國立臺灣大學外國語文學研究所 碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Master Thesis
葉慈《塔》中書寫之場所及想像旅程
The Place of Writing and the Imaginative Journey in W. B. Yeats’s The Tower
廖妘甄 Yun-jen Liau
指導教授：曾麗玲 博士 Advisor: Li-ling Tseng, Ph.D.
中華民國 101 年 7 月 July 2012
Acknowledgements
The completion of this thesis represents the end of a wonderful but also demanding journey. Without the guidance and love from the people around me, I could never have traveled this far. I want to thank my advisor, Professor Li-ling Tseng, who has initiated me into the field of Irish studies, and has led me through the difficulties in study and in life with warm suggestions and understanding. I am also grateful to my examiners, Professor Li-min Yang and Professor Tien-en Kao, who have given me many insightful suggestions and encouraged me with their comments. I would like to take this opportunity to especially thank Prof. Tien-en Kao, who had led me into the wonderful world of English literature, and whose love for poetry has initiated me in the reading of Yeats’s poems ten years ago. If I have learned to appreciate the beauty and subtlety of poetry, it is because of his teaching. He has also encouraged me to pursue graduate study five years ago, for which I am always grateful.
He is truly a great mentor for me. I want to thank Professor Chi-she Li, whose academic writing classes were always challenging and rewarding, and whose passion for research has inspired me greatly. I would also like to thank Professor Guy Beauregard, for whom I have worked as teaching assistant for one year. His solid academic approaches and passion has always been an inspiration, as well.
I want to thank all my classmates in the graduate school, who have been comrades, friends, and colleagues. Without them, how lonely and dreary this long road would have been!
I also want to thank all my friends, who have encouraged me during stressful days, exhausted days, and tearful days. They do not necessarily understand my love affair with Mr. Yeats, and yet their support and loving care has never been in short supply.
Lastly, I dedicate this thesis to my family. Thank you, for your always incomparable love and support. I love you.
摘要
本論文探討葉慈之詩集《塔》與詩人位於愛爾蘭高威郡之灞列力塔之間的關聯。灞 列力塔乃詩人之藝術象徵，亦為其書寫之場所。筆者認為《塔》描繪了一想像旅程，且 反映了詩人對於其祖國創建之刻之持續關憂。本論文分為三章，第一章分析《塔》中詩 作寫作之歷史背景，並探討促使葉慈回到一九二零年代愛爾蘭政治與文化中心之兩重要 因素。第二章探討「塔」在葉慈所熟知之文學及神秘學傳統中的意象，並探究灞列力塔 於地誌上之重要性，以了解該塔如何補全葉慈建構之「塔」的意象，並成為詩人書寫之 場所。第三章探討葉慈於《塔》中對當代歷史之沉思，筆者認為詩人之沉思，乃循一重 複進行之遠離與貼近之軌跡，始於詩人對年老之危機及藝術家身分產生的質疑，經「夢 回」愛爾蘭多變及暴力的一九二零年代初期，後發掘其對群體及個人圓滿性之理想意象，
而終於意識「漫遊」之平靜與滿足。藉由以上討論，本論文冀望能提供重新檢視並欣賞 葉慈《塔》之不同觀點。
關鍵字：《塔》、灞列力塔、書寫之場所、詩歌象徵、詩作格式
Abstract
This thesis investigates the relationship between The Tower and Yeats’s Galway tower, Thoor Ballylee, as his symbol of art and place of writing. I argue that The Tower represents an imaginative journey and reflects Yeats’s sustained meditation on the founding moments of his native country. The first chapter offers a background survey of the historical context in which most of the Tower poems were written, and examines the two main factors that had motivated Yeats’s return to the political and cultural center of Ireland in the 1920s. The second chapter beings with an investigation of the literary and occult associations of the tower symbol most relevant to Yeats’s understanding, and seeks to tease out the topographic significance of Thoor Ballylee in completing the tower symbol and becoming Yeats’s place of writing. The third chapter analyzes how The Tower can be read as an imaginative journey of the poet’s repeated disengagement and reengagement with contemporaneous Irish history, which begins from the problem of old age and questioning of the artist’s role, through a
“dreaming back” of Ireland’s volatile and violent recent past in the early 1920s, discovers an ideal image for the unity of being for both community and individual, and finally concludes in the contentment and equanimity of the mind’s “wandering.” In the process, the place of writing has also become the written place in the work. By doing so, this thesis hopes to provide new vantage points from which to reexamine and appreciate one of Yeats’s finest poetry collections.
Keywords: The Tower, Thoor Ballylee, the place of writing, poetic symbol, lyric form
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements i
Abstract in Chinese ii
Abstract iii
Abbreviations v
Introduction 1
Chapter One: Returning to the Center 11
Chapter Two: Thoor Ballylee as Symbol of Art and Place of Writing 36 Chapter Three: The Tower as an Imaginative Journey of Self-Refashioning 65
Conclusion 108
Works Cited 111
Abbreviations
Au Autobiographies
CL The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Electronic Edition
CT The Celtic Twilight
E&I Essays and Introductions
Ex Explorations
LE Later Essays
Mem Memoirs
Mm The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials
P The Poems
P&I Prefaces and Introductions
SS The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats
VA The Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925)
VB A Vision (1937)
VP The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats
Introduction
The title of this thesis is inspired by Seamus Heaney’s The Place of Writing, in which he investigates the role of place in the creative process. Commenting on the relationship between place and corresponding literary works, Heaney first examines how Ireland was made “part of the specifically artistic action” in the works of epoch-making writers such as Yeats, Joyce, and Wilde (The Place of Writing 19). He begins with W. B. Yeats, whose writing, as David Holdeman and Ben Levitas have pointed out in W. B. Yeats in Context, is
“notably ‘cartographic’: rich in allusion to landscape, often construing in potent symbolic terms the localities he held to be significant” (4). Specifically, Heaney’s focus is on the unique relationship between Yeats and his Galway tower, Thoor Ballylee, as he examines how the place serves as the “place of writing,” and thus becomes the “written place” through the poet’s imaginative imposition (The Place of Writing 36). This thesis is an extension of that focus, as it attempts to investigate Yeats’s particular relationship to his tower in greater detail and attention to the Irish context.
As a poet whose work has long been canonized into the great bulk of English poetry, Yeats was clearly indebted to British literary tradition. However, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant in Ireland, his affinity to England had complicated his identity in his native country. While he was generally considered one of the representatives of Irish literature and the “national poet,”
receiving the 1923 Nobel Prize for his “always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation,” identification for Yeats was never without its own problems. As I will argue, they are deeply implicated in his conception of and relation to place. In his youth, Yeats often expressed strong nostalgia for his maternal hometown of Sligo and its surroundings. His fascination with the Irish West also led to his dedication to compiling folk tales of the west countryside, and his well-known associations with the Irish West have created the “Yeats Country” in current-day County Sligo in Connacht. However, as
critics have often noted, in his boyhood and adolescence, Yeats was often moving between England and Ireland with his family, and spent relatively little time in his native country. In other words, the sense of belonging and close relationship to the land was largely imaginative.
