The Poems of W. B. Yeats: Volume Two: 1890-1898 (Longman Annotated English Poets) [1 ed.] 036749762X, 9780367497620, 9781003047254

Citation preview

THE POEMS OF W.B. YEATS

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. In this second volume, the poems of Yeats’s early maturity emerge in the contexts of his engagement with Irish history and myth, along with nationalist politics; his increasing involvement with ritual magic and esoteric lore; and his turbulent, often unhappy, personal life. The poems of The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) reveal a poet of intense narrative power and metaphorical resource, adept at transforming miscellaneous sources into haunting and original poems. A major revision of his earlier narrative, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, takes place in this decade when Yeats is also taken up with the composition of elaborate and uncanny symbolic lyrics, many of them resulting from his love for Maud Gonne, that are finally collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). This edition makes it possible to trace in detail Yeats’s debts to folklore and magic, alongside his involved and often difficult private and public life, in poetry of exceptional complexity and power. Peter McDonald is an Irish poet and critic, whose literary criticism includes Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012). He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, and is the author of numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. His own Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He is Professor of British and Irish poetry at the University of Oxford, and Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry at Christ Church, Oxford.

LONGMAN ANNOTATED ENGLISH POETS General Editors: Paul Hammond, David Hopkins and Michael Rossington

Founding Editors: F. W. Bateson and John Barnard

Blake The Complete Poems (Revised Third Edition) Edited by W. H. Stevenson Dryden Selected Poems Edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins The Poems of Alexander Pope Volume Three Edited by Valerie Rumbold The Complete Poems of John Donne Edited by Robin Robbins Robert Browning Selected Poems Edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan The Complete Poems of Shakespeare Edited by Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne The Poems of Alexander Pope Volume One Edited by Julian Ferraro and Paul Baines The Poems of W.B. Yeats Volume One: 1882–1889 Edited by Peter McDonald The Poems of W.B. Yeats Volume Two: 1890–1898 Edited by Peter McDonald For more information about the series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Longman­ Annotated-English-Poets/book-series/LAEP

THE POEMS OF

W.B. YEATS

– Volume Two: 1890–1898 –

EDITED BY

PETER McDONALD

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Peter McDonald The right of Peter McDonald to be identified as the author of the editorial material has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-49762-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04725-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254

T O J O H N K E L LY

Contents

A Note From the General Editors Acknowledgements Chronology of W.B. Yeats’s Life and Publications, 1890–1898 List of Abbreviations Introduction THE POEMS

xi

xii

xiv

xvi

xxi

1

96 A Cradle Song

3

97 The Ballad of Father Gilligan

6

98 Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected From the Irish Novelists

13

99 The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

17

100 The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland

22

101 The Pathway

28

102 The White Birds

30

103 To a Sister of the Cross and the Rose

35

104 A Faery Song

37

105 A Salutation

39

106 The Rose of Battle

41

107 A Dream of a Blessed Spirit

52

108 Mourn – And Then Onward!

56

109 When You Are Old

59

110 [‘He Who Bids the White Plains of the Pole’]

63

111 A Dream of Other Lives

65

112 The Sorrow of Love

70

113 A Song of the Rosy-Cross

76

114 The Rose of the World

79

115 A Dream of Death

84

116 The Death of Cuchulain

88

viii

CONTENTS

117 The Pity of Love

99

118 The Two Trees

102

119 To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time

114

120 To Ireland in the Coming Times

124

121 The Rose of Peace

133

122 Where My Books Go

136

123 Fergus and the Druid

138

124 When You Are Sad

147

125 A Mystical Prayer to the Masters of the Elements, Finvarra, Feacra,

and Caolte

149

126 The Watch-Fire

154

127 The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart

157

128 The Fiddler of Dooney

161

129 [‘I Never Have Seen Maid Quiet’]

166

130 Into the Twilight

168

131 The Danaan Quicken Tree

173

132 The Ballad of Earl Paul

177

133 The Cap and Bells

183

134 The Moods

197

135 The Host

203

136 [‘He Treads a Road of Glint and Gleam’]

209

137 Wisdom and Dreams

211

138 On a Child’s Death

212

139 The Glove and the Cloak

217

140 The Host of the Air

219

141 [‘Veering, Fleeting, Fickle, the Winds of Knocknarea’]

235

142 The Song of the Old Mother

243

143 [‘White Daughter of the Iron Time . . .’]

247

144 [‘I Will Not in Grey Hours Revoke’]

249

CONTENTS

ix

145 The Heart of the Woman

253

146 [‘The Poet, Owen Hanrahan . . .’]

256

147 The Lover to His Heart

259

148 [‘Out of Sight Is Out of Mind’]

262

149 The Indian to His Love

265

150 The Wanderings of Oisin

270

151 The Madness of King Goll

360

152 To Some I Have Talked With by the Fire

373

153 He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

377

154 [‘The Loud Years Come, the Loud Years Go’]

383

155 A Poet to His Beloved

385

156 The Everlasting Voices

390

157 The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods

395

158 He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace

402

159 He Tells of the Perfect Beauty

406

160 The Lover Speaks to the Hearers of His Songs in the Coming Days

411

161 The Travail of Passion

415

162 The Valley of the Black Pig

420

163 The Unappeasable Host

432

164 He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

439

165 The Secret Rose

445

166 He Reproves the Curlew

459

167 To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear

463

168 He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers

466

169 [‘O Tufted Reeds, Bend Low . . .’]

470

170 The Shadowy Waters [1896 TS version]

474

171 The Blessed

496

172 He Mourns for the Change That Has Come Upon Him and His

Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World

502

x

CONTENTS

173 The Lover Pleads With His Friend for Old Friends

511

174 The Song of Wandering Aengus

518

175 Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings

530

176 The Hosting of the Sidhe

535

177 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

544

178 He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead

551

179 He Hears the Cry of the Sedge

558

180 The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love

562

181 He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved

566

182 The Fish

571

183 He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations

of Heaven

575

184 The Poet Pleads With the Elemental Powers

580

Appendix 1: Contents of W.B. Yeats’s Volumes of Poetry, 1892–1899 Appendix 2: Draft ‘Subject for Lyric’ (late 1890s) Index of Poems Index of First Lines

585

589

593

595

A Note From the General Editors

The Longman Annotated English Poets series was launched in 1965 with the publica­ tion of Kenneth Allott’s edition of The Poems of Matthew Arnold. F. W. Bateson wrote then that the ‘new series is the first designed to provide university students and teachers, and the general reader with complete and fully annotated editions of the major Eng­ lish poets’. That remains the aim of the series, and Bateson’s original vision of its policy remains essentially the same. Its ‘concern is primarily with the meaning of the extant texts in their various contexts’. Accordingly, the annotation which the various editors provide ranges from the gloss­ ing of obscure words and references to the evocation of the cultural, social, and politi­ cal contexts within which the poems were created and first received. The editions draw on recent scholarship but also embody the fruits of the editors’ own new research. The aim, in so far as this is possible through the medium of editorial annotation, is to place the modern reader in a position which approximates to that enjoyed by the poems’ first audience. The treatment of the text has varied pragmatically from edition to edition; some have provided modernized texts where the original conventions of spelling and punc­ tuation were likely to create problems for a reader, whereas others retain the original accidentals – the spelling, punctuation, italics, and capitals. In the case of this new edition of Yeats, the editor’s detailed research into the cul­ tural contexts of Yeats’s poetry provides a new generation of readers with an extensive resource for understanding not only Yeats’s own extraordinary work but also the rich and diverse culture of his Ireland. Paul Hammond David Hopkins Michael Rossington

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the institutions and individuals who have contributed to the research on which these volumes are based. Help and advice have been given generously throughout. I must thank Christ Church, Oxford, as well the University of Oxford, for the granting of periods of leave from my teaching duties over the time I was working on this edition: my work was boosted at the start by the generosity of the Christopher Tower Trust, and in particular the late Mr John Roome, in providing for a protracted period of research leave. At Christ Church, I was fortunate to be able to make use of the knowledge, good sense, and kindness of a number of colleagues, to all of whom I am very grateful. This project could not have made any progress without the help of various libraries and special collections. The Bodleian Library has aided me in many ways, and at every stage; I have also good reason to be grateful to the staff of the National Library of Ire­ land, and to that of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, who have enabled me to work closely with a large number of Yeats’s early manuscripts. I  record also with gratitude my debt to the staff of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, who made their Yeats manuscript holdings available for study. An edition such as this one is bound to be heavily indebted to all its predecessors, but there are some editors of Yeats to whom I  must express a special obligation. The work of Professor George Bornstein has shown me the way through otherwise impen­ etrable thickets, and the extent of my debts to his work on Yeats’s early manuscripts will be visible throughout. I have built on foundations laid by fine editors of the poet, not least those of the late Professor A.N. Jeffares, Professor Daniel Albright, and Professor Richard J. Finneran; and I have been inspired as well as educated by the extraordinary achievements of the editors associated with the continuing project of Yeats’s Collected Letters: Professor John Kelly, Professor Ronald Schuchard, Professor Warwick Gould, and Deirdre Toomey have also, besides their labours over the Letters, contributed in many ways to establishing the modern scholarship on Yeats from which I hope I have profited, and to which the present work is contributed with (all too necessary) humility. My editors in the Longman Annotated English Poets series – Professor Paul Hammond, Professor David Hopkins, and Professor Michael Rossington – have been exemplary in their care and patience, and I am enormously indebted to them for the attention with which they read and thought about the present work. Many others have played important parts in both contributing to the edition (directly or indirectly) and helping its editor to have the courage to take it this far. I am particu­ larly indebted to Professor Edna Longley, Professor Fran Brearton, Professor Matthew Campbell, and Professor Edward Larrissy; to Professor Terence Brown and to Professor Roy Foster, as well as to Professor Christopher Ricks and Professor Rosanna Warren. My own family have been essential supporters, for whom this acknowledgement is a poor repayment: but what has been done here could never have been attempted, let alone finished, without Karen, Louisa, and Sammy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xiii

My first contact with Yeats in an academic context came when I was a nineteen-year­ old student, sitting at the back of a class given by Richard Ellmann and John Kelly. Too nervous to contribute anything then, I regard this edition as a very late addition to that conversation. Professor John Kelly (to whom this second volume of the Longman edi­ tion is inscribed) became in due course my supervisor and first critical interlocutor on the subject of Yeats; and I still regard what I have to say about the poet as subject to his correction, and strengthened by his example. Peter McDonald Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2019

Chronology of W.B. Yeats’s Life and Publications,

1890–1898

1890 (Jan.) Along with Ernest Rhys, establishes a group of London-based poets who meet to discuss their work, ‘The Rhymers’ Club’. (7 Mar.) WBY is initiated into a society for Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian magic and study, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 1891 (Jul.) Travels to Ireland and sees much of Maud Gonne in Dublin, where for the first time he proposes marriage and is refused. (Aug.) Writes poems for Maud which are later compiled in a manuscript book, The Flame of the Spirit, presented to her on 20 Oct. A second manuscript compilation, The Rosy Cross. Lyrics is made up to mid-Nov. (7 Oct.) Meets Maud Gonne as she arrives in Ireland, where she has travelled on the same boat as the coffin of Charles Stewart Parnell. (28 Oct.) WBY returns to London (Nov.) John Sherman and Dhoya, a novel with a mythic short story attached, is pub­ lished under the pseudonym, ‘Ganconagh’. 1892 (Feb.) WBY’s work appears in the anthology, The Book of the Rhymers’ Club. (May) Travels to Dublin and helps found the Irish Literary Society. (20 Aug.) The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics published. (Oct.–Nov.) In Sligo, staying with George Pollexfen. (Dec.) Returns from Dublin to London. 1893 (Jan.) Takes necessary grade initiations in London to enter the Second Order of the Golden Dawn. Returns to Dublin, where he has serious quarrel with Maud Gonne. (Feb.) 3-vol. The Works of William Blake, co-edited with E.J. Ellis, is published. (May) Returns to London, and active throughout summer in the Golden Dawn. (Sept.) Travels back to Dublin. (Dec.) A collection of folklore-related material, The Celtic Twilight, published. Re­ turns to London. 1894 (Feb.) Travels to Paris, where he sees the Golden Dawn magician MacGregor Mathers, as well as Maud Gonne, with whom he attends Villiers de l’Isle Adams’s symbolist play, Axel. Returns to London at the end of the month. (Mar.) Verse-play The Land of Heart’s Desire produced in London (published in Apr.). (30 May) Having been introduced to her at a dinner early in the year, WBY has first private meeting with Olivia Shakespear. (Oct.) Agrees terms for the publication of a volume of his Poems and soon begins process of revision for older work. (Nov.) Goes to Sligo to carry revision work forward and to make progress on versedrama The Shadowy Waters. WBY also writes letters to Olivia Shakespear often through the winter.

CHRONOLOGY, 1890–1898

xv

1895 (Mar.) Edited anthology, A Book of Irish Verse, published. (May) Returns to London, and in early summer Olivia Shakespear declares her love. Over the coming weeks, WBY first proposes elopement, then the pair decide to post­ pone such a move, meeting instead by arrangement in and around London that summer. (Aug.) Publication of Poems. (Oct.) Moves in with the poet Arthur Symons to his rooms in The Temple. 1896 (Feb.) Begins writing a second novel, The Speckled Bird. Takes rooms for himself in Woburn Buildings. (Spring) Affair with Olivia Shakespear intensifies, and the couple become lovers. (Jul.) Travels with Symons to Ireland, where they stay in Aug. with Edward Martyn at his house Tillyra, making visits to Aran and to AG at Coole Park. (15 Aug.) WBY has a vision of an otherworldly archer at Tillyra, which he ponders over for years to come. (Sept.) Goes with Symons to Sligo and to Dublin, leaving for London in Oct. (28 Nov.) Sends a TS of The Shadowy Waters to Leonard Smithers (publisher of The Savoy), who is considering an edition with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. (2 Dec.) Travels to Paris with Symons and sees Jarry’s play Ubu Roi there. Meets J.M. Synge for the first time (21 Dec.). 1897 (late Jan.) Returns to London, where he sees AG socially in Feb. and Mar. At this time, troubled by his continuing love for Maud Gonne, Olivia Shakespeare ends her affair with WBY. (Apr.) A volume of short stories, The Secret Rose, published. (May) Goes to Dublin and on to Sligo, and in Jun. stays with Martyn at Tillyra. Meets Maud Gonne in Dublin in order to take part in a major anti-Jubilee parade and public meeting on 21 Jun., and a convention in Dublin City Hall on 22 Jun., after which rioting breaks out, and WBY attempts to restrain Gonne from joining the rioters, to her great displeasure. (Jul.–Sept.) Recuperates at Tillyra, and goes to Coole. (Nov.) Returns to London, where in Dec. WBY spends much time with AG. 1898 (Mar.) After months of intensive committee work on Irish matters, briefly leaves Lon­ don for Dublin, where he takes part in 1798 commemoration discussion and planning. (23 Apr.) Goes to Paris to consult MacGregor Mathers on plans for the projected Celtic Mystical Order. Returns to London 15 May and departs for Ireland 8 Jun., having given Maud Gonne Celtic Order talismans. (Jun.–Jul.) At Coole, and experiences numerous visions connected with Celtic Mys­ teries, as well as with Maud Gonne. (Aug.) In Dublin with Maud Gonne, taking part in 1798 commemoration events. (Sept.) Busy with Celtic Mysteries at Coole and experiencing regular visions (some­ times with the help of mescal) including visions of the Celtic gods. (Sept.–Nov.) At Tillyra, then Sligo where he stays with George Pollexfen. (Dec.) Maud Gonne reveals that she has had visions that mark her and WBY as having undergone a spiritual marriage (which precludes the need for a real one), but also tells WBY the full story of her long association with Lucien Millevoye and the two children of hers he has fathered (including Georges, who had died in 1891). In despair, WBY tells AG that ‘I understand everything now’.

