the individual to the
nationalist ideal.
I should mention that Yeats's ideological project to
promote the Catholicism and unanisme of the French mystics
did not remain purely an ideological project during
Yeats's life, but it was articulated several times as
rhetoric and politics. Such intentions are clear even in
the 1919 essay, for at one moment Yeats fails to maintain
his hypothetical style and thus--by default--demonstrates
his awareness of his historical moment: "Perhaps we would
learn more at this moment of our history from Claudel than
186
from Peguy" (my emphasis; 265). Even in 1919, therefore,
Yeats is obviously ready to promote these writers not only
in his rhetorical present as well as his ideological past.
Such a project continues the one Yeats envisioned with
Iseult Gonne in late 19196 to translate Claudel and Peguy
for Irish readers to "civilize the Dublin Catholics," a
project he refers to obliquely in the Epilogue to Per
Arnica Silentia Lunae. Yeats took this project seriously.
Not only had he written his publisher in 1915 and
expressed his interest in translating these writers,23 but
in 1924, while he was a Senator, he took the opportunity
of a performance of Claudel’s L'Otage in Dublin to promote
their goals once more.24 And though Yeats had often
tried to subvert or challenge Catholic dogmatism,
especially in matters of sexual freedom or censorship, he
was not afraid to appropriate that dogmatism as a powerful
unifying tool against jacobinism and the rhetoric of
2 3 Yeats was interested in getting Peguy's Joan of Arc
trilogy translated and published in Dublin. He writes on
October 1915: "For various reasons I am very anxious to
introduce the French school of Catholic writers to
Ireland, and look upon the book as a start." Letters to
Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1967), 292
2 4 In a 1924 interview Yeats gave to The Irish Times,
which appeared under the title, "Paul Claudel and
Mussolini--A New School of Thought," he argued that
writers such as Claudel are "giving expression in
literature to the same movement that has brought Mussolini
into power in Italy, and that threatens France," and he
mentions that he sees "the same tendency here in Ireland
towards authoritative rule." But Yeats was not afraid of
authoritative rule per se, only the type that did not have
his cultural imprimatur.
187
rebellion. Since the Catholic doctrine and hierarchy were
already in place, they were quite useful; the only problem
was associating these features with Yeats's aesthetic.
Thus when Yeats the Senator is asked by the Irish Times
"What effect the new movement would have on the social
fabric generally, and what weapons it would use to
enthrone authority," he replies by listing a series of his
pet artistic projects for which he had been fighting in
the Senate chamber, all of which are intended to create an
Irish unanisme in the spirit of Claudel and Peguy. The
cultural authority of the village priest/inquisitor will
be supplanted by that of the politician/artist.
In 1924, then, Yeats explicitly identified his
rhetorical project of promoting the French mystics in
Ireland with his specific political projects in the
Senate, and in 1915, too, he engaged in a rhetorical
project to publish the mystics in Ireland. In 1919,
however, his praise of these writers in "If I were Four-
and-Twenty" is a purely ideological project, an essay
that had no rhetorical impact until the year after the
poet's death. It is clear, then, from these various
projects to get the work of Claudel and Peguy into the
hands of the Irish, that Yeats's rationale for noting
Claudel, as stated to The Irish Times reporter, was not
the complete story. Yeats obviously saw the literary
projects of the French mystics not only as a reflection of
188
history's turn to Mussolini-like individualism but also a
means of inspiring that turn.
Yeats enunciates two other plans that would help
Ireland attain emotional unity in "If I Were Four-and-
Twenty." The first calls for the Irish to return to the
ritual of making pilgrimages to such destinations as
Croagh Patrick, Lough Derg, or the Rock of Cashel. Yeats
recommends these pilgrimages for the youth in particular,
who would be (like Yeats was at that time), "but four-and-
twenty and a lover of lost causes." It is better, Yeats
implies, to turn such love into pilgrimages than politics.
By making these pilgrimages, one presumes, these ardent
youths would undergo a gradual self-realization and
purgation, a burning of damp faggots, as it were, instead
of flaming out like Patrick Pearse. Since it is the slow
process of self-realization through suffering that Yeats
wants to champion as an antidote to revolutionary
martyrdom, it makes sense that he also recommends that the
Irish bring back into the forefront of their religious
beliefs the notion of purgatory. This belief is important
to Yeats because it connects Catholic doctrine to the "the
countryman's beliefs in the nearness of his dead 'working
out their penance.'" By 1919, then, Yeats was obviously
anticipating the major theme of his version of the Oedipus
cycle, which would privilege the Sophoclean ideal of
salvation (by self-realization and purgatorial journeys)
189
over the Pearsian Ideal of salvation by self-sacrifice and
revolutionary immolation. In 1928, however, by pointing
to his ideological system of 1919 (and the revolutionary
situation that evoked it) Yeats is just as clearly
demonstrating the unity of his continuing argument against
Young Ireland and Easter Rising ideals.
Besides an emotional unity, Yeats's argues, Ireland
also needs a "logical unity.” If the emotional unity
cannot prevent arguments, he implies, at least the logical
unity will guarantee that those arguments will have a
pleasing and conservative coherence. What Yeats means by
logical unity requires some elaboration: The phrase
"logical unity" actually means a unity of binary
opposites, a unity held together, that is, because of
antipodal forces. A logical unity for Yeats is a
rhetorical unity that tries to encompass these differences
within a closed rhetorical space. Though Yeats explains
the rhetorical function of unities of this kind by
referring to his early ideological enterprises in the
nineties, it is apparent that he also means to comment
upon the events happening "now" in 1919:
We need also a logical unity. When I was a
boy William Morris came to Dublin to preach
us into Socialism. After an appeal from
the chairman, on the ground of national
hospitality, an unwilling audience heard
him out, and after gave itself to mockery,
till somebody quenched the light. Now our
young men sing The Red Flag, for any
bloody catastrophe seems welcome that
promises an Irish Republic. They condemned
190
Morris's doctrine without examination. Now
for the most part they applaud it without
examination; but that will change, for the
execution of Connolly has given him many
readers. (Expl 268; italics added)
Elizabeth Cullingford makes much of Yeats's
association with William Morris, which, she says, "is
dismissed by most critics." She argues further that the
ideological affinity between the two, which supposedly
continued throughout Yeats's life, is strong counter
evidence to the claim that Yeats was a fascist
(Cullingford, 16). But it is clear in this passage (which
Cullingford reads uncritically as objective autobiography)
that Yeats himself is aligning himself against Morris; he
only returns to his fond memory of the socialist poet in
order to repudiate his ideals. And he seems to hope that
Ireland is ready to repudiate them as well. That this
passage is highly rhetorical (and not straight reportage)
can be seen by the fact that Yeats collapses the
distinction between the appreciation of Morris, Connolly,
and The Red Flag with the republican claims for
independence in Ireland. Yeats's unsubtle anti-Bolshevik
rhetoric hardly holds up to historical scrutiny, as I have
noted; The Sinn Fein party and the I.R.A. were just as
concerned about maintaining private property as Yeats was.
What this means is that although it is easy for later
readers to discern the clear differences among the goals
of the Easter Rising, the Bolshevik revolution, and the
191
Anglo-Irish War, and that although scholars like
Cullingford are adept at keeping such distinctions clear
in their reading of Yeats’s own rhetoric; it is
nonetheless true that in 1919 Yeats tended to see all of
these revolutionary events as sharing the same jacobin
roots.
Yeats's ultimate answer to the ideological situation-
-in which, he says, young men who "find it hard to fill up
their evenings are filling them by reading Marx and
Mitchell"— is literary. He recommends that they read the
"whole Comedie Humaine." One hardly needs Pierre
Macherey's brilliant exposition of the ideological force
of Balzac's series (Macherey, 1985, 258-298), for Yeats's
own reading of the Comedie Humaine throws those
ideological elements into sharp focus. Indeed, Yeats's
praise for the historical insights to be found in
Balzac's work rivals the same praise brought forth by Marx
and Engels. But while Marx and Engels freely admit
Balzac's literary value, Yeats is interested only in his
propaganda effect. Balzac should be read not for his
artistic genius, Yeats implies, but for his ideological
force, the truth of his social insights; he has "cleared
men of utopian vapors," "he has explained and proved, even
more thoroughly than Darwin, the doctrine of the survival
of the fittest species" (270); he presents throughout his
work the idea that "the more noble and stable qualities,
192
those that are spread through the personality, and not
isolated in a faculty, are the result of victory in the
family struggle, while those qualities of logic and of
will, all those qualities of toil rather than of power,
belong to the individual struggle." He has shown that men
of talent are but shadows of the men of good breeding,
those whose modes of life have "made them their own
legislators"; he has shown us the absurdity of the
"Fourieristes and insurrectionists who would abate or
abolish the struggle" among great families; and, finally,
he has shown how ridiculous and dangerous is the
leveller's cry that "genius too is a privilege we shall
abolish" (272).
Balzac, according to Yeats's reading of him, achieves
a kind of rhetorical unity in his ideology that Yeats
would like the Irish to take for their own: In this
unity, the family struggle is opposed to and valued over
the individual struggle, the man of breeding is valued
over that of talent, the great man is favored to the weak,
and the fittest of the species is to reign the least fit.
"The family is the unity of social life," Yeats says, "and
the origin of civilization which but exists to preserve
it, and almost the sole cause of progress" (Expl 274). It
is this emphasis on the nobility of the family struggle
that puts into serious question T. R. Henn's idea that the
murder of Ellen Quinn by the Black and Tans "threw Yeats
193
into a fervid nationalism."25 Henn cites as evidence the
poem "Reprisals," unpublished during Yeats's life, which
includes the following lines, addressed to Robert Gregory:
Yet rise from your Italian tomb.
Flit to Kiltartan cross and stay
Till certain second thoughts have come
Upon the cause you served, that we
Imagined such a fine affair:
Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery
Are murdering your tenants there.
Men that revere your father yet
Are shot at on the open plain.
(Var 791)
Yeats's call to Gregory is not couched in terms of
nationalism, however, but clannism; Gregory is asked to
return and fight the feudal battle to protect the vassals.
The "cause" that should be questioned, therefore, is not
necessarily fighting for England, but fighting a war that
has risen out of the turn toward individual, rather than
family, struggle. The Irish republicans are fighting a
war of independence; Yeats is fighting his own War of the
Roses.
The crucial difference I have suggested between a
rhetorical project and an ideological one now becomes
clear. "If I were Four-and-Twenty" entails both. The
rhetorical project can be posited in the historical moment
of composition: In that act, Yeats drew a sharp
distinction between Morris's socialism and Balzac's social
25T. R. Henn, Last Essays, 123.
194
Darwinism. And this difference was produced deliberately
to influence the Irish youth who had once rejected Morris
but now applaud him uncritically. The rhetorical
alignment Morris/Blazac was produced in response to what
Yeats mhst have seen as a dangerous encroachment upon his
position in Ireland. And, if the essay had been published
in 1919, it obviously would have been taken as a
rhetorical act to at least urge a particular attitude, if
not a course of action, toward such an encroachment. Yet
that rhetorical act, the alignment of Morris and Balzac,
also contains within it an ideological project. The
ideological project, as I have noted, is an attempt to
bring wholesale into one historical moment the rhetorical
project (the logical unity, or conceptual alignments) from
a previous historical moment. It is an attempt to take
the identities and differences established in one
rhetorical moment and reify them into a trans-historical
dogma. When Yeats explicitly opposes Morris and Balzac in
1919, he is producing rhetoric. But when he conflates the
arguments of the contemporary republicans with those of
Morris, which implies that Morris's socialism is a
metonomy of all socialism, or when he fails to distinguish
the social Darwinism of Balzac from his own, implying that
one peasant disturbance is essentially like another, he
reproduces ideology. That Yeats even interrogates
himself on the issue of what he should have done when
195
four-and-twenty is evidence of his own static ideology,
implying that he could have (or should have, if his
philosophy had been pieced together) foreseen the
consequences of his literary work as it was then
formulated. Yeats's self-inquisitions can obviously be
rather extreme. "If I were Four-and-Twenty" suggests that
Yeats's private quests for personal divinity or cultural
integration must be also read as rhetorical projects.
Yeats's lyrical moments of contemplation are not private
experiences but emblems for instruction.
The poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," then, also
embodies an ideological project. The poem implies that
what Yeats had to say in 1919 about the Irish political
situation, and especially the danger of the rhetoric of
rebellion, is equally true of 1921 and 1928. And, unless
one reads the poem critically, those insights can become
transformed into bits of Yeatsian wisdom about the
essentially violent and ungrateful nature of the Irish
people. It is plain that readers of American and British
scholarship have every right to develop an opinion about
the relations between Ireland and England, but perhaps
they should look for their evidence for such an opinion
from sources other than Yeats. It is one of the saddest
legacies of Yeats's scholarship that the poet's
representations of Ireland's political scene, have been
196
continually reproduced under the guise of literary
insights. This reproduction, I would argue, is not only
the result of a hagiographic attitude toward the great
poet. It is rather the inability on the part of critics
to distinguish the "universal" and "transhistorical"
quality of Yeats's poetic talents from the local
rhetorical struggles of his ideological project. Our
respect for a poet's genius need not be diminished by
attempting to distinguish between the matters on which he
is expert, innovative, or revolutionary, and those matters
on which he remains an amateur, embroiled in the
ideological snares of his social position and his times.
Yeats's uniqueness as a poet, that is, his ability to
transcend the standard poetic projects of his time— to
create, as it were, "news that stays news"--should in no
way suggest that he also had the genius of the rhetorical
and political expert to transcend the standard (and
ideologically mired) political rhetoric (the news that
becomes history) of his time. That "Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen" can still be read in terms of trans-historical
emotional truths--like despair in the face of loss or the
"return of evil"--despite the fact that Yeats's redating
and retitling were the acts of a rhetor and politician,
points to the genius of the poetic work. Yet it also
exposes the petty gestures of Yeats's ideological
struggles. If Yeats's insights about the dangers of
197
republicanism are as true in 1928 as 1919, then the
killing of Kevin O'Higgins, the recent censorship bill,
and the gradual loss of Yeats's (and Anglo-Irish's)
influence in Ireland are all to be equally as bemoaned by
readers as the loss of Britain's imperial status in
Ireland, or the loss of Phidias's sculptures. Literary
critics must decide for themselves whom it is they mourn
for.
In closing, it should be noted that Yeats's retitling
and redating of "Thoughts . . ." in 1928 signalled an
abrupt change from his previous ideological struggles.
Yeats's rhetorical project after the Easter Rising was in
large part an attempt to repudiate the typical Irish
rhetoric that made the death of one Irish hero out to be
the death of all Irish heroes. But as Yeats's revision of
"Thoughts . . ." (as well as the poems in The Winding
Stair) demonstrate, Kevin O'Higgins death, and Yeats's
unceremonious departure from the Senate altered his
rhetorical project dramatically. From now on, Yeats would
adopt wholesale the rhetoric of Young Ireland--the
rhetoric of nostalgia, ghostly inspiration, and heroic
memory--but would appropriate it for his own ideological
purposes: The poet would continually mourn the loss of
heroes like Burke, Swift, Berkeley, and O'Higgins and to
cast the images of their ghosts before the eyes of an
Ireland Yeats would soon describe as "half-dead at the
198
top." Cairns Craig's thesis that Yeats's fascism promoted
a kind of rich associational memory, then, is true, I
would argue, mostly after 1927. That Craig ignores the
crucial difference in Yeats's rhetorical project before
and after that date, and thus tries to identify a specific
rhetorical project, motivated in opposition to particular
circumstance, as the essentially Yeatsian or modernist
one, demonstrates that Craig himself is engaged (perhaps
willy-nilly) in an ideological project of his own: The
particular rhetorical alignments that Yeats created in
response to historical events become reified into an
essential ideology. Though such an ideological effect of
criticism cannot be avoided, it can be postponed if
readers are willing to examine the temporal production of
a poet's symbolic and alignments, noting how this
symbolism functions in specific rhetorical moments. Such
a reading strategy does, it must be said, postpone and
defer the grand synthesis, or eagle's view, of Yeats's
oeuvre that was once the expected goal of Yeats
scholarship. Indeed, Yeats scholars have sometimes seemed
to join Yeats in proclaiming the foolishness of those who
would stick to the calendar, and valorizing the wisdom of
those who adopt the eagle's view:
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now gape at the sun._____________________
199
(CP 207)
Yet the "seasonal" reading of Yeats's writings, what
Yeats's himself would call the reading of the
"countryman," is a risky enterprise. For as Yeats argues
repeatedly (borrowing a classic topos from Marcus Aurelius
and Boethius) the function of the trans-historical
perspective is to achieve coherence in chaos, to achieve
peace in times of conflict--in sum, to find consolation
and solace. "But is there any comfort to be found?"
Whereas literature may be, as Pound says, "news that stays
news, 1 1 what makes the literature of W. B. Yeats "news" in
the first place, cannot be forgotten— or alchemically
purified away--except at a cost.
I
200
"MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR":
THE DENIAL OF RHETORIC AND THE RHETORIC OF DENIAL
As I have already remarked, perhaps the most famous
statement from Per Arnica Silentia Lunae is the aphorism,
"We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of
the quarrel with ourselves poetry" (Myth 331). Of the
many antinomies that together constitute Yeats's design of
opposites, this particular one--opposing a poet's inner
quarrel to the orator’s quarrel with the world (even a
lover's quarrel)--would not hold up to theoretical
scrutiny. On the one hand, we might refer to Kenneth
I
Burke, who would argue that all language use is
i
i
ultimately rhetorical, that is, persuasive and directed
'to an audience, or, on the other, to Roman Jakobson, who
I
has shown hoto the most "ordinary" discourse has a poetic
function.1 Yet I prefer to challenge Yeats's dichotomy
i
in a practical way, by analyzing how rhetoric and poetry
i
are inextricably linked in his poem "Meditations in Time
l
of Civil War"--a poem I choose because its very title
! 1 See, in particular, Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); The
Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941); and
Roman Jakobson, "The Dominant," in Readings in Russian
Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Ed. Ladislav
Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic
Publications, 1978), 82-87. _________________ ___
201
suggests an uneasy alliance between thought and action,
private and public life, and art and politics.
Yeats's opposition between poetry and rhetoric has
not been questioned in past readings of this poem,
primarily because readers have tended to explicate either
the "Meditations" of the title (that is the quarrel
within the tower) or the "Time of Civil War" (the quarrel
without). We tend to read the poem as a romantic
meditation, a symbolic drama, or a verbal icon.2
: Interesting in their own way, these kinds of readings
turn us away from the poem's explosive historical context
and thus leave its rhetorical potential insufficiently
|explored. In another vein, several studies discuss the
poem's historical context and Yeats's role in it. Yet in
i
Ithese accounts the poetry is often treated superficially,
poetic texture is ignored, and the poem is read as a
i
document of Yeats's views, like his letters, editorials,
!or speeches before the Senate.3 Following Yeats's own
2 See Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford, 1970),
353; Graham Martin, "The Later Poetry of W.B. Yeats,” in
Boris Ford (ed.) The Modern Age (Middlesex: Penguin,
1974), 178-203; and Thomas A. Whitaker, "Meditations in
Time of Civil War," in Raymond Cowell (ed.) Critics on
Yeats, Readings in Literary Criticism (Coral Gables, FI:
University of Miami Press, 1971), 6.
i
3 Bernard Krimm, Living in the Explosion: W.B. Yeats
and the Emergence of the Irish Free State; Elizabeth
Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (New York and
London: New York University Press, 1981); C. C. O’Brien,
"Passion and Cunning" in Reveries Ed. Jeffares and Cross
(1965); and Grattan Freyer, W.B. Yeats and the Anti-
Democratic Tradition (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble,
202 1
l
advice in "Vacillation," I plan to run my course between ;
these two extremities. My contextual reading, then,
follows two paths. Not only shall*I consider the poem
within its political context, as expected, but I shall
also consider the representation of political events
within the context of the poem's symbolic structure. In
other words, two questions will be raised: 1) How does
I
Yeats hold a meditation in Time of Civil War, and 2) How
does he hold a Civil War within a meditation? By these
means I hope to illustrate how Yeats uses poetic !
conventions and devices to deny the poem's rhetoric.
This denial was made necessary, I will suggest, because
I
of the explosive political context in which the poem was
i
written.
i "Meditations..." was written and published during
1981); John R. Harrison, The Reactionaries: Yeats, Lewis, j
Pound, Eliot, Lawrence. A Study of the Anti-Democratic
Intelligensia (New York: Schocken Books, 1967); Cairns
Craig, Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Politics of Poetry.
All of these studies have as their object something other
than the close analysis of Yeats's poems; they dedicate
themselves instead to reading Yeats's politics in the text
of Irish history. But in not examining the political
texture of the poems, they leave us with an incomplete ;
view of Yeats's politics. An exception to this group is
Daniel Harris, Yeats, Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore
and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974),
which takes as its subject Yeats's explicit encomia to the
Ascendancy "Great House." Harris's close readings '
identify the ways that Yeats adopts literary tradition to j
praise the Anglo-Irish tradition, though he does not
explore the ways by which Yeats's encomia also implicitly 1
urge courses of action in Ireland's local political scene.