His “authentic” relationship to Ireland was thus often doubted. Since places and place names figure prominently in Yeats’s work, his relation to places and his use of them in his work have often been examined along with topics of identity, aesthetics, or nationality. For instance, Daniel A. Harris’s Yeats: Coole Park & Ballylee connects Yeats’s “Coole sequence” with his
“Tower sequence” to investigate Yeats’s myth-making in constructing an imaginary space for the two localities. Harris interprets Yeats’s use of the two places as reflecting his often difficult negotiations with his Anglo-Irish identity. In “W. B. Yeats, Space, and Cultural Nationalism,” Jonathan Allison examines how Yeats’s particular sense of place/space can be linked to his early cultural nationalism and his conception of nationality. More recently, in Yeats’s Poetic Codes, Nicholas Grene lists Yeats’s use of places and place names to demonstrate Yeats’s reliance on the meanings of place and its name in his work. These approaches tend to focus on the symbolic significance of the place/locality and how it is made manifest in Yeats’s work; however, in presenting general surveys of the importance of place, they often fail to consider the role of specific places and localities, or simply make brief commentaries on them. Therefore, in this thesis, I want to focus on one particular place and examine how it functions in one particular volume of Yeats’s work.
Among the places that Yeats held dear, his Galway tower, Thoor Ballylee, is particularly important, not only because it is the only property he had ever owned, but also because of its rich symbolic and topographic associations. Yeats bought the tower in 1917. As Terence Brown observes in The Life of W. B. Yeats, Yeats had “never before owned any property and this toe in the waters of proprietorship gave rich symbolic satisfaction. He was a Yeats acquiring title on a building in the Irish west, close to Coole” (244). In this respect, the acquisition of the tower had strengthened his sense of self-recognition and served as a kind of
solution to the anxiety of disconnectedness that he was feeling around the period. Through his tower, Yeats was able to imagine an authentic relationship to the land, intimately linked to the soil. Moreover, it was situated near Coole Park, which had sustained him both financially and spiritually for almost two decades; the knowledge of this would surely reinforce its importance to him. More importantly, his tower took on aesthetic significance when he made it a declared symbol of his art. As Yeats famously wrote in a letter to T. Sturge Moore, he considered the tower as “a permanent symbol of [his] work plainly visible to the passer-by”
(CL, 21 September 1927). In other words, he had transformed the historical and material reality of Thoor Ballylee into aspects of his poetic symbol. The potency of this place-turned-symbol is most clearly demonstrated in its namesake poetry collection, The Tower, one of Yeats’s finest poetic accomplishments.
Published in 1928, The Tower contains poems written roughly between 1919 and 1927,1 a transitional period in Ireland’s national history. The period saw the drafting of the Irish Declaration of Independence in 1919, the passage of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, as well as the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Violence and disorder were often characteristic of the early years of this period: the European War had just ended in 1918, soon followed by the Anglo-Irish War from 1919 to 1921, and the Irish Civil War from 1922 to 1923. Yeats experienced this period witnessing the uncertainties and atrocities of the wars, especially when he was staying in Thoor Ballylee during the Civil War. His meditations on the unfolding events as he contemplated on the violence and chaos they brought also led to an inward-directed questioning of his role as the national artist finding expression for the founding moment of his nation. The poems of The Tower, written roughly during this period, thus acutely demonstrate the poet’s agitated
1 Exceptions include “The New Faces,” which was drafted as early as December 1912 (Mem 267), and
“Fragments,” which was added to The Tower in the 1933 Macmillan Collected Poems. For a detailed account of the different versions of The Tower, see Finneran, “‘From Things Becoming to the Thing become’: The
Construction of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower.”
response to the nation’s painful birth and to his own doubt about the validity of his role as an artist during a chaotic and transitional period. Since the volume is named after the tower, one of his most important symbols and his rightful property, it is worth investigating how different levels of significance of the tower are presented throughout the collection.
In this study, I argue that Thoor Ballylee completes Yeats’s tower symbol by its rich historical and symbolic associations, and that it is transformed by the poet’s imagination to become, in both the literal and metaphoric sense, his place of writing. Two levels of meanings are involved in the idea of “the place of writing.” On the material level, the actual tower, Thoor Ballylee, was also a place of dwelling for Yeats during most of the 1920s and served domestic functions; in other words, it is the actual “place” where he wrote the poems. On the imaginative level, that physical place is also transformed into a mental space that fortifies the poetic voice, as its historical and symbolic associations are incorporated into the poems to become signposts of the poet’s trajectory of thinking. I believe both aspects are indispensable to understanding the complexity of this particular place. This thesis follows the spirit of Heaney’s study on Yeats and seeks to tease out the significance of Thoor Ballylee in The Tower in terms of its enabling power for the poet. While the significance of the tower as a poetic symbol has been acknowledged by critics, it remains to be examined exactly what the tower is symbol of and how such process of symbolization can be understood in relation to the Tower poems, not just one particular poem. In the process, this thesis attempts to answer questions that address the relationship between place and writing: How is the poet’s imagination imposed upon the place from which he writes? How has the tower as a symbol been modified to suit the poet’s need? What does its location suggest in terms of the relationship between writing and place? How does the poet’s established relationship with place fortify his poetic voice in a personally and nationally transitional period? These are some of the questions that this thesis attempts to answer.
To fulfill that end, I propose to read The Tower first and foremost as a text, in the sense
that its poems, while varying in themes and style, are arranged in such a way as to demonstrate an imaginative journey, a mental space traveled. As Richard Finneran observes, Yeats was attentive to the arrangement of his poems in collected and published forms. The locus classicus” (Finneran 36, original emphasis) of that principle, as Finneran points out, is Hugh Kenner’s 1955 seminal essay, “The Sacred Book of the Arts,” in which Kenner argues that Yeats “was an architect, not a decorator; he didn’t accumulate poems, he wrote books”
(qtd. in Finneran 36). Likewise, Hazard Adams in his The Book of Yeats’s Poems treats the poems as “constituting a book,” which is shaped in a certain way to tell a story (x). I believe the same principle applies to individual collections, as well. While a poem is often considered a “well-wrought urn,” existing independently by itself, my purpose in considering the inter-connectedness of the Tower poems is mainly to highlight the integrity and unity of the volume as a whole. For while individual studies on single poems have accumulated quite formidably, studies on the overall design of The Tower remains relatively inadequate. David Young’s Troubled Mirror: A Study of Yeats’s The Tower, published in 1987, is perhaps still one of the most thorough studies on the structure of the volume. However, Young’s treatment of The Tower mainly employs a classification of overarching themes in the collection, which does not adequately explain the sequencing of the poems; moreover, the version of The Tower that Young uses is in fact a mixture of different versions, which I believe cannot fully account for Yeats’s careful design of the collection. By employing the idea of “the place of writing” to The Tower, I hope to offer clues to a better understanding of The Tower as a text and to provide new interpretations for its careful design.