Abbreviations

In the notes to the poems, abbreviations have been employed for references to some per­ sons, to certain volumes published by W.B. Yeats, to edited versions of the poet’s work, and to some frequently mentioned critical and reference materials. Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

Persons AG GY JBY KT MG OS SMY WBY

Lady Augusta Gregory George Yeats (née Hyde-Lees), the poet’s wife John Butler Yeats, the poet’s father Katharine Tynan Maud Gonne Olivia Shakespear Susan Mary Yeats (‘Lily’), the poet’s sister William Butler Yeats

Writings by W.B. Yeats Books by W.B. Yeats CK CP33 CP50 CWVP08

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892).

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1933).

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1950).

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats

(1908). EPS Early Poems and Stories (1925). E Explorations (1962). FFTIP (ed.) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). JS John Sherman and Dhoya [pseud. ‘Ganconagh’] (1890). P49 The Poems of W.B. Yeats (2 vols.) (1949). P95 Poems (1895). P99 Poems (1899). [Thirteen further editions of this book appeared between 1901 and 1929: where these are referred to, they are abbreviated to P with the last two digits of the year of publication – e.g., P12 is Poems (1912).] PBYI Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888).

PW06 The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats Vol.1 (1906).

Secret Rose The Secret Rose (1897).

SP29 Selected Poems (1929).

WATR The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

WO The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889).

ABBREVIATIONS

xvii

Other Writings by W.B. Yeats

IoS

The Island of Statues: An Arcadian Fairy Tale (1884).

Letters, etc. CL 1 CL 2 CL 3 G-YL InteLex LTWBY 1, 2 Mikhail 1, 2

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol.1 (1865–1895) eds.

John Kelly and Eric Domville (1986).

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol.2 (1896–1900) eds.

Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (1997).

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol.3 (1901–1904) eds.

John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (1994).

The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938 eds. Anna MacBride.

White and A. Norman Jeffares (1994).

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Electronic Edition Gen. Ed.

John Kelly (2002).

Letters to W.B. Yeats eds. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills.

Harper, and William M. Murphy (2 vols., 1977).

W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections (2 vols., 1977).

Edited Writings of W.B. Yeats Albright Cornell Early Poetry 1 Cornell Early Poetry 2 Cornell WATR CW 1 CW 2 CW 3 CW 4 CW 5 CW 6 CW 7 CW 8 CW 9 CW 10

Daniel Albright (ed.), W.B. Yeats: The Poems (1990).

The Early Poetry Vol.1: Mosada and The Island of Statues ed.

George Bornstein (1987).

The Early Poetry Vol.2: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other

Early Poems to 1895 ed. George Bornstein (1994).

The Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials ed. Caro­ lyn Holdsworth (1993).

The Poems (second edition), ed. R.J. Finneran (1997).

The Plays eds. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (2001).

Autobiographies eds. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N.

Archibald (1999).

Early Essays eds. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein

(2007).

Later Essays ed. William H. O’Donnell (1994).

Prefaces and Introductions ed. William H. O’Donnell.

Letters to the New Island eds. George Bornstein and Hugh

Witemeyer (1989).

The Irish Dramatic Movement eds. Mary FitzGerald and Rich­ ard J. Finneran (2003).

Early Articles and Reviews eds. John P. Frayne and Madeleine

Marchaterre (2004).

Later Articles and Reviews ed. Colton Johnson (2000).

xviii DC M Mem. SB UM UP 1 VE YP

ABBREVIATIONS

Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters eds. Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew, and David R. Clark (1971). Mythologies eds. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (2005). Memoirs ed. Denis Donoghue (1972). The Speckled Bird: An Autobiographical Novel with Variant Versions: New Edition ed. William H. O’Donnell (2003). Under the Moon: The Unpublished Early Poetry ed. George Bornstein (1995). Uncollected Prose Vol.1: First Articles and Reviews 1886–1896 ed. John P. Frayne (1970). The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats eds. Peter Allt and Rus­ sell K. Alspach (1956). Yeats’s Poems ed. A.N. Jeffares (1989, 3rd edn. 1996).

Critical and Reference Materials The following is a list of the most commonly cited books of criticism and reference in the

present volume. It is not a critical bibliography: the fullest listings of critical work may be

found in K.P.S. Jochum, W.B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism (second edn.,

1990), supplemented by annual bibliographies in YACTS and YA.

Adams Bloom Bornstein Bradford Campbell Chapman Cullingford Donoghue Ellmann, Man and the Masks Ellmann, Identity Engleberg Finneran Foster 1 Grene Grossman Harwood

Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems (1990).

Harold Bloom, Yeats (1970).

George Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley (1970).

Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (1965).

Matthew Campbell, Irish Poetry Under the

Union,1801–1924 (2013). Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English Renais­ sanceLiterature (1991). Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (1993). Denis Donoghue, Yeats (1971). Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; second edn. 1979). Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (1954). Edward Engleberg, The Vast Design: Patterns in W.B. Yeats’s Aesthetic (Toronto, 1964; second edn. 1988). Richard J. Finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Recon­ sideration (1990).

R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life Vol.1, The Apprentice

Mage 1865–1914 (1997). Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes (2008). Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats: A Study of The Wind among the Reeds ((1969). John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W.B. Yeats (Basingstoke, 1989).

ABBREVIATIONS

xix

T.R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B.

Yeats (1950).

Holdeman and Levitas eds. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas eds., W.B. Yeats in

Context (2010).

Hone

Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats 1865–1939 (1943; second

edn.1962).

Howes and Kelly eds.

Marjorie Howes and J.S. Kelly eds., The Cambridge Com­ panion to W.B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006).

Jeffares, Commentary

A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of

W.B. Yeats (1984).

Kelly, Chronology J.S. Kelly, A W.B. Yeats Chronology (Cambridge, 2003).

Kinahan Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of

the Early Work and Thought (1988).

Larrissy Edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Differ­ ence (1994).

Loizeaux Elizabeth Bergman Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts

(1986).

Longley Edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge, 2013).

MacNeice Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941; second

edn., 1967).

McGarry James P. McGarry, Place Names in the Writings of William

Butler Yeats (1976).

Murphy William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John

Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (1978).

Orel Harold Orel, The Development of William Butler Yeats

1885–1900 (Lawrence, KS, 1968).

Parkinson Thomas Parkinson, W.B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of his

Early Verse (1971).

Putzel Steven Putzel, Reconstructing Yeats: The Secret Rose and

The Wind Among the Reeds (Dublin, 1986).

Ramazani Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy,

Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (New Haven, CT, 1990).

Reid Forrest Reid, W.B. Yeats: A Critical Study (1915).

Saul G.B. Saul, Prolegomena to the Study of Yeats’s Poems

(1957).

Schuchard Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the

Revival of the Bardic Arts (2008).

Sidnell Michael J. Sidnell, Yeats’s Poetry and Poetics (1996)

Toomey Yeats and Women ed. Deirdre Toomey (1997).

Vendler Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric

Form (2007).

Whitaker Thomas R. Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue

with History (1964).

Williams Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods

of Irish Myth (Princeton, NJ, 2016).

Henn

xx YA YACTS

ABBREVIATIONS

Yeats Annual (1982–). Cited by volume. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (1983–1999). Cited by volume.

Other Abbreviations DUR GD NLI NYPL TCD

The Dublin University Review. Order of the Golden Dawn.

The National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

New York Public Library.

Trinity College Dublin.

In recording manuscript variants, the following abbreviations and signs are used in the

notes.

del. (following word or phrase) Deleted: where a replacement is made for one or two words, this is transcribed after del. (e.g. How del. Why.) del. (within square brackets []) Deleted: where a line or lines have been deleted, the whole is enclosed within square brackets, e.g. [Who lies below these del.] ^ Indicates written material entered by WBY either above a line or between two lines.

Introduction

In keeping with the principles of the Longman Annotated English Poets series, this edi­ tion of W.B. Yeats’s poetry sets out to provide edited texts of all the author’s poems, including a selection of textual variants from manuscript and printed sources, along with a commentary that explains specific references, sets poems in their contexts, and offers an account of particular influences, both literary and historical, at work on the verse. As much as possible, poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for works thus reconceived by the poet. It follows from this that the edition is not, and cannot even remotely resemble, any book that Yeats himself would have envisaged in order to pres­ ent his oeuvre to posterity. There have been many arguments (often intense ones) about the figure Yeats ‘finally’ intended his work to cut, in terms of its presentation in a ‘col­ lected’ form. For the most part, these are not arguments that this edition feels obliged to address – nor are they, perhaps, arguments capable of any definitive solution in edito­ rial terms. Instead, this Longman edition presents a life’s poetic work in a form which its author would never have intended  – as a relatively heavily annotated, continuous chronological sequence  – in order to provide a new perspective (part historical, part critical) on a career of composition that began when the poet was about seventeen and ended only days before his death in 1939, at the age of seventy-four. The shape this edition makes is the partly accidental one made by an actual life; whereas the shape of Yeats’s intended oeuvre is something quite distinct, and far more a matter of design than of chance. The purpose of this brief introduction is to outline the editorial principles that have been applied and to explain the consequences in practice of those principles, since Yeats offers some editorial difficulties that are not often presented in such acute forms by other poets. Principles of inclusion. It is the aim of the present edition to make as comprehensive a gathering as possible of Yeats’s poems. By ‘poems’ here is meant more than just those pieces which the poet saw into print, and unpublished or abandoned work is included alongside the poetry that appeared in volume or periodical forms. The question of what is meant by a poem for these purposes needs to be addressed: of the many manuscript stray lines and stray phrases, for which no home in any completed piece is easily to be found, a large proportion have not been included here, except in cases where they seem to possess inherent interest for critical reading (as, for example, when they point forwards to later creative developments for the poet). On a much larger scale, though, the problem in deciding what should constitute a ‘poem’ by Yeats affects editorial policy with regard to work cast in dramatic form. Here, an editorial decision has been taken not to include the verse-plays for which Yeats plainly had staging intentions at the time of composition, but to provide edited versions of those works which, though set out on the page as dramatic, were either never performed or had no reasonable prospect of per­ formance. These works belong to the earliest phase of the poet’s career, and it is the case that some of them were incorporated as poems within Yeats’s collections of verse (see

xxii

INTRODUCTION

for example The Island of Statues and Mosada, both of them in dramatic form, but both published by Yeats as poems and included in The Wanderings of Oisin [1889] as such). In the years of his poetic apprenticeship, Yeats was (like anyone else of his generation) fully aware of the peculiar status of the verse-drama intended for page rather than stage, and his most ambitious early works in the genre are obviously meant to be received in this way. Besides the early verse-plays included in the present edition, Yeats generated (especially in the years 1884–1886) a great deal of dramatic and quasi-dramatic mate­ rial, surviving now in very rough drafts, discontinuous fragments, and occasional bald outline, some of it in verse, some in prose, and some in a mixture of the two. Whether the manuscript materials as they are preserved could ever be assembled into coherent read­ ing texts is, at the very least, a debatable matter; but at all events, reconstructed (or partly conjectural) texts of these have not been considered for the present edition. A handful of fragments from these projects, which may possess inherent interest as examples of the poet’s developing technique, have been included. The finished verse-plays (not all of which were published), along with a few of the more suggestive dramatic fragments, have been edited here, and are included on the grounds that they offer essential perspec­ tives on the poet’s early creative (and technical) development. It is with The Countess Kathleen (begun in 1889) that Yeats’s dramatic composition begins to be explicitly an attempt at something which will be represented on stage; and although that play (like The Land of Heart’s Desire [1894]) is in intimate creative dialogue with the poet’s lyric work of the time and was accorded much attention from early reviewers and critics who gave accounts of his writing and its value, it is not included in the present edition. From this point onwards, Yeats’s verse-drama cannot meaningfully be considered a part of his body of poems as such, and it is therefore not incorporated in the edition (though on those occasions when the poet allowed a lyric from a play to be printed separately, it is brought within the purview of the present work). A difficult case is presented by the verse-play The Shadowy Waters, which Yeats saw sometimes as a poem, and sometimes as a stage-play; and among its numerous printed incarnations are versions explicitly for the stage, as well as versions that connect it much more closely with the nineteenthcentury tradition of verse-drama intended for the page. The present edition includes the latter but excludes the former. Texts and copy-texts. This edition is built around a core of those poems which W.B. Yeats preserved in successive collected editions of his verse. For these, the usual copytext has been The Poems of W.B. Yeats (2 vols., 1949), prepared under the supervision of the poet’s widow alongside his long-serving copyeditor at the publishers Macmillan, Thomas Mark. It was this text which served as the basis for A Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (first published in 1956, and still the fullest repository of variants in the poems’ printed texts), and it can claim precedence as the closest thing to a ‘final’ text with direct editorial links to the poet himself. There are places where the 1949 edi­ tion requires supplement or emendation, and these are shown in the present edition’s notes as and when they occur; but in general there is no good reason for an editor to quarrel with the readings or to reject them on the basis that they may owe much to Mrs  Yeats and Thomas Mark: these were the poet’s trusted readers, and Yeats was explicit on the degree to which he looked to Mark in particular to regulate and supply

INTRODUCTION

xxiii

punctuation. The poet’s punctuation, as he acknowledged, was almost as disordered and threadbare as his spelling; there is no evidence that he wished to be seen wearing either in public. The present edition is not concerned with questions of intended order of poems, nor with intended inclusions and exclusions, since these do not fall within the scope of an arrangement founded on the concept of chronological order of composition. Yet the poet’s acts of ordering and arrangement were also in their way compositional acts, even acts of revision. For this reason, the contents of Yeats’s published volumes will be listed as appendices in this edition, allowing readers to see the differing shapes which he chose for his oeuvre in its process of evolution over time. Poems printed in Yeats’s lifetime, but either dropped from collected editions or never included in these, are edited in general from their latest texts, and accounts of these are given in the notes. Where poems exist only in manuscript, the source is given in the notes, and (where multiple manuscripts are involved) the copy-text is specified. In presenting reading texts for these pieces, the present edition regularizes spelling and (where necessary) supplies punctuation. For all of the texts which the poet did see into print, the present edition generally follows both the punctuation and spelling of the copy-text versions. The reader should understand that Yeats was heavily reliant on the services of others in arriving at the presentation of these texts, and that he accepted (more often than not) conventions of both spelling and punctuation which he was himself largely unable to maintain. One area in which the poet was liable to repeated changes of mind, from one edition to the next, was the spelling of proper names, and in particular proper names in Irish. While this matter had reached some state of relative stability by the 1930s, resulting in the regularized spellings for the 1949 Poems which provides copy-texts for many of the poems here, Irish proper names – from Oisin/Usheen to almost everybody else – were for many years in a state of flux for Yeats’s published texts. The present edition does not attempt to present the elaborate (not to say labyrinthine) record of change; however, in the notes for the poems the forms used both by Yeats and his sources, as well as in related material from before and after his time, are kept largely in their first-written guises. Any impression of a stable set of spellings for Irish names in the poet’s time would be an illusion; and the fluidity of this state of affairs offered Yeats – who was not in the least a speaker or a reader of the Irish language – room for creative manoeuvre as he put his poetry before Irish, British, and American audiences. Again, a full record of the many changes is to be found in the Variorum Edition of Allt and Alspach. Manuscript and printed variants. Yeats’s poetry has behind it a large number of manu­ script versions. These can be early rough beginnings, slightly less rough drafts, and then fair copies (and for many poems, all of these). For a long time critics have found this manuscript evidence suggestive and often worthy of study in its own right. The aim of this edition is to present as much as possible those manuscript versions that may have a bearing on the critical understanding of each poem. Inevitably, though, this is a subjec­ tive process rather than an objectively regulated routine, since decisions about what to include and what to pass over in silence are in every instance those of the editor. In gen­ eral, an attempt has been made to err on the side of inclusiveness where that is possible in practical terms: relatively small changes may, after all, reveal points in the evolution of Yeats’s senses of cadence or of syntax that prove to be of some critical interest. It is