203
one of Ireland’s most bitter national conflicts.4 The
Irish Civil War, best understood as a continuation of the
Anglo-Irish War, had its seeds planted when Michael
Collins and Arthur Griffith negotiated a Treaty with
Lloyd George on December 21, 1921. The treaty granted
Ireland Dominion status, excluded the six counties of
Ulster, and required, among other concessions, that
members of the Irish Parliament would swear an Oath of
Allegiance to the King--this last point being the bone of
contention.5 After a month of bitter debate in the Dail,
the treaty was approved by a slim margin of 64 to 57,
,primarily on the strength of Michael Collins's argument
that Dominion status would be a steppingstone to the
establishment of an Irish Republic. The opposition to
the treaty, however, led by Eamonn De Valera, and
including a number of women whom Yeats would later label
"hysterical," were not convinced; they refused to speak
the Oath and formed their own body devoted to the
i
principles of the Easter Rebellion.
4 I have drawn my historical background on these
events from the following sources: F. S. L. Lyons,
Ireland Since the Famine (1971); J. P. O'Neill, The Anglo
Irish Treaty; W. A. Phillips, The Revolution in Ireland,
1906-1923, 2nd ed., 1926; Beaslai, P. Michael Collins and
the Making of a New Ireland, 2 vols., Dublin 1926; C.
Younger, Ireland's Civil War, 1968.
5 It was the Oath to the King, and not partition, that
was the main issue of the Treaty debate. De Valera said
"He would be in favor of giving each county power to vote
itself out of the Republic if it so wished" (cited by
Lyons, Ireland Before the Famine, p. 44)._______________
| 204
Yeats was living in the English countryside during
I
this time, and, delighted with the Treaty, began making
plans once the treaty had passed to return to Ireland and
serve the new state. Having recently been nominated as
the Sinn Fein delegate to an Irish Race Congress, he was
now a prime candidate for Minister of Culture, a position
,for which friends like Oliver St. John Gogarty were
lobbying on Yeats's behalf. Yeats continuously denied
any explicit support for either party during arguments
[over the treaty. Writing to Lady Gregory in January, for
example, he said,
I feel strongly against speaking or writing
on the political situation at this moment.
I will say nothing unless I find I have
something to say which is quite clearly my
own thought. I will never take any
position in life where I have to speak but
half my mind and I feel that both sides are
responsible for this whirlpool of hate.
Besides, only action counts or can count
till there is some change. (L, 12 January,
1922)
Action came, and quickly. By the time Yeats published
t
"Meditations in Time of Civil War" in January 1923, he had
become a Free State Senator, placing him in a position
opposed to (and threatened by) the Republican group led by
de Valera.6 Yeats's knowledge of his political situation
6"On 30 November 1922, the Republican Command issued
orders to shoot at sight fourteen categories of persons,
including Senators" (Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939,
2nd edn., [London, 1962]).______________________________
205
allowed him to joke to his friend Edmund Dulac upon
receiving the nomination,
I am on the Irish Senate[,] and a probable
income as senator, of which I knew nothing
when I accepted[,j will compensate me
somewhat for the chance of being shot or my
house burned or bombed. (L, 694)7
Yet even before Yeats joined the Senate and became a
special target for the Republicans, he was already in
danger. The summer during which he composed "Meditations"
he had been forced to live with Lady Gregory and leave
jThoor Ballylee to the protection of Free State soldiers
(Letters, June 5, 1922, 683).
For a soon-to-be active member of the new government,
to write about the Civil War required the utmost delicacy.
Obviously, the poet did not want to be accused of writing
i
propaganda. But in such explosive circumstances--when the
rhetoric of revolution and counter-revolution filled the
ears of almost every Irishmen--how to avoid it? One
strategy was to fall back on the mystique of the
, 7 Yeats had every reason to fear the Civil War; the
Irregulars were followers of the ideals of Pearse and
Connolly, and made up the main force of the IRA. Ernie
O'Malley, second in command, was one such radical; he
noted in a dispatch; "The need for a Democratic
Republican Constitution is felt and I believe it would get
the workers.... All industry will be controlled by the
state for the worker and for his benefit . . . with the
lands of the aristocracy seized and divided amongst those
who can and will operate them for the people's benefit"
(Quoted in F. Blake, The Irish Civil War 1922-23 (London,
1971), pp. 15-16._____________________________________________
i 206
!
jcontemplative, metaphysical poet--precisely the persona
I
ithat Yeats had been cultivating for himself since the
Easter Rebellion. The isolated poet, removed from the
‘ world, who realizes but does not pursue his anti-self, the
i
i
man of action--this is the ethos Yeats had claimed for
i
jhimself in Per Arnica and would later delineate in A
i
j Vision. It is an ethos quite evident, as well, in his
I
I
correspondence of this period, especially in lines like
Ithese, written at the height of the Civil War: "There is
no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by
i
candlelight" (L, 691). It is this ethos that we also find
i
jin "Meditations in Time of Civil War."
j The opening lines of "Meditations...," like the title
iitself, insist that what follows is not a public statement
but rather an interior monologue:
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills.
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.
(CP 198)
Although these opening stanzas vaguely recount the rise
and fall of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, they are
[transformed from historical record to personal discourse
i
by what Todorov calls "signs of person, 1 1 grammatical
i
‘ evidence of the writer's enunciation--signs such as
:"Surely . . . as though . . . Yet ♦ . . though now it
j 207
jseems . . . as if . . . . "8 The privacy of the
{monologue is furthered by the complicated, heavily
!
(subordinated syntax that is woven intricately in iambic
{pentameter through the ottava rima stanza, a stanza that
Yeats lifted from Byron, who had used it to satirize the
aristocracy, whereas Yeats used it to valorize the same
social group. This is the language of contemplation, not
lof action. The poet must contemplate the cycles of the
I
jlrish Ascendancy's power and impotence. This cycle
[begins, Yeats says, when "violent and bitter men" call on
i
["architect and artist" to create the "sweetness that all
!
longed for night and day." But the glorious repose of an
I
‘ "ancestral house," "where slippered contemplation finds
its ease," leads to decadence: The "master's . . . great
jgrandson . . . 's but a mouse." The repose that comes
I
iwith actionless thought is decadent, Yeats fears, because
it "takes our greatness with our bitterness." The first
quarrel of the poem, then, concerns not the Civil War at
all but whether there are other choices besides the two
extremes of thoughtless action and actionless thought; it
is not a quarrel over kinds of state but over states of
mind. And it occurs not in public but within the poet's
i
i
j"thick wall of personality"--to borrow a phrase from Pater
8Tzvetan Todorov, "Enunciation," in Oswald Ducrot and
iTodorov (eds) Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of
Language tr. Catherine Porter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1981); cited in Anthony Easthope Poetry as Discourse
[(London and New York: Methuen, 1983), 42.___________________
in a passage that continues: "Everyone of those
impressions is the impression of the individual in
isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its
iown dream of the world."9
! As Yeats develops this theme later in the poem, in
I
■section VI, it becomes obvious that Yeats's isolation is
'more than psychological. The Republican reprisals in the
Gort area have endangered both him and his family:
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainly; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned;
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood;
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
(CP 202)
Nevertheless, the isolation remains both a dangerous trap
and a conscious choice. As Graham Martin (who calls this
Ipoem "Yeats's 'Wasteland'") points out, this "isolation
I
becomes not a paralysis, so much as an opportunity for
j
'diagnosis and judgement."10 While trapped in the tower,
I
the poet can also, in the words of Per Arnica, "sing amidst
i 9 Walter Pater, "Conclusion" to the Renaissance, cited
in Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 644-645.
i
| 10Graham Martin, "The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats" in
The Modern Age, 3rd Edn., Ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1974), 185.
his uncertainty” (Myth 331), thus defending the isolation
as a personal choice. This choice is asserted in two
jplaces in the poem. Once, at the end of "The Road at My
Door," where the poet rejects the ways of the men of
Action: "I turn towards my chamber, caught / In the cold
I
snows of a dream" (CP 202). And again in the poem’s
closing, after the distinction between action and thought
i
has been sharpened: Action is now embodied by the violent
mob crying for "Vengeance Upon the Death of Jacques
Molay," while thought, by contrast, engenders the "half-
i
|read wisdom" and visions of the "Heart's Fullness." The
jpoet, of course, chooses the latter:
I
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;
i But 0! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn
j forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
j It had but made us pine the more. The abstract
! joy,
] The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
j Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.
I (CP 204)
f
Action versus Thought: Logically these are not the only
jchoices.11 Nor are they the only choices to be made
11 The poet, though he is a thinker, observer, or
jvisionary, is still, as Stuart Hampshire reminds us, a
physical being in the world, a self-moving body among
.other bodies that he can potentially move or be moved by.
Action can be denied, but there remains the potential for
[action, the various actions the poet could— and would--
perform if the conditions were to change. Stuart______
1
I
jduring a Civil War. But the false dichotomy serves
ianother function, a rhetorical one; it reasserts the
jpoet's ethos as artist, not pamphleteer. To choose
j"abstract joy" and to retire to the upper chamber of the
tower implies that, for this poet, political action is
i
[eschewed in favor of aesthetic contemplation. Further-
i
more, it asserts that the poem itself is not a political
action but a meditation, the result of a quarrel with
i
I
himself. According to his own definition, Yeats is
i
[writing poetry--not rhetoric.
i
; Various literary allusions support this arhetorical
|
[stance. The familiar poet isolated in his chamber recalls
j
ja tradition of such scenes, from the Anglo-Saxon poems
"The Wanderer" and "The Ruin" and medieval and Renaissance
"complaints," such as Spenser's (indeed, "I complain" is
[the only explicit speech act within the poem [CP 202]), to
!the melancholy meditation of "II Penseroso's Platonist,"
who--the poet reminds us--"toiled on in some like
chamber." Yet despite the conventional topos, the
!
reference to Milton may undermine Yeats's assertion of
nonserviam. While we may recall the Milton of the
]
meditations, or even of Paradise Lost (a tale of
i
spiritual, not corporeal and temporal civil war), we
I
should not forget the Milton of "On the Late Massacre in
Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York; Viking, 1959),
jpp^ 48-60._________________________________________________
i
(Piedmont," which cries vengeance on the Catholic
I
murderers of the Protestant saints. Nor can we ignore
i
Milton's own political role as pamphleteer and public
servant. The various poetic conventions and allusions do
not, then, make the rhetorical stance of denial and
i
neutrality totally convincing, especially for contemporary
readers who would know that while Yeats the poet was
(rejecting public life by the front door, Yeats the person
(was entering public life through the window.
I
; Let us now look directly at the poem's explicit
I
(argument. In a letter to Sturge Moore (15 August 1922),
I
,Yeats's explains that he is writing a "series of poems
Jabout this Tower and on the civil war at which I look (so
i
|remote one is here from all political excitement) as if it
'were some phenomenon of nature."12 Such a strategy—
i
(transcending the Civil War by interpreting it in natural
terms--serves both a psychological end and a rhetoric
one. As Yeats describes it in a note to his Nobel Lecture
"The Irish Dramatic Movement," it was by paying attention
to nature that he was able to maintain an Arnoldian calm
jduring the Civil War: "One felt an overwhelming desire
not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense
i
! of the beauty of nature" (Au, 394). Nevertheless,
r
12Ursula Bridge, ed. W. B. Yeats and Sturge Moore:
( Their Correspondence: 1901-1937 (Westport, CN: Greenwood
Press, 1953), 46._____________________________ ___________
212 j
!
portraying political events as natural phenomena serves a j
\
rhetorical, as well as therapeutic, purpose. A familiar
i i
I !
quality of successful war literature, especially that j
|which ostensibly seeks to be more art than propaganda, is ’
I i
jits portrayal of war as an inevitable part of life, caused '
! i
jby the flaws all flesh is naturally heir to--not the
| i
'unique flaws of particular parties, circumstances, and !
^configurations of power.
1 If Yeats turns the Civil War into a natural conflict,
Irather than a political one, the historical details are !
i • I
mystified, and the poem cannot become propaganda. Or can ]
;it? Can it, in fact, thereby become propaganda? Let us
i
examine that natural conflict carefully. In Poem V, "The |
i |
Road at My Door" for instance, Yeats complains to the i
i :
j"brown Lieutenant" about the "foul weather, hail and rain,
1/ A pear-tree broken by the storm." Since Lady Gregory's
(journals report no such storms that summer, we should
i
probably read the "storm" metaphorically, as an
intensified version, perhaps, of the wind that strews the
petals in an earlier section, "My Descendants":
j
S Having inherited a vigorous mind . . .
| From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
j And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
j Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
j Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
j But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
! And there's but common greenness after that.
| (CP 201)
I
I 213 I
| !
Since the poet then wonders "And what if my descendants I
lose the flower / Through natural declension of the soul?" j
i i
jwe can assume that the wind that strews the petals j
i !
Isymbolizes a levelling, decaying force threatening not I
i j
[only pear-trees but the "planted hills" of aristocracy
I
Sitself; it is a democratic wind that would leave Ireland !
! !
with only its "common greenness." And it is a wind--the J
i :
very Zeitgeist--that the poet both despises and struggles
I '
|to "cast a fragrance on."
| These cyclical patterns of nature can also be found
! i
|in the poem's theory of history, the recurrent conflict |
I i
s
[between thoughtless action and actionless thought that
makes up history--more precisely, as Yeats sees it, the
[ t
(struggle between democracy ("indifferent multitude") and |
i
[aristocracy (Ancestral Houses).13 It is a cycle that does j
j !
not need to be recapitulated here, but one of its apogees [
] i
[appears in the visionary moment in the penultimate stanza: j
I i
[the chaos of a rage-hungry troop that has neither leisure j
Nor self-delighting reveries,
Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's
gone,
Nothing but the grip of claw, and the eye's
complacency,
13 Yeats's opposition here provides the roots of his
later metahistorical view: "History is very simple," he
once said, "the rule of the many, then the rule of the
few, day and night, night and day for ever" (L, 812).
■Again: "After an age of necessity, truth, goodness>
mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace, comes
an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred art,
[ari stocracy, particularity, war." (Vision, 1962, 52 ) _ .__
214
| The innumerable clanging wings that have put out
! the moon.
! (CP 204)
That is, the clanging wings have "put out” the symbol of
|natural (and, for Yeats, historical) change that would
lead bitter and violent men to call in "architect and
i
artist" and begin the cycle once more. Yet the cycle
remains more powerful than even they: "the Primum Mobile
,that fashioned us," Yeats writes, "has made the very owls
in circles move." Human beings are obviously helpless
against this tide, whether they are aristocrats who want
jto "cast a fragrance on the wind" or an "indifferent
multitude" seeking to establish an independent state.
!
Hence the Civil War becomes not a legitimate historical
i
|event in its own right, but an emblem of the Phoenix-like
l
pattern of nature and history, a pattern that, like the
i
jwind that tears the petals from the aristocratic gardens,
ultimately mocks our enterprises to construct the ideal
state. The Republicans led by de Valera, then, those who
I
said "No" to the English treaty in favor of the ideals of
I
}the Easter Rising, are also helplessly caught in
history's turns. The gyre has become a maelstrom.
| Although the poem's view of history ultimately mocks
i
all human endeavor, the poem's image patterns— what we
might call its implicit argument--demonstrate that some
choices are more fruitful than others: The productive
i
!
activity of the honey bees, for example, is highly
215
f
appreciated in section VI, "The Stare's Nest by My
Window":
I The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
| The mother birds brings grubs and flies,
[ My wall is loosening; honey bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
I (CP 202)
I
Although nature's recurrent patterns (like history's) are
.indifferent and untouched by human values, the poet
implies that nature does have its hierarchies,
distinguishing, for instance, between the creative honey-
I
bees and the parasitic "grubs and flies." Since honey-
i
bees are not only creative but united in devotion to a
I
queen, the prayer can be read as a nostalgia for the order
i
jof royal tradition (nostalgie de 1'ancien regime),
represented in the poem by the "glory of the rich."
j
Primarily, though, the honey-bees to whom Yeats prays
i
Jsymbolize the sweet constructive self-delight that he
i
Imagines once dwelled "among a rich man's flowering
lawns." And since honey bees (unlike the wind) feed on
flowers without consuming them (and in fact serve to
i
pollinate and thus propagate the flowers), they produce
I .
only more sweetness, a theme that recurs in the final
stanzas: "Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts
are full / Of their own sweetness, bodies of their
i
; 216
loveliness."14 Examples of such human self-nourishing
delight furnish each stanza. We find houses, landscapes,
jgardens, fountains, statues, urns, doors, chambers,
I
jgalleries, portraits, halls, tables, and an ancient
'sword. Opposed to those who would construct and
appreciate such objects of aristocratic culture is the
"eye's complacency" of the rage-driven multitudes. They
do not build but destroy; "'Vengeance upon the murderers,'
the cry goes up." And they are, according to Yeats's
descriptions, consumers only, "feeding the heart on
fantasies"; they are "rage-hungry," "biting at arm and
face."
| Where does Yeats stand in this hierarchy? He
obviously condemns decadence and aimlessness because
unlike those of the honey-bees and architects, they are
not productive activities. But what has he produced?
Besides his "Descendants" and Thoor Ballylee, his
i
monument, we see that he has also produced this poem. His
promise to the future that "these stones remain their
i
monument and mine" recalls the Elizabethan trope "Not
marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall
I
outlive this powerful rhyme" and the locus classicus of
! 1 4 Yeats himself further anthropomorphizes the
productive and sweet activity of the honey-bees. In a
note to "Among School Children," he mentions that the line
l"honey of generation" was taken from Porphyry's essay on
j"The Cave of the Nymphs." In that essay, Porphyry makes
explicit that honey-bees represent the "good souls" of
certain beings ♦ ___________________________________________
I 217 !
i ;
such sentiments, Horace's poem "Exegi monumentum": "I ,
have completed a monument more lasting than bronze and
; I
loftier than the royal structure of the pyramids, which no
icorroding rain, or violent north wind, can destroy or the
| . I
i :
innumerable succession of years and the flight of ages. I ;
shall not wholly die, and a great part of me shall evade
death."15 In other words, the Tower is not only his
summer home but also the title of the book (published in
1928) in which "Meditations" appears. The poem is the
I
jfruit of his productive self-delight; like Sato's sword, i
\
! it is an artifact of war that will "symbolize my days out
of their aimlessness." It is, in a word, his own
j "Ancestral House."
i
j Thus, while Yeats ostensibly denies the art of j
i
!
persuasion, he has not forgotten the persuasion of art, I
i
convincing us through various poetic conventions that the j
I 1
poem is both a meditation (a personal rather than j
] I
political struggle) and a monument, an artifact, an j
I
"indifferent garden deity." Like the tower, the poem is !
not constructed for public display but for the love of i
i
his friends and family: How can a verbal icon be
I
rhetorical? Neither meditations nor monuments can speak !
I I
|to the public like an orator? Nor can the poet. At one [
I 15 Horace, Carmen 3 XXX (tr. Joan Coldwell), cited in [
Joan Coldwell, "The Bodkin and the Rocky Voice: Images of j
Weaving and Stone in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats," in Masaru
Sekine, Irish Writers and Society at Large: Irish Literary
Studies 22 (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1985), 16-30.
point:, when tempted by the "sense-less" tumult, he "all
but cried for vengeance" but does not. And earlier in the
poem he must "silence the envy in [his] thought." In
Yeats's ideology of poetry, to open one's mouth to
consume, cry, scream, or even speak is an act of political
hysteria. In "Easter 1916," for instance, we recall that
i
»
ja sweet-voiced woman's "night in argument" made "her voice
grow shrill" (CP 178). And in "Lapis Lazuli," it is
^'hysterical women" who say they are "tired of the palette
I
land fiddle bow" (CP 291) while the Chinamen carved of
I _
llapis stare silently on the tragic scene of history.
|Yeats himself denies the efficacy of political writing in
i
ithe same terms, replying to a request for a war poem in
1916 with the comment:
i
I
I I think it better that in times like these
! "A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
| We have no gift to set a statesman right . . .
(CP 153)
i
|The gift to which he refers is that of persuasive speech,
!
■a gift not appropriate for the poet, who must keep silent,
I
must hold his tongue. When silent, of course, a poet can
i
jquarrel only with himself. Yeats has taken Horace's ut
pictura poesis a step further, claiming ut statua poesis
instead.
i
; Now that we have established the framework of values
within the "Meditation," we might consider how the "Time
of Civil War" is evaluated within it. The section that
refers most directly to these events is "The Road at My
jDoor."
! An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
' The finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his men.
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
1 Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
j A pear-tree broken by the storm.
I count those feathered balls of soot
i The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
j In the cold snows of a dream.