As I have just mentioned, Young’s version of The Tower is problematic. In fact, commentaries on the overall design of The Tower inevitably involve the problem of versions.
As Finneran’s study on different versions of The Tower demonstrates, during Yeats’s lifetime, he had produced four different versions of The Tower between 1928 and 1933, altering the sequence and contents of several poems. Finneran argues that by doing so, Yeats had shifted
the emphasis of The Tower and the whole of his collected poems. It is when Yeats was preparing the 1933 edition of the Macmillan Collected Poems that he made most of the important changes to the contents and sequence of The Tower. For instance, a long poem,
“The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” originally published as the penultimate poem in the 1928 edition of The Tower, was moved out of collection and placed in the “Narrative and Dramatic”
section in the 1933 Collected Poems, in fact becoming the concluding poem to the Collected Poems. Yeats also added “Fragments” and a fourth part to “Two Songs from a Play.” These changes all have significant impact on the overall impression produced by The Tower (and surely, by the Collected Poems, as well). In the present study, I follow Finneran’s edition of The Tower because I believe that the 1933 edition of Collected Poems represents Yeats’s final decision for the sequencing of his poetry. Editorial differences will doubtlessly always persist;
however, it is not the purpose of this study to address such a complicated and controversial issue. By adopting Finneran’s edition of The Tower, I work with the new order and contents Yeats had wished for The Tower to appear in the 1933 Collected Poems, instead of the 1928 version or other versions preferred by other editors. For the convenience of reference, however, citations of the poems in this study will be indicated as they appear in the Variorum Edition.
The body of this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter one offers a background survey of the context in which the poems in The Tower were written. This chapter attempts to shed light on the transitions taking place both in Yeats’s personal life and in Ireland’s national history, and to offer interpretations of their correspondence. I discuss important events that had motivated Yeats’s return to the political and cultural center of Dublin in the 1920s. Taking the year 1915 as a crossroad moment in Yeats’s personal life, I consider two major decisions he made that had prompted his return. The first is his purchase of the Norman Tower at Ballylee in County Galway from the Congested Districts Board in late March, 1917. Harris points out that when Yeats “took title to the islanded tower and its adjoining cottages, he
began the actual and symbolic reconstruction of his life” (92). The second is his marriage to Georgina Hyde-Lees in October of the same year. Married life had promised the possibility of progeny and thus a sense of continuity, liberating him from the disconnectedness expressed in the 1914 collection Responsibilities. Moreover, through joint occult experiments with his wife, which brought him “metaphors for poetry” (VB 8), Yeats was able to systemize experience and theorize his philosophy about personalities and history in A Vision. These two decisions are in fact inextricably connected, and they both prepared Yeats for his reengagement with the Ireland of the 1920s. On the historical level, the 1920s is perhaps one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history. The 1916 Easter Rising had in many ways steered public sentiment towards more violent ways of gaining independence. The Anglo-Irish War soon followed the European War in 1919. The 1921 Treaty did not bring conclusive peace but instead buried the seeds for more civil strife to come in the Civil War, which lasted from 1922 to 1923. These public events deeply affected Yeats, and also prompted him to meditate on his responsibility and role as the national poet in a time of crisis.
At the same time, especially towards the latter half of the 1920s, he was beginning to feel the strain of growing conservatism in the new Irish Free State, which led to his strengthened identification with his Anglo-Irish heritage.
In the second chapter, I will first focus on the symbolic associations of the tower image, approaching from two most relevant aspects, the literary and the esoteric. Since Yeats is greatly indebted to his British literary predecessors, his adoption of the tower symbol from Milton and Shelley as representing lonely philosophic retreat should not come as a surprise.
However, his use of these inherited associations in his poems, such as “The Phases of the Moon,” in fact points to his desire to challenge these received meanings and to re-invent the symbol as distinctly his own. On the other hand, since Yeats had once been an Adept in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, his knowledge of and interest in the esoteric and the Tarot pack, which he also owned, make it possible to consider his tower symbol in terms of
the associated meanings of the Tower Trump in the Major Arcana of the Tarot pack. In the Tarot, The Tower suggests a moment of imminent change, favorably as inspiration from above, unfavorably as apocalyptic destruction, which serves as a suitable analogy to the atmosphere of the 1920s. However, what really links Yeats’s tower symbol indelibly to his Norman tower is the metaphoric topography of Thoor Ballylee. The building corresponds to his wish to be “rooted” in historic Irish soil. I argue that it is because the tower has a real referent in the ancient building that it is so unique among Yeats’s poetic symbols. In the latter part of the chapter, I examine the titular poem, “The Tower,” in terms of how Thoor Ballylee becomes “the place of writing” for Yeats, and how it is made symbolic of Yeats’s indomitable poetic voice. Through the poet’s imaginative imposition, it also becomes the “written place”
in his work.
Chapter three begins with a close reading of “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” a sequence of seven parts written in Thoor Ballylee during the Civil War. I want to show that Yeats’s poetic vision constantly dwells on conflicting views and antithetical formulations.
Therefore, the seemingly established fortitude of the poetic voice, represented by the tower image, is openly questioned in the sequence. The sequence also highlights Yeats’s readiness to acknowledge the inevitability of destruction and his belief in the coexistence of construction and destruction. While there is no direct mention of Thoor Ballylee in The Tower after this sequence, I argue that the place has entered so deeply into his imagination that it was no longer simply a literal place of writing, but a mental space from which the poetic voice can issue forth. In “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” we see Yeats doubting his own belief, which shows his courage to face the possible void underneath his cherished conviction.