xxiv

INTRODUCTION

not possible, on the other hand, to render a comprehensive account of all the changes in some of the more complex sequences of manuscripts behind a number of poems with­ out establishing what would be effectively an apparatus criticus, which demands careful navigation on the part of readers in order to arrive at relevant information for any given line. The fullest available accounts of Yeats’s poetic manuscripts (where there are com­ monly photographic reproductions in addition to full diplomatic transcriptions) may be found in the Cornell series of manuscript materials, where individually edited volumes are keyed to Yeats’s individual collections. In the present edition, manuscript material, when reproduced, is usually given with editorially supplied spelling and punctuation, unless there is good reason to reproduce the spelling or punctuation of the original: this is intended to clarify readings and present a more immediately comprehensible view of Yeats’s composition in process; readers who need to see exactly the forms of spelling and punctuation used in the manuscripts must consult the relevant Cornell volumes. Tran­ scription from Yeats’s handwriting is notoriously difficult, and it is to be expected that different pairs of eyes will come up with different readings from time to time. The present edition has very often, in cases of doubt, gratefully accepted readings from the Cornell editors; occasionally, however, its readings do differ from theirs, and such divergences are generally mentioned in the notes. Once a Yeats poem reached print, the process of change was seldom at an end. Here, there is less room for uncertainty in the matter of readings, at least. The present edition attempts to give as full a record of printed variants as practicable, at least with regard to matters of verbal alteration. In matters of punctua­ tion, in which changes are too numerous to be given in full, editorial recording is here much more sparing; and in questions of the spelling of names, the myriad changes of policy between different editions have been largely passed over in silence. For the fullest record of printed variants available, readers should consult the Variorum Edition of the poems which, although not always easy to use, is comprehensive in its coverage. Commentary: nature and extent. The commentary offered on poems in this edition tries to cover several areas of potential interest for readers. First, the date of composition, the textual and publication history of a piece, and its immediate contexts in Yeats’s life are addressed. Here, frequent recourse to Yeats’s other works is required, along with material from the poet’s voluminous correspondence. These letters are cited, where appropriate, from the published volumes of The Collected Letters, and after that point from the elec­ tronic version (InteLex). (In transcribing quotations from correspondence in the present edition, the writer’s wayward spellings, and his habits of non-punctuation are not always reproduced.) A second area of attention in the commentaries is more broadly contextual: this attempts to see works in relation both to the poet’s various source materials and to other relevant works upon which he drew, or by which, in a broader sense, he might have been influenced. The historical context of particular poems is also important, and an attempt has been made to locate work in relation to the moments of its composi­ tion and publication. A  third aspect of the commentary is more specifically literary: Yeats absorbed a very great deal of poetry, much of it when young, and for the length of his career showed signs of his reading in terms of stylistic indebtedness (and, indeed, stylistic innovation, since poetic innovation is often one way of paying a debt, and can be understood in terms of what it has profited from). In order to allow the reader to

INTRODUCTION

xxv

gain some sense of the ways in which these poems embody a vast number of specific points of contact with other poets’ works, the present notes invite specific comparisons where necessary with previous writers and their poems. An illuminating comparison may indicate an allusion on Yeats’s part; but it is also a way of setting the detail of the poetry against the broader traditions from which it draws, especially in terms of diction. So, the injunction to ‘compare’ (or ‘cp.’ as it is abbreviated here) does not mean neces­ sarily that Yeats is conscious of any given point of convergence with another poetic text (though sometimes of course he is); instead, it may mark a place where the phrase or line in question crosses other phrases and other lines by poets of whom, in general, Yeats was already aware. Much more sparingly, the present edition makes comparisons with work written later, and influenced by the relevant words of Yeats: this does, however, include subsequent work by Yeats himself, so that such comparison is an aid to more general understanding of the degree to which his poetry is self-feeding and self-perpetuating. No editor can always be entirely confident that a particular comparison has a critical point, or will turn out some day to yield one; but even coincidence is not necessarily pointless, and on many occasions ‘cp.’ is qualified as ‘perhaps/possibly cp.’: this is not the hedging of bets, but a gesture towards that larger body of poetry in English in which Yeats’s poetry is located, where various lines and traditions of poetic diction operate in certain ways, and may well be exercising an influence on the composition, if only by being ‘in the air’ at a certain stage. That ‘air’, that broad and various tradition of other poems by other poets, is not only the ‘English’ tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser and Shelley (though it centrally includes them), but it is also significantly the tradition of Irish poetry in English  – Yeats’s congruence in detail with poets such as Aubrey De Vere and Sir Samuel Ferguson, James Clarence Mangan, and even such now obscure figures as Robert Dwyer Joyce or Thomas Caulfield Irwin, or political poets like Thomas Davis and ‘Speranza’ (Lady Jane Wilde), as well as contemporaries such as Katharine Tynan and George Russell (AE), is a matter where comparison (however tentative) may well pay critical dividends. A fourth level of commentary is that broadly covered by the concept of ‘reference’ – that is, the explication of allusions and references made in the body of a poem and the offering of some evidence about how, where, and when the poet came about his knowledge of the things concerned. Here, the present edi­ tion is the beneficiary of a long tradition of explicatory commentary, from the work of G.B. Saul to that of A.N. Jeffares, as well as the authors of major modern editions of the poet, including D. Albright and R.J. Finneran; Jeffares’ New Commentary (1984) remains an essential foundation for such work. (In due course, this will be superseded by a fresh commentary by W. Gould and D. Toomey, only a few of whose many insights the present edition can hope to have anticipated.) Explication has been a rich seam in critical studies of Yeats also, from early days to the present; and the present edition aims to make use of this is explaining numerous points of reference which are far from self-explicatory in the poems. It is the critical tradition on Yeats which constitutes a final level of the com­ mentary offered here; and while it is not possible to summarize and evaluate all that has been written on the poet’s works within realistic bounds of length, this edition makes an attempt to represent major critical contributions to discussion of many poems, alongside (where relevant) the views of Yeats’s contemporaries. The same degree of critical context

xxvi

INTRODUCTION

has not been applied to every poem, and here again reasons of proportion apply to influ­ ence the kinds of coverage given (a good number of Yeats’s poems, most especially those from the early decades of his career as a published poet, have attracted very little in the way of critical treatment). It may be remarked, finally, that although Yeats’s poems appear here as part of a venerable series referring to ‘English Poets’, the adjective must be taken only in the sense of the English language, in which Yeats wrote: the poetic tradi­ tions within which the poet situated himself, and where he continues to be located, are to a vital extent Irish ones, just as Yeats himself is an Irish, and not an English, poet. Dates of composition and chronological order of poems. Any ambition to present Yeats’s poems in chronological order of composition faces two major obstacles. The first is simi­ lar to problems that present themselves in establishing the order of any other poet’s writ­ ings, unless the writer has been an exceptionally careful keeper of records, and those records themselves have all been successfully kept: that is, there is often a shortage of documentary evidence for the date (or dates) on which a particular poem was composed. For Yeats, this situation is much more acute in his earlier work than that of his maturity; but it means, nevertheless, that many poems can only be assigned a very approximate date of composition, using various kinds of circumstantial evidence. This first difficulty, then, is not insurmountable, any more than it is unusual. A second obstacle, though, stands in the way of a chronological ordering, even when evidence is to hand about when Yeats might have first set pencil or pen to paper: put simply, the poet returned to his poems many times after they were first written (or rather, after they had been begun) and from the very earliest days had made substantial revision into what might be thought of as a habit of composition. Plainly, Yeats’s revisions are moments of poetic creativity. So, something begun in one week, month, or year might very easily be continued in another; and what was done then could be undone, done again, done differently, or simply done away with. This may present a confusing picture: a poem written first in the late 1880s can hold on to its title and its place while being rewritten on several occasions through successive decades, sometimes with substantial changes being implemented in editions as late as the 1930s. The question of ‘when’ such a poem was composed is not one that can be given any straightforward answer. In negotiating the first of these obstacles, the present edition makes use of such docu­ mentary help as can be mustered, supplementing this with contextual information that may point towards a particular date or period when a poem first came into being. How­ ever, the documentary evidence is far from complete or conclusive, and an element of guesswork necessarily enters judgements made about order. When evidence is especially slight (and guesswork correspondingly substantial), the notes alert readers to this situ­ ation. It is an added complication that Yeats himself was somewhat slapdash with dates, even when he thought to record them: not only should we not assume that a particular date entered on a manuscript is the date when a poem was finished (it may be the date on which Yeats remembers beginning the piece), but we must not take it for granted that the poet always knew what day it was even on the day itself, let alone some weeks or months afterwards. The second obstacle is much more serious, and is more perplexing for an editor. It is, of course, feasible to print each poem in the order (however approximate) of first composition, but in its latest textual form, recording changes made to earlier

INTRODUCTION

xxvii

versions and assigning dates to these; yet this runs the risk of being misleading as well as visually complex and cumbersome. Promoting a text of (for example) 1929 to the prime position in a reading version of something written first (and differently) in the 1880s would require a prominent editorial health warning, requiring readers to make their way through a dense undergrowth of earlier published and manuscript versions in order to arrive at a sense of what was first published or written by Yeats in a specific case. No edi­ torial solution for this problem is ideal; but the present edition is arranged in such a way as to ‘freeze’ heavily revised poems at different points – often, in effect, at the points they reached before large-scale acts of revision took place. Separately edited versions of the substantially revised versions are provided, placed in the order of poems at the year in which the major revision happened. Thus, for example, ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (composed in 1891 and first published in 1892) is placed along with other poems of 1891, using as copy-text the last printed version before Yeats’s major revision, and recording MS and textual variants up to that point; another version will appear with poems of 1924, since this was the year when the large-scale revision by the poet was made. This results in cases where poems appear in the chronological sequence more than once, and years apart. It is certainly true that Yeats did not intend such poems to have multiple identities in his oeuvre; at the same time, it is also true that these works do in fact possess distinct identities as literary productions, and there are advantages for readers in being able to encounter them separately within the larger sequence. In Volumes One and Two, the major instance is that of Yeats’s long poem ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, edited first in its initial state (as published in 1889, but with the manuscript evidence of composition in 1886–1887 provided), and later as comprehensively revised by Yeats: this major revision is at its most extensive for Poems (1895), and it is here in the chronological sequence that a second edited version is placed. This second version, instead of referring back to the 1889 poem’s manuscripts, includes details of further (and in general smaller) revisions to the text of the poem from 1899 until the 1930s: the copy-text (as with other poems in their revised states) is the latest version worked on by the poet. This poem that was given its last small touches in the 1930s, however, was essentially (in all but details) the one published in 1895; so it makes sense that it should be placed in a chronological sequence with other work of 1895. We can say plausibly that a ‘new’ ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ came into being for Poems (1895); but such a claim would be nonsense for its appearances in (say) Poems (1899), or Early Poems and Stories (1925). The poem that was included in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), on the other hand, was a distinct work, subsequently overwritten and partly obscured by its author in 1895; the present edition takes it as a work deserving to stand in its own right amongst other poems of the later 1880s written by Yeats. A critical assumption which is central to the editorial procedure described here is that the work of revision for Yeats was creative work: in order to follow the arc of his poetic development from year to year, it is necessary to encounter substantial revisions in their chronological place, as elements in a larger and very complex process of self-reading and self-correction that often, for this poet, issued in further poems. It remains the case, naturally, that revision is not always on a major scale and that the smaller alterations are also deserving of attention. For this reason, an edited poem here will typically contain

xxviii

INTRODUCTION

information about a number of alterations in print by the poet that come from earlier points than the date of the copy-text. By this means, it will be possible for the reader to see easily the particular phrases or lines that were present in a poem at its position in chronological sequence, but were subsequently changed, removed, or augmented by revision in later years.

THE POEMS

96

A CRADLE SONG

Date and circumstances of composition. WBY had written a version of this poem by 13 Jan. 1890, when he included it in a letter to KT as ‘a little song written lately – one thing written this long while bar prose’, adding the explanation that ‘It is supposed to be sung by a mother to her child’ (CL 1, 208). Continuing his original letter, which had remained unposted due to a bout of influenza, WBY wrote out a second version on 16 Jan., asking ‘Is this better than the other?’ (CL 1, 209). KT evidently did not give any response, since WBY was asking her on 27 Feb. why she ‘never said anything about them’, and tried once more with ‘did you like them?’ (CL 1, 213). The poem appeared in The Scots Observer on 19 Apr. (SO); WBY was obliged to write asking for payment at the end of May (CL 1, 220). Text. The two versions in WBY’s letter to KT of 13 Jan. (MS1 and MS2) are the earli­ est material; however, MS B was an enclosure, which is now no longer to be found with the earlier pages of MS A (Huntingdon Library). MS A is transcribed in Early Poetry 2, 291, as well as in CL 1, 208, but the text of MS B included in CL 1 is dependent on previ­ ous transcriptions in e.g. Wade, Letters of W.B. Yeats (1954). The poem’s publication in The Scots Observer (possibly carrying changes by the editor, W.E. Henley) did not mark the end of its textual history, and a fair copy, tipped in to a copy of WO belonging to James Nicol Quinn, and now held in the Tilton Library, Tulane University, is transcribed in Early Poetry 2, 292 (MS3): this predates the poem’s volume publication in CK. There are no significant changes to the text for P95 and P99, but a copy of P99 with extensive verbal changes to the poem in WBY’s hand (Huntingdon Library, transcribed in Early Poetry 2, 292: MS4) shows the creation of the revised text adopted in P01 and thereafter. The next significant revisions came in EPS, after which WBY’s reprintings of the poem remained textually stable.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-98

4

A CRADLE SONG

Copy-text. P49.

T

he angels are stooping

Above your bed;

They weary of trooping

With the whimpering dead.

5

God’s laughing in Heaven

To see you so good;

The Sailing Seven

Are gay with his mood.

Title: Song SO. Subtitle: Until EPS, the poem carried a subtitle, of Irish in a phonetic spelling: ‘Cloth [Coth CK] yani me [nu SO] von gilli beg ’N heur ve thu more a creena.’ WBY’s source is a novel by Gerald Griffin (1803–1840), The Collegians: A Tale of Gar­ ryowen (1829). In Ch. 32, the song is sung by a nurse over a new-born baby, whose mother has just died in childbirth (The Collegians, 310): Old Winny was sitting at the fireside, dan­ dling the now forgotten little infant in her arms, and lulling it with an ancient ditty, of which the following beautiful fragment formed the burthen: – “Gilli beg le m’ onum thu!

Gilli beg le m’ chree!

Coth yani me von gilli beg,

’N heur ve thu more a creena.’ *

* My soul’s little darling you are!

My heart’s little darling!

What will I do without my little darling,

When you’re grown up and old?

On the facing page, an address to the infant, by its shocked brother, to some extent checks the sentimentality of the lullaby: ‘The Lord forgive you, you little disciple!’ said Lowry, ‘’tis little you know what harm you done this day! Do all you can – grow

up as fine as a queen, an’ talk like an angel – ’twill set you to fill up the place o’ the woman you took away from us this day! Howl your tongue, again I tell you, ’tis we that have raison to cry, an’ not you.’ 1–4.] P01 and after. The angels are sending

A smile to your bed,

They weary of tending

The souls of the dead. MS1

The angels are bending

Above your white bed,

They weary of tending

The souls of the dead. MS2, SO, MS3 CK,

P95, P99. The angels are stooping

Above your bed;

Weary of trooping

The whimpering dead. MS4.