I (CP 201-202)
i
I
I
,This section is central to my argument in several regards
!
■First, it marks the point where the speaker descends from
i
his tower and directly confronts the "outer struggle";
jnext, it contains the references to events that most
[contemporary readers would have recognized and held
I
jspecific opinions about, and finally, it contains the
Clines most often cited as evidence of Yeats's neutrality.
]
[Let us consider each of these points in turn.
I
j The title "The Road at My Door" juxtaposes the
l
horizontal road and the vertical door (a metonymy for the
i
tower). As has been mentioned, the tower symbolizes a___
; 220
I
irefuge for the spirit, a place of study for the man of
i
|"lonely mind." It is the locale for meditation, spiritual
jconflict, the quarrel with self, imagination, and poetry.
|The road, on the other hand, is associated with the
[Opposite principles ("Last night they trundled down the
road / That dead young soldier in his blood”). It is the
place for the Time of Civil War, bodily conflict, the
I
quarrel with others, realism, and rhetoric. The primary
i
conflict portrayed in the section, then, is not between
^the parties of the civil war. They do not fight. They
are protected from each other by white space and unified
by the poet-as-diplomat who envies them equally and then
rejects them. Of these lines, Grattan Freyer writes:
l
i ”Yeats catches the feeling of euphoria often induced by
I
!the prolonged exposure to physical danger [and] admits to
[
ithe envy he feels for the life of action he could never
share"16
I
I John Holloway has written of poems like "Meditations
l
j. . . ” that they "produce the poetic effect of being, by
ithe totality of what is in them, not a mere reflection of
some external reality, but an independent reality with a
I
'nature of its own."17 And Ellmann has written that in the
i
j 16Freyer, Anti-Democratic Tradition, 73.
i
j 1 7 John Holloway, "Style and World in The Tower," An
Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, edd. Denis
Donoghue and J.R. Mulryne (London: Edward Arnold, 1965),
p. 97).
221
Yeats canon "Every poem is a battleground and the sounds
of gunfire are heard throughout" (MM 298). But to
(Understand how the affable Irregular and the brown
1
Lieutenant came to be opposed in the first place, we must
iturn to the "external reality" and the "sounds of gunfire"
outside the poem. The arguments over the treaty that
split the Irish leadership in the Dail were repeated with
similar results at a General Army Convention held on March
26, 1922. The anti-treaty forces (the so-called
irregulars) then took over the Four Courts in Dublin and
dared the pro-treaty forces (the Regulars) to dislodge
them. For about a month of this stand-off, an unofficial
and often comical state of civil disobedience prevailed
throughout southern Ireland. In the first two weeks of
April, for instance, over 323 Post Offices were robbed by
Republicans. Sean Moylan, one of the robbers, actually
I
bragged in the Dail about collecting "dog taxes with
relish" from pro-Treaty citizens and others, to clothe and
|
provide food, tobacco, and drinks for his men. "We are
i
hot all pussy footers," he said, and claimed he would
'repeat the acts, for by doing so he was "standing up for
and defending the Republic."18 Yeats's "Falstaffian"
f
epithet for the "affable Irregular" certainly seems
appropriate in this case.
18 Dail Eireann Official Report (28 April 1922), 34.
j 222
I
1 By June, however, the war was losing its comic
aspect. The British Government, on rumors that the
I Irregulars were gearing up for an invasion of Ulster,
I
'ordered the Free State to remove them from the Four
jCourts, under threats of dissolving the treaty entirely.
I
jFinally, on Michael Collins's reluctant approval, the
J
Four Courts was shelled, the civil war began in earnest,
I
iand the bloody reprisals carried out by both sides ensued
throughout Southern Ireland. The war had several tragic
jaspects, one of which Yeats refers to in describing the
'Free State soldiers as "half-dressed," a description both
accurate and emblematic. When the Civil War began, the
Free State had not produced enough uniforms to clothe the
army. Its soldiers wore both the bright green of the Free
State and the khaki from former British rule. This sad
i
■irony provides an apt emblem for the contradictory role
jthat the Free State soldiers were forced to--following
i
jorders from Lloyd George to Michael Collins to arrest or
execute their own countrymen. In many ways, the Free
j
State soldiers were what a Republican folk song called
I
'them, "Irish boys, cute English toys."19
| 1 9"Sweet Kerry fair was far from where they murder'd
brave O'Neill; / There were no khaki uniforms behind the
flashing steel, / The firing squad, I swear by God, was
not from London town, / But Irish boys, cute England's
|toys, cut Ireland's hero down." "The New Free Staters"
Ireland Sings ed. Dominic Behan (London: Tro Essex Music
Ltd., 1973), 93._____________________________________________
In her highly praised study Yeats, Ireland and
[ Fascism, Elizabeth Cullingford argues that "The Road at My
i
jDoor" shows that "Meditations . . . reflects [Yeats's]
I
|lack of partisanship: the 'affable Irregular* and the
i
i
jlieutenant 'half-dressed in national uniform' receive
jequal welcome at his door .... "2 0 Yet I would suggest
'that the two soldiers do not receive equal treatment, not
at the door and not in the poem. In the first place,
there is no evidence that Yeats talks to the "Falstaffian
man," for all his affability, or welcomes him at his door.
|
|He does, however, speak to the "brown lieutenant," and
though the subject is weather, these are not polite
meaningless words: their referent is the "foul weather"
Jthat has broken the pear tree, which, as I have argued,
I
represents more general political concerns; Yeats's
conversation with him implies they both share the same
i
jenemy. In the second place, the poem's hierarchy of
[values grants the "brown lieutenant" even more privileges:
I
.That he considers the broken pear-tree worthy of complaint
i
•
jshows that he is not one who suffers the "eye's
[complacency." Also, he does not struggle as to effect
unnatural change. Whereas the Irregular seems to march
through the stanza in fairly regular iambics, "as though
jto die by gunshot were the finest play under the sun," the
I
[brown lieutenant and his men, by contrast, pause: they
2 0
Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, 112.
224
j
"stand at my door; and I complain,” the caesura
iemphasizing the value of this moment. Finally, while the
Irregular is linked with the road, which to Yeats would
'have represented a foolish and dangerous teleological view
jof history and socialist politics, the Lieutenant is
linked to the tower, whose winding stair represents the
cyclical view and serpentine pathway of the true poet.
:"For a hero loves the world till it breaks him," we
■recall from Per Arnica, "and the poet till it has broken
faith" (Myth, 337).
One might argue of course that Yeats not only
tolerates but admires the Irregular, just as he does in
the case of John MacBride in "Easter 1916," where MacBride
iis listed as a hero despite Yeats's "dream" of him as
being a "drunken vainglorious lout." But we should recall
I
that Yeats's change of heart toward MacBride came only
after his death, only after the English firing squad made
him heroic; that is, at the point when he had resigned
his part in "the casual comedy." In contrast to the
i
tragic figure of the slain MacBride, this affable
I
Irregular is still playing to the front row, acting out of
i
a comic and romantically tinged view of warfare--"as
|though to die by gunshot were the finest play under the
sun." It is equally true that Falstaff was Yeats's
‘favorite Shakespearean character,21 but Yeats has other
i
reasons to reject the Falstaffian Irregular; in
particular, Yeats would wholly reject his comic attitude
i
|toward history. One recalls that the primary reason that
!
! Yeats rejected the poets of the Auden school was that he
found their comic vision of history intolerable:
"Communism is their Deus ex Machina, their Santa Claus,
their happy ending, but speaking as a poet I prefer
tragedy to tragi-comedy."22 Finally, if the Irregular is
:to be seen as Falstaffian, an implicit political allegory
rises from the text which further distances the poet from
him. Just as Henry in Henry IV, Part I could freely play
jwith Falstaff and his other anarchic friends until stern
[duty summoned his loyalty to the throne--at which time
!
Henry’s kindly attitude toward Falstaff ceases— Yeats's
i
i i
own flirtation with the revolutionary poets of the Easter
Rising has now been completely rejected by the maturing
(and increasingly royalist) poet.
' It is therefore difficult to agree with Cullingford
^hat both sides of the civil war are welcomed equally in
j
Yeats’ poem, for as we have seen, the Irregulars have been
' 21 Rupin W. Desai, Yeats1s Shakespeare (Evanston,
1971), 42, 65n, 138, 146, 182.
I 22 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, pp xxxvii-xxxvii.
226
portrayed as both non-productive and contra naturam.2 3 By
valuing the construction of a monument at the same time as
he rejects persuasive argument, Yeats not only denies the
^mediation of dialogue between the parties in the Civil
War, thus forcing a sharper opposition between them, but
he condemns the affable Irregular, whose jokes and
Falstaffian demeanor are associated with the parasitic
grubs and flies and the crying rage-hungry troops. The
■Free State soldier, in contrast, not only shares the
Tower’s values, he is a tower--he is himself a monument-
standing mutely at Yeats's door, as impassive and
iindifferent as one of the stone deities in Lady Gregory's
garden. What purports to be a transcendent meditation is
i
i
! in fact itself embroiled in political issues.
i
It is worthwhile to recall, however, that the poem is
neither a meditation nor a monument, but a piece of
discourse. Although Yeats may insist in Per Arnica that
.the poet is "Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident
voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may
win," the poem does in fact have a crowd of readers. We
I
have not overheard the "sage in solitude pondering," in
2 3 Cullingfords's more recent study of this poem
i("How Jacques Molay Got Up the Tower: Yeats and the Irish
|Civil War," ELH, 50:4 [Winter 1983], 763-89) provides an
excellent analysis of the influences of Masonic thought
on Yeats and on the poem; nevertheless, she maintains her
idea that the poem treats the soldier and the Irregular
equally and that the poem is ultimately a demonstration of
Yeats' s neutrality.______________________________ ____________
! 227
jthe words of the Wanderer, nor have Yeats's meditations
I
I
ireached us through telepathy. The tower is not an
l omphalos tying us directly to the poet's most intimate
jthoughts. As for the monument, Yeats himself admits that
i
j"only an aching heart conceives a changeless work of art."
I
]The "tower is loosening," and perhaps the meditation can
escape through its cracks; once it does, however, it risks
i
interpretation by a diverse array of readers, some more
politically engaged than others. For instance, while
Harold Bloom calls "Meditations" a "triumph of romantic
f
irony" (353), Bernard Krimm has argued the contrary:
I
I
Placing Yeats in the tradition of Irish didactic poets
i
jsuch as Seanach, Krimm reads the poem as a public appeal
jto the new Irish state to resolve its conflicts (38).
This reading seems implausible, however, for the simple
i
i
ifact that few Irish citizens would have read the poem in
!
either the American Dial or the London Mercury, where it
i
jappeared simultaneously in January of 1923.
! That Yeats showed such attention to the details of
publication supports the rhetorical reading outlined here.
i
|Yet Yeats remains the anti-rhetorician to the last,
|seeking not so much to persuade a crowd as not to persuade
i
one. But this is not an easy task. If the illusion were
jto be maintained that Yeats's poem is artifact and not
argument, a particular readership was needed: made up of
f
readers who could extract themselves from the Civil War
; 228
I strifes and the arguments about them; who were more
■interested in intertextual than contextual references; and
who would have no interest in Yeats's public role as
[Senator. Yeats could find such readers only outside of
i
Ireland. While the London Mercury readers in particular
[would have been sufficiently removed from the Irish
[troubles, a closer consideration of their literary and
I
ipolitical expectations casts further doubt on Krimm's
thesis that Yeats wrote "Meditations" as Ireland's
official bard.
i
1 In Yeats's day, the London Mercury saw its role as
ipreserving English cultural traditions; its raison d'etre
^appeared on the title page of every issue:
The conductors of the London Mercury . . .
may fairly claim to have formulated a
scheme, which, when perfectly executed,
will meet all the demands of the public
which reads old and new books, and of the
imagination. The more intense the troubles
of society, the more uncertain and dark the
future, the more obvious is the necessity
for periodicals which hand on the torch of
culture and creative activities.
Literature is the spirit; and by this
spirit man lives. Our traditions are never
more jealously to be cherished than when
they are threatened; and our literature is
the repository of all our traditions.
Part of the Mercury's "perfectly executed" scheme included
!
publishing a series of letters from Australia, New j
Zealand, and Ireland, whose main purpose, it seems, was to [
discredit the local nationalist movement that threatened !
229
! English cultural hegemony. For example, J.M. Hone,
i
jYeats’s first official biographer, in his Letter from
Ireland, which was published a few months after Yeats's
ipoem, explained why Irish literary anthologies and school
books had recently begun to exclude English and Anglo-
Irish writers. He said that "the Irish literary revival
would represent . . . a national reaction against the
extreme individualism which has characterized most Anglo-
Irish writers, men who from Berkeley onwards have never
been able to choose between the life of action and that of
contemplation."24 Besides nicely paraphrasing the theme
of "Meditations," Hone's statement also places the poem in
! a tradition now antithetical to that espoused by the new
;Irish state. Equally damaging to Yeats's role as
i
^Ireland's official bard during the early years of the New
Irish State was the publication of his own Memoirs (which,
i
according to Krimm, was also deliberately didactic [45f.])
in the same journal in the spring and summer of 1922. The
I
Memoirs included commentary on the nationalist movements
of Yeats's youth, but, considering the circumstances, they i
I !
could easily be read as referring to the Irregulars: "The
i '
i
Nationalist abstractions were like the fixed ideas of some 1
I !
I |
hysterical woman, a part of the mind turned to stone, and
j !
)
i :
)
| - I
! 2 4 J. M. Hone, "A Letter from Ireland" London Mercury
;7:42 (April 1923), 42.________ 1
! 230 ;
I
>
,all "the rest a seething and burning. . . . "25 It is this !
! I
background, Yeats's portrayal of Ireland's nationalism as j
fiery, irrational, disdaining life and dangerous to
! individual liberties, that the London Mercury readers
'would have brought to their reading of "Meditations."
In his study Yeats, Eliot, and Pound and the Politics
of Poetry, Cairns Craig claims that all three poets were
i
"driven to politics in order to maintain the institutions
and the pattern of society which preserved and promulgated
the kinds of memory on which their poetry relied. The
I
open poem demanded for its completion not the free mind of
the democratic man, but the rich mind of the privileged
I
within a hierarchical society" (Craig, 71). Yet
obviously, as regards Yeats, Craig's thesis must be taken
with some salt. It is difficult to believe that Yeats was
"driven to politics" to create an audience for his poetry;
to the contrary, the audience was out there, reading the |
i :
London Mercury, the Dial and other literary magazines. !
Although "Meditations" did require a special reader--one i
willing to read poetry as either meditation or a verbal
Sicon, a well-wrought urn, or a gilded monument--Yeats had
no trouble finding readers like this. i
: During the Irish Civil War, however, he would have
found few such readers in Ireland. Publishing outside of
Ireland, then, can be seen as part of his rhetorical .
25W.B. Yeats, "Memoirs" London Mercury. _____________ ;
231
strategy to deny that the poem had anything particular to
say about the Civil War, a strategy that was not
completely successful. Paradoxically, in an attempt to
ideny its own rhetoric and claim ut pictura poesis, the
poem can be read as everything Yeats sought to avoid; the
poem is political, partisan, and rhetorical. Even as
ceremonial oratory it is hardly neutral, praising the Free
State soldier and deriding the Republican claims as the
clanging of brazen wings. For as Aristotle warns us,
!"Even to praise a man is in some ways to urge a course of
1
action." Thus, although the poem may have had little to
say to the "common greenness" of contemporary Ireland, it
would have given a particular message to the English
readers of the London Mercury--the message that Ireland
was still a troubled and violent state, regardless of
I
English interference. And, as Maud Gonne has emphasized,
portraying Ireland as "too troubled and too violent" was
an ideology that served John Bull well whenever it was
necessary to deny Irish claims to independence.26
i
Contributing to this ideology--by dramatizing it in
i
"Meditations in Time of Civil War"--was hardly, for an
Irish Senator, a neutral position.
j 26 See Maud Gonne, A Servant of the Queen (London:
Victor Gollanez, 1950), 163. Cited in Krimm. _
232
"THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT”:
THE RHETORIC OF NOBEL OBLIGE
; The first person to congratulate Yeats on receiving
the Nobel Prize was Oliver St. John Gogarty. Gogarty's
speech in the Senate, finally cut short by Lord Gleneavy,
not only demonstrates how epideictic oratory can be
deliberative, but it also suggests Yeats's newly acquired
authority as cultural leader:
Since the treaty, the award of the Nobel
Prize to Senator Yeats is the most
significant thing that has befallen this
country. . . . Plato, Aristotle, Virgil,
Dante, Marconi, and Mussolini .... It
is by such as these that our civilization
is assessed. Our civilization will be
assessed on the name of Senator Yeats. . .
. Coming at a time when there was a regular
wave of destruction, hatred of beauty, a
crushing out of perfection, and a blindness
to the national ideal in this country, it
is a very happy and welcome thing." (II,
156-160; 15 November 1923; SS 154).
Gogarty's hyperboles must not be taken at face value.
3
After all, he also insisted that without Yeats there
i
would be no Irish Free State. Nonetheless, Yeats was well
aware of the importance of his Nobel Award in increasing
his rhetorical authority in Ireland and in the world. But
l
his opportunity for expressing that authority did not come
J
in the Senate itself, but during his Nobel Acceptance
Speech, which was published as "The Irish Dramatic_____
233
Movement," and his other Nobel essay, "The Bounty of
Sweden."
"The Irish Dramatic Movement" locate the ways in
which Yeats integrated his literary and political projects
during his early years as a Senator. It displays the
i
contradictions resulting from his attempt to separate
himself from his early nationalist proclamations. For
although Yeats was granted the Nobel Award for such plays
as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, which was in fact performed at
the ceremony, his speech attacks the kind of nationalism
that those plays inspired and valorizes instead the Anglo-
Irish and, in particular, English influences in Ireland,
which were declining rapidly.
The Nobel Prize for literature, as first conceived by
Alfred Bernard Nobel, was to be given, to "the person who
should have produced in the field of literature the most
distinguished work of idealistic tendency." Yeats was
i
praised by the Nobel committee specifically because "his
idealism has never dulled." Yeats's Celtic bent toward
i
jthe spiritualistic, combined with his symbolic "hostility
to dogmatic science and naturalistic art," provided the
!
'Irish--and most of Europe, as well--with a perfect
antidote to the doctrine of historical materialism:
"[Yeats] was disturbed," the committee insisted, "by the
desiccation of imagination and emotional life in a world
i
which at best had faith only in a collective and automatic
234
progression to the sacred land of Cockaigne." Yeats is
praised for providing an ideological balm during troubled
! times: "Events proved him to be terribly right: the
'paradise' which could be reached by humanity with such
schooling, we have now the dubious advantage of enjoying"
(Nobel Lectures, 196).1 To the Nobel Committee Yeats was
a symbol of an idealism and Celtic mysticism that
countered revolutionary materialism.
Yet such a simplistic view of the causes--and the
antidotes--to revolution was simply lost on Yeats. For he
had been fighting a double ideological battle since the
Easter Rising and the October revolution. Against the
Bolshevik ideas, he summoned the value of the spiritual
life, the efficacy of ghosts, and the power of ideals and
the imagination to influence historical events. This was
the "unwritten history" he referred to in Per Arnica.
Within the local context of Irish politics, however, this
ideological position would stop nothing. The civil war
1 The Committee continued: "Events proved him to be
terribly right: the "paradise" which could be reached by
humanity with such schooling, we have now the dubious
advantage of enjoying. Even the more beautiful kinds of
social utopianism, represented by the greatly admired poet
William Morris, did not captivate such an individualist as
young Yeats" (Nobel Lectures 196). Elizabeth
Cullingford's thesis that Yeats and Morris remained in
certain ways ideologically compatible throughout his life
is severely challenged by this passage. Yeats actually
demonstrated his revised stance toward socialism in any
form by explicitly repudiating his early association with
Morris. That the Nobel Committee would make such a point
of his distance from Morris points to Yeats's active and
public renouncing of M o r r i s . ______________________
235
that still divided Ireland as Yeats received his award was
not driven by excess materialism, but by excess
spiritualism; it was not a lack of religion or idealism
that fired the Republicans— to the contrary, the Easter
Rising had coalesced much of the religious, idealist and
literary energy in Ireland at the time.
Yeats faced an enormous rhetorical burden, then, when
he turned to address the Nobel audience. He needed to
accentuate his role as Irish patriot, which derived from
his early work in the Abbey Theater, but he also had to
marshal this authority to criticize and repudiate the very
ideals for which he won the award.
The Nobel Medallion that Yeats received was inscribed
with the words: "For his always inspired poetry, which in
a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a
whole nation." Though the award is for his lyric as well
as his dramatic poetry, Yeats opens his speech by
explaining that his topic will be the Irish Dramatic
Movement. He chooses this theme because the lion's share
of the award must be intended for his dramatic works, not
his lyrics:
Perhaps the English committees would never
have sent you my name if I had written no
plays, no dramatic criticism, if my lyric
poetry had not a quality of speech
practiced upon the stage, perhaps even—
though this could be no portion of their
deliberate thought--if it were not in some
degree the symbol of a movement.