It is such strength of the mind that enables him to carry on the imaginative journey of The Tower instead of sinking into total dejection. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is the last of the first four (mis)dated poems, and completes the poet’s “dreaming back” in time to relive the recent violence and horror in Ireland. This sequence relentlessly questions the role of the
national artist and his cherished artistic isolation. In the end, human violence seems to remain irresolvable. However, the tone of self-debasement in the sequence should alert us to the effort with which the poet attempts to adopt a critically detached perspective in contemplating Ireland’s recent past. The poetic voice that emerges from the first four poems will be one that is able to continue the imaginative journey in repeated disengagement and reengagement with the immediate present, demonstrated in “Leda and the Swan,” “On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac,” and “Among School Children.” In the last of the three, Yeats finally emerges as the Irish Free State senator, identifying with his public role. He is now able to imagine the ideal image for the unity of being both of the state and the individual. The Tower, at its close in “All Souls’ Night,” concludes with the tranquil and inward-directed contemplation of “the mind’s wandering,” in a space and time imaginatively removed from the Irish present. The equanimity with which The Tower ends demonstrates the contentment at the end of a journey through which the poet has achieved an imaginative refashioning of the self.
With this thesis, my purpose is mainly to show how the poems can be understood both in their achievements as poetic meditations on seemingly irresolvable human enigmas, and as critically removed commentaries on the chaotic historical times. I draw from historical context when necessary because I believe that some poems in The Tower in particular should be considered along their historical context. However, I do not want to prioritize the historical context over the work of art. Nor do I want to argue with the political or ideological positions of the poems. I share Helen Vendler’s view as she argues:
[P]oems are hypothetical sites of speculations, not position papers. They do not exist on the same plane as actual life; they are not votes, they are not uttered from a podium or a pulpit, they are not essays. They are products of reverie. They are expert experiments in imagining symbols for a state of affairs, and of arranging language to suit; they are not propositions to be agreed or disagreed with. (Our Secret Discipline
xiv)
Therefore, in my investigation of the poems, I pay close attention to their form and style, an approach greatly indebted to Vendler’s assiduous and insightful study on Yeats’s lyric form.
While the thesis mainly examines The Tower, I also draw from other first-hand resources when necessary, which includes Yeats’s letters, Autobiographies, Memoirs, and A Vision, among others. With A Vision, I must stress that it will be chiefly cited to support readings of the poems when necessary, for I do not venture to engage in detailed explication of Yeats’s Vision system. As R. F. Foster suggests, Yeats’s “idiosyncratic philosophy [in A Vision]…provided a symbolic language rather than an analytical structure” (365). A Vision represents Yeats’s stylistic arrangement of experience, and indeed elucidates many otherwise obscure postulations in the poems. However, since my focus is The Tower, ideas in A Vision will only be cited or used when they are either indispensable to or greatly enhances the understanding of the poems.
As one of Yeats’s most highly acclaimed poetry collections, The Tower has received enormously accumulated critical attention in the Yeatsian scholarship. By re-examining the poems in terms of how the tower as symbol of art and place of writing renders its enabling power for the poetic voice facing the “filthy modern tide” (VP 610), this study hopes to provide new vantage points from which to read and appreciate these much canonized and anthologized works of art.
Chapter One Returning to the Center
This chapter investigates the context that stimulated many of the themes and concerns of The Tower, including Ireland’s continuing struggle for independence, civil unrest in the new Free State, Yeats’s own troubled emotional states before and after his marriage, the studies and experiments that produced A Vision, and his intensified identification with his Anglo-Irish Protestant heritage in the growing conservative and hegemonizing ideology of the Irish Free State in the 1920s. By outlining major changes in Yeats’s attitudes towards Ireland and the forces that helped produce them, I want to show how Yeats moved back to the Irish cultural and political center, and how this return had required him to re-examine his role in his native country, as new challenges and crises surfaced. These investigations are presented in order to provide a more comprehensive background to study The Tower. As I have mentioned, the period during which most poems in The Tower were written was also one that saw Ireland’s painful struggle for independence and the troubled divisions after the emergence of the new nation. Therefore, The Tower can also be seen as a record of Yeats’s meditations on the local Irish context. In this respect, it has particular aesthetic and historical importance both to the poet and to Ireland. As a volume that astonished Yeats with its
“bitterness” after its publication (CL, to Olivia Shakespear, 25 April 1928), The Tower also gains much of its power from that bitterness. As Virginia Woolf commented after its publication: “Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately” (Mm xl). To better grasp its complexity and the extensiveness of its concerns, we can start by looking at the challenges and frustration that Yeats confronted. Although the majority of poems in The Tower were composed during the 1920s, we must go further back in order to understand how the changes in the 1920s were engendered.
Yeats turned fifty in 1915. In the previous year, he had finished writing the first part of
his memoir, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, published in 1916 and later included in Autobiographies. The final section of Reveries concludes in a dejected tone:
For some months now I have lived with my own youth and childhood, not always writing indeed but thinking of it almost everyday, and I am sorrowful and disturbed. It is not that I have accomplished too few of my plans, for I am not ambitious; but when I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens. (Au 108)
For a memoir that records childhood and adolescence, the apparent sense of disappointment and unfulfillment is striking. This concluding section reflects his dejection as he was reminiscing the first twenty years of his life; it also indicates how much he was still concerned with the frustration and regrets of the past. Brooding on the past was for him to revisit old disappointments. Terence Brown has pointed out the book’s “strange lack of emotional zest, as if the isolation and uninvolvement of the mature Yeats in the general crisis of the autumn of 1914 extends its influence to the recollection of his own childhood and youth” (219). Brown further observes that Yeats “chose to ignore the grim horror of the present but could not find in his past a source of imaginative renewal” (219). By “general crisis” Brown is referring to the European War, on which Yeats deliberately remained silent.
In a letter to Henry James in August 1915, Yeats included the poem “A Reason for Keeping Silent,” adding that “[it] is the only poem I will write of the war or will write” (CL, 20 August 1915). The poem, which he later revised and included in The Wild Swans at Coole under the title “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” shows Yeats’s attitude towards the European War, which he considered as “bloody frivolity,” and provides a clue to his belief that art and politics should be separated: “I think it better that in times like these / We poets keep our
mouth shut, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right” (CL, 20 August 1915).2 A closer look at Yeats’s life up to 1915, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, allows for a better understanding of his sense of unfulfillment and his deliberately maintained distance from Irish politics and involvement in public affairs in general. During the first three decades of his life, Yeats had envisioned a cultural movement that would revive the traditional Celtic past, which he considered to be distinctively Irish and could be utilized to cultivate a cultural unity in Ireland. With the help of Lady Gregory, he collected and published folk tales during the late 1890s and the early 1900s, finding in them “beautiful, pleasant, and significant things” that would allow him to “show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of [his] own people who would look where [he] bid[s] them” (CT 11).