5.] And God smiles in heaven MS2 God smiles in high heaven MS3, SO, CK, P95, P99 [God laughs in his Heaven del.] MS4. 5–8.] Of tending the seven –

The planets old brood:

And God smiles in heaven

To see you so good. MS1

7–8.] And the old planets seven | Grow sweet with his mood MS2, SO The old planets seven | Grow gay with His mood CK, P95, P99 And

A CRADLE SONG

10

5

I sigh that kiss you,

For I must own

That I shall miss you

When you have grown.

the shining seven | Are gay with His mood MS4 The Shining Seven | Are gay with His mood P01-P24. WBY’s eventual ‘Sailing Seven’ evidently means the seven planets, though a reader coming fresh to the poem might well take this as a reference to the seven Pleiades. 9–10.] I  kiss you and kiss you, | With arms round my own, MS2, MS3, SO, CK, P95, P99. 9–12.] My darling I kiss you With arms round my own,

Ah how shall I miss you When heavy and grown. MS1 10.] My pigeon, my own; MS4, P01-P24. 11–12.] Ah how shall I miss you | My dar­ ling when grown. MS2 Ah how shall I  miss  you | My darling, when grown! MS3 Ah! How I shall miss you, | My dear, when you’ve grown! SO Ah, how shall I miss you, | When, dear, you have grown. CK, P95, P99. 11. shall I] I shall MS2, P01 and after. 12.] P01 and after.

97

THE BALLAD OF FATHER

GILLIGAN

Date of composition. Probably composed in 1890. Although the poem was published at the beginning of Jul. 1890, WBY later suggested in public that it had been completed for some time by this stage, though for how long is unclear. If a letter by ‘Tristram St. Mar­ tin’ (see Sources) is to be taken at face value, WBY had seen a poem on the same story in Feb. or Mar. 1890; and the writer of that letter believed ‘Father Gilligan’ was written immediately after then. Sources. According to WBY, the ballad form of this poem was influenced by a tradi­ tional air. In the 1907 additions to his essay ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, the poet remarked on how ‘Sometimes one composes to a remembered air’, and said that this poem had been written ‘to a modification of the air, ‘A Fine Old English Gentleman’’ (CW 4, 17–18). The song was composed by Henry Russell (1812–1900) and published in 1831; it became sufficiently well-known to be the occasion of a parody by Charles Dickens and to be alluded to in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The connection would hardly be appar­ ent without WBY’s mentioning it (the poem demands very considerable ‘modification’ indeed to come anywhere close to fitting Russell’s music); but since he does, it is perhaps useful to compare Russell’s ballad with this poem. If there is a relation between the two, it consists in WBY’s turning the subject matter around, so that the celebration of the wealth and charitable good nature of an English gentleman ‘All of the olden time’ (who dies still engaged in bonhomie and good works) becomes the commemoration of a workworn Irish priest, aided by divine agency in his ministrations to the needy dying of the parish. A review of The Book of the Rhymers’ Club in The Academy mentioned this poem as ‘a delightful variant of an antique and widely-diffused legend’ (26 Mar. 1892). This appar­ ently innocuous formulation hides a controversy which was already taking place in the pages of that very publication. In The Academy, 12 Mar. 1892, a letter was published from ‘A Lover of Originality’: Will you allow me to point out what appears to me a plagiarism in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club, recently published? It is in the ballad by W.B. Yeats, entitled ‘Father Gilligan,’ the idea of which is evidently taken from a poem entitled ‘He sent His Angel,’ which appears in a volume by Tristram St. Martin published two years ago under the title The Christ in London. A couple of quotations will show how closely Mr. Yeats has followed his orig­ inal. Mr. Yeats writes: DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-99

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

7

‘I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,

For people die and die;’

And after cried he, ‘God forgive!

My body spoke, not I!’

And then, half lying in the chair,

He knelt, prayed, fell asleep.

The original has – ‘More ill and dying? Shall one never rest?’

He cried. ‘There is no peace for sick and dead.

Ah, who would choose a life so illy blest!

What am I saying? Lord, what have I said?

* * * *

’Twas not my heart spoke – ’twas my weariness!’

So saying, sunk he down upon his knees

To pray, and praying fell fast – fast asleep,

Murmuring, ‘We have no strength unless it please

Thee, Lord, us ever in thy hands to keep.’

Then Mr. Yeats has – When you were gone he turned and died

As merry as a bird.

The original has – That dying man was happy as a bird

That soars aloft in spring-time as he passed.

Nor are these the only coincidences of expression. WBY lost no time in responding to this accusation of plagiarism (written probably by ‘Tristram St. Martin’ himself, though the name is almost certainly a pseudonym). His letter was published in The Academy for 19 Mar. 1892: I thank your anonymous correspondent for giving me this opportunity of explaining that Tristram St. Martin’s ballad and my own have a common origin, although I never saw ‘He sent his angel’ until some time after writing ‘Father Gilligan’. The author of Christ in London himself told me the story on which both poems are founded as a curious piece of folklore given him by a friend. I wrote ‘Father Gilligan’ at once; but knowing that Tristram St. Martin himself intended a ballad on the subject, kept it back for some time in order to give him

8

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

the advantage of prior publication. When I did at last publish it, about two years ago, in the National Observer, I told him that I had done so and gave him the date of the paper; and from that day to this he has never told me or any one else, so far as I know, that he considered himself ill-treated. I have never claimed the story as mine, but both in the National Observer and in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club have given full credit where it is due, namely, to its inventors, the peasantry of Castleisland, Kerry. The passages quoted by your correspondent are almost word for word from the folk-tale as I heard it. It may comfort your correspondent, however, to know that even if I had seen Tristram St. Martin’s ballad before writing mine, and had never heard the story apart from the ballad, I should none the less have considered myself perfectly justified in taking a legend that belonged to neither of us, but to the Irish peo­ ple. Tristram St. Martin has done one interesting ballad, but I do not think he is so triumphantly successful in the present instance as to have made the story his until time shall end. I am even inclined to say that he is bit ‘illy blest’ in having so ardent a champion, ready to come forth with quotations that certainly do not show a very subtle sense of the peculiarities of Irish folk-lore. On other subjects he is more at home and more worthy of quotation. (See also CL 1, 291–292 for edited version of WBY’s MS of this letter.) It appears from this that WBY knew ‘Tristram St. Martin’s’ identity, and had contact with him in 1890 and after. After the information given here, there was nothing for it but that ‘A Lover of Originality’ should be replaced in any further correspondence by ‘Tristram St. Martin’ himself; and so it was this author who wrote to The Academy in its 26 Mar. issue: Will you allow me in the friendliest manner possible to correct one or two errors into which Mr. Yeats has, I am sure, inadvertently fallen in regard to his ‘Father Gilligan’ and my ‘He sent His Angel’? In the conversation referred to in his letter Mr. Yeats says I told him ‘a piece of Irish folklore’; in reality I narrated to him the story of my poem, the revise of which I had that day passed for the press. (Hence my mind was full of it.) It had been completed many months before, and was published, within a fortnight of our talk, in The Christ in London (Mar. 1890). I can show proof of this in a letter from the late Cardinal Manning, who saw the work and asked me to call and see him, this very poem having greatly struck him. I did not tell Mr. Yeats the story as ‘a piece of Irish folklore,’ but as an incident said to have occurred in the family of an Irish friend of mine; in fact, in that of the great-uncle of my informant, who was warden of the church of which the priest was curate. Moreover, I did not tell the story as it came to me, but in the form into which it had grown in my imagination. The original story was simply this: ‘The priest was called up after he had gone to bed to attend a dying man; he promised to follow the messenger at once, but fell asleep again, and

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

9

did not awake till dawn, when, in a state of great trouble, he hastened to the house of the dying man. Arrived there, he was told that he had already been, had administered extreme unction, and that the man had died happy (not ‘merry’). The people believed the priest had gone in his sleep. The story added that he died shortly afterwards.’ I think, like Mr. Yeats, that legends are common property, and open for any one to treat; but I think, too, that when one writer adds anything to his original, that addition is his ‘for all time.’ I may not have improved on the first story, but I altered it, and that alteration Mr. Yeats followed to the letter (except as regards the ‘moth-hour,’ which, if he had done a little ‘rum and treacling’ at all hours of the night, he would know is not true to Nature). I make these corrections in all kindliness, believing Mr. Yeats (whose friend­ ship I value) wrote his ballad under a misunderstanding. If ‘Tristram St. Martin’ (of whom no further trace remains) and WBY were indeed friends, it is hard to see how the matter might not have been sorted out easily in some less formal way, out of sight of the public prints – though this was, it is worth remember­ ing, exactly the place where WBY as a poet was happy to be regularly seen. Reception and interpretation. The poem was a popular one, and is often mentioned (albeit briefly) with approval in early reviews of WBY’s work; it was also reprinted in a number of anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Critical studies of WBY (even early ones) seldom dwell on the poem, and it still awaits protracted and detailed critical attention. H. Adams sees this as an ‘accomplished balladic poem,’ but detects nevertheless ‘an aura of forced simplicity,’ since the priest is ‘perhaps too innocent, and the poem is perhaps a condescension’ (Adams, 59). H. Vendler maintains that WBY’s ‘ballads about priests’ (this, and ‘Father O’Hart’) suggest that the poet ‘wanted to reach the Catholic readers of Ireland, to include them in the national literature he hoped to create’, though she sees this as ‘a generous if aesthetically unproductive impulse’, and believes that these ‘early ballads remain within common spheres of reference, and do not predict [WBY’s] drive toward originality in the form’ (Vendler, 113). R. Schuchard also includes this poem among WBY’s ‘ballads meant to link him to the bardic tradition and the populace of the nation’ (Schuchard, 5). Yet WBY in 1890 was hardly so naïve an observer of Irish culture as to believe that the mere act of writing ballads about priests would establish an organic artistic link between himself and the Irish ‘populace’. The poem could be approached more usefully not as a pitch on the poet’s part for Irish popularity – it is published in the first place, after all, for an English audience – but as a narrative that suggests the uncon­ scious exercise of quasi-supernatural powers. Here, curiously perhaps, it is the old priest’s sense of duty which is at the forefront of the story: when his body fails him, it is his will – figured here as a kind of dream – that does the required work in the real world, producing an image of him to administer the necessary rites to a dying man. In this sense, the ballad is a poem about the supernatural, and its merely religious context is allowed to become in comparison a matter of the dull everyday. The poem’s creator-God, complete with purple robes and a full set of planets in his care, has pity for even an old rural priest.

10

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

Text and publication history. No MS materials survive for the poem. It appeared first in the Scots Observer, 5 Jul. 1890 (SO); it next appeared in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) (BRC), and was included in CK, then P95 and all subsequent collected editions. A TS version is preserved as NLI 30624: this was used by WBY for readings on a lecture tour of 1920, and there are five points of divergence from the printed texts – all of these are likely to be typist’s errors. The TS is transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 282–283. Copy-text. P49.

T

he old priest Peter Gilligan

Was weary night and day;

For half his flock were in their beds,

Or under green sods lay.

5

10

Once, while he nodded on a chair,

At the moth-hour of eve,

Another poor man sent for him,

And he began to grieve.

‘I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace, For people die and die’; And after cried he, ‘God forgive! My body spake, not I!’ He knelt, and leaning on the chair

He prayed and fell asleep;

Notes by WBY: This ballad is founded upon the Kerry version of an old folk tale. CK A tradition among the people of Castleisland, Kerry. P95-P24. Title: P95 onwards] Father Gilligan: A Legend told by the People of Castleisland, Kerry SO, BRC Father Gilligan CK. 2. weary night and day] A naturalistic turn on the fairly common ‘a weary night and day’, as in e.g. Shelley, ‘Song’ (‘Rarely comest thou | Spirit of Delight’), 5–6: ‘Many a weary night and day | ’Tis since thou are fled away’: WBY simply applies the adjective to the priest, rather than the night and day, producing an everyday effect – but not, in fact, one to be found elsewhere in the poetry of his time.

3. were] lay SO. 4. under green sods] Another simplification of poetic diction (cp. 1 above). The usual phrase is ‘under the green sod’, as in e.g. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘Death’s Jest Book’ II ii 324: ‘Under the green sod are your coffins laid’. 6, 15. the moth-hour] This phrase is WBY’s coinage. ‘Tristram St. Martin’’s objections notwithstanding, moths do appear in num­ bers during the first two hours of dark­ ness and just before dawn; this information would have been well-known to WBY, who had spent many nocturnal hours observ­ ing moths and other insects when a boy at Howth. 13–14.] And then, half-lying on a chair, | He knelt, prayed, fell asleep SO, BRC, P95, P99.

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

15

20

11

And the moth-hour went from the fields, And stars began to peep. They slowly into millions grew, And leaves shook in the wind; And God covered the world with shade, And whispered to mankind. Upon the time of sparrow-chirp When the moths came once more, The old priest Peter Gilligan Stood upright on the floor.

25

30

35

40

‘Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died While I slept on the chair’; He roused his horse out of its sleep, And rode with little care. He rode now as he never rode, By rocky lane and fen; The sick man’s wife opened the door: ‘Father! you come again!’ ‘And is the poor man dead?’ he cried. ‘He died an hour ago.’ The old priest Peter Gilligan In grief swayed to and fro. ‘When you were gone, he turned and died As merry as a bird.’ The old priest Peter Gilligan He knelt him at that word.

16.] KT appropriated this for the first line of her ‘The Little Ghost’, in New Poems (1911): ‘The stars began to peep’. 22. the moths] moths CP33. This is probably a slip, and the definite article is present uncor­ rected in WBY’s Edition de Luxe proofs, as well as in P49. 25. ‘Mavrone, mavrone!] ‘Ochone, ochone! BRC. Mavrone is an Anglicized version of the Irish mo bhron (my grief). It is to be found

commonly in Anglo-Irish poetry, in the work of A.P. Graves, William Allingham, R.D. Joyce and many others, most prominently perhaps for WBY in the opening line of J.C. Mangan’s ‘O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire’, ‘Where is my Chief, my Master, this bleak night, mavrone!’, which WBY was to include in his A Book of Irish Verse (1895). Ochone has a similar meaning and function, and is similarly widespread.

12

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

‘He Who hath made the night of stars For souls who tire and bleed, Sent one of His great angels down To help me in my need. 45

‘He, Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.’

41. Who] This word was not capitalized until CP33. 46. His] his SO, BRC, CK. God as protector of the planets is an unusual conceit, but not one unknown to readers of

WBY, since it appears with reference to ‘The old planets seven’ in ‘A Cradle Song’, which had been published in the SO just a couple of months before the present poem, and was retained in all versions of that poem up to and including P99.

98

DEDICATION TO A BOOK

OF STORIES SELECTED

FROM THE IRISH

NOVELISTS

Date of composition. Jan.–Mar. 1890. WBY sent the MS for his book Representative Irish Tales to Putnam’s on 16 Mar. 1890. After missing his first deadline for a list of contents in Jan. 1889 (CL 1, 200–201), the poet had already been working on the volume for some months; in early 1890 he concentrated on the project intensively. Since the work itself was not published until Mar. 1891, a year after the initial submission, it is possible that WBY wrote his dedicatory poem after 16 Mar. 1890; however, there is no evidence that he did so. Text and publication history. WBY’s edited selection from Irish writers of fiction, Rep­ resentative Irish Tales, was published in the United States in 1891 (RIT); this poem stood at the beginning, as the work’s ‘Dedication’. It was next published as one of WBY’s con­ tributions to The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) (BRC), and subsequently included in CK. The poem was included in all collected editions from P95 onwards; after P24, it was rewritten by WBY, and is included separately in its rewritten form with later poems in the present edition. No MSS of the poem are extant. Contexts and interpretation. The poem introduced WBY’s own two-volume selec­ tion from Irish prose fiction, which included the work of Maria Edgeworth, John and Michael Banim, William Carleton, Samuel Lover, William Maginn, T. Crofton Crocker, Gerald Griffin, Charles Lever, Charles Kickham, and Rosa Mulholland. Selections from each author were prefaced by WBY’s short biographical and critical introductions. The edited collection was aimed very squarely – like its dedicatory poem – at an American audience, and WBY plays up to exiled nationalist sentiment. The conclusion to WBY’s ‘Introduction’ is an essential context for the poem in its first appearance (CW 6, 36–37): Meanwhile a true literary consciousness – national to the centre – is gradually forming out of all this disguising and prettifying, this penumbra of half-culture. We are preparing likely enough for a new Irish literary movement – like that of ’48 – that will show itself at the first lull in this storm of politics. [. . .] These new folk, limited though they be, are conscious. They have ideas. They under­ stand the purpose of letters in the world. They may yet formulate the Irish cul­ ture of the future. To help them, is much obscure feeling for literature diffused DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-100

14

DEDICATION TO A BOOK OF STORIES

throughout the country. The clerks, farmers’ sons, and the like, that make up the ‘Young Ireland’ societies and kindred associations, show an alertness to honour the words ‘poet,’ ‘writer,’ ‘orator,’ not commonly found among their class. Many a poor countryside has its peasant verse-maker. I have seen sto­ ries – true histories – by a village shoemaker that only needed a fine convention to take their place in fiction. The school of Davis and Carleton and Ferguson has gone. Most things are changed now – politics are different, life is different. Irish literature is and will be, however, the same in one thing for many a long day – in its nationality, its resolve to celebrate in verse and prose all within the four seas of Ireland. And why should it do otherwise? A man need not go fur­ ther than his own hill-side or his own village to find every kind of passion and virtue. As Paracelsus wrote: ‘If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.’ (The final quotation here is almost exactly that which would be used on the title page of CK in 1892.) In the poem, WBY’s prophecy about new national literature is something of a motive force, though here with an especially marked emphasis on the promise this movement carries for the interests of Irish America, the ‘Exiles’ who still hold to ‘the cause that never dies’. However, the image of the legendary ‘bell branch’, which is so important to the poem, suggests reverie and dream rather than national stirring and awakening; to that extent, there is some discrepancy between the exordium of the book’s Introduction and the imaginative languor of its dedicatory poem. WBY asked KT her opinion of the poem shortly after publication, describing it to her as ‘my [. . .] lines to the Irish abroad’ (CL 1, 247). No reply survives, but WBY thought well enough of his work to include it in the selection contained in BRC before its inclusion in CK. By the time he published his wholesale revision in The Irish Statesman (1924), WBY described the poem as ‘a sheaf of wild oats’. Copy-text: P24.