____________ (Autobiography 378) _____
236
This passage plays several tricks. First, though it is
true that the English committee did include Yeats's name,
he was not their first choice; in fact, there was a
vigorous lobby for Thomas Hardy. Thus Yeats conjures a
host of shrewd intentions on the part of the English
committee to identify the Abbey Theatre project as
something the English would (read "should") find
admirable. Second, and more important, the passage
continues Yeats's argument that his lyric poetry is
something distinct and separate from his ideological work
with the Abbey, and thus should not come under the
scrutiny of those Nobel judges who praise literature as
much for its ideological influence as for its artistic
form.
Yeats points up the importance of this exclusion in
his "bread and butter letter to Sweden," The Bounty of
Sweden, published in 1925. There he explains that his
poetic composing process is fundamentally a transcription
of dramatic voices that appear mysteriously in his head.
He remarks, "I print the poem and never hear about it
again, until I find the book years after with a page dog
eared by some young man, or marked by some young girl with
violet," he writes, "and when I have seen that I am a
little ashamed, as though somebody were to attribute to me
a delicacy of feeling I should not possess." Yeats
237
protests slyly, if too much. In a double gesture he
denies the rhetorical impact of his poetry (expressing a
shock that it would find readers at all) by claiming proud
ownership over the rhetoric of his prose: "On the other
hand, if I give a successful lecture, or write a vigorous,
critical essay, there is immediate effect" (Au 359).
There is a private lyrical Yeats who shies away from
honour, and a public prosaic Yeats who would "covet
honour" (Au 359), and the two, he implies, shall always
differ.
A Free State Senator, Yeats might want to be
dispossessed not only of the "delicacy of feeling" in
some of his poems but from the indelicacy of the politics
in others. Irish readers of poetry at the time were
somewhat like the Nobel Committee itself, and inspired by
the verse of Thomas Davis, Pearse, Plunkett, MacDonagh,
and, even, Connolly, they were not likely to separate the
ideology of a poem from the nobility of its syntax. In
sum, though Yeats's separation of his lyric poetry from
Nobel (and therefore political) may disappoint, it is no
accident. At the very moment when an independent group
tried to dissolve the dichotomy between the poet's
rhetoric and poetry, his quarrel with others and his
quarrel with himself, Yeats holds up his lyrics as
something special and distinct from his more political
238
literary projects, and then he slips them unobtrusively
into the waistpocket of his coat.
2. Nobel Idealism
Inasmuch as Yeats was praised by the Nobel committee
specifically because "his idealism has never dulled," it
is fitting that he explains that ideal to the Nobel
audience. It is not presented directly, however, but in a
narrative structured by logical oppositions: English
versus Irish, country versus city, and art versus politics
or religion. In the opening paragraph, Yeats speaks of
the objective world of Ireland against which he and the
Abbey struggled: "A trumpery dispute about an acre of
land can rouse our people to monstrous savagery ....
Yet their ignorance and violence can remember the noblest
beauty" (Au 379). Though the Irish remain rough and raw,
l
Yeats, as the literary gold miner, recuperates nuggets of
the past from the argumentative and violent present.
Because he found peasant stories, such as those about the
beauty of Mary Hynes, resonant with classical emotions, he
says,
i
It seemed as if the ancient world lay all
about us with its freedom of imagination,
its delight in good stories, in man's force
and woman's beauty, and that all we had to
do was to make the town think as the
country felt; yet we soon discovered that
the town would only think town thoughts.
(Au 380)
239
Though this description obviously catalogues several
ideals of Western culture that would please the Nobel
committee, it consists of nothing but reifications: Of
what "ancient world" is he speaking? What countries,
under whose reign? "Freedom" for whom? "Man's force"--to
what end? "Woman's beauty"--to what purposes? Yeats's
style gathers clarity and energy in the last sentence,
when he speaks of conflicts and antitheses, but even here
questions arise: What does the "town think" about; what
makes the "country feel" as it does?
Yeats's ladder of abstraction leads him to an
overwhelming argument about the Irish, remarkable for its
overt ideological slant, polemical style, and eminent
quotability--all of which suggest that the passage is
meant to be rescued from both the narrative and from the
Nobel occasion, preserved as a gem of Yeatsian wisdom:
In the country you are alone with your own
violence, your own ignorance and heaviness,
and with the common tragedy of life, and if
you have any artistic capacity you desire
beautiful emotion; and, certain that the
seasons will be the same always, care not
how fantastic its expression. In the town,
where everybody crowds upon you, it is your
neighbor not yourself that you hate, and if
you are not to embitter his life and your
own life, perhaps even if you are not to
murder him in some kind of revolutionary
frenzy, somebody must teach reality and
justice. You will hate that teacher for a
while, calling his books and plays ugly,
misdirected, morbid, or something of that
kind, but you must agree with him in the
end. (Au 380)
240
The country or the city? The deconstruction or
historicizing that Raymond Williams might bring to such a
dichotomy is performed by Yeats himself in a footnote to
the passage. It locates the sentiments in the historical
conflicts of the Irish Civil War, specifying their purpose
as ideological balm: "I was in my Galway house during the
first months of civil war, the railway bridges blown up
and the road blacked with stones and trees." Endangered
by the guerilla tactics of the Irregulars, Yeats finds
comfort in the natural cycle of wars: "Men must have
lived through so many tumultuous centuries” (Au 394).
After quoting two stanzas from "Meditations in Time of
Civil War," a gesture that links that private meditation
to his public position in this essay, he concludes: "When
I got back to Dublin I was with angry people who argued
over everything or were eager to know the exact facts: in
the midst of the mood that makes realistic drama" (Au
395). The "you" of the passage is becoming more
particular than country or city dwellers; it now specifies
the Irish at the present moment. The ideological gesture
becomes rhetorical. Yeats's sincere statements of his own
beliefs in the turns of history serve as rhetorical
weapons against Irish revolutionaries.
The critical difference then is not one between
country and city: Obviously for Yeats and his family, as
"Meditations ..." indicates, and also for Lady Gregory,
241
whose childhood home, Yeats tells the Nobel audience, "was
burned down by incendiaries some few months ago" (Au 379),
the country is not the place to avoid "revolutionary
frenzy." We cannot go to the country, for the country
will bring us no peace. The significant opposition in
Yeats's rhetoric is rather the one between the world view
of those in the country and those in town. Country folk
find comfort and peace by their ability to contextualize
local conflicts in terms of the larger historical cycles,
which, in Yeats's view, are just as natural as the
seasons. Through this perspective, any political events,
even when they threaten one's place in society (perhaps
especially when they do) are minimized in importance and
rendered unworthy of action or thought. The country
perspective understands "how seasons run," as Yeats had
put it in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” though that
intuition is historical, not agricultural. Those in the
town, however, do not have such knowledge. Being over
concerned with "facts" and "realistic drama," the repeated
exchange of goods for cash and words for ideas, they have
■little time for self-loathing and thus project their
hatred upon their neighbors--and this is somehow the cause
of "revolutionary frenzy."2
2 This argument shows the limited extent of Yeats's
anti-English rhetoric during his Senate years. He would
only complain about the English in ways that also drew
blood from local Irishman. Here he deplores those under
the rule of the "despotism of fact"--whether they be
242
Yeatsf s over-psychologizing of Irish history suggests
a deeper ideological enterprise. He is concerned not only
with the perspectives of the town and country but also
with the influence of these environments on the politics
of the oppressed classes. Though the subsistence
conditions of peasants and slum-dwellers remain similar,
the degree to which the ruling classes can remediate those
attitudes differs. In the country, as Yeats's narrative
reveals, Lady Gregory can easily converse with the
peasants and share stories; thus, there is room for a
freedom of exchange and, it seems, the possibility of
dialogue. People know their places. In the city,
however, no such mutual enculturation can occur.
Conditions are too crowded and mobility is diminished,
which translated into Yeatsian (if not Balzacian) terms
means there are too many peasants and not enough
aristocrats. What the city needs, therefore, is a strong
teacher, a teacher who must be hated, seen as an
oppressor: "Somebody must teach reality and justice. You
will hate that teacher for a while ..." (Au 380).
Yeats’s project for the Irish Dramatic Movement, has its
English or Irish--while praising the Celtic qualities of
imagination and gaiety. Yeats thus adopts Arnoldian
distinctions whole, but he changes the object of their
ridicule. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy comes to hold all
the imagination and gaiety, and the Irish middle-class
displays all the worse qualities of Arnold's Saxon.
England becomes the imaginative and "fictive" force in the
Commonwealth. ___________________________________________
243
historical irony: The Ascendancy landholders, whose
initial oppression of the peasants often forced them to
jmigrate into the cities in the first place (where they
found a new master in manufacturing), now arrive in the
city to continue their lessons with the same group. Yeats
means to teach the reality put forth by the Senate in the
New Irish State: the revolution is over, it is now time
for rebuilding; stop burning down Ascendancy mansions!
Because an intense historical struggle in Ireland
lies behind Yeats’s proposal to recapture classical ideals
through literature, it is fitting that the history of the
ilrish Dramatic Movement is described as war, in terms of
"labours, triumphs, and struggles." The Movement
ostensibly remained in struggle because it had no clear
ideological agenda nor essential nature; it is tied to the
political attitudes it must oppose. It is reactive, not
active. It got its impetus, Yeats tells us, from
i
Parnell's fall:
A disillusioned and embittered Ireland
turned from parliamentary politics; an
event was conceived; and the race began, as
I think, to be troubled by that event's
long gestation. (Au 378)
And as the race is troubled, so is the theater. Its
enemies are the same ones that Yeats had identified from
i
his early reviews as the main shackles to Irish
literature: The Abbey fights against "internal political
244
speeches" (Au 378); "public opinion" (380); against; the
demands of the Dublin audience to be represented
accurately, "compell[ing] us against our own will . . . to
become always more realistic, substituting dialect for
I
verse, common speech for dialect" (Au 380-81); against
"political misunderstanding" (382); against the "Patriotic
Press" (382); against political parties "who desire to
substitute for life, which never does the same thing
twice, a bundle of reliable principles and assertions"
(383); against "religious orthodoxy" (383); against
"incendiaries" (379); even against the Free State, whom it
must now educate (387); and, finally, against the "Dublin
audience" itself. In 1919, Yeats's ideals for the theater
were an unpopular theater, "the theatre's anti-self"
(Explorations 257). Now that Yeats is a Senator and the
Abbey is the official National Theater, that ideal is
impossible; inasmuch, therefore, as the audience cannot be
eliminated completely; they must be subdued or conquered;
the audience is an enemy from which the theater must rise
victorious: "Two events brought us victory," Yeats
explains, "a friend gave us a theatre, and we found a
strange man of genius, John Synge." The implementation of
culture, especially when it is meant sweeten and
enlighten, cannot be easily separated from military
procedure.
245
2. The Abbey as Ideal State
Yeats describes the Irish Dramatic Movement as if
were its own country, an island within an island: "We are
burdened with debt for we have come through war and civil
war and audiences grown thin when there is fighting in the
streets (Au 387). Transforming the Theater into a
microcosm of Ireland (with all of its classes, interests,
and political squabbles represented), he then demonstrates
how such a rag and bone shop of disparate elements can be
brought together into a noble and praiseworthy
enterprise. From the beginning, we are told, Yeats's
goals differed from those of the Gaelic League (Au 378) in
; that he sought to bring together Celtic imagination and
the English language.3 When he turned to dramatic work
(because the "great mass of our people, accustomed to
interminable political speeches, read little"), he kept
the same goal of reconciliation and variety. The Abbey
included Lady Gregory, "a member of an old Galway family,"
who arrived with a fine harvest of peasant stories, told
I
to her "in a form of English with much of its syntax from
Gaelic, much of its vocabulary from Tudor English" (a
potent synthesis). There was also Edwin Martyn, an ex
leader of Sinn Fein, who "paid for some of the first
3 Since the Gaelic League had been one of the groups
suppressed by the English police, presumably for inciting
divisiveness, it is understandable why Yeats casts his own
intentions as conciliatory.___________________________
246
performances," and, finally, a "company of Irish
amateurs," including a "stage-struck solicitor's clerk," a
"working man," and several actresses who, interestingly,
the theatre "got"
from a little political society which
described its object as educating the
children of the poor, or, according to its
enemies, teaching them a catechism that
began with this question, "What is the
origin of evil?" and the answer, "England."
(Au 381)
Yeats describes the Abbey group in this speech in the same
terms that he used to describe his ideals for the group
that had been shattered by the Easter Rising: "At the
moment 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
(my emphasis; Letters 613).
But Yeats1s attraction to this heterogeneity is
short-lived. Heterogeneity is soon replaced by
homogeneity; political and rhetorical interests are
siphoned away; sweetness and light remain. Even though
the actresses, "came to us for political reasons and acted
from precisely the same impulse that made them teach,"
their work in the theater led to an astonishing
transformation:
I do not know what their thoughts were as
that strange new power awoke within them,
but I think they must have suffered from a
247
bad conscience, a feeling that the
patriotic impulse had gone, that they had
given themselves up to vanity or ambition.
(Au 381)
Whereas the political interests of these women are
described as an "impulse," implying it was a mere
reaction, motivated by forces outside of them and not
something self-developed, the moment when "genius" "awoke"
in them is described as if it were an act of self-
productive delight, as if they were birthing their own
beauty, a beauty hardly "terrible." Yeats had yet to
write "Leda and the Swan," but his fascination with the
mysterious powers that can overcome a woman from without
is already manifest. Yeats's anecdote thus testifies to
the remarkable transformative power of the Abbey. If the
ideological position were translated into argument, it
might be the following: If these women from Cumman na
nBal -- women whom Yeats was not afraid on occasion to
label "hysterical" (Lett 350) -- could be converted away
from politics through aesthetic pursuits, the leisurely
discovery of their genius ("We could experiment and wait"
[Au 382]), and the replacement of their own words with
those supplied by the Abbey playwrights, could not Ireland
itself be transformed by embracing the Abbey ideals? Such
a reading is supported by the fact that Yeats wrote these
lines while continually lobbying in the Senate for
248
appropriations for the Abbey and other artistic projects.4
Yeats here demonstrates the kind of contradiction in his
aesthetic ideology that could only be brought about by the
interference of rhetorical motives. On the one hand,
Yeats fought to free himself from political criticism by
claiming that his work was only art; on the other, he
claims a transformative power in art in general (and his
work in particular) in order to elicit funding from the
New Irish State. But when art is not enough, there is
always force.
A further political lesson to be drawn from Yeats's
story of the Irish Dramatic Movement is that for any noble
venture to succeed, democracy (inefficient) and patriotism
(silly) must be excised. The early democratic
organization of the Abbey is described as "preposterous":
players and authors all sitting together
and settling by vote what play should be
performed and who should play it. It took
a series of disturbances, weeks of argument
during which no performance could be given,
before Lady Gregory and John Synge and I
were put in control. (Au 382)
On another occasion, "the company refused to perform" a
play, but "after interminable argument had worn us all
out," Lady Gregory relented, made some changes in the
script," and the actors gave way" (382). These "weeks of
4 The Finance Minister was to give The Abbey a stipend
beginning in 1925.___________________________________________
249
argument” and this "interminable argument" backstage can
be identified with Ireland's "interminable political
speeches" (378), or "an interminable argument about . . .
respective religions" (385). Yeats has no more tolerance
for "interminable argument" in the Abbey than he does in
the Senate. The true success of the Abbey began,
therefore, Yeats tells us, when he, Synge, and Lady
Gregory were "put in control."
Yeats recounts that after The Rising of the Moon was
performed "Dublin Castle denied to us a privilege which we
had shared with other Dublin theatres, of buying, for
stage purposes, the cast off clothes of the police" (Au
383). The keenness of this loss becomes clear, however,
when Yeats's rhetoric makes the functions of the Abbey and
the police nearly identical, a function he suggests when
he says of Lady Gregory: "[H]er own house has been
protected by her presence, but the house where she was
born was burned down by incendiaries a few months ago, and
there has been like disorder over the greater part of
Ireland" (Au 379). Lady Gregory's "presence" serves to
protect her own house and to protect artistic endeavors
even more than the "five hundred" police "keeping order in
the streets outside" the Abbey Theatre. It is that
presence that Yeats invokes at the conclusion of his
speech:
250
[W]hen I received from the hands of your
King the great honour your Academy has
conferred upon me, I felt that a young
man's ghost should have stood upon one side
of me and at the other a living woman
sinking into the infirmity of age. Indeed
I have seen little in this last week that
would not have been memorable and exciting
to Synge and to Lady Gregory, for Sweden
has achieved more than we have hoped for
our country. (Au 387)
Though Yeats promises to recall "many known and unknown
persons” in the beginning of his speech, he finishes by
evoking specifically only the leaders of the Abbey
Theatre. Yeats's point seems to be that as long as the
Abbey Theatre carries on the legacy of Yeats, Synge, and
Lady Gregory, and keeps these figures "present," the
Theatre will do its best to protect Ireland from
"incendiaries." In the words of "Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen," The Abbey will "bar that foul storm out" (CP
207).
3. The Syngean Ideal: Reconciling Irish and English
i
Besides his consistent idealism, Yeats was praised
explicitly by the Nobel committee for another talent,
intertwining English and Irish cultural threads: "The
synthesis of Celtic and English, which had never been
successfully effected in the sphere of political life,
became a reality here, in the world of poetic imagination
-- a symptom of no small spiritual significance."
Yeats' s Nobel speech. then, has a double purpose_. At the
251
same time that Yeats presents the Abbey theatre as a
humanizing antidote to the republican fervor and
philistinism of Ireland, he also describes an Abbey
committed to reconciliation with England and carrying
forth England's sweetening influence on the island.
Yeats's praise for Synge as the man who "brought us
victory" must be read in light of Yeats's own rhetorical
project to reconcile things English and Irish.
Yeats praises Synge first for his model neutrality in
the war between Ireland and England. "So far from being,
as they had thought, a politician working in the interests
of England, he was so little a politician that the world
merely amused him and touched his pity" (Au 386).
Paradoxically, Synge's apolitical nature became its most
powerful political weapon. Synge's first attempt at
writing an explicitly political play, based on the
rebellion of '98, is cited as an example of his attitude.
Two women in a cave, as Yeats summarizes the unpublished
play's action, "carry on an interminable argument about
the merits of their respective religions. The Catholic
woman denounces Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, and the
Protestant woman the Inquisition and the Pope."
This last sentence, as well as the sentiments it
expresses, seems neatly balanced; but they describe a
situation more balanced than that portrayed in the play
Synge actually wrote. When Yeats had described the play's
252
plot in 1910, the plot is slightly less parallel; the
Protestant in that story does not mention the
"Inquisition" as a fault to lay at the foot of the
Catholics. Does Yeats's addition of this act in his 1925
version merely heighten the contrast between the
Protestants and Catholics for the Swedish (and
predominately Protestant) audience--or was he, rather,
imputing an inquisitorial tendency to the Irish
Republicans, whom he had labeled in 1919 as "at once
economists, patriots, and inquisitors" (Explorations 280)?
Was he suffering a lapse of memory or was he carrying on
ithe English tradition of dismissing any political actions
by Catholics as a means of returning to the rule of Popery
and the days of bloody Mary?
Yeats identifies Synge's neutral stance as the twin
of his own. Of the Irish, he says, "And if in their war
with the English auxiliary police they were shown no
mercy, they showed none: murder answered murder" (Au
379). He seems less concerned with sides than with
preventing murder and destruction. Yeats seeks to empower
the Irish in his imagination by making them reciprocal
agents in the war with Ireland, and not only anti
colonial guferrillas; he licenses their subordination by
creating and promoting a false reciprocity. Yet in such
explosive circumstances, binaries are difficult to
I
maintain. By specifying the conflict as one between "our
253
people" and the "English auxiliary police," Yeats rewrites
the history of the "war," which to most observers was one
between the forces of Irish nationalism and English
colonial rule. Further, by referring to the English
■"auxiliaries," instead of the English empire, Yeats
implies that these soldiers were, as the name implies,
aids, additions, or supplements to the English government,
not at the heart of its policy. The "auxiliaries" are
thus portrayed as a temporary manifestation of England's
power (unlike, one notes, the Royal Irish Constabulary),
whereas the "ignorance and violence" of "our people," (a
phrase that Yeats adopts rather royally) is depicted not
as local and historically motivated, but as an essential
part of the Irish nature. The English are not above
violence and will undertake reprisals, Yeats admits, but
only as a supplement; the Irish take violence as their
daily bread. Yeats's Ireland remains a land of Ire.