Yeats’s preoccupation with Irish folklore and the revival of Irish literature has contributed to what is known as the Celtic Renaissance. He was also one of the founding members of the Abbey Theater, which, when established in 1904, proclaimed to “build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature” and to “find in Ireland an uncorrupted audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory” (Gregory 8-9). With the younger Yeats, critics have often identified a belief of Irish cultural nationalism. The objective of such nationalism, as David Lloyd argues, was “to forge a sense of national identity in Irish subjects such that their own personal identity would be fulfilled only in the creation of the nation” (69). It follows that the artist, as a representative of the voice of the yet-to-be nation, must have “a total ethical and cultural identification with the nation” (69). However, with Yeats, such total identification was never easy or even possible. His much embittered frustration at the Abbey rows, mainly over Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and Synge’s untimely death in 1909, left him disappointed with his Dublin audience and also strengthened his determination not to “talk down to a popular audience” (Foster 11). The Hugh Lane art gallery fiasco in 1913 further
2 The poem was first published in The Book of the Homeless (edited by Edith Wharton as part of her war relief efforts) in 1916. Yeats later revised the poem, and in The Wild Swans at Coole the second line reads “A poet’s mouth be silent” (VP 359).
distanced him from Dublin society, as Ireland’s middle-class Catholics became the target of his belligerent attack in poems such as “September, 1913” and “To a Shade.”
“Romantic Ireland” may have been dead and gone for Yeats in 1913, as he spent most of his time between Woburn Buildings in London and Coole Park in Galway, determined to keep away from the political and cultural center of Dublin. In fact, the antagonism and seemingly unbridgeable distance that he felt towards his native country are not too surprising or unpredictable. Although he and his friends believed they had toiled for the awakening of true Irish spirit through joint enterprise such as the Abbey Theater, to suspicious Irish Catholics, mostly middle-class, these efforts were considered as arrogant imposition by Protestant artists of what they deemed as art on the general public. And in Yeats’s case, he cannot be totally excused from this arrogance, particularly because of his fascination with the aristocratic way—control and guidance from the above, order, and harmony. Moreover, behind his animosity lies a sustained and unresolved conflict of identification. Being an Anglo-Irish Protestant underlies his minority status and interstitial position, which creates tension that is strengthened by his relations to different places and the societies he chose to be involved.
Foster argues that around 1915 Yeats was “[standing] at a crossroad in his life” (xxiv), a statement that holds true if we consider the events that were soon to take place around him shortly afterwards. During the first half of the 1910s, Yeats deliberately kept out of Dublin society. He was then absorbed by spiritual mediumship, psychic experiments, and occult communication (Brown 190-191), and was also writing his memoir. Around 1915, he was spending time with Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage in Sussex, where he was introduced to the Japanese Noh plays and found much to admire. Both the countryside and the Noh drama proved to be invigorative and restorative for him, as he enjoyed peace and newly found inspiration. In a letter to Mabel Beardsley in January 1915, he wrote: “I always long for a life of routine & seldom attain it but here I shall have it & that will make the life of my thoughts
much more vehement” (CL, 7 January 1915). At Stone Cottage, he found himself coming in from his walks “full of thoughts” (CL, 7 January 1915). Edward Larrissy further points out that for Yeats, the Noh “was by no means merely an instigation to technical experiment”;
rather, it “allowed Yeats to link themes of tradition, family, the spirit world, desire and the possible void at the heart of human existence in what seemed to him a coherent way” (115).
The Noh also links ideas of aristocratic elitism to Yeats’s projected ideal audience—limited, learned, and sharing his interests. Its elaborate use of masks would also fascinate him, reinforcing his theory of the mask and the anti-self, which dominates his evolving thought and philosophy for the rest of his life. Yeats’s first Noh play, At the Hawk’s Well, was first performed in 1916 in London, and he was quite pleased with the achieved effects. In “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” he wrote of his newly-invented drama form, which he considered
“distinguished, indirect, and symbolic, and having no need of mob or Press to pay its way—an aristocratic form” (E&I 221). The apparent satisfaction was both with the work and with the audience. Unlike the Dublin society that left him disappointed, the literary society in London provided him with the comforts and artistic privilege he was looking for.
However, the undisturbed distance from Irish life was soon to be shortened by the Easter Rising in 1916, an event that is both a turning point for Ireland’s national history and for Yeats’s life. As the following study will demonstrate, during the turbulent years of struggle and war, Yeats’s changing relations to different places can be seen to mirror his growing concern for Ireland. The early years of the 1910s saw him consciously staying out of Dublin society; however, the changes and crises brought by the Easter Rising initiated a process of return to the cultural and political center, and prompted new commitment and responsibilities. Different from the cultural-nationalistically minded years, the middle-aged Yeats took up the challenge in a more direct and assertive way, an attitude that will be carried on throughout his later years, and is ostensibly reflected in his mature work.
Unlike his rather cool and distant attitude towards the European War, Yeats’s response
to the Easter Rising was agitated and troubled. Although the event affected him greatly, he was cautious in making his response public, well aware of his interstitial position and the complications it involves. Much as he expressed in personal correspondences feelings of regret and shock over the “Dublin tragedy,” for instance in a much quoted letter to Lady Gregory: “I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me—& 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 & criticism from politics” (CL, 11 May 1916), or much as he lamented in an elevated tone over the executions—“[w]e have lost the ablest & most fine natured of our young men” (CL, to John Quinn, 23 May 1916)—both in public pronouncements and in verse he refrained palpably from a total recognition with the Rising and the violent way it was carried out. Yet, as his famous “Easter, 1916” refrains, all is indeed “changed, changed utterly” (VP 392). The ambiguity in this poem is impossible to miss, not only in the seemingly incompatible and troubling combination of “terrible” and “beauty,” presenting moral and aesthetic judgment simultaneously, but also in Yeats’s strategy of questioning in the last stanza. Vendler points out that the poem traces his changing states of mind: from regret to pain to bafflement, finally to a carefully positioned series of judgment (Our Secret Discipline 22). This process also reflects the actual changes in Yeats’s attitude towards Ireland and the position he decided to adopt. He sensed that “a world seems to have been swept away,” and among the uncertainties felt that he should “return to Dublin to live, to begin building again,” although almost immediately confessed that he “dread the temptation to controversy one finds in Dublin” (CL, to John Quinn, 23 May 1916). Nevertheless, the Rising did shift his concern back to Ireland, as renewed interests in and re-directed concerns for Irish matters found their way into the decisions he made in the ensuing years. As Anthony Roche observes: “[t]he effect of the Easter Rising on Yeats was to move him to a closer connection with Ireland” (94). Most significantly, two personal decisions would tremendously influence his life: first, he
purchased Ballylee Castle, which he later renamed as “Thoor Ballylee,” in March 1917;
secondly, he married Georgina Hyde-Lees in October of the same year. These two events proved to be the defining events at the crossroad moment in Yeats’s life. In the following section, I will highlight the significance of these two decisions.