T

here was a green branch hung with many a bell When her own people ruled in wave-worn Eire;

And from its murmuring greenness, calm of faery,

A Druid kindness, on all hearers fell.

Stanzas are numbered with Arabic numerals in RIT. Title] Dedication RIT; Dedication of ‘Irish Tales’ BRC, CK. 1.] The poem’s opening reference to the bellbranch of Irish mythology is also a reference to

WBY’s earlier use of the motif, in The Wander­ ings of Oisin III 46. The image of a sleep-asso­ ciated branch laden with bells, offering access to otherworldly experience, is first found in the eighth-century Voyage of Bran (Immram Brain). WBY incorporated this in the sleep­ centred third book of his mini-epic, but also alludes to it in ‘The Song of Wandering

DEDICATION TO A BOOK OF STORIES

5

10

15

It charmed away the merchant from his guile,

And turned the farmer’s memory from his cattle,

And hushed in sleep the roaring ranks of battle,

For all who heard it dreamed a little while.

Ah, Exiles wandering over many seas, Spinning at all times Eire’s good to-morrow! Ah, world-wide Nation, always growing Sorrow! I also bear a bell branch full of ease. I tore it from green boughs winds tossed and hurled, Green boughs of tossing always, weary, weary!

Aengus’. He shared the motif with John Todhunter, whose work based on the Deirdre story, The Fate of the Sons of Usna (included in his Three Bardic Tales (1896)) WBY knew as early as spring 1888 (CL 1, 58); here, Todhunter gives a much more elaborate account of the bell-branch (First Duan, 17–22): From the King’s board each day fed Felimy MacDal, Who bare a golden branch of Music in his hand, As royal Bard, and ruled o’er famous Bards a score, Who bare Branches of silver; and four­ score Bards and ten, Well-skilled in song, who bare Branches of Bronze. Each one Could with his Bell-branch lull the angry heart asleep. The association of the bell-branch with poetic status (Todhunter’s 1896 note makes a point of its being ‘the distinguishing mark of a Bard’) is important to WBY’s poem: the selection of tales that is being presented in the book is to be understood, it suggests, as part of the work of a poet. 2. Eire] P99 onwards. Eri RIT, BRC, CK, P95. WBY’s use of ‘Eri’ in this poem is to some extent locked into the poem’s rhymes, as here. Revision serves to weaken the rhyme, but by 1899 WBY evidently did not want to keep this poorly attested name for Ireland in his

writings any longer. The word also appears often in his prose writing at the time and shortly afterwards, and it is prominent in his quickly produced elegy for Parnell, ‘Mourn, and then Onward’. For further information on the term, see notes to that poem. wave-worn] WBY used ‘this compound twice in his abandoned 1884 poem ‘When to its end o’er-ripened July nears . . .’ (130, 217). 4. A Druid kindness,] – A  Druid kindness – RIT, BRC, CK. WBY’s adjectival use of ‘Druid’ is a relatively unusual one, and there­ fore distinctive. 9. Exiles] Exiles, RIT. 10. Eire’s] Eri’s RIT, BRC, CK, P95. to-morrow!] to-morrow, RIT, BRC, CK. Eire’s good to-morrow] Cp. W.E. Henley, A Book of Verses (1888), ‘The West a glimmer­ ing lake of light’, 18–19: ‘I take the good to­ morrow | That fills from verge to verge my dream’. 11. world-wide Nation] OED world-wide adj., a, ‘Extending over or covering the whole world; known or occurring throughout the world; affecting all parts of the world’: the term ‘world-wide’ (despite a brief burst of life in the seventeenth century) was an increas­ ingly current phrase in the mid-late nine­ teenth century; WBY here clearly intends to bring attention to the wide scattering of Irish patriots across the globe. Sorrow!] Sorrow, RIT, BRC, CK. 14. weary, weary!] weary, weary, RIT, BRC, CK.

16 15

20

DEDICATION TO A BOOK OF STORIES

I tore it from the green boughs of old Eire, The willow of the many-sorrowed world. Ah, Exiles, wandering over many lands!

My bell branch murmurs: the gay bells bring laughter,

Leaping to shake a cobweb from the rafter;

The sad bells bow the forehead on the hands. A honeyed ringing: under the new skies

They bring you memories of old village faces,

Cabins gone now, old well-sides, old dear places;

And men who loved the cause that never dies.

15. Eire] P99 onwards. Eri RIT, BRC, CK, P95. 17. lands!] lands, RIT, BRC, CK. 21. ringing,] ringing! RIT. 23. old dear places] Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Bal­ lads, Romances, and Songs (1861), ‘I still am

a rover’, 5–6: ‘From all those dear places the bland summer graces, | From all their fair faces my heart still doth stray’.

99

THE LAMENTATION OF

THE OLD PENSIONER

Background and date of composition. Probably composed autumn 1890. WBY’s note in CK is simply: ‘This small poem is little more than a translation into verse of the very words of an old Wicklow peasant.’ The note allows the possibility of a reader’s taking WBY to have heard the peasant’s words; but a much fuller account, offered first in the National Observer 3 Oct. 1891, shows that this is not the case. Here, WBY’s subject was ‘An Irish Visionary’ whom he refers to as ‘X — ’ (in fact George Russell [AE]): I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop. His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles into his care. [. . .] But always under this largeness of colour [in X — ’s poetry] lies some tender homily addressed to man’s fragile hopes. This spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek for illumination or else mourn for some joy that has gone. One of these especially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of the night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy: X — because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word or deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with pro­ longed sorrow. Once he burst out with ‘God possesses the heavens  – but he covets the world’; and once he lamented that his old neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said: ‘Who is that old fellow there?’ ‘The fret [Irish for doom] is over me,’ he repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, ‘Only myself knows what has happened under the thorn tree forty years ago’; and as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight. This old man always rises before me when I think of X —. Both seek, one in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle allegoric poetry, to express a something that lies beyond the range of expression; and both, if X — will forgive me, have within them the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-101

18

THE LAMENTATION OF THE OLD PENSIONER

duellists that were, and the whole hurly-burly of legends – Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of fairyland, these two mystics walk­ ing up and down upon the mountains uttering the central dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind that finds them so interest­ ing – all are a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel revealed. This piece (which WBY reprinted, in revised form as ‘A Visionary’, in The Celtic Twilight (1893)) sheds considerable light on the poem’s origins, as well as its place in relation to some of his major poetic and mythic preoccupations. Many years afterwards, Russell provided his own account of the meeting with an ‘old vagrant’ as ‘my first vision of the wonder and agony of the soul’ (quoted in Peter Kuch, ‘‘The Sunset of Fantasy’ by AE’, YA10, 199): The first character which emerges clearly from the obscurity of boyhood is that of an old vagrant. My meeting with him was an adventure which began for me the unveiling of humanity. It was my first vision of the wonder and agony of the soul. I was walking with my friend John Hughes on a mountain road one eve­ ning when I saw an old man coming towards us. He was hugging his body as if there were none other in the world but himself that would hold it with familiar hands and he was talking to himself, and his grief seemed so great that he must speak it even if it were only two boys passing he met in the twilight. That old man was the remains of a magnificent human being I would think over sev­ enty years of age. He stopped before me and began to speak. I remember every word: ‘Over those hills I wandered forty years ago. Nobody but myself knows what happened under the thorn tree forty years ago. The fret is on me. The fret is on me. God speaking out of his darkness says I have and I have not. I pos­ sess the heavens. I do not possess the world. Abroad if you meet an Irishman he will give you the bit and the sup. But if you come back to your own country after being away forty years it is not the potato and the bit of salt you get, but only ‘who’s that ould fella?’ The fret is on me. The fret is on me!’ I found that this was his first day of returning to his country after forty years of absence and nobody remembered him. He had been in the Army, was in the Crimean War but saw no fighting. He lay in some place I think he called it Scutari in a fever covered with lice. You, he said to Hughes, are amused: but you, he said to me, are watching me. You are thinking about me. And indeed I was thinking about him for life, for when the deeps of another’s being are first revealed to us something from that deep enters our own being and goes on with it for ever­ more. The appearance and voice and tone impressed themselves on [me] with unforgettable poignancy. It was sorrow shaped by its intensity to be like a work of art. I did not write the song, but Yeats to whom I told the story made out of it his first version of The Old Pensioner. Meeting with that old man had other

THE LAMENTATION OF THE OLD PENSIONER

19

effects on me. His image, his thought flying from earth to heaven, as all pro­ found sorrows do, the first beautiful speech I heard spoken in life, not merely found in literature, the thought of that unforgotten love under the thorn tree, what beauty might have heard that beautiful voice making poetry in her heart; all entered into consciousness, and I began to watch those about me to see if life had other voices so poignant, speaking with unconscious natural beauty of the adventures of the spirit wandering through time. It is impossible to know either how much Russell had added to his own memories of the meeting over the decades (including how much might have been added to these by WBY’s poem) or how full the account was which he gave verbally to WBY before the poem was composed. However, ‘An Irish Visionary’ shares with Russell’s account the apparently Wordsworthian detail of the thorn tree; and Russell’s account makes the ‘old vagrant’ strongly reminiscent of the homeless wanderers and discharged soldiers of Wordsworth’s poetry. On its first publication, the poem had the Wordsworthian title of ‘The Old Pensioner’. WBY sent his poem to W.E. Henley for The Scots Observer in early Nov. 1890, and it was published in the 15 Nov. number; there are no extant MSS to offer clues as to the date of composition, but WBY had last published a poem in The Scots Observer on 5 Jul. of that year, and much of his energies in the summer had been devoted to work with E.J. Ellis on Blake MS research: so a date of composition in autumn 1890 seems likely. This was perhaps two years after ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ was first composed; but that was, in fact, the other poem which WBY sent to Henley in early Nov., perhaps having revised it very recently for the purpose (it did not appear in The Scots Observer until 13 Dec.). WBY was explicit about ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’s’ origins in a sense of nostalgia felt by him in London for Ireland, and ‘The Old Pensioner’ may share the same mood. WBY and Russell had not met since the beginning of 1888 (WBY left Dublin to live again in London on 26 Jan.), and the incident of the vagrant is evidently from 1888 or earlier. In The Trembling of the Veil (1922), WBY wrote at length of his memories of 3 Upper Ely Place in Dublin, which served as the headquarters of the Theo­ sophical Society and where Russell lived for some years. Towards the end of this account, WBY associates Russell’s anecdote with an apparently unrelated story of a different (and unnamed) Irishman’s nostalgia (CW 3, 202): I heard the other day of a Dublin man recognizing in London an elderly man who had lived in that house in Ely Place in his youth, and of that elderly man, at the sudden memory, bursting into tears. Though I have no such poignant memories, for I was never of it, never anything but a dissatisfied critic, yet cer­ tain vivid moments come back to me as I write. . . .[WBY’s ellipsis] Russell has just come in from a long walk on the Two Rock mountain, very full of his con­ versation with an old religious beggar, who kept repeating, ‘God possesses the heavens, but He covets the earth – He covets the earth’. WBY’s memory must be playing him false here, for 3 Upper Ely Place became a Theo­ sophical commune only in Apr. 1891 (when Russell moved in), and the ‘long walk’ must

20

THE LAMENTATION OF THE OLD PENSIONER

have taken place some time before then. Two Rock (Irish: Binn Dá Charraig), which is in the Dublin mountains, seems a plausible enough location for Russell’s encounter, how­ ever: the Neolithic structures near its summit, the ‘Fairy Castle’ and the Ballyedmonduff Wedge Tomb, make it a likely destination for one of the young mystic’s out-of-town excursions. In a note for CWVP08, WBY had already mentioned this location for ‘words spoken by a man on the Two Rock Mountain to a friend of mine’. WBY’s memory of Russell ‘very full of ’ the encounter with ‘an old religious beggar’ must date from a time when he and Russell could casually meet as friends in the same city, i.e. before Jan. 1888. The poet’s recollection of this, in London in the autumn of 1890, can be understood as a kind of mystical nostalgia, akin to but less explicit than that of ‘The Lake Isle’’s pastoral mode. The Wordsworthian encounter staged in the poem may therefore be read, at least in part, as an exile’s imagining of another exile’s return; and this is a return to find (as the hero Oisin had done) a place that is strange and unwelcoming, and at odds with the protagonist’s mystical vision. Publication history. After its initial publication in The Scots Observer (SO), the poem was included by WBY in CK, and subsequently in P95. It remained in collected editions thereafter, but was revised drastically in 1925 for EPS: this revised text is edited sepa­ rately in the present edition. Copy-text: P24.

I

5

had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With ‘Look at that old fellow there, And who may he be?’ And therefore do I wander now, And the fret lies on me.

Title] The Old Pensioner SO. 5. wander now] wander on SO, CK. 6. the fret lies] the fret is SO. the fret] WBY’s confident assertion that ‘Fret means doom or destiny’ (note in P99 and after) is hard to verify from literary evidence. The word is used in a very similar way by KT in Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘The Only Daughter’, 12: ‘And heavy fret is mine’, and with exactly WBY’s sense by Frederick Manning in his Poems (1910), ‘Helgi of Lithend’, 466: ‘Some fret is on me!’; but both of these instances are almost certainly influenced by WBY, and not

by an already-known ‘Irish’ meaning, for the sense of ‘fret’ meaning ‘doom’ is apparently absent from Irish verse before WBY. While WBY’s source is clearly Russell, precedent from Hiberno-English is distinctly lacking; and at all events, the reported words of the ‘old peasant’ might more naturally be taken to mean ‘I’m very troubled/worried’ than ‘I am under a curse’, which WBY’s ‘doom’ seems to imply. The reported words may accord with OED ‘fret’ n.2, 3: ‘Agitation of mind; a ruffled condition of temper; irritation, passion, vex­ ation; also, querulous or peevish utterance’; connotations of physical affliction are in the

THE LAMENTATION OF THE OLD PENSIONER

10

21

The road-side trees keep murmuring.

Ah, wherefore murmur ye?

As in the old days long gone by,

Green oak and poplar tree?