Yeats extends his characteristic gesture of Irish-
English consanguinity to the point of embracing the
police. The speech itself reads like a police blotter;
"the English auxiliary police were shown no mercy" (379);
the Rising of the Moon is about "a patriotic policeman"
(383); the Aran islanders in The Playboy "hand the hero
over to the police" (386); The Playboy itself is "played
under police protection, seventy police in the theatre the
last night, and five hundred, some newspapers said.
254
keeping order in the streets outside" (386). The police
are a crucial part of the history of the Abbey. They
stand on the side of art.
The primary duty of the police in Yeats's story is to
show themselves to be much more benevolent than the
average Irish person (or even the average American or
European, viewing them through Irish propaganda)
considered them to be. This project is crystallized in
the central passage, which discusses the controversy over
Lady Gregory's play, The Rising of the Moon;
A policeman discovers an escaped Fenian
prisoner and lets him free, because the
prisoner has aroused with some old songs
the half-forgotten patriotism of his
; youth. The players would not perform it
j because they said it was an unpatriotic act
to admit that a policeman was capable of
; patriotism. One well-known leader of the
mob wrote to me, "How can the Dublin mob
i be expected to fight the police if it looks
upon them as capable of patriotism?" . . .
1 Castle and Press alike knew that the police
had frequently let off political prisoners,
! but "that only made the matter worse."
(Au 383)
I
1
As the "letter from the well-known leader of the mob"
proves, The Rising of the Moon had profound rhetorical
force. Its plot directly contradicted the rhetoric of the
"Leaders of the Crowd." Yeats's characterization of the
patriot is designed to portray him as wrong-headed in
literary matters, insofar as he would try to restrict the
dramatist's right to portray reality as she sees it. The
255
argument can be reversed, however, and both the patriot
and Yeats can be found to be naive about the power of art
to influence politics.
They are equally deceived if they believe that the
representation of the police at the Abbey theater could
provide an antidote to the view of the police that the
Irish had acquired in daily experience. The six years
before Yeats spoke included'some of the most violent
incidents in the struggle of the patriots and the police
forces. These include the suppression of Sinn Fein in
■1917 and 1918, which continued in the next year when Sinn
Fein, the Irish Volunteers, the Gaelic League and all
kindred bodies throughout Ireland were declared illegal
(25 November 1919)--and which occurred despite the fact
that Sinn Fein had been continuously winning elections
since the spring of 1917; the police raids on the Cork
Examiner and the Freeman's Journal (autumn 1919); the
infamous Black and Tan raids beginning in the 1920s and
those of the Auxies (which Yeats even recalls to the
Nobel audience). At a Gaelic football match in Dublin (21
November 1920), the Auxiliary police fired on the crowd,
i
killing twelve. The proclamation of martial law in
December and the Sack of Cork a few weeks later destroyed
the Carnegie Free Library, causing two and one-half
million pounds sterling in damages. The official
reprisals against the republicans in 1921 led to the
256
executions of twelve republican prisoners held without
trial. Even after the Treaty was signed, and the Free
State came to power, military courts executed 77
Irregulars (17 November 1922), two weeks after Mussolini’s
i
march on Rome. Finally, after Eamonn de Valera had
ordered his followers to call off armed struggle (24 May
1923), the Free State, following the Public Safety Act and
the establishment of the Garda Siocha (8 August 1923),
arrested de Valera (15 August) and held him without trial
even as Yeats spoke.
; Given this history, a patriot might ask Yeats where
I
then were the patriotic policeman that he paraded before
the audience at the Abbey and the Nobel Committee?
Although Yeats claims that "The country man thinks that
the more terrible the crime, the greater must the
provocation have been" (Au 385), and though he claims to
be himself a country man, his lecture refuses to confront
the "provocations" that led to the treacheries he
I
mentions. Yeats’s "imaginative" release of two prisoners
I
in his narrative (Au 383; 386) is no doubt evidence of
utopian wishful thinking, and should perhaps accrue to his
credit. Yet such a mis-representation obscures the
international vision of how England was treating Ireland;
and from the early days of Maud Gonne's visits to France,
257
this vision was a potent force in moving English rule
toward reforms.5
Yeats's Nobel narrative notwithstanding, securing the
release of political prisoners in Ireland (or from English
jails) was a rare event, engaging the efforts of many
people, including Gonne. In the Memoirs Yeats mentions
that her correspondence on behalf of prisoners "at one
time took up eight hours a day" (Mem 108). It is probably
for this reason that Yeats's conditions for marrying her
included that she "renounce all politics, including
amnesty for political prisoners" (Cardozo, 213). One
could point, moreover, to the historical record of the
mistreatment of Irish prisoners by the English, a subject
of much documentation and debate and obviously fresh in
the minds of any contemporary of Yeats's speech. Yeats's
saccharine version of the "reality" of the relations
between republicans and the English (or even the Free
State) police would have been a bitter pill for most Irish
patriots to swallow.
Yeats's most subtle— and ingenious--rhetorical
maneuver to reconcile democratic and royalist elements in
5 In his patriotic heyday, Yeats once wrote in an
article praising Maud Gonne for her oratory that "England
has indeed, as Mitchel phrased it, gained the ear of the
world, and knows right well how to tell foreign nations
what tale of Ireland pleases her best . . . [it is] a
ceaseless tale of English patience and Irish
insubordination" ("Maud Gonne," 30 July 1892, 149ff.).
Thirty years later, Yeats has taken on this role for
himself.
258
Ireland is embodied in his version of Synge's Playboy of
the Western world, which he recounts before the Nobel
audience.
A young man arrives at a little public-
house and tells the publican's daughter
that he has murdered his father. He so
tells it that he has all her sympathy, and
every time he retells it, with new
exaggerations and additions, he wins the
sympathy of somebody or other, for it is
the countryman's habit to be against the
law. The countryman thinks the more
terrible the crime, the greater must the
provocation have been. The young man
himself, under the excitement of his own
story, becomes gay, energetic and lucky.
He prospers in love, comes in first at the
local races, and bankrupts the roulette
tables afterwards. Then the father arrives
with his head bandaged but very lively,
and the people turn upon the imposter. To
win back their esteem he takes up a spade
to kill his father in earnest, but,
horrified at the threat of what had
sounded so well in the story, they bind him
to hand over to the police. The father
releases him and father and son walk off
together, the son, still buoyed up by his
imagination, announcing that he will be the
master henceforth. (Au 385-86)
Yeats's rhetoric is most successful (and insidious) not in
his explicit statements--many of which are clumsy and, as
#
the Bounty essay shows, even embarrassing--but rather in
his anecdotes, stories, and representations.6 Regardless
6 Louis Althusser writes: "Ideology must always be
necessarily narrative in its structure, inasmuch as it not
only involves a mapping of the real, but also the
essentially narrative or fantasy attempt of the subject to
invent a place for himself/herself in a collective and
historical process which excludes him or her and which is
itself basically nonrepresentable and non-narrative."
259
of the allegorical meaning that the Playboy of the Western
World itself had for the 1907 Dublin audience, anyone
hearing this plot summary in 1924 would have been struck
by the uncanny resemblance between the story and the
recent history of the Irish Free State.
We should take the arrival of Synge's hero at the
"public-house" as the re-arrival of the voice of Irish
republicanism, trying to convince the children of Robert
Emmet and Wolfe Tone ("the [republican's daughter") that
their revolutionary program, as embodied, for example, in
the heroic feats of the Easter Rising, had killed the King
of England and English colonial rule. Playing off the
Therefore Althusser concludes, "The ideological is a
'representation' of the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Lenin
and Philosophy tr. Ben Brewster [London: New Left Books,
1971], 162). Althusser is right that the ideological must
be perpetuated by narrative and that narrative can thus,
regardless of intention, harbor ideology. When discussing
Yeats, however, other distinctions are necessary. In
discussing Yeats's representations one must carefully
separate their "ideological function" from their
"rhetorical function." For rhetorical purposes, Yeats's
representations help to construct identities and
differences that urge a course of action or course of
attitude at a particular moment. This action is urged
implicitly because the historical (or, more accurately,
rhetorical) moment presents the available actions. The
action urged out of the rhetoric of a narrative, then, is
always experienced as a challenge to the status quo. The
historical moment validates the rhetoric of narrative.
By contrast, the ideology of a representation is
comprised of residues of past rhetorical identities and
differences that have become reified. The ideology of a
narrative is dominant when the historical moment does not
provide the means of action. During certain periods of
time, such as during civil wars, of course, all narratives
are both ideological and rhetorical.
260
natural rebellious sympathies of the Irish ("it is the
countryman's habit to be against the law"), the rebel
cause slowly gathered support: The Easter Rising came to
be viewed as a noble sacrifice (see Chapter One) and,
through a series of trials and events, the cause began to
gather steam. The reiteration of this tale of
revolutionary success led to the establishment of the Free
State. The creation of the Free State did not actually
kill the father (only the establishment of a true Republic
would do that), but it seemed to provide an imaginary
victory, and it puts some distance between the son and
the Father's control.7
At the height of Christy Mahon's celebration and
renown, however, the father returns, like the stone guest
in Don Giovanni. It is just such a shock that the Irish
rebels experienced when the Treaty required an Oath of
Allegiance to the King of England--the main point of
argument preceding the Civil War. Like Christy Mahon, De
Valera and his followers, who had rejected the Treaty and
7 Such imaginative gestures were a familiar piece of
republican semiotics, even back in the nineties. Yeats
writes in the Memoirs that "Somewhere in front of us was a
mock funeral Maud Gonne devised, a coffin with 'The
British Empire' printed upon it, and black flags with the
names of all those who had been handed for treason during
Queen Victoria’s reign" (Mem 112). The Autobiographies
record the same act, but this time the coffin is seen as
the brain child of Connolly, not Maud Gonne: "Later that
night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the
words 'British Empire' upon it, and police and mob fight
for its ownership, and at last that the police may not
capture, it is thrown into the Liffey" (Au 244-45).
261
still clung to the ideals of the Easter Rising, now needed
to strike another blow; this time they would have to
execute the remnants of the father in the new guise of
the Free State government, in particular the members of
the Senate.. At this point, the similarity between Yeats's
metanarrative and Irish history falls apart, and Yeats's
ideological project is asserted; the father cannot quite
be killed. The republican attempt to "kill the father in
earnest," as Yeats puts it, shocks the Irish people
instead of inspires them. The rebel's new call to
patricide falls on deaf ears. The country people "bind
[Christy] and hand him over to the police," that is, they
voted for the Treaty, against the new revolutionaries;
Seventy-seven Irregulars are executed; de Valera is
clamped in jail. The point of the story gradually
emerges: The Sinn Fein separatists--"buoyed by their
imagination," and, one might add, the memory of heroes
like Pearse--continue to avow their mastery, but they do
so under the watchful eye of the revitalized (even
resurrected) Father. In most productions of Playboy,
indeed, Christy Mahon makes his shallow declarations of
mastery under the paternal care of his father, who,
bandaged and weakened, pushes the hero down the road with
an occasional tweak of the ear or kick of the pants.
Yeats's anecdote has several rhetorical effects. The
Irish, Yeats implies, who always like a good story, are
262
truly revolutionary only when the killing of the father is
an illusion, something they can watch in a play; they do
not take such a project seriously. Just as the police in
Yeats's narrative are more benevolent than they are in
real life, so is the paranoid father.
The Playboy of the Western World has been adequately
analyzed in terms of the classic "Oedipal" struggle. Yet
as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, in another context, the
classical psychoanalytic approach to the Oedipal struggle
puts too much attention on the neurotic son, ignoring the
larger political criticisms to be made of the overbearing
and paranoid father who starts the whole trouble. Yeats's
version of Synge's story follows the traditional line that
places guilt on the son rather than blame on the father.
For it is the son (Christy Mahon, the republicans) who
needs to be instructed in Yeats's view, not England or the
established conservatives of the Irish Free State.
("Indeed the young Ministers and party politicians of the
Free State have had, I think, some of their education from
our plays" [Au 387].) The son needs to remember his
connection to the ancient world, to his paternal roots, to
the rule of kings. He needs to be reminded that the
father, even when struck a hard blow, is always ready to
forgive, and, moreover, that the father is difficult to
kill. Yeats's ideology not only resurrects the dead
father, and makes him present before the eyes of the
263
world, it keeps awake a drowsy Emperor. Finnegan's wake
becomes the King's. The ideological views that Yeats
embodied in his work for the Abbey Theater provide in
themselves a record of his growing conservativism;
Cathleen Ni Houlihan called for the overthrow of the
oppressive father; Playboy of the Western World claims
that the father can only be killed in imagination; by the
time Yeats produces Oedipus, as we shall see, the message
is clear: Kill the father? Don’t even think about it!
4. Yeats's Idealism Revisited
Yeats's primary goal in the "Irish Dramatic
Movement," as mentioned, was to present a model vision
that exemplified the ideals for which he received the
award. But when he turns to praising the contemporary
Abbey stage at the end of his speech, several
contradictions occur. He praises the new theater not for
its idealism but its realism. He hails the success of
these plays for their depiction of "the bribery at the
appointment of a dispensary Doctor, the attempts of some
local politicians to remain friends with all parties," and
the like--plots that seem realistic, not idealistic.
Yeats notes that these are part of the second wave of
Abbey plays, but even the first wave, including Synge's
work, is implicitly praised in the same way. Yeats's
justification for The Playboy in the face of criticism is
264
made not in terms of the right of the artist to produce an
imaginative work free of political constraints, which had
been the commonplace argument for most of his life, but
rather in terms of the play's remarkable slice-of-life
verisimilitude. Though Yeats does explicitly describe
Synge's play as "picturesque, poetical, fantastical, a
masterpiece and music, the supreme work of our dialectic
theatre," and though he praises it for its "exaggerated
symbolism," he defends the play before the Dublin
ideological critics by its accurate portrayal of the rule
of justice on the Aran islands: Yeats had heard the tale
of Playboy from an old man when he visited the islands,
and "It was a play founded on that old man's story Synge
brought back with him" (Au 385).
Yeats defends the Abbey plays by their realism on
two other occasions. When Lady Gregory's first comedy was
objected to by both "Castle and Press" because its
portrayal of an emigrant returning from America with one
hundred dollars might encourage emigration, "We produced
evidence of returned emigrants with much larger sums,"
Yeats explains, "but were told that only made the matter
worse" (Au 382). A few pages later, he offers the same
defense for the Rising of the Moon: "Castle and Press
alike knew that the police had frequently let off
political prisoners, but 'that only made the matter
worse'" (Au 383). The coyly repeated phrase becomes a
265
running joke between Yeats and the idealistic Nobel
audience on what seems to be the Irish inability to
experience the "recognition" of successful drama. Arnold
had praised the Celtic spirit for its refusal to submit to
the "dogmatism of fact,” and Yeats had praised them in an
early essay for the same quality. Now it seems that their
refusal of fact provides grounds for dismissing their
critical acumen. Yeats's contradictory ideology becomes
apparent. If the dramatist portrays a reality contrary to
fact, it is the license of the artist to produce art
freely from the imagination; yet if the play presents
reality congruent with history, reality, or fact, the
audience has no right to complain. Either way, to
criticize the drama by political terms is the worst kind
of philistinism. An ideological contradiction is unified
by a rhetorical project.
To defend the Abbey plays because they are true to
life, however, produces further contradictions in Yeats's
aesthetics of the drama and his situation as Nobel winner.
Not only did he argue repeatedly that realism is a debased
form of theater, meant only to please the contemporary
groundlings, and not only did he always claim that artists
have the right to transform reality to create beauty, but
the Nobel Award, as mentioned, was intended to reward
works characterized by an ideal, not realistic tendency.
Yeats paradoxically justifies the Irish Dramatic Movement
266
before the Nobel audience by its affinity to Zola rather
than Balzac. These contradictions do not arise merely
because of the implicit contradictions of high symbolist
rhetoric, within whose terms someone like Synge could be
praised for describing "through an exaggerated symbolism,
a reality which he loved precisely because he loved all
reality" (Au 386). They can only be resolved if we
understand the degree to which Yeats's form of idealism in
1923 was actually a disguised and peculiar form of
aristocratic realism. And, as I shall argue in closing,
it was idealism of a kind antithetical to that for which
the Nobel Prize was granted. Yeats's attempt to evoke the
spirit of Synge to the Nobel dais was quite fitting: The
Nobel was, in many ways, awarded to a ghost. Yeats's
anti-realist aesthetic ideology, well-known to readers,
was undermined by the pressure of the local political
struggles that Yeats must fight in Ireland.
4. Countering Idealism: Yeats in the Senate
To demonstrate the realistic ideology of Yeats's
rhetorical idealism in 1923, we must turn to Yeats's
Senate proposal for the study of Irish manuscripts, a
proposal he made about six months before he was awarded
the Nobel. I turn to this speech not only because Yeats's
new idealism is easier to locate when it has been put into
action but also because Yeats opens his proposal by
267
referring to the first impulses of the Irish Dramatic
Movement:
In the old days in Ireland when we began
our imaginative movement which, for good or
evil, had a little share in bringing about
recent events, we all looked forward to the
time when there would be adequate editions
of the old literature of Ireland. (SS 42)
As he progressively obscures the political consequences of
the movement and clarifies its literary nature, he adds:
The movement I am connected with, the whole
poetic movement of modern Ireland, has
drawn a great portion of its inspiration
from the old Bardic literature. (SS 44)
Although Yeats will insist (more than once) that such a
project is scholarly, that is "a work of science . . . not
a work of propaganda," he also mentions the rhetorical,
and thus political, impact of such research. An
additional benefit of translating the Bardic poems, he
says, will be to shape a "new idealism":
It is a moment, too, when we will have to
build up again the idealism of Ireland. We
have had the old form of wild, wasteful,
historic idealism. The country got into
that position, but, like a spendthrift
coming into the possession of its
inheritance, it has wasted that idealism in
a year of civil war. We have to build up
again in its place an idealism of labour
and of thought .... (SS 44-5)
The old idealism inspired a heroism of wasteful spending,
of self-sacrifice, of mindless pursuits and
268
humanitarianism; it was the Christian gesture of the widow
giving up her last half-pence or the socialistic sharing
of the loaves and fishes. The new idealism, "of labour
and of thought" (a purposefully vague formulation), must
teach the Irish to shore up those half-pennies and loaves,
to cut spending (as the Senate itself was trying to do),
to promote respect for possessions and property, and to
guard and preserve the legacy of Irish wealth and
tradition. "September 1913" had castigated the Irish
middle-class because they were born to "pray and save";
now Yeats wishes the entire country to adopt these
practices.
How can the translation of a few Old Irish poems
effect such a reversal? One answer is the difference
between the Saga literature, which was the fountain of the
"old idealism," and that of the Bardic. "The greater
portion of the Saga literature," Yeats explains, "has
already been adequately translated and adequately edited,
but there remains great quantities of old Bardic poetry
which should be translated." He emphasizes: "We will
learn nothing new of importance about Finn and Cuchulain
and other old Irish heroes or Kings of the legendary
period" (SS 75). Why should the "work of the official
Bards" be excavated but the Sagas forgotten, perhaps even
buried, even though the Bardic poetry, Yeats admits, is
"not of great literary value but of great historical
269
value" (SS 75)? Was Yeats being merely self-promotional,
asserting the importance of individual acts of heroism and
leadership if they are done by artists, not rebels? The
answer lies in the place of the Bardic poets in society.
The Bards Yeats refers to are not the fillid, the Celtic
version of the Anglo-Saxon scop, but a group of poets who
came to Ireland after the Norman invasion. According to
Myles Dillon's Early Irish Literature, they were court
poets attached to noble houses, and most of their poems
were panegyrics in honor of court or family. From the
thirteenth to the seventeenth century, these professional
poets were "the most powerful secular influence in Irish
society" (174)— a role that Yeats always, but especially
after the Easter Rising, appropriated for himself. Yeats
must also have been attracted to the fact that unlike the
Saga literature, which was preserved by the monks in the
monasteries, the Bardic poetry was protected by the courts
and great families ("Her own house has been protected by
her presence"). Yeats's historical interest in the Bardic
poets, then, cannot be separated from his project for
promoting a "new idealism" in Ireland.
The new idealism of Yeats's early Senate years,
whether articulated by the Bounty of Sweden, "The Irish
Dramatic Movement," or his promotion of the Bardic
literature, was, it must be stressed, not developed in a
vacuum, or even in a "utopian vapour" (Explorations 269).
270
Nor can it be seen as a dialectical movement in his
thought outside of the political exigencies of his
position as Irish Senator. The turn in Yeats's ideals for
the theater was part of the continuing argument in
Ireland about what should constitute a patriotic
literature and a national(ist) imagination. (I shall
explore this turn in more detail in the next chapter.)
Yeats's part in this argument was to consciously supplant
the imaginative legacy of the Easter Rising with the
courtly ideals of the Anglo-Irish and English. This
project would not come easy. What Yeats failed to mention
during his Senate case for the "new idealism" of Bardic
literature, but which would have been obvious to all
present, was that the "old wasteful heroic idealism" of
the Ulster cycle was alive and well in Ireland, and was
being propagated in the schools through Patrick Pearse's
own translations. The nationalist activities of St.