Yeats had written of the Ballylee area as early as in The Celtic Twilight. In “‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye,’” dated 1900, he recalled:
I have been to a little group of houses, not many enough to be called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a cottage…and old ash trees throwing green shadows upon a little river and great stepping-stones. (CT 33)
The castle, dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth century, is one of the thirty-two fortified residences (variously known as “castles,” “keeps,” or “towers”) built by the Norman Family de Burgo, or Burke. After its latest residents, the Spellmans, gave up residence there, the castle became part of the Gregory estate, until the Congested Districts Board acquired it for redistribution of land (Hanley and Miller 9-12). The castle appealed to Yeats immensely by its severity and antiquity. He was also charmed by the thought of the local beauty, Mary Hynes, “the shining flower of Ballylee” (CT 37) celebrated by the Gaelic poet Raftery in verse, who had once lived there. These details of the castle’s history would later be incorporated into the titular poem of The Tower, becoming emblems of his place of writing.
Yeats’s renewed interest in Ballylee Castle in 1915, as Robert Gregory suggested to him that he should consider buying it (Foster 17), was expressed in a letter to Lady Gregory, in which he told her that he was “quite serious about Ballylee” but “cannot bid for it now [1915]” due to his father’s financial difficulties in New York. In a 1916 letter to the influential trustee, William F. Bailey, Yeats inquired over the possibility of purchasing the castle:
For years I have coveted Ballylee Castle…. It has got a tolerably good roof on it, good
rough old Elizabethan chimney pieces, and I could restore it to some of its original stern beauty…. At present it is worth nothing to anybody, and will soon become ruinous, and that will make the neighbourhood the poorer of romance.” (CL, 2 Oct 1916)
The words he used to describe the castle, such as original, stern, and romance, hint at the values Yeats saw in acquiring the otherwise plain and almost uninhabitable castle: an ancient rootedness in history, which echoed his fascination with Irish folk culture. Yeats’s negotiations with the Congested Districts Board continued from late October 1916 to March 1917, until he finally settled for a price of ₤35, which he considered a “very small sum” (CL, to John Butler Yeats, 13 Feb 1917)—and indeed it was, compared with the money he later had to spend on the restoration work.
Brown observes that “[Yeats] had never before [the purchase of Ballylee Castle] owned any property and this toe in the waters of proprietorship gave rich symbolic satisfaction. He was a Yeats acquiring title on a building in the Irish west, close to Coole” (244). The emphasis here is on the sense of having one’s own place, a place in the Irish west and close to Coole, which had long sustained him spiritually and financially. To John Butler Yeats, the acquisition of this tower suited his son well. In a personal correspondence, he wrote of his son’s acquisition: “He says he will live no longer in London but in Castle Ballylee—henceforth I shall mention my son—not as a poet but as my son of Castle Ballylee in the County Galway—so please congratulate me. (It has cost very little—& possibly no-one could live in it. Except a Poet.)” (qtd. in Foster 86). He was pleased, as he wrote to his son:
“It is all a symbol of the poetical life, a thirst for the soil, and you have it to the centre of the earth. It is in Ireland, another thirst instinctive, and therefore of the poet. And it is old, therefore again a poet’s desire” (qtd. in Jeffares 219). To Yeats, the tower was one among “the only signified buildings left in Ireland,” and he was greatly pleased with its “perfect” winding stair (CL, to Florence Farr, 5 March 1917). Harris argues that when Yeats “took title to the
islanded tower and its adjoining cottages, he began the actual and symbolic reconstruction of his life” (92). In the following years, he would indeed “start building,” as he waited for the completion of the renovated tower, at the same time starting to re-shape his idea of nation-building during the tumultuous times. The tower would become more than a symbol of his art; it would become “the place of writing,” as Seamus Heaney calls it, with its locally and historically rich connections incorporated and transformed into the poems.
However, Yeats’s tower would not have such an indispensable role in his later life without his wife. In fact, he had once hesitated over the purchase out of practical concern.3 Brenda Maddox argues that for Yeats, “the ‘castle’ and marriage were entwined in his mind”
before both events really took place (23). In a sense, Yeats’s marriage in late 1917 truly made it possible for him to convert his tower into a permanent symbol of his work. Brown terms his marriage to Georgina Hyde-Lees (hereafter referred to as George) an “occult marriage” (246), but its significance extends well beyond the occult. George’s automatic writing, initially attempted to divert her newly-wed husband’s troubled mind from Iseult Gonne, became the medium through which Yeats communicated with his “Instructors,” and they produced, between 1917 and 1920, over 3,600 pages of automatic script in 450 sittings (Harper x).
These automatic scripts were later laboriously compiled into A Vision (1925), arguably Yeats’s most thorough occult investigations and attempts to systemize history and personalities according to his invented phases of the moon. Joseph M. Hassett argues that the principle significance of the automatic writing was “not as the source of a particular word or image, but as the basis for Yeats’s belief that direct communication from the spiritual world had confirmed the validity of his thinking about the relationship between the material and spiritual worlds and the nature of his creative process” (151). In a way, Yeats was finally able to confirm his held belief in the connection between the material world and the spiritual
3 In a 1915 letter he confessed “[i]f I remain unmarried I would find [Ballylee] useless (I am too blind for the country alone & too fond of company)” (CL, to Lady Gregory, 29 Jan 1915).
world, and his long involvement in the occult societies and activities had partly proved to have their reward. In a later poem, “Fragments,” he made it explicit: “Where got I that truth?
/ Out of a medium’s mouth” (VP 439). Moreover, the experience of the automatic sessions and the results they generate had, as Brown argues, “the aesthetic consequences of…[marking a] reorientation of his poetry towards present vital, challenging experience instead of towards the past and its disappointments and failures in love, which had been so much in his mind since 1914, when he had begun to compose his autobiography” (266). Even after his marriage, memories of the past still haunted him for some time, including frustration and lingering obsession with the Gonnes. The emotional turmoil is present in The Wild Swans at Coole all the way through The Tower, showing how much his mind was still brooding on the recent frustrations in his personal life. However, married life had brought him some measure of peace and a reinvigorated surge of creativity, partly attributable to the stimulus from their joint occult experiments. Moreover, in his poems, Yeats had come to associate George with wisdom, intellect, and domestic peace, all of which are traits that could not be found in his previous love affairs. For the then over fifty-year-old Yeats, marriage had brought a sense of settling down and made possible the thought of posterity and offspring.