The well-known faces are all gone

And the fret lies on me.

common phrases also cited by OED ‘fret and fume’ and ‘fret and fever’. It may be that Russell (and subsequently WBY) hears the poetry of Keats rather than a peasant, and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 23: ‘The weariness, the fever, and the fret’. 7. road-side trees] Perhaps cp. William Alling­ ham’s Flower Pieces (1888), ‘Honeysuckle’, 8: ‘Dusty wayfarers ’twixt roadside trees’, and R. Southey, Poetical Works (1838), ‘A Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, ‘Flanders’, 114: ‘And lines of road-side trees, in long perspective lost’. 8. Ah, wherefore] The opening exclamation of Shakespeare’s sonnet 67, ‘Ah, wherefore with infection should he live’ was much copied in nineteenth-century poetry, and is being echoed again here by WBY. 9.] WBY’s line sounds conventional, but it is matched in a poem by Edmund Gosse, On Viol and Flute (1873), ‘Elsinore’, 29–32: ‘And

I  knew that from where I  was standing | In the old days long gone by, | Hamlet had heard at midnight | The ominous spectre cry’. 10. green oak] Green oaks are common in poetry, but perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches and Songs (1889), ‘The Faeries’ Home’, 1: ‘Lying under a green oak’s shadow’. These otherworldly associations of the tree would have been familiar to WBY from W. Scott (Marmion III xxix, 12–15): For elves, if elves there be,

An empty race, by fount or sea,

To dashing waters dance and sing,

Or round the green oak wheel their ring.

tree?] tree! SO. 11.] WBY’s line inevitably recalls the refrain of Charles Lamb’s famous poem in Poetical Works (1836), ‘The Old Familiar Faces’: ‘All, all are gone, the old familiar faces’. 12. the fret lies] the fret is SO.

100

THE MAN WHO DREAMED

OF FAERYLAND

Date of composition. No evidence to give a firm date of composition survives, but it is likely that WBY wrote the poem late in 1890 or at the beginning of 1891. Context and reception. WBY remembered this poem in the context of his relation to the writer and editor W.E. Henley, who offered him a market for Irish (but not national­ ist) writing in the early 1890s. ‘Do you see’, WBY recalled him saying about this poem, ‘what a fine thing one of my boys has written?’ (Mem., 39). The poet was himself proud of his work; he wrote to KT in Mar. 1891, asking her, ‘Did O’Leary show you a poem of mine in National Observer called “A man who dreamed of Fairy land”?’ and informing her that ‘Henley liked it very much and some friends here say it is my best that is to say Arthur Symons and Edward Garnett do’ (CL 1, 248). In coming years, WBY continued to think about the poem, and he used it to explain a lyric from The Land of Heart’s Desire, ‘The wind blows out of the gates of day’, in a letter to D.J. O’Donoghue of 13 Feb. 1894: ‘It means much the same as “the Man who dreamed of Fairy Land” ’, he said, ‘The wind is the vague idealisms and impossible hopes which blow in upon us to the ruin of near and common and substantial ambitions’ (CL 1, 381). Critical reaction to the poem was posi­ tive, and one review of P95 saw how it offered a perspective on fairyland that was some way removed from picturesque escapism (The Bookman Dec.1895): Perhaps the most revealing thing of all in this volume – I am inclined to call it the most remarkable poem – is ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland’. This world was not without its interests to the man. He fell in love. [. . .] He gathered money like a prudent man, but in the midst of his reckonings came a song again, ‘And at that singing he was no more wise’. [. . .] These are not the poems of a man who finds fairyland convenient because it provides pretty and pictur­ esque and romantic circumstance. This interpretation did not come readily to all critics, and especially to those who pre­ ferred to keep the young poet in a sentimentally ‘Celtic’ compartment, as e.g. in the Contemporary Review for 1 Jan. 1894: The Man who Dreamed of Fairyland represents the race whose imagination has the same unique note in the Mabinogion, in the Triads, in the old Irish heroic tales, in the West Highland Marchen, in the fragments of peasant song, Volks­ lieder, love lyrics, which have been recently published in prose translations. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-102

THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF FAERYLAND

23

This charm Mr. Yeats exercises [. . .] in his poems. These occasionally remind one of a Celtic Heine. But apart from this one admirable quality, this fairy touch, one does not feel certain that Mr. Yeats’s Muses have matter enough for long endurance. But the poem’s popularity became proof of endurance, and increasingly critics saw it as a key achievement. It is worth noting that the situation of the poem is from time to time read as one that reflects the position of the poet himself, and the ‘man’ and WBY are sometimes identified. ‘On the whole,’ a review in The Academy pronounced, ‘it is Mr. Yeats’s best poem’, adding ‘And it should be; for he is himself ‘the man that dreamed of fairyland’ (6 May 1899); another critic wrote, in The Academy, 11 May 1901: No more perfect or characteristic poem is there of Mr. Yeats than ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland,’ which relates how life and the things of life become an idle tale to a man because his whole mind was set on Tir-nan-Ogue, the land of perpetual peace [. . .] The man who dreamed of fairyland is Yeats himself. In 1915, Robert Bridges included the poem in his anthology of ‘consolatory poetry’ which ‘people in distress would like to read’ in wartime. In the cast of great figures from world literature, Bridges thought WBY ‘absolutely necessary’, saying that readers would appreciate ‘the extreme beauty and mastery [.  .  .] of the Faeryland man’: ‘I find that very little modern poetry will stand up among these people, but you are an exception and your ‘Sad Shepherd’ and ‘The man who dreamed of Faeryland’ come by their own’ (LTWBY 2, 314). (In the anthology, Bridges placed the poem between two lyrics from The Tempest, ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ and ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’.) Most modern criticism of WBY has read the post-1929 version of this poem, but the best analysis of the earlier version is that by F. Kinahan, who examines the formal structure illuminatingly, and discusses the significance of the various natural things which are important in that structure (Kinahan, 66–69): The vehicles of the several epiphanies that the dreamer experiences are all unat­ tractive, and grow more so as the poem progresses: from dead fish to lugworms to a knot of grass to the worms of the grave. The temptation is to take this to mean that the poem takes a skeptical stance towards the transcendent world by depicting the heralds of that world as repellent [. . .] It may be more to the point to note that the fish, the lugworm, and the grass knot are all symbolic of the state in which the human dreamer finds himself. [. . .] Being part of both earth and ocean, they belong wholly to neither; they are intermediaries, and as intermediaries they remind the dreamer of his own intermediate situation. He is unable to reach the transcendent world; but the persistent call of that world prevents him from finding joy in the things of the earth. [. . .] But the transcen­ dent world intruded; and when the spirits seek a man out for their own, it is to carry him off to limbo or mock him into the grave.

24

THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF FAERYLAND

This ambitious poem was in part an act of imaginative consolidation on WBY’s part, which revisited key themes of his brief epic, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, while concentrat­ ing these in a tightly constructed lyric shape. Each twelve-line stanza (made up of three abba rhyming units, so that each stanza resembles an overgrown octave of a sonnet, to which the answering ‘sestet’, as it were, never comes) begins with the man in a named location, then after four lines introduces a ‘But . . .’ (in the fourth stanza, this becomes ‘Were not . . .’), the sense of which runs to the end of the eleventh line, when a final state­ ment sums up the damage done to the man’s initial hopes in each stanza. The cumulative effect of this syntactic/structural repetition is considerable, and makes the force of the poem’s last line all the greater  – and all the more unsettling. The poem’s revisiting of the imaginative and conceptual worlds of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ is also significant. Instead of a legendary Fenian hero, there is now a ‘man’ simply, and one who moreover spends his life in Co. Sligo: WBY carefully sets down a Sligo place-name at the begin­ ning of each of the twelve-line stanzas. The man’s experiences are, however, parallel to those of Oisin, although they are projected in a much less glamorous way. Oisin never perhaps quite understands his own ultimate disappointment on his wanderings through the world of faery; but the man in WBY’s poem here grasps all too well the degree to which the supernatural exceeds, and mocks, his lot in the mortal world. The early critical suspicion that ‘the man who dreamed of fairyland is Yeats himself ’ is true to the extent that WBY not only allows but draws creative impetus from the coincidence between the locales of the poem and those of his own Irish youth: the protagonist is in some senses the poet, but the poet as he might have been had he never succeeded in writing poetry, and remained instead in thrall to imaginative longing rather than artistic mastery. Text and publication history. The sole surviving early MS for this poem is a three-page ink copy with alterations, in the Berg Collection, NYPL (MS). This is transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 293–294. The poem was first published in The National Observer 7 Feb. 1891 (NO), then in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) (BRC), and CK. It was included in P95 and all subsequent editions of P up to and including P29. WBY revised the text substantially for SP29 (and all future editions): the revised version is edited sepa­ rately in the present edition. Copy-text: P24.

H

e stood among a crowd at Dromahair; His heart hung all upon a silken dress, And he had known at last some tenderness, Before earth made of him her sleepy care;

Title] A Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland NO, BRC; The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland CK. The stanzas are numbered I-IV in NO, BRC, CK.

1. Dromahair] Drumahair NO, BRC, CK. A Co. Leitrim village, in Irish Droim Dha Thiar, ‘The Ridge of the Two Demons’. It is on the River Bonnet, which flows into Lough Gill. WBY was given to pairing the village with

THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF FAERYLAND

5

10

25

But when a man poured fish into a pile, It seemed they raised their little silver heads, And sang how day a Druid twilight sheds Upon a dim, green, well-beloved isle, Where people love beside star-laden seas; How Time can never mar their faery vows Under the woven roofs of quicken boughs: The singing shook him out of his new ease. As he went by the sands of Lisadill, His mind ran all on money cares and fears,

Drumcliff as an especially supernatural site. At the beginning of The Celtic Twilight (1893), in ‘The Teller of Tales’, WBY writing of how Ballysodare was said by ‘a little bright-eyed old man’ to be “the most gentle’ – whereby he meant faery  – place in the whole of Co. Sligo’, adds that ‘Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Dromahair’ (M, 5). In the same book, in the story ‘Kidnappers’, WBY tells of ‘the door of Faeryland’ on the southern side of Ben Bulben: ‘All night the gay rabble sweeps to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless perhaps where, in some more than commonly ‘gentle’ place – Drumcliff or Dromahair, the night-capped heads of ‘faery doctors’ or ‘cow-doctors’ may be thrust from their doors to see what mischief the ‘gentry’ are doing’ (M, 47). Anciently, Drom­ ahair had been the seat of the O’Rourkes of Breiffny (a kingdom that extended into Cavan and Meath), and it was from here that Dervogilla, wife to the King, eloped with Dermot MacMorrough, the King of Lein­ ster, an event that was said to have helped bring about the Norman invasion of Ireland. WBY knew the village – it is about ten miles from Sligo town, and from 1881 was acces­ sible from there by rail – and he mentions it in a letter of 1909, recalling an exploit of his youth: ‘The lake near Dromahair is wonder­ fully beautiful. I  once walked round Lough Gill – starting at night fall, trying to sleep in a wood and getting back to Sligo half dead for

lack of sleep and fatigue at noon the next day’ (to Winefred Letts, InteLex 1121). 5.] cp. John Todhunter, Laurella and Other Poems (1876), ‘Laurella’, 13: ‘their eager eyes were gleaming | O’er shuddering heaps of fish’. This was quoted with approval as ‘a touch from nature’ in a piece on Todhunter in The Irish Monthly Mar. 1889 (148). 11. woven roofs] Perhaps cp. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems (1851), ‘Prometheus Bound’, 830: ‘Perched in wheeled wagons under woven roofs’. quicken] The rowan or mountain ash, Sor­ bus aucuparia. 13. Lissadill] NO, BRC, CK, P95-EPS. WBY changed this to ‘Lissadell’ only with P27. The place-name is from the Irish, Lios an Daill ui Dálaigh (O’Daly’s Court of the Blind), and it covers three coastal townlands on the Co. Sligo peninsula of Magherow, to the west of Ben Bulben. Since the seventeenth century, the Lissadell demesne had belonged to the Gore family; WBY knew of the family in his youth, and knew the imposing neoclassical house built for them in the 1830s. However, the poem’s topography does not involve the demesne or the Big House, and focuses on the sands of the coast. The form ‘Lissadill’ is less usual; however, it does occur in a poem by J.C. Mangan, ‘Lament for the Princes of Tyrone and Tyrconnell (Buried in Rome)’, 25–30:

26 15

20

25

30

THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF FAERYLAND

And he had known at last some prudent years Before they heaped his grave under the hill; But while he passed before a plashy place, A lug-worm with its gray and muddy mouth Sang that somewhere to north or west or south There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race; And how beneath those three times blessed skies A Danaan fruitage makes a shower of moons, And as it falls awakens leafy tunes: And at that singing he was no more wise. He mused beside the well of Scanavin, He mused upon his mockers: without fail His sudden vengeance were a country tale, Now that deep earth had drunk his body in; But one small knot-grass growing by the pool Told where, ah, little, all-unneeded voice!

Oh no! – from Shannon, Boyne, and Suir,

From high Dunluce’s castle-walls,

From Lissadill,

Would flock alike both rich and poor,

One wail would rise from Cruachan’s halls

To Tara’s hill.

WBY’s ‘Lissadill’, like Mangan’s, takes its form probably from the need of a full rhyme with ‘hill’. By 1927, the poet was willing to give him­ self a little more licence in matters of rhyme and used the commoner form of the name. 16. heaped] piled del. heaped MS. 17 a plashy place] For ‘plashy’, see OED adj. 1., ‘Abounding in or characterized by shal­ low pools or puddles; marshy, swampy, boggy; (hence also) wet, slimy.’ Perhaps cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam VI xii 5–6: ‘a plashy fen | Under the feet’ and T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘Ebba and her Sisters’, 4: ‘The path that leads unto the plashy sands’. 18. lug-worm] OED 4, ‘A large marine worm (Arenicola marina) which burrows in the sands of the British coast and is much used for bait’.

19.] F. Kinahan points out how WBY sends the poem’s protagonist to points of the compass in his search: ‘Lissadell in the west, Droma­ hair in the east, Toberscanavan in the south, and Lugnagall in the dead cold of the north’ (Kinahan, 66). west] east MS, NO, BRC, CK. 21. blessed] Though not marked as such, the word here is disyllabic. 25. the well of Scanavin] The village of Tub­ berscanavin is a mile south of Collooney in Co. Sligo. The name means the well of Sceanmhan, ‘the place of fine shingle’. WBY used the name again, in the first published version of the story ‘Red Hanrahan’s Curse’ (‘The Curse of O’Sullivan the Red upon Old Age’, The National Observer 29 Sept. 1894): ‘And then old Shemus Cullinan, cooper of Scanavin, | Because he holds two crutches in his fingers long and thin’ (See notes to ‘The Poet, Owen Hanrahan’). 26. mockers: without] mockers. Without NO, BRC, CK. 29. pool] rim MS, NO, BRC, CK. 30. where] how del. where MS.

THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF FAERYLAND

35

40

45

27

Old Silence bids a lonely folk rejoice,

And chaplet their calm brows with leafage cool;

And how, when fades the sea-strewn rose of day,

A gentle feeling wraps them like a fleece,

And all their trouble dies into its peace: The tale drove his fine angry mood away. He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;

And might have known at last unhaunted sleep

Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

Now that old earth had taken man and all: Were not the worms that spired about his bones A-telling with their low and reedy cry Of how God leans His hands out of the sky, To bless that isle with honey in His tones; That none may feel the power of squall and wave, And no one any leaf-crowned dancer miss Until He burn up Nature with a kiss: The man has found no comfort in the grave.