Etna's, Pearse's Gaelic school, carried on boldly during
the early years of the Free State. By using the Abbey
Theatre as his platform, however, Yeats was offering a new
(and alternative) pedagogy--a strong dose of reality. And
that reality, as far as Yeats was concerned, was that the
Treaty had been signed and the revolution was over. It
was now time to put away the childish idealism of youth,
as Yeats himself had. Thus Yeats's brand of education
often borrows the rhetoric of force-feeding: "Somebody
271
must teach reality and justice. You will hate that
teacher for a while, . . . but you must agree with him in
the end" (Au 380). "All we had to do was to make the town
I think as the country felt" (emphasis added; Au 380).
i
Those who cannot purify themselves through the process of
self-possessed meditative alchemy that Yeats outlined in
Per Arnica, must, it seems, be purged by a cathartic.
Marx's famous essay "On the Eighteenth Brumaire of
i
Louis Bonaparte," develops the idea that when history
repeats itself, what had been tragedy the first time
around becomes farce the second. Marx's example is the
regime of Louis Bonaparte, which borrowed the trappings of
the French Revolution to mask its reactionary program in
1848.® Marx's thesis provides an interesting way of
looking at Yeats's return to the Gaelic manuscripts, as
well as his return to the ideals of the Irish Dramatic
Movement in 1923. It is obvious that Yeats's revival of
Gaelic literature was no longer an extension of the goals
of the original Gaelic Movement, or even of the Irish
Dramatic Movement in its early days. Translating the
i
Bardic literature, for example, was not a literary vehicle
to inspire Irish independence; it was, rather, a project
meant to produce an imaginary reaction. Its goal was to
promote in popular literature the ideals of society that,
8 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte in Karl Marx; Selected Writings Ed. David
McClellan (Oxford, 1977), 300-325.____________________ _____
i 272 j
; i
while quickly declining, were part and parcel of Yeats’s
j I
own aesthetic theories. Though such a dream was quickly !
losing its force in Ireland, Yeats, like the hero of
I
Playboy was "still buoyed by his imagination, announcing ;
1
that he will be the master thenceforth." That Yeats j
would promote such values, given that the Irish Civil War
was fought over the question of Oath to the King, can
hardly be considered accidental, nor merely the product of
an antiquarian interest on his part.
Though Marx's "Eighteenth Brumaire" thesis is helpful
in explaining how Yeats's return to the heyday of the
Irish Literary Movement made him an ideologue of the i
western world, it nonetheless falls short of explaining j
I
Yeats's specific rhetorical project. Though Yeats did j
revive the images of the nineties for reactionary rather i
1 I
i
!than revolutionary ends, the repetition involved not a !
; !
transformation from tragedy to farce, but from farce to
jtragedy: Yeats consciously tries to replace the "comic"
I |
view of life--embodied in republican rhetoric, where every i
I
jmorning is a vision of hope--with a tragic one. It was ,
for this ideological purpose that Yeats revised the tone
i i
of the triumphant summons of Cathleen Ni Houlihan for its
Nobel performance: j
f J
On Saturday I see at the Royal Theatre a !
performance of my Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
The old father and mother are excellent and [
each performance differs but little from an I
exceedingly good Abbey performance, except i
273 |
for certain details of scene, and for
differences of interpretation, made
necessary by the change of audience. Lines
spoken by Cathleen ni Houlihan just before
she leaves the cottage always move an Irish
audience powerfully for historical reasons,
and so the actress begins at much the same
emotional level as those about her, and
then works up to a climax upon these lines.
But here they could have no special
appeal, so she strikes a note of tragedy at
once, and does not try for a strong climax.
(Bounty, Au 375-76)
The "lines spoken by Cathleen" that Yeats reframes include
"If anyone would give me help he must give me himself, he
must give me all." (Collected Plays 84). Face to face
with his own "old idealism"--that of radical self-
sacrifice for Irish freedom— Yeats was forced to revise
the play to suggest his "new idealism." Cathleen Ni
Houlihan, once a farce, with Irish revolution its deus ex <
machina, and the idealism of self-sacrifice as its engine,
I
|was now a tragedy. By 1923 the Abbey audience was no
I ;
longer to think of sacrificing themselves for Ireland but j
rather must pray and save. They must no longer envision a
i
future but remember, perhaps with regret, the past. As
I (
the perspective of the state changes, so does the
i
perspective of the poet changes--and thus the perspective
i
of the audience must change as well. A coup had taken
place at the Abbey. Cathleen was replaced on the bill by
Oedipus.
; 274 I
i ;
i I
' !
I !
' j
THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT, STAGE RIGHT:
OEDIPUS AND THE CIRCUS ANIMALS i
I
i |
As we have seen, Yeats's renewed interest in the 1
! I
Irish Dramatic Movement when he came to the Senate was
I
driven by a new idealism, "an idealism of labour and
thought," that was actually a disguised realism. Post- ;
revolutionary reality demanded that the Irish put away j
their childish dreams of a republic and come to terms with
the Anglo-Irish elements of the New Irish State. And
Yeats was happy to promote these ideas in his writings.
But putting this "new idealism" into practice--either in
j
his Senate proposals or his poetry--produced
t ;
contradictions. Yeats's "new idealism" reversed the
I «
i j
idealistic nationalism of his youth, a nationalism that
had paradoxically given him the authority to be a Senator
and lobby for cultural projects in the first place. In
this final chapter I want to consider two of Yeats's
attempt to resolve these contradictions. I begin by i
reading his translations (or "versions") of the Oedipus j
Cycle and their production at the Abbey as attempts to set j
forth an alternative model of heroism to that of the
Easter Rebels. Then, I read the final three poems of his
I
life, "The Man and the Echo," "Politics," and "Circus j
Animals’ Desertion," as projects to revise, once and for j
I 275
I
I
all, his history with the Irish Dramatic Movement and with
i
Irish politics.
1. Oedipus at the Abbey J
! i
"Why was King Oedipus produced by a repertory theater
with a national folk tradition?" Oliver St. John ;
I
f ,
Gogarty's 1933 question continues to perplex.1 Scholars
have largely neglected Yeats's "versions" of Sophocles's
i
King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus, produced first at the
Abbey Theatre in 1926 and 1927, except to mention how they *
demonstrate Yeats's control over the plain, dramatic !
style, his recurrent interest in the theme of old age, or ;
I
his artful manipulation of modern stage conventions.2
i 1 "Sophocles, Yeats, and Dr. Gogarty," NYHT, 92:31472 ,
(15 January 1933), 4. When Yeats first proposed to ’
translate the Oedipus plays in 1904, Gilbert Murray !
rejected the request because he saw "nothing Irish in the j
work" (cited in Karen Dorn, Players, 74).
t
j 2 Frederic Grab in a pioneering article does ;
acknowledge Yeats's "interest in Sophocles stretching over |
some twenty-five years ..." and does attempt to assess
the "intellectual interests and the poetic attainments of j
[Yeats late in his career" ("Yeats's King Oedipus," Journal ;
of English and Germanic Philology, 71:3 [July 1972], 336-
354, 336). Grab falls short of explaining, however,
.'exactly what underlying motives compelled Yeats to turn to
Greek drama in the first place. Karen Dorn's admirable j
Players and the Painted Stage (Sussex: The Harvester [
Press, 1984) primarily concerns itself (at least in terms
of the Oedipus plays) with how "Yeats's method of \
production . . . developed along the lines suggested by
jtheories of the ritual origins of drama" (63), noting that
this method "illustrates . . . the way drama reflects and
shapes the interests of the audience" (64). Yet Dorn
identifies neither what were the interests of the early
twentieth-century audience were nor how Yeats hoped to
"shape" those interests through the vehicle of the j
276
l
‘ Little attention has been paid something of which Gogarty
is aware: Yeats’s turn to the Oedipus story in the last
years of his Senate career interwove dramatic,
ideological, and rhetorical projects:
Until the asbestos curtain of the Roman
Empire fell between the Gael and the Greek,
their point of view on life was almost
identical. Greece, in its mythological
period, lived more by the imagination than
by the reason, just as we in Ireland still
do today, despite the lingering influence
of Rome. ("Sophocles, Yeats and Dr.
Gogarty," 4)
Gogarty declares his recurring desire to "Hellenize the
island." But to Hellenize Ireland meant also to de-
I
Romanize it (to lift the "asbestos curtain of the Roman
Empire"), and to de-Romanize it meant to cleanse it of the
I
worst qualities of Roman Catholicism. To those who
opposed Irish self-government, "Rome Rule" was the
derogatory synonym for "Home Rule." This rhetoric did not
die when the Irish Free State was born: Yeats asserted
I
jthe equivalence in his notorious "Divorce Speech" (11 June
1925).
i
Throughout his life, Yeats's affinity for Oedipus and
i
for the Sophoclean theater always served particular
i
ideological ends. His translation of Sophocles and the
production of the Oedipus cycle at the Abbey, however,
I
l
were attempts to promote that ideology among the Irish
j __________________
j
"ritual origins of drama." ______________
! 277
i
public. In 1909, shortly after the Playboy riots and when
he first became interested in translating Oedipus Rex as a
j i
political challenge to English censorship of the play,
1 I
Yeats wrote in his diary that "No art can conquer the j
people alone--the people are conquered by an ideal of life j
i
upheld by authority" (Autobiography 333). In the volumes !
I
In the Seven Woods (1909) and The Green Helmet (1910), j
i
Yeats presented his "ideal of life" as a Renaissance-style
courtesy, which survived during his time as part of ,
Ascendancy tradition. Though Yeats had the ideal early
on, the "authority" was to develop slowly. It was only in j
l
1926, after Yeats became a Senator and Nobel winner and
the Abbey became the official national theatre, that the |
poet reawakened his interest in the Oedipus cycle. j
; !
, This sudden return to Oedipus in 1926 demanded that
jYeats reverse his earlier skepticism regarding the ability j
of the Abbey audience to either comprehend or tolerate |
I
Greek myth. "Could we create a vision of the race as i
| !
noble as that of Sophocles and of Aeschylus," he mused in j
I |
1909, "it would be attacked upon some trivial ground by ;
minds that prefer Young Ireland Rhetoric, or the obvious !
I I
sentiment of popular English literature, a few Irish j
i ;
thoughts and feelings added for conscience sake" j
(Autobiography 300). In 1919, when Sinn Fein support was \
I
at its peak, Yeats published "The People's Theatre: A j
Letter to Lady Gregory" in the Irish Statesman. The [
278
ostensible goal of this letter-cum-editorial was to
[explain "certain thoughts that have made me believe that
'the Abbey theatre can never do all we had hoped” (Expl
|244). The modern realist world of journalists and orators
had severely reduced the efficacy of a national theater
i
like the Abbey, whose goal was to portray "emotion and
intellect at their moment of union and at their greatest
l
intensity" (Expl 246). In short, in 1919 Yeats thought
the Abbey had the "ideal of life" but lacked the
["authority" to support its vision. After Yeats became a
senator, with an eye toward the position of cultural
minister, and the Abbey was adopted as a National Theatre
With an annual stipend, the authority began to match the
ideal.3
The Nobel Prize re-energized Yeats's hopes for the
I
Abbey, granting a special pedagogic force and authority to
its productions. Yeats's pedagogical motives guided the
structural changes he made in the Sophoclean text,
notably condensing the plot and reducing the importance of
3 Thus, when Yeats republished "A People's Theatre" in
1923, he added a footnote to revise his earlier despair.
Yeats had claimed in the essay that one could find proper
audiences for aristocratic theater only in London or
Paris, implying that he was ready to sail to one of these
theatrical Byzantiums. The note suggests a sudden renewed
Interest in the Dublin audience, though the political
impetus for the decision is masked by the idiosyncracies
of old age: "I live in Dublin now, and indolence and
hatred of travel will probably compel me to make my
experiment there after all.--1923" (Expl 256). Yeats the
Senator is effaced by Yeats the private man.______ ________
the Chorus, revisions I will explore later. Yeats noted j
I i
in his introduction to King Oedipus that he was writing |
; I
for an audience where nobody comes for
self-improvement or for anything but |
| emotion. In other words, I put readers !
I and scholars out of my mind and wrote to be !
sung and spoken. The one thing that I kept I
j in mind was that a word unfitted for living j
speech, out of its natural order, or
j unnecessary to our modern technique, would '
check emotion and tire attention. j
i
Yeats does not translate Sophocles into common speech only
l j
to demonstrate his mastery over the plain style or the i
conversational tone. His style was guided not by i
; I
modernist ideals but Horatian ones; he sought to delight
so he could teach the Irish a Sophoclean ideal. A 1933 j
| i
note explains; j
About five years ago my wife found the
manuscript and set me to work again, and
when the dialogue was revised and the
choruses written, Lady Gregory and I went
though it all, altering every sentence that
might not be intelligible on the Blasket
Islands. Have I made a plain man's
Oedipus? The pit and gallery of the Abbey
Theatre think so? ("Plain Man's Oedipus,
New York Times [15 January 1933] )
After the Easter Rising, Yeats had turned from the popular
l
^theater, claiming that his new ideal was an "Unpopular
[theatre," an aristocratic theater such as the Noh.
Yeats's designs for a "plain man's Oedipus," then, are
remarkable in mixing his desire for an aristocratic
theater, to which he claimed audiences come not for "self-
| 280
[improvement . . . but emotion," with his interest in the
i
popular Shakespearean theatre, which included cheap seats,
I
the "pit and the gallery," where the groundlings and the
I
half-poor would sit.4 The Oedipus plays revealed both an
[antiquarian interest in the poet and an ideological
i
project for the Senator: To present the best that has
been thought and said before the worst that had ears to
hear.
2. Oedipus nee Houlihan
Frederic Grab argues that Oedipus "came to represent
'for Yeats the hero of an historical movement which exalted
'subjective' (in the terms of A Vision) assertion of
personality over 'objective' Christian obedience," (Grab
i
342). Yet Yeats's Nietzschean opposition in A Vision
I
between Christ and Oedipus must be understood as a
| 4 It is paradoxical that Yeats's justification for his
"plain man's version" often reminded commentators of the
inability of the Irish audience to appreciate genuine
drama, for they were equipped only to be entertained by
the "sordid and farcical." See, for instance, New York
Times (26 December 1926) p. vii.: "Ireland is truly a
strange country, and the versatility of her people is
equally strange. What is said of them today in truth
ceases to be true tomorrow. But yesterday it was said the
Abbey audiences had degenerated and that they reveled only
in the sordid and the farcical. This week they prove
themselves more than appreciative of the sublime in drama.
Yesterday it was declared that the Abbey Players were so
drilled in the gait of the Irish peasant and so steeped in
the peasant accent that it was impossible for them to cast
either aside and be even ordinary human beings upon the
stage." Note that to be an "ordinary human being," one
must avoid the peasant gait and accent._____________________
! 281 j
i !
continuous rhetorical project since the Easter Rising to J
i I
oppose the rhetoric of self-knowledge and self-realization
(embodied in Oedipus's decision to punish himself for his
1 !
( crime) to that of self-sacrifice--an ideal embodied not j
only by Christ but by Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Countess J
! !
Cathleen, and the patriot who was most inspired by such j
symbols, Patrick Pearse. !
; Cathleen Ni Houlihan was first performed on 3 April
i
1902 at the St. Theresa's Total Abstinence Hall. Uniting ;
allusions to mystical faith and radical self-sacrifice, i
the theatre name suggests both the play's theme and its I
i
impact on its audience. As James Stephens put it in a |
famous review:
The effect of Cathleen Ni Houlihan on me
was that I went home asking myself if such
plays should be produced unless one was
prepared for people to go out to shoot and
I be shot. Yeats was not alone responsible:
j no doubt Lady Gregory had helped him to get
; the peasant speech so perfect; but, above
! all. Miss Gonne’s impersonation had stirred
! the audience as I have never seen audience
| stirred. (Irish Literature and Drama,
London, 1936, 158)
Cathleen Ni Houlihan placed Yeats in the nationalist camp,
j
a place he had lost with his earlier Cathleen plays.
Buoyed by the play's success, he wrote to his English
|friend, Sir Henry Newbolt:
Our plays have been a great success, both
A .E.'s Deirdre and my Kathleen ny Houlihan.
Crowds have been turned away at the doors
282
and great numbers stood about the walls
with patient enthusiasm. . . . Something, I
think, must come of all this energy and
delight in high things, (cited in Freyer,
41)
What came out of this Irish "energy and delight in high
I
jthings" was not Arnoldian sweetness but, to Yeats’s shock,
'an idealism that fired the leaders of the Easter Rising.
i
Yeats’s turn to Oedipus is a direct result of his
i
regrets about his Cathleen plays. Later doubts about the
Influence of Cathleen Ni Houlihan on the Easter rebels is
t
preserved in the famous couplet: "Did that play of mine
send out / Certain men the English shot?" Yet only by
reading this epigram in the context of the poem "The Man
and the Echo," can the symbolic means by which Yeats's
I
Oedipus plays come to revise and repudiate the Cathleen
plays be understood:
In a cleft that 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.
All that I have said or done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men that English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman’s reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
And all seems evil until I
i Sleepless would lie down and die.
! (CP 337-8)
i
f
Readers have noticed the serious concern over the
political impact of Yeats's plays, poems, and speeches in j
this passage; what is missed is the ways in which the poem j
I i
enacts the ideological division by which Yeats removed I
i !
himself from the guilt over the Cathleen plays. The poems )
ambiguates the symbolic import of Alt, a place on Ben
Bulben. Is "Alt" a derivation of altar and thus signal a
place of sacrifice?5 Or does it derive from alter, as in
I
change or revision, implying a place of purgatorial self
questioning? The phrase "christened Alt" implies the
former, especially to Irish readers, but the poem rejects
,this symbolism, enacting a secularization of the site, a
hellenization of the isle: To "lie down and die," as the
i
Echo suggests, "were to shirk / The spiritual intellect's !
I ’
great work, |
And shirk it in vain. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease.
Nor can there be work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
(CP 338)
The great work that "cleans man's dirty slate," then, is
'not a dramatic act of immolation, as practiced by the
Easter martyrs as a way of releasing themselves from
i 5 In an article titled "Mr Lionel Johnson's Poems" and
written for the Bookman (Feb 1898), 155, Yeats criticizes
Johnson because he allowed the pulpit to upstage the altar
in his poetry. In the nineties, Yeats argued for the
altar over the pulpit; now, after the Easter Rising, he
prefers the journey (the alteration of self-realization)
to the altar.___________ __ _______________________
! 284 i
[ !
^responsibility, but rather a slow purgatorial process. j
i |
This subtle reversal suggests Yeats’s ideological project, j
i 1
|The theme of the Cathleen plays, the desire to give one's I
(life for a higher cause, is rejected in favor of the theme |
I t
of the Oedipus cycle--the search for self-knowledge and j
i !
cleansing through a kind of purgatorial wandering.
! ;
Speaking of the heroism of Robert Gregory, Yeats once 1
i I
wrote, "Some burn damp faggots, others may consume / The j
entire combustible world in one small room." Both methods I
I J
| i
seemed equally valid at the time. By the time Yeats |
i
produced the Oedipus plays, he promoted only the former j
mode of being. "The Man and the Echo" separates Yeats !
i
^rom his early nationalist plays, rewriting Irish history
L ^ I
in the process. i
! Soon after the Easter Rising Yeats began to !
I |
explicitly repudiate the ideal of heroic self-sacrifice in
production, and self-delight. Yeats’s opposition between
j "self-sacrifice" and "self-realization" appears as early j
as 1909, in a journal entry that would be published in
1926 as Estrangement. Yeats holds a conversation with i
Dean Bernard of St. Patrick's: I
! i
I !
i We discussed self-realization and self-
! sacrifice. He said the classic self- j
realization had failed and yet the victory j
of Christian self-sacrifice had plunged the ;
world into the Dark Ages. I reminded him I
! of some Norse God, who was hung over an I
! __________abyss for three days, "a sacrifice t o ____________„!
himself,” to show that the two were not
incompatible, but he answered, "Von
Hartmann discusses the question whether the
soul may not sacrifice itself, even to the
losing of itself, for some good end." I
said, "That is the problem of my Countess
Cathleen, " and he said, "It is a further
problem whether a nation may make this
sacrifice." He must have been thinking of
Ireland. (Au 314)
jThough the ideology in this passage remained essentially
iunchanged, its rhetoric shifted according to the different
contexts in which it appeared between 1909 and 1926.6 In
1909, the line "That is the problem of my Countess
i
Cathleen" describes the dramatic "problem" of Yeats's
!
jplay, and it refers backward in the text, to the sentence
describing Von Hartmann's theory of the soul. Published
in 1926, however, to a readership that had witnessed the
Rising, the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars, and Yeats's
[Struggles with the Catholic patriots in the Dail, the line
'describes the rhetorical and ideological "problem" with
^Countess Cathleen (not its structure but its social
meaning) and thus points to the sentence that follows it,
i
that is, Bernard's concerns about the Irish state. In
1909, this paragraph took the subject of the ideology of
| 6 That Yeats was aware of such difference can be seen
by his careful editing. In the 1909 Memoirs, Dean Bernard
has the "too ingratiating manner of certain highly
[educated Catholic priests," but in the published version
he has "the ingratiating manner"— a revision suggesting
jthat Yeats later came to see Bernard as a sort of Swiftian
hero. But changes in context matter more than changes of
text ♦ __________________________________________________________
I I
art; in 1926, the ideology of nationalism. Thus, when |
! I
published in Estrangement (1926), at the height of Yeats's ;
!