Two poems published in 1918 in The Little Review and later collected in The Wild Swans at Coole, “Under the Round Tower” and “Solomon to Sheba,” can be seen as Yeats’s secret celebration of his marriage and the occult wisdom it has brought. In the ballad “Under the Round Tower,” Billy Byrne, sleeping on his great-grandfather’s tomb at the monastic site of Glendalough, dreams about the sun and the moon as king and queen dancing and singing in the round tower. The round tower is a tower in the Glendalough monastery, County Wicklow, but Yeats’s own tower could not have been far from his mind (P 558). The “golden king and silver lady” spiraling up all the way to the top of the winding stair also refer to Yeats and his wife, dancing in harmonious unity,
Bellowing up and bellowing round,
Till toes mastered a sweet measure, Mouth mastered a sweet sound, Prancing round and prancing up
Until they pranced upon the top. (VP 331)
While the attempt at fusing high cosmic ideas and popular (low) diction is not too effective in this ballad (Vendler, Discipline 119-120), the celebration of perfect sexual union through the image of sun and moon and the joy and satisfaction it brings is significant. The ascent up the tower away from the common world is a typical Yeatsian expression of reaching wisdom, a
“mystical ascension” made possible by the associations of the tower symbol (Leavitt 138).
“Solomon to Sheba” further hints at the wisdom brought by George and their married life by joining love with wisdom. In the Bible story, Solomon’s wisdom and the prosperity of his kingdom are greatly admired by Sheba. In Yeats’s poem, he projects the persona of Solomon and Sheba as himself and his wife. In fact, his association of the two figures dated back to 1909, when in a journal entry he had written:
It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline, but it needs so much wisdom that the love of Solomon and Sheba must have lasted for all the silence of the Scriptures. In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life. Love also creates the mask.” (Mem 144-145)
Ideal love is thus imagined as capable of producing the mask that allows one to assume the anti-self. Cast in dialogue form, “Solomon to Sheba” has Solomon sing to Sheba: “All day long from shadowless noon / We have gone round and round / In the narrow theme of love”
(VP 332-333); however, the “narrow theme of love,” as Sheba humbles herself by calling her thoughts “a narrow pound,” is only an understated way to express the exaltation in the union of the two in achieved wisdom. In the final stanza, Solomon boldly declares,
‘There’s not a man or woman
Born under the skies
Dare match in learning with us two, And all day long we have found There’s not a thing but love can make The world a narrow pound.’ (VP 333)
By projecting his wife and himself as the Bible figures whose union he had long associated with the attainment of wisdom, Yeats acknowledges the inspiration and new medium to mystical knowledge that his wife had brought into his life.
Yeats’s first celebration of the tower and his married life appears in “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” one of the elegy poems he wrote on the death of Lady Gregory’s son, who was shot down when returning from a mission in Italy in 1918. The poem purports to be motivated by having settled down in his newly acquired tower:
Now that we’re almost settled in our house I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower, And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed (VP 323-324)
The setting is important here. It shows Yeats, for the first time, assuming the role of the host and owner of the house, ready to welcome his imaginary visitors. In a roll-call manner, he recalls old friends who represent, respectively, three types of accomplishment: scholarly learning, artistic creativity, and physical energy, before introducing Robert Gregory as “[o]ur Sidney and our perfect man” (VP 325), in whom the aforementioned qualities are united. As an elegy, it differs much in tone and content from its predecessor, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” While the earlier poem projects the speaker’s (Robert Gregory) impartiality towards both sides of the War, showing him solely driven by a “lonely impulse of delight”
(VP 328) to face death, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” is much more personal in
terms of Yeats’s incorporation of his memories of old friends. Vendler also reads the poem as a concealed (“superseded”) epithalamion, pointing out that not until the final stanza does Yeats reveal his original intention of introducing friends whom he wished he could have invited to meet his bride (Discipline 295-297). The poem shows that Yeats was beginning to incorporate the changes in his life—the acquisition of the tower and his marriage—into his work. These changes are not merely new backgrounds for his poems; they also helped shape his evolving thoughts and strengthened his growing concern for family, unity, and tradition.
In “A Prayer on Going into My House,” the idea of inherited tradition is stressed and explicitly connected to the tower. Yeats prays that “God grant a blessing on this tower and cottage / And on my heirs, if all remain unspoiled” and that he may spend “portions of the year” only thinking or reading “…what the great and passionate have used / Throughout so many varying centuries / We take it for the norm” (VP 371). The wish to preserve the building also extends to its surroundings, which are valued more than their material existence as tree or cottage, because they are all part of the ancient “stern beauty” of the neighborhood:
…and should some limb of the Devil Destroy the view by cutting down the ash
That shades the road, or setting up a cottage Planned in a government office, shorten his life, Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea Bottom. (VP 372)
The poem is also one of the first instances in which a direct mention (and the possibility) of heirs is present in his poems. The determination shown by way of curse in this poem also appears in the draft version of “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee,” which was included in a 1918 letter to John Quinn:
I, the poet, William Yeats,
With common sedge and broken slates And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And on my heirs I lay a curse If they should alter for the worse, From fashion or an empty mind,
What Raftery built and Scott designed. (CL, 23 July 1918)
The deliberate mention of “Gort” is not merely for the purpose of rhyme. It strengthens the sense of place (Gort is a town in Galway, near Coole and Ballylee) and adds connection to the traditions that still existed in the Irish west. The idea of his heirs—thus the continuation of the family name and his line—is inextricably bound to the house, and the future prospect of his descendents are closely identified with the preservation of the tower and the tradition it represented. Married life has brought the prospect of family, liberating him from the disconnectedness expressed in the preface poem of Responsibilities in 1914:
Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, Although I have come close on forty-nine, I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine. (VP 270)
Yeats’s daughter, Anne, was born in 1919, and his son, Michael, in 1921, making him no longer “childless” (The Municipal Gallery Revisited”). Established with property, family, and a substantial literary reputation, Yeats was ready to face the challenges of the tumultuous times of the 1920s with a new assertiveness and determination. As the events of the 1920s brought along uncertainties and doubt, there also emerged a sense of anxiety over the future of his tower and posterity. The changed moods and a sense of foreboding will be reflected in poems composed during the tumultuous period.
For the last three years of the 1910s, Yeats and his wife were busy with plans to make Ballylee tower inhabitable. They also continued their intensive occult experiments to schematize historical cycles and personalities. Meanwhile, Europe was undergoing the throes
of social and political changes. In Russia, revolution in November 1917 was followed by civil wars in 1918; in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire resulted in more disorders in the Austro-Hungary area; revolution in Germany expedited the armistice in late 1918 that concluded the European War. In Ireland, although conscription was never carried out, it had contributed to heightened anti-British sentiments that were among the Irish populace since the 1916 Easter Rising, which had already steered public opinion away from anticipating the passing of Home Rule Bill and toward more violent approaches to gain independence. As the European War further postponed the possibility of Home Rule, hard-line advocators of independence and republicanism took to direct military conflicts.