32. chaplet] WBY seems to be unique in employing this word as a verb; the noun is ‘A wreath for the head, usually a garland of flow­ ers or leaves, also of gold, precious stones, etc.; a circlet, coronal’ (OED 1a.) cool] dim MS, NO, BRC, CK. 37. Lugnagall] This is a townland at the foot of Copes Mountain, and near Glencar Lough, in Co. Sligo. WBY understood the Irish to mean ‘steep place of the strangers’ and referred to the site in his 1887 poem ‘The Protestants’ Leap’; in The Gael, where that poem was pub­ lished, a note probably by WBY said: ‘Lug­ na-Gall is a very grey cliff overlooking that Glencar lake, where Dermot and Grania had once a crannóg (whereof the remnants were found some years back)’. 41. spired] This is OED spire v. 3 intrans. ‘To curl, twist, or wind spirally; to make a

spiral curve; esp. to mount or soar with spi­ ral movement’. It is unusual, however, in that most uses of the verb are in connection with upwards movement in the air, and not under­ ground spirallings; see e.g. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘Lines Written in Switzerland’, 36–37: ‘scared eagles | Spire to the clouds’. 42. low and reedy] The two adjectives here seem to be at odds with one another, for ‘reedy’ is OED 5a., ‘Of a tone: high, thin, penetrating; of a voice, sound, or instrument: having such a tone’. WBY was eventually to remove ‘low’ in the 1929 revision. 46. no one] never del. no one MS. 47.] The idea of God burning nature with a kiss prefigures the 1895 poem, ‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’, 7: ‘until God burn Time’. 48. found] got del. found MS. the] his del. the MS.

101

THE PATHWAY

Date of composition. The two MS versions of the poem (see MS materials) carry dates after their final line: in MS1, this is ‘Dublin | July 5th 1891’; in MS2, ‘[July del.] August 5th | 1891’. The ‘July’ of MS1 is a mistake, corrected in MS2; for WBY was in London, not Dublin, on 5 Jul. 1891. Context. It seems that WBY wrote this poem on the day after his visit to Howth with MG (a visit which also occasioned his poem ‘The White Birds’, probably written within a day or two of this piece (see notes)). Where ‘The White Birds’ is a poem full of the urge to break free from present circumstances into an unrestricted (and partly super­ natural) realm of mutual love, ‘The Pathway’ is a more concentrated (and even more fanciful) meditation on the lover’s subjection to the beloved: it is also in itself an offer of this subjection. As such, it is formally distinct from the long lines and triple rhythms of ‘The White Birds’, its tetrameters and two abab quatrains culminating in a plea to the beloved to ‘Tread gently’ on the ‘pathway’ which the poet/suitor’s life has now figu­ ratively become. The metaphor is not entirely worked through, and the poem perhaps never really recovers balance from its initial ‘were I God’ gambit, or the staff-like ‘sudden hurry’ of its archangels; but the governing idea – that the speaker wants to become the beloved’s road through (or out of?) the world – is worth attention. It is not obvious that a pathway is something wholly passive in regard to questions of direction: it is trodden upon, but it also leads somewhere. By the start of 1898, when the metaphor is trans­ formed in the reworking of this poem as ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, the lover’s submissiveness is clearly all cost and no return (so to speak), since ‘my dreams’ are to be trodden over while the beloved pursues a pathway beyond the speaker’s influence or control. MS materials. This poem survives only in MS, in the two notebooks containing poems for MG from summer and autumn 1891. A MS book, which he entitled The Flame of the Spirit, containing seven poems all linked to his romantic/mystical courtship, was pre­ sented by the poet to MG by WBY on 20 Oct. 1891. In this, ‘The Pathway’ is the sixth in the series of seven poems (MS1); in another notebook intended for MG, The Rosy Cross. Lyrics, it is the fourth of six poems (MS2: the notebook is NLI 30318). The poem was first published in 1948, in R. Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, where a version tran­ scribed from MS1 is given. Transcriptions of MS1 and MS2 are in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 485–486. Copy-text. MS2. There are no verbal changes between MS1 and MS2, but the punc­ tuation of MS2 (still incomplete) is clearer than that of MS1; the poem in MS2 also has DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-103

THE PATHWAY

29

indentation of lines to bring it to a closer approximation of a poem in print; it is, as well, the copy of this poem to which WBY retained personal access after 1891.

A

5

rchangels were I God should go Unhook the stars out of the sky And in a sudden hurry fly And spread them in a shining row – A shining pathway as were meet. I had alone my life for thee; Tread gently, tread most tenderly, My life is under thy sad feet.

Title: VI | Your Pathway MS1. 1. Archangels . . . should go] Possibly cp. a hymn by John and Charles Wesley, on the text Job xi.7: ‘canst thou by searching find out God?, Poetical Works (1868), 1–8: Shall foolish, weak, short-sighted man

Beyond archangels go,

The great almighty God explain,

Or to perfection know?

His attributes divinely soar

Above the creatures’ sight,

And prostrate seraphim adore

The glorious Infinite.

2. Unhook] WBY’s verb here is arrestingly unusual. While it may develop from the more conventional notion of the fixed stars (for what is fixed can be unfixed), it still delivers a deeply odd visual impression of the stars being placed in the sky like pictures hung on a wall. It is possible that WBY recalls Pl.9 of W. Blake’s series of emblems, The Gates

of Paradise (1793)/ For the Sexes (1818), in which, against a night sky with seven stars, a figure leans a long ladder against the crescent moon, and begins to climb: the motto for the image is ‘I want! I want!’ 3. a sudden hurry] Possibly cp. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘The Bride’s Tragedy’ III iii 194–196: ‘ye have waked | A  sudden hurry round my heart, | I’ll think it joy’. 5. a shining pathway] Probably by coincidence, WBY echoes here a poem by Ada Cam­ bridge, The Manor House (1875), ‘The Kind Word’, 103–107: And saw the stream

Of tender, mellow light make, as it were,

A shining pathway in the misty air,

Whither soft footsteps trod

Out of the world into the courts of God.

8 thy sad feet] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘A Tree Group’, 20–22: ‘like a mild, aged mother, | Whose children die around her, or are dead, | Silent at her sad feet’.

102

THE WHITE BIRDS

Date and circumstances of composition. Probably composed 5–7 Aug. 1891. The poem takes its occasion from events of 4 Aug. 1891, when WBY and MG went walking on the cliff path at Howth. After receiving a letter from MG regarding her dream of a past life, in which she and WBY had been a brother and sister who were sold together into slavery, the poet had returned to Dublin from a stay in Co. Down with his friend Charles John­ ston, and on 3 Aug. at the Nassau Hotel promptly proposed marriage. MG immediately refused, but the pair made a trip together to Howth the following day. WBY’s account of this, written in 1916, tempers romance with reality (Mem., 46): We spent the next day [after his proposal] upon the cliff paths at Howth and dined at a little cottage near the Baily Lighthouse, where her old nurse lived, and I overheard the old nurse asking if we were engaged to be married. At day’s end I found I had spent ten shillings, which seemed to me a very great sum. Much later, MG told A.N. Jeffares something of the day (Commentary, 29): Madame MacBride (to whom, as Maud Gonne, the poem was written) told the present author that she and Yeats had been walking on the cliffs at Howth one afternoon (the day after Yeats had first proposed to her and been rejected) and were resting when two seagulls flew over their heads and on out to sea. She had said that if she was to have the choice of being any bird she would choose to be a seagull above all, a commonplace remark, but ‘in three days he sent me the poem with its gentle theme, ‘I would that we were my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea’. Whether or not this was a ‘commonplace remark’, MG’s memory was of a somewhat prosaic kind of bird, given that the variety of seabirds (many of them white) on Dublin Bay at Howth is a wide one. MG’s recollection implies that the poem was written almost immediately after the couple’s day out. WBY copied into his The Flame of the Spirit note­ book on 5 Aug. a version of ‘The Pathway’, which could well have been composed that day; while MG, who was still in Dublin, seems to have received ‘The White Birds’ on or just after 7 Aug. Taking MG’s word for it, the poem can therefore be given a date of com­ position of between 5 and 7 Aug. 1891. WBY did not copy the poem into either of the two MG-related notebooks he prepared in 1891: it is not in The Flame of the Spirit, nor DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-104

THE WHITE BIRDS

31

does it appear in the sequence in The Rosy Cross. Lyrics. A longer poem from this time, with the same metrical form and also addressed to MG, and which is found in The Flame of the Spirit, is ‘A Dream of Other Lives’. Poetic form. The poem’s form, of stanzas with lines of six stresses that follow a pre­ dominantly anapaestic rhythm, recalls that of Part III of WBY’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, with the main difference being that it rhymes aabb rather than abab. Behind both pieces of verse is the metrical influence of Tennyson’s ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ (whose six-stress anapaestic lines are, like this poem’s, rhymed in couplets). In his acute analysis of ‘The White Birds’ and its metre, M. Campbell writes (180–181): The rhythmic effect is a simple mimetic one, a verse alternately dipping and soaring and bobbing about like the gulls Maud Gonne dreamt she had become. [. . .] The poem is [. . .] aware of both the spinning earth and of being spun by it, spun on it. [. . .] The poem travels from evening star to morning dew, timebound for two stanzas. Indeed, this is the time-binding of sorrow and sadness, the rhythm of being on this earth and being haunted by numberless islands, the places that are not this one. [. . .] It [the poem] sustains a balancing act, on one hand between a willed recreation of the textured layering of ballad and on the other a desire for transmigration into a timeless existence on the ‘foam of the sea’. Critical reception. Although this poem is mentioned approvingly by a number of early reviewers and writers, criticism of WBY has in general emphasized its limitations. R. Ell­ mann (Identity, 70–71) calls it ‘obviously not one of Yeats’s best poems’ because ‘relying on pictorial beauty to justify imprecise symbols’. For H. Bloom, while the poem is ‘vital­ ized by a violence from within, an impatience with all natural limitation’, its ‘emblems are too much Shelley’s, too little Yeats’s’, and its ‘aspirations are represented most inad­ equately by its vision of white birds sustained by sea foam’, so that WBY’s ‘recognition of his need to go beyond natural images of more-than-natural desire is hardly conveyed here by his art’ (Bloom, 113). An assumption that the poem’s ‘simple, almost banal imag­ ery’ is merely ‘expressed in lingering, wavering rhythms full of repetition and return, vague exclamations and long dying cadences’ (S. Smith, W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduc­ tion (1990), 31–2) is fundamentally (and rightly) challenged by formally and historically informed analyses such as Campbell’s (see Poetic form). Text and publication history. No MS material survives for this poem, but a page proof of CK with WBY’s corrections is in the Beinecke Library, Yale. The poem was first pub­ lished in The National Observer, 12 Dec. 1891 (NO), and was then included in CK as the sixth poem in the book (between ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ and ‘Father Gilligan’). It next appeared in P95 and was retained by WBY in all collected editions thereafter.

32

THE WHITE BIRDS

Copy-text: P49.

I

would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;

Title] In a purely biographical context (see ear­ lier), WBY’s ‘White Birds’ are to be identified as gulls in Dublin Bay. It is possible, though, that the poet intends some degree of mythic reso­ nance: Aengus Og, described by WBY in the notes to P95 as ‘The god of youth, beauty, and poetry’ who ‘reigned in Tir-nan-Oge, the coun­ try of the young’ was associated by the poet with love in his work of the 1890s, and he often makes his appearances accompanied by birds. In AG’s Gods and Fighting Men (1904), Aengus held in his hand ‘a silver harp with strings of red gold, and the sound of its strings was sweeter than all music under the sky; and over the harp were two birds that seemed to be playing on it. [. . .] The birds, now, that used to be with Angus were four of his kisses that turned into birds and that used to be coming about the young men of Ireland, and crying after them’ (82). Aengus (with his accompanying birds) is important in The Shad­ owy Waters, on which WBY was working spo­ radically for much of the 1890s: there Forgael, speaking of his beloved Dectora, says that ‘she grows young | As the ageless birds of Aengus, or the birds | The white fool makes at morning out of foam’; a few lines later, the adjective ‘white’ attaches itself to the ‘foam’. The effect is to recol­ lect the poem entitled ‘The White Birds’, rather than to reveal that title’s first meaning; but it is possible that WBY did already have Aengus and his birds in mind in 1891. WBY’s note: The birds of fairyland are said to be white as snow. The Danaan Islands are the islands of the fairies. NO. The birds of fairyland are white as snow. The ‘Da­ naan Shore’ is, of course, Tier-nan-oge, or fairyland CK. The birds of faeryland are said to be white as snow P95. I have read

somewhere that the birds of fairyland are said to be white as snow P99, P01. 1. I would that] O would that NO. white birds on the foam of the sea] Cp. Aubrey de Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Striving of Saint Patrick on Mount Cruachan’, 333–339: Then the Saint Upraised his head; and lo! in snowy sheen Cresting high rock, and ridge, and airy peak, Innumerable the Sons of God all round Vested the invisible mountain with white light, As when the foam-white birds of ocean throng Sea-rock so close that none that rock may see. ‘Foam of the sea’ recalls three uses of the phrase by A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), two of them also in anapaestic rhythm: ‘A Song in Time of Order’, 45–46: ‘Let the wind shake our flag like a feather, | Like the plumes of the foam of the sea!’, ‘Dolores’, 142: ‘More salt than the foam of the sea’, and (with the addition of ‘flame’) ‘Anactoria’, 160: ‘Through flamelike foam of the sea’. A fainter echo may also be present, of E.B. Barrett, The Seraphim (1838), ‘The Sea-Mew’, 6–10: Familiar with the waves and free

As if their own white foam were he,

His heart upon the heart of ocean

Lay learning all its mystic motion,

And throbbing to the throbbing sea.

2.] For we tire of the flame of the meteor before it can pass by and flee NO. the flame of the meteor] WBY may be recall­ ing here his own ‘Ephemera’ from WO and its ‘faint meteors in the gloom’ (14). The meteor-lit situation of William Allingham’s

THE WHITE BIRDS

33

And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die. 5

A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose;

‘The Shooting Star’ (1877) continues to be relevant here (see note to ‘Ephemera’). fade and flee] WBY’s revision here produces an echo of Shelley, Posthumous Poems (1828), ‘That time is dead for ever, child’; although the poem relates to the death of Shelley’s son William, its setting and temper are not alto­ gether alien to WBY’s purpose: That time is dead for ever, child!

Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!

We look on the past

And stare aghast

At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,

Of hopes which thou and I beguiled

To death on life’s dark river.

The stream we gazed on then rolled by;

Its waves are unreturning;

But we yet stand

In a lone land,

Like tombs to mark the memory

Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee

In the light of life’s dim morning.