Senate popularity, the passage becomes one more point in J
Yeats's argument to question, subvert, and supplant the |
i !
ideal of self-sacrifice with that of self-realization. >
!
I
The Easter Rising inspired years of quarrel over what j
constituted the proper Irish hero, especially when the j
Free State began; and Yeats was intimately involved in
this quarrel. A 1933 alludes to the "cult of sacrifice
: i
planted in the nation by the execution of 1916 (L 809), i
and in Wheels and Butterflies (London, 1934), he states
that
►
Here in Ireland we have come to think of
self-sacrifice, when worthy of public
] honour, as the act of some man at the
i moment when he is least himself, most
! completely the crowd. The heroic act, as
I it descends through tradition, is an act
! done because a man is himself, because,
; being himself, he can ask nothing of other
men but room amid remembered tragedies; a
sacrifice of himself to himself, almost, so
little may he bargain, of the moment to the
I moment. (75)
Yeats's regrets about the impact of his literary work j
on the Easter Rebels were not exhausted by "Man and the
I
Echo." The poem provides no more evidence of what Yeats
|
actually believed about his Cathleen plays than do his
I
i
letters or essays. Yeats's distance from the Cathleen
plays, the idealism of the Rising, and from his early
|
status as a national writer were never secured but changed
[with the occasion.7 Yeats realized early that his
i
jrhetorical authority was increased in Ireland the more he
[could claim to be "True brother of a company / That sang,
i
to sweeten Ireland's wrong" (CP 49). As explained in the |
Autobiography, 0'Leary warned that in Ireland one must ^
\ j
have either the Catholics or the Fenians on one's side and
i i
[that Yeats would never have the Catholics. Thus, even j
I .
though Yeats was ideologically opposed to the narrow
!
nationalism of the Easter Rebels, he was not above citing I
[that spirit to increase his rhetorical authority. To I
i |
propose a fresh translation of the Bardic poets to the
Senate, he began, "In the old days in Ireland when we [
f i
began our imaginative movement which, for good or evil had
i • <
a little share in bringing about recent events . . . ."
I i
| ( SS 42). Though he would often separate the life of j
!
letters from that of action, here he signalled the power ;
I '
of the imagination--including his own— to move political
' i
events. When Yeats argued for better care of the t
p
jtreasures of the National Museum, he invoked the same |
patriotic fever he despised, proclaiming "I cannot imagine '
I i
jthat if the mind of this country were what it was seven or j
[eight years ago, the people would think for a moment of !
I i
j I
leaving in any greater danger their treasures . . . . " i
7 That is why I am less concerned with what Yeats
relieved (ideology) than the way that he held these
beliefs to be persuasive at particular moments (rhetoric).
288
(16 July 1924; SS 85). And during the Playboy riots, as
he chided the nationalists for their failure to
I
distinguish art from propaganda, he silenced the Abbey
theater by declaring, "The author of Cathleen Ni Houlihan
addresses you." Yeats moved back and forth between the
claim that his art was innocent and that it was seminal to
the Irish State. Yeats was an ideologue in conflict and a
rhetorician who faced changing historical circumstances,
forced to shift politically in order to push for his
social programs.8
3. Oedipus as Hero
If Yeats presented Oedipus to the Irish as a hero,
what made Oedipus the kind of hero the Irish should
emulate? Yeats described Oedipus as his Odysseus, "the
representative of human genius," but also as
representative Irishman, such as Swift and Raftery:
i
We think perhaps of Jonathan Swift, hating
himself first of all and then mankind,
I until suffering had made him half-divine.
| And then perhaps by a strange freak of
imagination we think of our blind poet
; Raftery wandering with his blessings and
his cursings from road to road. (Talk on
Sophocles' King Oedipus broadcast from
Belfast, 8 September 1931. Typescript in
Michael Yeats's collection of unpublished
1 manuscripts; cited in Dorn 82)
8 This portrait of Yeats reminds one of O'Brien's
epithet of "cunning," but Yeats's cunning was cunning in
response to shifting rhetorical scenes and to the received
opinions about his earlier work.____________________________
289
)
i
Oedipus was not only like Swift but an alternative model
i
of self-sacrifice to Christ: In A Packet for Ezra Pound,
I
( Yeats wondered:
I send you the introduction of a book which
will, when finished, proclaim a new
j divinity. Oedipus lay upon the earth at
the middle point between four sacred
| objects, was there washed as the dead are
washed, and thereupon passed with Theseus
| to the wood's heart until amidst the sound
of thunder earth opened, "riven by love",
and he sank down soul and body into the
\ earth. I would have him balance Christ
who, crucified standing up, went into the
abstract sky soul and body, and I see him
I altogether separated from Plato's Athens,
j from all that talk of the Good and the One,
! from all that cabinet of perfection, an
I image from Homer's age. (A Vision 28)
Yeats's desire to "get back to Homer," as he put it in "A
jGeneral Introduction to My Work,” was not separated from
his desire to escape the influences of Catholicism in
Ireland. And that influence, especially as Yeats fought
i
'against it as a Senator, was political, as well as
religious and cultural. Yeats turned to Oedipus to
I
balance the Christian influence in Ireland. He continues
in Packet for Ezra Pound:
What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift th§
names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael
Angelo, are the two scales of a balance,
the two butt-ends of a seesaw? What if
every two thousand and odd years something
happens in the world to make one sacred,
the other secular; one wise, the other
foolish; one fair, the other foul; one
divine, the other devilish? (A Vision_29_)__
290
I
(Yeats would not wait for the answer. His production of
ithe Oedipus plays were meant to tip the see-saw toward
[oedipus.9
I
j That Oedipus is opposed to Christ in Yeats's belief
system is a subject for the ideologist, but when that
i
opposition becomes public, and Yeats chooses to praise
Oedipus at the Abbey, then rhetorical matters arise.
jYeats's ideological beliefs in the difference between
Oedipus and Christ, become, when demonstrated before the
I
jlrish audience of 1926, a public and rhetorical assertion
i
jof difference between Oedipus and famous Christ-like
(figures in Ireland, namely Yeats's Cathleens and Patrick
i
Pearse. The Countess Cathleen offered her soul to save
her nation; Cathleen Ni Houlihan called on Irish patriots
j
to give their own souls for the same struggle. Unlike
jthese women, Oedipus was to Yeats a political leader who
•internalized his guilt and did not call out for others to
follow his path. Instead of being "pity-crazed," like the
Countess, with an excess love of the world, or shaping
j __________________________
i
j 9 In "The Second Coming," Yeats had opposed his pagan
jvision to that of the Christian mystics by envisioning the
arrival of some rough sphinx-like beast. Here in A Vision
he seems more interested in the return of a potent leader,
[like Oedipus in his heyday, who can master this rough
beast by deciphering its riddles. If Oedipus can become
divine once more, it seems, the "ceremony of innocence"
|(once drowned) could be resuscitated, and the "rocking
Cradle" (now equated in Yeats's rhetoric as the "terrible
beauty” of Easter 1916) could be stilled.___________________
291
!
one's world view around the hatred of another country (as
the Countess hated the English), Oedipus, like Swift,
"hating himself first of all and then mankind, [suffered]
until suffering had made him half-divine." Oedipus
sacrifices himself to save his country, but remains a
living emblem, not a martyr.
The rhetorical import of such a difference becomes
clear when Oedipus’s death is compared to Pearse's.
"Martyrdom (bearing witness) is so essentially
rhetorical," Kenneth Burke writes, "it even gets its name
i
from the law courts," (Rhetoric of Motives, 222).
Pearse1s last words are prime examples of the rhetoric of
a martyr. They signal his desire to mingle his own ghost
with those of the great Fenian dead, to form a heroic
phantasmagoria for future patriots: "They think they have
won," he said before the firing squad, "but they have not;
my death will mean many more will fight" (Lyons 335).
Pearse, like Christ, was an "objective personality" in
i
Yeats's system. He allowed the value of "this life, this
death" to be determined by the objective world. Since his
I
life would be measured in light of Ireland's national
I
struggle, Pearse dies a man of failed dignity, a pursuer
!
of crowds, a hunter, an orator. Oedipus, on the contrary,
i
makes no effort to place a specific reading of his death
at the feet of his followers, and he leaves no
I w
| 292
Iprogrammatic debt to the future. He dies without
^resentment, calling down blessings on Athens:
I
i
! 0 light bathing my body for the last time;
I 0 light, my light long ago, I tread the
road to Hades; blessed be this land,
! blessed be its people, you, best of
friends, be blessed, and when your fortune
l mounts, remember me in the tomb.
1 (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus 359)
i
The traditional view of Yeats's attacks on Irish rhetoric
place them in the eighties and nineties, the early days of
his work with the Irish Literary Movement. But Yeats's
i
struggle against rhetoric was equally intense when he
i
argued for the ignoble failure of the objective
personality in A Vision, or when he decided to blame
people like Pearse by praising Oedipus on a public stage.
I
Yeats's ideological (and apparently artistic) abuse of
rhetoric always promoted a political project to condemn
those before his face who flourished under its practice.
Oedipus dies having learned to yield control to
i
forces greater than himself, whether gods or history. He
i
refuses to take the road of martyrs like Pearse who assign
I
ftheir historical status to later generations* Before his
i
jdeath, Oedipus is offered such a chance by the Oracle:
I
those who possess Oedipus's bones (the metaphor for his
i
blessing) will be victorious in the civil war over the
Theban throne (Oedipus at Colonus 337). Ismene notes,
!
Oedipus "shall make them strong or weak as [he] pleases"
293
(Oedipus at: Colonus 337). Oedipus is Yeats's "subjective
man," however; he refuses to support either Polynices or
Eteocles: "I shall permit neither the son that now holds
the throne to keep the throne, nor the son that is
banished to return," he declares (Oedipus at Colonus 338
[Emphasis mine]). Oedipus, like Yeats's personae at the
end of "Meditations in Time of Civil War," serves the
country best by refusing to serve. Here is Yeats's model
for the noble way to die, without antipathy and without
interest in furthering civil war.
The analogy to Irish politics is clear. Just as
factional disputes and sectarianism in Christianity are
fueled by arguments about rightful claims to Christ's
legacy, so the factions in Irish politics following the
Easter Rising were determined (and are still measured
today) by their right to claim the blessing of Pearse,
Connolly, de Valera, or Parnell. Yeats's implicit
I
argument in the Oedipus plays is that the bloody
consequences of civil wars are caused by cowardly heroic
figures who seek to control the ways their memories (or
|
"bones") are exploited by their followers. Of course,
Oedipus does commit an act of self-sacrifice, like Christ,
Cathleen, and Pearse; but his blinding himself is, unlike
theirs, only a partial sacrifice--a step towards purgation
and wisdom, not immolation and eternity. Oedipus's
triumph is neither a "triumph of failure" like that of the
294
I
Easter Rebels, nor a simple victory. His triumph is one
of "completed destiny" (Oedipus at Colonus 359). Unlike
Pearse, whose gospel depends on the fame that Cuchulain
valued so highly, Oedipus finds "fame . . . but a breath
of wind" (Oedipus at Colonus 334-5). Though Oedipus
eschews civil strife, he nevertheless makes a choice clear
to the Irish audience: He grants his bones to Theseus
because, he says, Athens (unlike Thebes) "observe[s]
justice, does all according to law" (Oedipus at Colonus
i
348). By analogy, Oedipus grants favor not to the
revolutionaries but to constitutional, parliamentary
nationalists, following the path of Parnell and O'Leary.
> Yeats's translation of Oedipus the King accentuates
ithe heroism that Oedipus shows at his death in Oedipus at
Colonus. Oedipus's wise passivity as a means to self-
i
determination is highlighted at every turn. Grab remarks,
)
•"Yeats wants to present us with an Oedipus who regains
f
control over himself much more quickly than in the
original play." Referring to Yeats's changes in the Jebb
I
translation of Sophocles, he adds, "Yeats cuts entirely
i
the expression of the Chorus's grief, and also most of
joedipus' s following outburst, which shows us for the first
time an Oedipus out of control of the situation."
Although Grab does help to establish the consistency of
!
Yeats's characterization, he does not fully explore the
rhetorical ends to which these changes were put in the
295
i
Ireland of the twenties. To the contrary, Grab dismisses
Yeats's revised Oedipus: because he is not as heroic as
the traditional one, his recovery is too "automatic” (352-
i
;3). Grab sees Yeats’s Oedipus as a falling away from an
ideal. But Yeats's rhetorical intentions are plain
enough: his noble hero, his representative Irishman, must
repudiate star status and the violence of mob worship,
lest control fall into the hands of the ignoble (like
Polynices and Eteocles or the I.R.A.), who could degrade
his nobility for destructive ends. In his Nobel Speech
Yeats declared the Abbey was needed because "someone must
,teach reality and justice." The Oedipus plays were meant
j
to do both.
;4. The Rhetoric of a Version
i
Several commentators have noted the structural
changes that Yeats made in the Sophoclean version or Jebb
translation.10 Although both Dorn and Grab point out the
; 10 Yeats's source for his versions included Sophocles
The Oedipus Tyrranus as performed at Cambridge, November
22-26, 1887, with a translation in prose by R. C. Jebb,
and a translation of the songs of the chorus in verse
adapted to the music of C. Villiers Stanford by A. N.
Verrall (Cambridge: Printed for the Committee at the
University Press and sold by Macmillan and Bowes, 1887).
Yeats’s copy exists in the library at Miss Anne Yeats’s
home. Cited in David R. Clark, "Yeats's 'From "Oedipus
at Colonus"': Transcription of the Manuscripts, and two
comments," in James Lovic Miller Yeats Four Decades After:
some Scholarly and Critical Perspectives (Modern British
Literature Monograph Series: Butler, PA: Edward A.
Kopper, Jr., 1979), 63-82, 82.___________________
296
significance of Yeats's revisions in light of his
doctrines and dramatic aims, they leave unexplored his
rhetorical agenda.11 Yeats's revisions show two
tendencies, the one rhetorical, the other, ideological.
First, they Hellenize the Irish people by presenting a
restrained heroic ideal to counter the sacrificial ethos
of Irish nationalism. Second, they meet Yeats's
ideological desires for a theater, indeed a society, where
rhetoric has no influence on political decisions, where
leaders would be like Lady Gregory, "whose ear seems
indifferent to praise or blame" (Au 254).
Sophocles is revised in two ways. First, Yeats
diminished the number of lines and dramatic influence of
I
the chorus. In "Art and Ideas" (1913) Yeats had argued
that Greek playwrights depicted the "emotion of the
multitude from the chorus" (E&I 215) and thought such a
goal honorable, but when the Easter Rebellion helped the
"emotion of the multitude" to dominate the reasoning of
the solitary intellect, that ideal was repudiated. In
traditional versions, the Sophoclean chorus represents the
i
communal lament over Oedipus's religious heresies and
11 "His version transforms the tragedy of a community
into that of the lone figure Oedipus, a modern 'tragic
hero.' This transformation is most apparent in two
instances, in the adaption of the chorus to fit the Abbey
orchestra pit, and in the restructuring of the final
episode” (Dorn, 75); and again, "Yeats obviously wants to
switch the focus from the Chorus to the solitary man"
(Dorn, 78).
297
misplaced actions, and it also voices the audience's own
thoughts. Yeats's revisions turn the attention away from
the complex narrative that involves the fate of the city,
to fall instead on the solitary responses of Oedipus to
his apparently chaotic situation.12 Yeats effects a shift
from a communal sense of sorrow--of the kind that followed
the Easter Rebellion, and which might inspire some kind of
retributory justice--to a sense of individual sorrow.
Yeats also secularized the Oedipus story. Grab
carefully catalogues how Yeats excluded the religious
elements from the Jebb version of the Priest's first
speech from King Oedipus. Yeats changed "thy altars” to
"your doors"; the people gather "in the market places,"
not at "shrines" (345). "Oedipus as 'subjective man,'"
Grab says, "is seen as embodying within himself all the
elements necessary to conquer the Sphinx" (Grab 345).
12 Dorn notes that "Yeats omits about half the
dialogue in which Oedipus's self-revulsion is mirrored by
the horror of the Thebans" (Dorn 77) and also remarks that
Yeats's version of Oedipus "transforms the tragedy of the
community into that of the one figure Oedipus, a modern
tragic hero" (Dorn 75). Grab, too, while explaining why
Yeats diminished the role of the Chorus, argues
(correctly, I think) that "Yeats’s version . . . does not
present the city's communal sorrow, but instead
constitutes a prayer for the defeat of death" (347). The
goal, he continues, is to present what Yeats considered
the appropriate model hero to his Abbey audience; "the
climax of [The Resurrection] is the revelation of the
'actual presence' of Christ, transforming ritual into
reality, myth into history. Here [in the Oedipus plays]
the revelation at the end is not of the God, but of man;
a view of Oedipus, furthermore, quite different from that
of the original play" _(Grab_353).
298
Yeats eliminates any hint of divine intervention in
Oedipus's life. In Jebb's version, the lines read: "But I
pray that the god never quell such rivalry as benefits the
State; the god will I ever hold for our protector." In
Yeats's version: "Yet an ambitious man may lift up a
whole State / And in his death be blessed, in his life
fortunate." Yeats thus de-theologized (and obviously de-
Romanizes) the State, but he leaves us with this curious
idea of a great "ambitious man," a notion that has a
discomfiting connection with Yeats's valorization of
figures like Mussolini and Kevin O'Higgins. At the same
time, however, Oedipus’s ambition paradoxically displays
itself in nonpartisanship, abnegation, and a handing over
of his power to legislative processes.
Yeats's play portrays an Oedipus who can internalize
many of the religious and communal powers of his age, at
the same time that it depicts a highly secularized Thebes.
One can assume that this move downplays the "paganism" of
the play, while maintaining the antithetical quality
"paganness" as a contrasting term to the
"Romanism"/Catholicism Yeats meant to neutralize. Yeats
perhaps knew he could "secularize" the Abbey audience a
bit, but not "paganize" them. This was probably his
concern when he wrote Lady Gregory before the opening (27
July 1926) that "a good audience will give [Oedipus] life,
but how will the Catholics take it?" By eliminating the
299
important: invocations of pagan gods in the plays, Yeats
did more than construct a relatively non-controversial
background for the portrayal of his heroic ideal. He also
suppressed an aspect of the Sophoclean plot that would
have not only embarrassed him but thwarted his rhetorical
authority. One function of the Chorus in the first place
is to worry that Oedipus no longer practices the
established religion of the State. In Sophocles's text,
Jocasta's references to Chance and Fate (cut by Yeats in
his version) signify how far the family has strayed from
faith. To restore the State to health, then, Oedipus must
forego his haughty private religion and return to the
beliefs of the community. For Yeats, by contrast, the
Oedipus-style hero must find his own religious reality,
distinct from that of the State or the Crowd.13 To
suppress the conventional religious conflict of the play
not only lends more authority to Yeats, but it undermines
the Catholic majority's protests against being ruled by a
primarily Protestant Senate. (It was for this reason that
the Senate was eliminated when Eamonn de Valera came to
power in 1932. ) Yeats allows Oedipus his haughty heroism,
showing in the process that he can represent the best
13 Yeats had yet to write "What if the Church and
State / Are the mob that howls at the door! / Wine shall
run thick to the end, / Bread taste sour" (CP 282). Yet
his revisions to the Sophoclean text demonstrate that even
in 1926 (and perhaps especially after the "Divorce
Speech") such a convergence appeared highly disturbing.
300
interests of the Thebans, even though he acts
independently of them. In this regard Yeats's Oedipus is
not humbled for stepping away from the norms of society;
he is valorized.
5. A Version of Rhetoric: The Fear of the Demotic
Yeats's most significant attempt at justifying his
version of the Oedipus plays, in particular his reasons
for attenuating the role of the Chorus, was expressed
during a 1931 broadcast of the poet speaking from Belfast
to a British audience on the BBC:
Probably the first thing that will seem to
you very strange, very unlike anything seen
on the English stage, is that every few
minutes a number of persons who are called
citizens of Thebes sing their comments upon
the actors. I never understood the
dramatic value of their singing, perhaps
the sole reason for its existence from the
point of view of a theatrical producer,
until I attended a meeting of the
Salvation Army in Dublin. They had hired
the Abbey Theatre for a Sunday evening, and
unnoticed by anybody I went to a little
window high up above the stage platform
among the pulleys and ropes that lower the
stage scenes, and stood there listening.