Guerilla wars that were determinedly fought inaugurated a period of domestic turbulence in Ireland. The Anglo-Irish War that lasted from 1919 to 1921 became the decisive event that eventually brought about independence, but it also generated further divisions and antagonism. Conventionally dated from 21 January 1919 to the truce established on 11 July 1921, the Anglo-Irish War was first ignited by the killing of two British policemen in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary by members of the IRA. For the two and a half years that followed, the IRA carried out guerilla wars with the British “Auxiliaries,” otherwise notoriously known as the “Black and Tans” for the design of their uniform. During the wars, retaliatory conduct was common on both sides, which only intensified resentment and furthered violence in malicious repetitions.
During this period, Yeats had mainly stayed outside of Ireland, taking lodgings in Oxford and only spending the summers at Ballylee, partly worried about the ongoing war, partly because his tower was yet to be readied. Shortly before the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he wrote to Shakespear with a sense of foreboding, expressing his “deep gloom” over the future: “I see no hope of escape from bitterness…. When men are very bitter, death & ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of the fox”
(CL, 22 Dec 1921). However, despite the sense of foreboding, Yeats’s public pronouncement
left no doubt regarding his loyalty to his native country. It was during this period of national crisis that he decided to publish the poems on the Easter Rising, including “Easter, 1916,”
“Sixteen Dead Men,” and “The Rose Tree,” which were previously withheld from publication.4 By publishing these highly politically-charged poems that echo his indictment of British atrocities in late 1920, shortly after a random killing in Gort and later intensifying violence in Dublin, Yeats was making his position and loyalty clear. Especially, “Easter, 1916”
was published in the London-based The New Statesman, and the irony of “Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said” (VP 394) could not have been missed. Conor Cruise O’Brien, in his influential essay “Passion and Cunning:
An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats,” portrays Yeats as combining passion and a strategic cunning in political matters. Regarding Yeats’s publishing strategy in 1920, O’Brien observes that “[t]o publish [the three poems] in this context [1920] was a political act, and a bold one;
probably the boldest of Yeats’s career” (239), although he tempers this judgment quickly by pointing out Yeats’s apparent caution: “Yeats’s indignation was spontaneous: his method of giving expression to that indignation in his published writings seems calculated” (240).
O’Brien maintains that Yeats’s publishing strategy is calculated to keep him at a safe distance and that he “closed no doors in terms of contemporary politics” (240). However, this judgment lacks sympathy and underestimates the effects produced by such publishing strategy. O’Brien’s argument was later countered by critics who identified an unmistakable loyalty in Yeats’s case. For instance, Elizabeth Cullingford cites a report in the Freeman’s Journal on Yeats’s 1921 speech at the Oxford Union, during which he “broke the political silence…with words of scathing denunciation on England’s treatment of Ireland” (qtd. in Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism 108) and argues that “Yeats’s fierce speech left his hearers in no doubt as to where his sympathies lay” (109). Brown also contends that Yeats
4 “Easter, 1916” was first published in the London-published The New Statesman on 23 October 1920; “Sixteen Dead Men” and “The Rose Tree” were first published in The Dial in the United States in November 1920. These poems were later included in the 1921 Michael Robartes and the Dancer.
was “making his loyalties clear at a defining moment, in a way that bespeaks a more resolute national commitment than O’Brien allows” (277).
The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 was the result of negotiations between the Lloyd George coalition government and the Irish delegates, including Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith. The Treaty gave Ireland equal “constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire…with a Parliament having powers to make laws for the peace order and good government of Ireland and an Executive responsible to that Parliament, and shall be styled and known as the Irish Free State.”5 However, the Treaty was ratified by only a small margin on 7 January 1922, which indicates the split inside the Sinn Féin over the acceptance of its condition and is evidence of further civil unrest to come. The creation of the Irish Free State (1922-1937), while undoubtedly a result achieved through long and painful struggles, did not put an end to ongoing violence, or, as Yeats darkly prophesied, “blood & misery” at home (CL, to Olivia Shakespear, 22 Dec 1921). During the Anglo-Irish War, there was hardly a unified voice representing the will of the Irish people—deliberate use of violence by a minority to block possibilities of a compromise settlement and the ruthless action against the “informers” and “collaborators” had buried seeds of antagonism. Moreover, the Anglo-Irish Treaty allowed for the separation of Northern Ireland, created by the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, which opted out of the Free State one day after the signing of the Treaty. The partition of Ireland turned the pro-republican members in the IRA anti-Treaty, who not long after engaged in open military conflicts with the pro-Treaty provisional government and were later known as the “Irregulars.” The Irish Civil War, which lasted from June 1922 to a ceasefire in May 1923, created even more challenges for the newly established Free State struggling toward national unity.
Yeats’s commitment to the Irish Free State and his determination to influence the
5 Excerpted from the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, taken from the transcript in Documents on Irish Foreign Policy Volume I, 1919-1922. Accessed from The National Archive of Ireland,http://www.nationalarchives.ie/index.html.
younger generation are clearly evidenced by the active public life he chose to play in the 1920s. The feeling in 1916 that he should return to Ireland to “begin building” was finally realized. In 1922, he accepted senate nomination, which he served for two consecutive terms, until 1928. He was one of the three senators who were qualified to advise on topics of education, literature, and arts, and he made good use of his position to exert influence on the way Irish culture was to be shaped and to find government support for the Abbey Theater.
Cullingford argues that the disruptions and violence brought by the Civil War stimulated Yeats’s longing for order and turned him “in the opposite direction [of the Republican cause]”
(Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism 113), which partly explains why he willingly accepted the Senate nomination. In late 1922, Yeats finally moved back to Dublin and took lodgings at 82 Merrion Square, “the grandest of the Georgian squares” (Foster 210). Yeats wrote of the decision with satisfaction to Lady Gregory: “[Merrion Square] puts back my family into some kind of dignity & gives my children a stately home & myself a background for old age”
(CL, 23 Feb 1922). Clearly, he was starting to be more concerned with being established and with the approaching of old age. Moving back to Dublin also signaled his willingness to return to the political and cultural center that had once driven him away and left him disappointed. Even with the worsening situation of the Civil War and the threat it brought, Yeats managed to hold his ground.
In the spring of 1922, also, the renovation work at Ballylee Castle was finally complete.
It would be Yeats’s summer residence from then on until 1928, and would provide him the quietness and peace he needed in order to write. He renamed it “Thoor Ballylee” and explained to Shakespear, “Thoor is Irish for Tower & it will keep people from suspecting us of modern gothic & a deer park. I think the harsh sounding ‘Thoor’ amends the softness of the rest” (CL, 23 April 1922). Nicholas Grene believes that the act of renaming further confirms Yeats’s possession of this place, with a name “exotically unrecognizable as either Irish ‘túr” or English ‘tower,’” and that Yeats would from then on be “poetically at home in