There were, I think, five sermons, all with
a single idea— Christ's presence in the
world--and between every sermon came a
hymn. And I found that, rested by the
change of attention made possible by the
hymn, the change to a different kind of
attention, I listened to the exposition of
one idea taken up by speaker after speaker
without any sense of monotony. A Greek
play, unlike a Shakespearean play, is the
exposition of one idea; in the case of King
Oedipus, fate closing in upon one man who
is almost continuously on stage. There is
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no comic relief, no Polonius with his
worldy wisdom and his absurdity, no
gravedigger taking off, perhaps in
accordance to an ancient stage tradition,
innumerable waistcoats, no sub-plot, no
Fortinbras with his filibustering army, but
a chorus is there so that we may sit back
and relax our strained attention. Not that
we cease to listen, for the chorus is
beautiful--past ages are called up before
us, vast emotions are aroused--but our
attention is no longer concentrated upon a
single spot, a single man. (Talk on King
Oedipus)
Yeats's curious position as character in this story
requires analysis. He had once railed in the Senate that
were a proposed Copyright Law to pass, he would not leave
the country but would sail to the border:
Cajolery! This great State is going to
pass a law by which people are to be
cajoled to do what it wants. I will not
leave this country because you appropriate
my books, the few I have to write. If you
made it impossible for me or any Irish
author to serialise our work our income
would suffer. I shall not leave this
country, but shall move to the border, and
I assure you I shall become exceedingly
eloquent if I do. (Senate Speeches 141)
To address a BBC audience from Belfast is probably as
close to moving to the border as Yeats could get. From
this location it is fitting for Yeats to cast himself as a
surreptitious Childe Roland, viewing the Salvation Army
"unnoticed" from a "little window high above the stage
platform among pulleys and ropes." This vantage point is
one familiar to English readers from poems such as
302
"Thoughts on the Present State of the World" and
"Meditations in Time of Civil War" in The Tower volume.
That the Salvation Army "had hired the Abbey Theatre for a
Sunday evening" suggests that their religious practice
resembles the fecklessness of the Bedoins roaming in their
tents — types Yeats condemns in several poems (e.g., CP
240). It also signifies that any "ties" between the
Salvation Army and the Abbey are only temporary and rest
on a merely for-hire basis. Yeats distances himself,
literally and in attitude, from the Salvation Army's
intentions; he stands not only apart from them but far
above them, silently judging. Finally, this passage, more
than any quoted heretofore, presents the clear difference
that Yeats saw between the Christian "self-sacrificial"
ideal, and that of the Oedipal "self-realized" one. The
central idea of the Salvation Army meeting is "Christ's
presence in the world"; that of King Oedipus is "fate
closing in upon one man who is almost continuously on
stage." Yeats's description of Oedipus applies to his own
personae, especially when he voiced the embattled minority
side in the Senate debates on copyright or divorce.
Let us now turn directly to Yeats's rationale for his
truncation of the Chorus--a rationale that bears much
ideological charge. Yeats begins by noting how his
Chorus, which functions to relieve the attention of the
audience, differs from the traditional means of
303
distracting the audience, the comic scenes in Shakespeare.
Yeats replaces these interludes, which, according to
Yeats, were designed for the groundlings, with lyrical
choruses that approach the condition of music: "For the
chorus is beautiful--past ages are called up before us,
vast emotions are aroused." In sharp contrast to the
Shakespeaean interludes, the Yeatsian chorus, designed
for beauty and emotion, has neither a particular end— that
is, a dramatic purpose--nor any contemporary
significance. The traditional function of the Greek
Chorus--to represent the voices and perceptions of the
audience and the established values and codes of the age--
is supplanted by voices that have no groundwork, purpose,
or rhetorical impetus. They function instead as beautiful
distractions, and Yeats implies that should they fail to
live up to that description, one would "cease to listen."
How Yeats regards the Greek chorus can be seen as an
allegory of his stance toward the Irish public voices
during his Senate career. The voices of Irish citizens
were relatively expendable, especially as they represented
emotions that were local and rhetorical, rather than
universal. They were to be attended to only as an
intermission between episodes in the important story of
Irish politics, seen, by Yeats's lights, as the story of
"fate closing in upon one man"— a Parnell, a Higgins, or
304
even Yeats himself. The vox populus was obviously mostly
unpleasant to Yeats, and he would therefore "cease to
listen." The Senate speeches record several instances of
his directly refuting the voices, or "pressure" of the
Press, church, and even government.
The voices of the common herd became worthy of
attention, however, and relatively pleasant distractions,
if their form partook to a degree in music and beauty.
Yeats had argued continuously against the Free State's
plan to promote the Gaelic language by translating
prayers, road signs, and the like; instead, he espoused
"training scholars in phonetics, so that they would be
able to take down what of Irish literature still remains
in the living tongue" (SS 44). This is not a
contradiction: Yeats was interested in the demotic only
if it had been alchemized into literary language.14 The
Salvation Army story actually reproduces Yeats's
rhetorical project in transforming the choral Greek voice
from public mouthpiece into music and lyric, transforming
it from a bearer of local emotion to a vehicle of
universal feelings and values, transforming it, indeed,
from a voice critical of Oedipus to one that would praise
14 Yeats’s narrative about the Salvation Army reveals
his implicit ideology of rhetoric in the same way as does
his anecdote of the coffee shop at the conclusion of Per
Arnica Silentia Lunae. In that little episode Yeats was
forced to silence his fellow diners so that he could cease
to hate them— the diners were transmogrified into statues.
305
him. Yeats's poem "Colonus's Praise" (CP 215) enacts a
peasant of his dreams, praising the abundance of
"Colonus's horses," without envying them. Yeats's choral
voices are the embodiment of his utopian wish to supplant
what he saw as the jacobin sentiments of the contemporary
working class, "poor and half-poor," who wish to see
"lords and ladies . . . robbed and murdered before he
dies" (Expl 246) with a deference to aristocracy that
borders on worship. Yeats's return to work in the Abbey
Theatre in the 1920s, therefore, did signal a return to a
public theater. But in sharp contrast to his pre-Easter
Rebellion work, it was a people's theater that was
consciously not popular. In "A People's Theatre," Yeats
had bragged that in the contemporary Abbey, an average
citizen "does not feel that he has strayed into some other
man's seat." But the members of the Abbey audience who
did not share Yeats's praise of tradition, family, and
great men must have felt, watching his Oedipus plays, an
alienation precisely of that kind.
6. The Circus Animals and the Dispositio of Desire
"The Circus Animals' Desertion" continues Yeats's
rhetorical project of rewriting the Irish Dramatic
Movement (and of distancing himself from the public impact
of that work) that began with his Nobel Prize Speech. It
306
also enacts the very process by which Yeats and his
critics turn the poet's rhetorical conflicts into
idealized and universal poetic struggles. I shall thus
close this dissertation with a reading of the poem to
suggest its dialogic nature with Yeats's early writings
and the social history of those writings for the Irish
audience.
As the opening stanza of "Circus Animals” signals,
Yeats portrays himself as the aging poet who is no longer
concerned with public issues and social programs, the
"day's war with every knave and dolt"; he is, instead,
engaged with day's private war over his own composing
process. In the "Irish Dramatic Movement" Yeats described
this process as something of a dream, wherein voices would
come into his head, voices that were not his own. In
this poem, Yeats is not a receptacle or channeller of
these voices, as he claimed to be Per Arnica Silentia
Lunae. He is now the active pursuer, seeker, and hunter
of poetic themes. Nevertheless, as soon as that active
mode of production is identified, Yeats turns away from
it, preferring to be "satisfied with [his] heart," almost
as if the poet was now deferring the heroic voyage to
Byzantium and returning home instead, as if there were
some profit in being an idle king:
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,___________
307
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
Traditionally this stanza has been read as an emblem
of the continuing tension between Yeats's public desires
and his private concerns— his quarrels with others and
with himself. Thus the poem is seen as a moment of
Yeatsian self-awareness, self-judgment, and self-
criticism. He seems to purify himself of his past
"actions" as a seeker, a rhetor, popularizer, and
propagandist by sifting through all that dross to find
what remains personally (and poetically) important.
"What thou lovest well remains," as Pound phrased a
similar idea in the Cantos.
Yeats’s moment of apparent clarity, however, during
which the cloud of his previous ideological blindspot is
blown away, pulls other clouds in its wake. Though Yeats
may have begun to compose the poem in a phenomenological
moment of self-criticism, by the time the poem is turned
into language, edited, and published, it is an act of
ideological reproduction. It is also rhetorical. Though
Yeats seems to question the wisdom of his earlier attempts
to entertain, teach, or enlighten through the vehicle of
his literary works, he nevertheless performs a new
articulation of precisely those pedagogic intentions and
his stance toward them. Indeed, in this poem and in the
308
two that follow it in Last Poems--"Politics," and "The Man
and The Echo" (which includes the famous couplet, "Did
that play of mine send out / Certain men the English
shot?")--Yeats attempts once again to distance himself
from the acts of imagination that inspired the Easter
martyrs. He will accomplish this task by a subtle act of
distinguishing his own personal investments in his past
literary efforts from their public and political
consequences. "Circus Animals," then, is less like "All
Things Can Tempt Me," than a remarkable poetic revision of
Yeats’s Nobel Lecture, "The Irish Dramatic Movement."
Let us begin with the extended metaphor of the
circus. To label the Irish Dramatic Movement a "circus"
has several rhetorical effects: Yeats highlights its
popular qualities at the same time that he rejects it as a
debased form of art, entertainment for the masses. He
leaves out the various rhetorical situations and
ideological projects in which his poetic images were
constructed. The plays are no longer farm animals or
pullers of carriages; they appear in memory only as
"circus animals," a heterogeneity that refuses to cohere,
a nomadic troupe propped up for the occasion, dependent
(like the rhetor) upon the whims of its audience. The
poem draws a contrast between those aspects of his
productions that are near to the people1s hearts and those
that are near to Yeats’s. The people demand bread and
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circuses; Yeats cherishes only the entertainment, not the
educational, value.
Given these intentions, it is no coincidence that
"Circus Animal's Desertion" is placed beside "Politics" in
Last Poems. In that poem, too, Yeats enacts the ethos of
a poet whose political interests differ from, and can
always be mastered by, his personal motives: "But 0 that
I were young again / And held her in my arms!" Yeats
counters the political motives of language by asserting
the sincerity of his passionate desires. Yet these
factors are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Yeats's
amorous desire for Maud Gonne was never separated from
his political interests in Ireland ("Red Rose, proud Rose,
sad Rose of all my days!), and his desire for power over
them both did not diminish: "I, who could not influence
her actions, could dominate her inner being" (Mem 124).
"Politics" should be read as different from a lament such
as "0 Western Wind": the epigraph ("In our time the
destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms"
[CP 337]) is by Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize
after Yeats. Yeats not only rejects his early days in the
Irish Dramatic Movement but also repudiates the ideals of
the Nobel Committee that typically wove together a
writer's artistry and political impact.15
15 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Nobel idealism.
310
Like "Politics," "Circus Animals," transforms Yeats's
social and political concerns into private and personal
ones. In this process of re-visionary history, the
political meaning of Yeats's early nationalist writings-
-what connects their symbolic structures to shared public
values— is supplanted by their psychological meanings.
And these emblems are not of rhetorical and political
struggles but of the poet's own psychological conflicts.
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I starved for the bosom of his faery bride?
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me.
The Ulster cycle heroics of the Wanderings of Oisin, whose
rhetorical impact inspired a heroic vision of the Irish
past, is rewritten as a symbolic projection of Yeats's own
passions. The self-sacrificial ideal of The Countess
Cathleen, which--despite Catholic protests to the
contrary--actually demonstrated the nobility of losing
one's soul for a cause because of "excess love," is
translated into a symbolic antidote for such an ideal.
(If Yeats's meant The Countess Cathleen to help rid Maud
Gonne of her fanaticism, why, then, did he cast her as the
lead in Cathleen Ni Houlihan a few years later?) Finally,
the Cuchulain ideal, which Patrick Pearse turned into the
mythological root of his propaganda, becomes the ideal to
311
be realized in the Abbey productions of the Oedipus plays:
("Character isolated by a deed / To engross the present
and dominate memory"). Yeats is translating the quarrel
with others that motivated his Abbey theatre work into a
quarrel with himself. Young Ireland is supplanted by
Jungian Ireland.
But to "engross the present and dominate memory" is
more than a psychological need or an artistic attempt to
reach the virtues of the Aristotelian theater. What Yeats
fails to mention is that the "memory" Yeats sought to
"dominate" is a specific one--the Irish historical memory
of their struggles against England--including, and perhaps
especially, the Easter Rising. At the same time that
Yeats seeks to influence the political ideals of the Irish
readers once again, he also seeks to erase all of his
efforts to do so. Yeats's "masterful images" are
designed to be masterful in the realms of literary and
political history.
The second section of the poem, then, performs a
remarkable transformation: the details of "theatre
business, management of men" are forgotten, and any
propagandistic intentions (even explicitly aesthetic ones,
such as countering realism) are purified; the difficult
process of production amid controversy is erased from
memory, and their production seems to be mystically
inspired, emanations of the Spiritus Mundi: "And then a
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counter-truth filled out its play." It is as if Yeats's
play-writing itself were merely a vehicle of the dialectic
lessons of history. The act of writing the poem
”engross[es] the present and dominate[s] memory:" the
capacity that Yeats had as poet, theater producer, or
Senator to act, pursue, challenge, argue, and promote is
obscured by cosmological hindsight.
The last stanza of "Circus Animals," in which Yeats
attempts to describe his compositional process through an
extended metaphor, throws into sharp relief the poem's
attempts to transform art, to reposition rhetoric, and to
reproduce ideology.
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can.
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Yeats no longer opposes the quarrel with others to the
quarrel with himself; indeed, all metaphors of poetic
singing, speaking, or voice are eliminated. The only
voice is owned by the "raving slut who keeps the till."
Caught in an economy of exchange, she is unable to coin
new phrases, or even to phrase new coins, as Yeats himself
did in the Senate.
Metaphors of discourse are replaced by metaphors of
material production; Yeats's poems and plays are no longer
313
"inspired"--they are constructed. This is not the
construction that produced Phidias' bees or the collages
of Picasso. Nor it is the arrangement process of the
Byzantine mosaic workers, combining heterogenous elements
into a harmonious whole. Nor is it smelting. Yeats does
not adopt alchemical metaphors: the "A mound of refuse or
the sweepings of a street" will not be purified into some
kind of pure energy; old iron will not be turned into
golden birds.
Yeats does not begin with raw materials (and thus he
will not produce by melting and molding); rather he begins
with products that are already commodified, which have
spent their use and exchange value; and, through a process
of collection, re-arrangement, and re-valuation, he sets
up a "foul rag-and-bone shop," a sort of pawn shop wherein
new values are established. He is a peddlar, a bricoleur,
less interested in recycling than recirculation. Yeats
remains in charge, but he is less a bard than a manager.
He has gone from production to retail.
In Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, Yeats had articulated a
theory of poetry whereby such poets as Keats and Morris,
who practice a compensatory aesthetic, are to be praised
or emulated less than those who, like Dante, fight a
"double war": "Unlike those of the great poets who are
at peace with the world and at war with themselves, he
fought a double war" (Myth 330). Yeats once saw himself
314
In Dante's mold. With "Circus Animals" he adopts the
other stance. He now has given up the public struggle to
better continue the personal one. He would not mind being
remembered as one of "the great poets" who fought a war
only with himself.
But whereas "Circus Animals" does try to enact the
transition from public to private, the poet is not really
at war with his private life either. The poet has retired
from the public sphere into his little pawn shop, to
tinker, repair, re-collect, and rearrange. Though he has
lost his voice and song, the tools of the orator,
replacing them by a small hammer, inventory pad, and
pricing pen, to believe that he has thus retired from the
world of rhetoric would be a mistake. He is, to the
contrary, embroiled in the rhetorical enterprise of
arranging his past. More specifically, he is arranging
his Last Poems.
Through careful re-arrangement and juxtaposition of
his last poems, a process fully documented by Richard
Finneran, Yeats creates new values among the poems. He
leaves his final book not only as an ideological testament
to his beliefs but as a final rhetorical assertion of his
stance as a deeply personal poet. "Circus Animals" is no
less an epitaph than "Under Ben Bulben." It reduces the
complexities of the social world to those of the heart and
emotion. It is an attempt to counter the pathos of
315
Yeats's literary work with ethos, to displace consequences
as a criterion of literary judgment with sincerity. Yeats
once noted that "The greater the subjectivity, the less
the imitation." (To J. B. Yeats; March 5, 1916; L 607).
"Circus Animals" is a final assertion of Yeats's
subjectivity while it is also a public assertion, a final
attempt to keep his art from being judged by its social
consequences.
Herein lies the paradox at the center of Yeats's
self-presentation. Although Yeats rejected the political
ideology of the romantic movement and came to repudiate
the desire for a Romantic Ireland that led to the Easter
Rising and the Irish Civil War, he embraces that romantic
ideology when judges his own work. "To speak one's
emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out from
under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their
needs, to be utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care
for" (Essays 339). To speak from the heart. Is that the
highest value of an artist? For all audiences?
While the poetic act makes Yeats speak from the
grave, he is not alone when the poem speaks for itself.
He is surrounded, not by a crowd but by the "foul rag-and-
bone shop" of his earlier productions, as well as their
social impact and reduction by the audience. The objects
on his shelves are not only the trash-heap of images
floating down Dublin streets but also the vestiges of his
316
own imagination: the garden of Anima Mundi is now a rag
shop. Books and plays lie beside cans, and bottles. These
earlier works have already been in circulation; earlier
editions have attained market value. Yeats’s motive now
is to establish a new value. Thus, he judges, selects,
re-categorizes, and realigns his past work. It is no
longer possible to revise or remake these later poems as
he did for his early ones; nor can revising the early
Cathleen plays make much difference; these works remain
current in the economy of Irish rhetoric. The values of
Yeats's images have been overdetermined by the values of
Young Ireland, the Easter Rising, and the Catholic Church.
These values are to be subverted in the poet's pawn shop.
What cannot be melted down can be re-arranged, re
aligned, re-evaluated.16 We make from the trash-heaps of
others, rhetoric, and from the trash-heaps of ourselves,
poetry.
No longer, therefore, is Yeats the inspired vates.
What he finds now is not "discovered," but "found”
(inventio); his meanings are not "created," but produced
by arrangement (dispositio). His past productions and
ideological projects already place him the economy of
Irish literary politics; he can now only re-position
himself vis-a-vis them. The production of the Yeatsian
16 The formation by which meanings and values of
language derive, which Saussure had assigned to langue,
Yeats the poet retains for the parole. ______________________
317
mythos, an act of ideology on the part of the Irish, has
exceeded and now overwhelms his ability to produce
rhetoric. Yeats's rhetorical authority can only come by
arguing with his own earlier opinions. The "foul rag-and-
bone shop of the heart" is therefore not the originary
heart that creates poetry, the rawest elements of the
poet's process, that heart is actually a belated one,
overwhelmed by previous productions that no longer have
the value of their first minting. The pain of that heart
is not the nostalgia for rugged stumps of time that can be
purified in the transcendance of art. That pain is rather
the sheer burden of rhetorical history, reified into the
trash of tropes and slogans from which the poet must climb
away.
Yeats once wrote to Lady Gregory about a young man
who "told my sisters that it was Kathleen-na-Houlihan that
changed his politics and also set him writing, so I should
share the enthusiasm but I don't" (April 5, 1909;L 527).
Yeats could share no enthusiasm inspired by his early work
in the Irish Dramatic Movement; to the contrary,
enthusiasms like these, when adopted by men and women of
action, put him in danger. Yeats's various rhetorical
acts were reified by Irish readers (and even by the Nobel
Committee) into ideology. He was burdened by the debt; he
would remain the great Irish poet despite himself.
Yeats's ideal was the subjective man such as Oedipus, who
318
eschewed rhetorical excess before he died; his enemies
were martyrs like Pearse, who left the excess to be spent
by the audience. The rhetoric of his work could not be
submerged by a mere assertion of personal belief; mimesis
could not be masked by subjectivity. A handful of final
poems wherein Yeats reasserted the "will" he had
delineated in "The Tower" could not overpower the
historical burden, the sheer materiality of the corpus,
and the intense memory of the patriotic Irish. Yeats's
turn to a circular view of history has been attributed to
the influence of Nietzsche, but Ireland's reception and
appropriation of Yeats's early work taught him more than
the philosopher about the repetitiveness of history, and
the burden of that repetition, and the terror of eternal
return.
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