3. the blue star of twilight] Presumably Venus, the morning star. Possibly cp. Mary Robin­ son, Poetical Works (1806), ‘Anacreontic: To Cupid’, 65–66: ‘See the star of twilight peep | O’er yon mountain’s dusky steep’. hung low on the rim of the sky] WBY echoes (probably unwittingly) the opening of a poem by the Chartist poet Ernest Charles Jones (1819–1868), Corayda (1860), ‘The Parting’, 1: ‘The moon hung low on the rim of the mist’. 4. that may not die] that never may die NO. 5.] WBY enters this line in the page proofs of CK. It replaces: ‘We tire of the light of the lily, and tire of the breath of the rose’. dew-dabbled] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), I 682–683: ‘the poppies hung | Dew-dabbled on their stalks’.

the lily and rose] Jeffares points out that ‘the lily is a masculine symbol, the rose feminine’ (Commentary, 32), though in medieval and post-medieval art both flowers have mainly feminine associations (the lily being associ­ ated with sexual purity, and the red rose with martyrdom and charity; both often carry specifically Marian associations). One con­ text in which lily and rose bore gendered meanings was that of superstitions concern­ ing the prediction of the sex of an unborn child: an expectant mother was shown a lily and a rose and if she chose the lily would she bear a boy; if a rose, a girl (this European superstition is attested in England as early as the Anglo-Saxon period). WBY does deploy masculine and feminine associations in The Shadowy Waters (1900), where Forgael ‘has a silver lily embroidered over his breast’ and Dectora ‘has a rose embroidered over her breast’. The conjunction of these two flowers in literature originates in The Song of Solo­ mon 2.1–2: ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’. This bib­ lical verse formed part of the initiation cer­ emony for the second, ‘Zelator’ grade (1 = 10) in the GD: MG was not to be initiated into the cult until Nov. More specifically poetic uses of this combination of blooms would also have been known to WBY, in particular their frequent occurrences (not without trou­ bling psycho-sexual implications) in stories of doomed romantic obsession, from Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, 9–12, ‘I see a lily on thy brow, | With anguish moist and fever dew; | And on thy cheek a fading rose | Fast withereth too’ and Tennyson’s Maud (1855) – e.g. II v 310–312: ‘But I know where a garden grows, | Fairer than ought in the world beside, | All made up of the lily and rose’. In his play The Countess Kathleen (1892), dedicated to

34

THE WHITE BIRDS

Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes, Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew: For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you! 10

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,

Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;

Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,

Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

MG, WBY uses both rose and lily in relation to the heroine, who at the end has died and triumphantly foiled the demons to whom she had sold her soul: an angelic spirit calls her ‘the red rose by the seat of God’, and a peasant declares ‘O, she was the white lily of the world’ (CK, pp. 87–88). In his abandoned novel The Speckled Bird, WBY has a charac­ ter remark ‘and, as the song says, the rose and the lily were fighting one another in her cheeks’ (‘final’ version of 1902; in 1900 ver­ sion ‘as the old song says, the rose and the lily was fighting one another in her cheek’ (SB, 33, 145)). The poet may have had his infor­ mation on this from Douglas Hyde; in Hyde’s Beside the Fire (1900), ‘The rose and the lily were fighting together in her face’ is cited as ‘a very common expression of the Irish bards’ (189). WBY returned to the conjunction of flowers in the final line of ‘The Travail of Pas­ sion’ (first publ. Jan. 1896): ‘Lilies of deathpale hope, roses of passionate dream’. 7. In the CK proof, WBY inserts this line, to replace: ‘Or the flame of the blue star that lin­ gers, hung close by the foam of the sea:’ 9. Danaan shore] WBY’s early notes (see above) direct the reader to the fairy realm

of the Tuatha De Danaan, and to the land of the young (Tir na nOg). In so doing, the poet sends readers back to his own ‘The Wander­ ings of Oisin’, which first employs ‘Danaan’ as an adjective (see note on ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), II, 46). 10. Where Time would surely forget us] Where surely Time would forget us NO. Sorrow] change corr. to sorrow CK proof. 11. fret of the flames] Another use of ‘fret’ was in WBY’s mind at this time, in the material that first appeared in his ‘Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’ (first publ. Nov. 1890) as ‘The fret is on me’; the same reported use of ‘fret’ occurs in the related prose piece ‘An Irish Visionary’ (first publ. Oct. 1891): see notes to ‘The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’. Here, however, WBY is plainly using ‘fret’ in another sense, though one that is not alto­ gether straightforward. One meaning may be that of OED n.2: ‘A gnawing or wearing away, erosion’. (In the US edn. of EPS (1925), then in P27 and P29, ‘fret’ is replaced by ‘free’: this is likely to be a repeated misprint rather than a revision.) 12. Were we only] If we were corr. to Were we only CK proof.

103

TO A SISTER OF THE

CROSS AND THE ROSE

Date of composition. Probably composed early Aug. 1891. In the two MSS of this lyric, WBY appends the date ‘August | 1891’ (along with the location ‘Dublin’ in The Flame of the Spirit). WBY saw a good deal of MG in that month: on 3 Aug., directly on arriving in Dublin from his visit to Charles Johnston in Co. Down, he met with Maud and proposed marriage. His proposal was unsuccessful. Text and circumstances of composition. This poem is composed to mark MG’s forth­ coming status as an initiate in the GD, under the sponsorship of WBY. MG’s initia­ tion took place on 2 Nov. 1891, when she became Soror Per Ignem ad Lucem (Sister Through Fire to the Light) in the London Isis-Urania Temple. In the summer of 1891, WBY encouraged MG to join this mystical order, an encouragement that could not be wholly dissociated from the progress of his own courtship. The Flame of the Spirit (FOS), containing seven poems all linked to his romantic/mystical suit, was presented to MG by WBY on 20 Oct. 1891. In this, the poem occupies the first place – though properly without its later title, which would only become applicable once MG had taken up her GD identity. WBY compiled another MS  book, this time with a sequence of poems, as The Rosy Cross. Lyrics (RC) later in Nov. 1891 (the final poem here dated Nov. 22). This is again directed towards MG, though it remained in WBY’s possession. In this arrangement, the poem is the third of the sequence. The form of the poem, that of two quatrains run together, is also that of ‘The Pathway’, another piece included in both of the MS sequences. WBY was not finished with ‘To a Sister . . .’, rewriting it very sub­ stantially in 1893: the revised poem is edited separately in the present edition as ‘White Daughter of the Iron Time’. A full discussion of the poem is given by G. Bornstein and W. Gould, “To a Sister of the Cross and the Rose’: An Unpublished Early Poem’, YA 7 (1990), 179–183. Textual history. Both the FOS MS and the RC MS are transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 484.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-105

36

TO A SISTER OF THE CROSS AND THE ROSE

Copy-text. The Rosy Cross. Lyrics (NLI 30318).

N 5

o daughter of the Iron Times, The Holy Future summons you; Its voice is in the falling dew, In quiet starlight, in these rhymes, In this sad heart consuming slow: Cast all good common hopes away, For I have seen the enchanted day And heard the morning bugles blow.

Title] [No title] FOS. 1. the Iron Times] The allusion is partly to the ancient concept (first in Hesiod) of an age of iron, in succession to ages of gold and silver; partly, too, WBY intends to convey a sense of modern, industrial society. In the verse here, WBY may be remembering W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), Lay of the Last Minstrel, in the Prologue to which ‘the last of all the bards’ lives when ‘Old times were changed, old manners gone’ (19), and ‘The bigots of the iron time | Had called his harmless art a crime’ (21–22).

5. this sad heart] The phrase is by no means uncommon in poetry, but WBY may be recalling William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘To the Cicada’, 15–17: ‘And I may listen, and forget | All the thorns, the doubts and fears | Love in this sad heart hath set’, and KT, Sham­ rocks (1887), ‘A Nested Bird’, 79–80: ‘And he, perchance, with pity fair, | Would mark where this sad heart lay bare’. 7. For I] Mine eyes del. For I RC. WBY wisely here prevents his mystical poem from taking a sharp turn towards ‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic’.

104

A FAERY SONG

Date of composition. The poem was finished at the end of Aug. or beginning of Sept. 1891 (see Text and publication history), but it is likely that it was begun some time before this. WBY writes a three-stanza early version of the poem in at the end of his abandoned narrative poem ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’, which concerns ‘the outlaw Michael Dwyer and his bride’ (as the early versions of this poem’s note/subtitle put it): see headnote to ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’ for the difficulties of assigning a date of composition to that poem; but it is likely to be from 1889, if not earlier. Text and publication history. The first surviving MS of this poem is at the end of the copy of ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’ in NLI 30456. Here, the poem is just three stanzas long, ending as the later versions do, but missing the first stanza (though this is, of course, identical with the final one). The poem is written with a different pen and is therefore added later; but the connection to ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’ is clear, especially since a title is given as ‘The good people of the mountains sing’. Another MS, in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, is the fair copy of the poem as sent to W.E. Henley by WBY from Dublin on 4 Sept. 1891. Both MSS are transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 290: there are no significant verbal differences from the text as first published in the National Observer (NO) on 12 Sept. 1891. In 1892, the poem was included in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (BRC), next in CK, then in P95 and all subsequent collected editions. The text remained stable, though Michael Dwyer and his bride were replaced in the note/subtitle by Diarmuid and Grania in 1901. Context and interpretation. Whether the pair of lovers are Michael Dwyer and his bride or Diarmuid and Grania, the poem’s nature was always that of a song sung by the fairies over a mortal couple on the run. As a lyric, the poem seems insubstantial; but the poem’s slightness is perhaps its point. The fairies’ song is a song made entirely of repeti­ tions: its verbal music is unmodulating and unchanging. The question of its efficacy does not arise and cannot emerge in its limited, repetitive chant. However, WBY’s note/sub­ title provides another perspective – for Diarmuid and Grania (like Dwyer and his bride before them) are doomed to discovery and disaster. In its small way, the poem establishes again the distance between the fairy world and that of life; this time, a distance that is also one between repetitive poetic rhythm and rhyme and the narrative scene within which it is placed.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-106

38

A FAERY SONG

Copy-text: P49. Sung by the people of faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech.

W

e who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, If all were told: 5

10

15

Give to these children, new from the world, Silence and love; And the long dew-dropping hours of the night, And the stars above: Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then: Us who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, If all were told.

Note/subtitle. Sung by ‘the Good People’ over the outlaw Michael Dwyer and his bride, who had escaped into the mountains NO, BRC, CK; Sung by the faeries over the outlaw Michael Dwyer and his bride, who had escaped into the mountains P95, P99, Poems (Cuala Press, 1935); Sung by the people of faery over Diar­ muid and Grania, who lay in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech P01-SP29. Diarmuid and Grania] In the story of the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, who had eloped and were hunted down by elderly Fionn Mac Cumhaill to whom Grainne had

been engaged, Diarmuid is eventually gored to death by a boar, and allowed to die by Fionn. 7.] ‘Dew-dropping’ is very common, and almost a cliché, in nineteenth-century verse; but WBY is here returning to the dropping dews of his own work (where in fact the tired epithet ‘dew-dropping’ is avoided as a phrase), especially perhaps the ‘peace comes dropping slow’ of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (5). 12.] Tell it us then: NO, BRC, CK, P95.

105

A SALUTATION

MS materials and date of composition. These lines were composed on 1 Sept. 1891. The poem is included in both of the MS volumes which WBY prepared in the late summer and autumn of 1891, The Flame of the Spirit (MS1) and NLI 30318, The Rosy Cross. Lyrics (MS2). In each, it is the second poem, and carries the date ‘Sept. 1st’; this date is also entered by WBY in the copy of John Sherman and Dhoya which he presented to MG, and where the eight lines are inscribed as a dedication (now held in University of Texas at Austin): it is probably right to suppose, then, that this was indeed the date of composition. WBY returned to the poem in late 1895, beginning the work of revision that would result in ‘Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty’ in WATR. The poem in its earlier version was first printed (from MS1) in R. Ellmann, Man and the Masks, 155. Copy-text: MS2.

W

5

e poets labour all our days

To make a little beauty be,

But vanquished by a woman’s gaze

And the unlabouring stars are we;

So I, most lovely child of Eire,

Title] Dedication of ‘John Sherman and Dhoya’ MS1. WBY’s book of fiction, John Sherman and Dhoya was published (as the work of ‘Gan­ conagh’) on Nov. 6, 1891. If indeed there was some thought of making this poem its dedica­ tion, it seems to have been set aside by the time of The Rosy Cross. Lyrics (the two latest poems in which are from that month). More likely, the MS1 title simply records the function that had been served by these lines when WBY entered

them by hand in the copy of John Sherman and Dhoya which he presented to MG. 4. unlabouring] The word is an uncommon one, but possibly compare Wiliam Cowper, The Odyssey of Homer (1797) XXI, 487–488: ‘As when in harp and song adept, a bard | Unlabouring strains the chord to a new lyre’. 5. Eire] Ir MS1. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-107

40

A SALUTATION

Rising from labour bow the knee With equal reverence to the fire Of the unlabouring stars and thee.

6. bow the knee] OED bow v. 9.c: ‘to bend [the knee] in adoration or reverence’. 7. equal reverence] Perhaps cp. John Banim, The Celt’s Paradise (1821), Third Duan, 284–286: ‘And equal reverence to the bard | All creatures

gave – and his reward | Was equal glory’. WBY mentions Banim’s poem in 1891 in his intro­ duction to Representative Irish Tales; it may have been an influence on ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, where there are some possible echoes.

106

THE ROSE OF BAT TLE

Date of composition. The poem was probably composed in summer or autumn 1891. There is no firm evidence for this, other than the fact that it was in the MS of CK as sent to Unwin on 25 Nov. 1891. Since the poem strikes a note of romantic defeat (albeit one which it combines with other notes), it is tempting to speculate that its composition fol­ lowed from the failure of WBY’s proposal of marriage to MG on 3 Aug. 1891. Symbolism: ‘rose’ and ‘battle’. In the context of WBY’s other rose-centred poems of the time, this is the least dependent on the erotic connotations of the symbol, which had been sharpened by WBY’s own romantic fixation on MG. Instead of a beloved, the rose here seems to be at the nexus of magical, mystical, and perhaps nationalist struggles; in this respect, though, there is still a strong (and, for WBY, personally trying) connec­ tion with MG’s activities and their impact around 1891. In the context of MG’s political operations and rhetoric, ‘Danger no refuge holds, and war no peace | For him who hears love sing’ (9–10) has a clear personal applicability for WBY. However, the rose symbol in this poem comes closer than a number of its other deployments in these poems to fulfilling the function of a symbol of Irish nationhood which it had carried in traditional nationalist discourse (see note to ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’). The opening line stakes out a universalism for the symbol which is in some ways misleading, for it is the ‘battle’ of the poem’s title which leads the rose symbol towards a more specific, and perhaps Irish, realm of significance. ‘Battles never done’ (7) and ‘God’s battles’ (20) seem to be identified here; this may indicate no more than the vague notion that the seemingly endless series of struggles that constitute an Irish nationalist view of history are also, at some level, struggles with a divine justification and meaning. At the time of this poem’s likely composition, WBY was himself heavily involved in numerous aspects of a cultural campaign in the service of Irish nationalism, and he was capable of presenting this in public as a struggle marked by both longevity and long-standing defeats. In Sept. 1891, he gave an address at the formation of the Young Ireland League in which he told his audience (as reported in the Freeman’s Journal, 18 Sept. 1891): The ideal which they put before them was to see that there grew up in this nation a heroic people; to never do anything that should make these people feel that their manhood had been lowered; to never lower the national flag of Ire­ land to England [. . .] They were fighting an arduous fight. They had already had seven centuries of it, and they did not know how much more of it was before them. They had need, therefore, of all their forces, of all their instincts. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-108

42

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

Nevertheless, it is also clear that in the poem these battles are to be lost as much as won, and that the participants are to be ‘defeated in His wars’ (33). Here, the original title in CK is especially pertinent, since it links defeat with the conscious acceptance of defeat’s likelihood, invoking both Matthew Arnold (the cultural friend to Celticism who was also, in the view of Yeats and others, in a political sense its enemy) and the Scottishappropriated Ossian of Macpherson. The Rose of Battle, then, is also a rose of lost causes, at least on the level of contemporary political meaning. However, other levels also come into play, and here the mystic and magical connota­ tions of the symbol come to the fore. The poem’s speaking voice, which is the voice that invokes the rose, spends much of its time addressing ‘you’, the ‘bands’ (or originally ‘throngs’) who are urged not to board the waiting ships, but to ‘Turn if you may’ from them. If the ships are interpreted as vessels on their way to (or even from) open warfare, the course being urged here is towards something more metaphysical, where the task of waging ‘God’s battles’ is undertaken with a cast marked by defeat: ‘The sad, the lonely, the insatiable’ (21). Inevitably, WBY conceives of this in the light of his knowledge of magical discipline, and especially through the GD. A  case has been made (Kinahan, 177–180) for the relevance to this poem of certain formulations contained in GD rituals, claiming that WBY is here writing ‘a magical text that is merely masquerading as a poem of exile’. WBY’s remarks from 1922 are adduced (CW 3, 205): My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by that method [MacGregor] Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I  plunged without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are warned against in those oracles which antiquity has attributed to Zoro­ aster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet: ‘Stoop not down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images.’ Whether the phrases quoted by WBY here ‘describe ‘The Rose of Battle’ precisely’ (Kina­ han, 177) must be open to some doubt; but they do reflect some of the GD phraseol­ ogy which WBY would have known, and which may indeed contribute to the poem. In the ceremony for admission to the Practicus grade of the GD’s Outer Order, lines from the (supposedly) Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster are used as a warning to the adept about the inevitability of a period of doubt and uncertainty, a phase of darkness in which ‘no longer are visible to thee the Vault of the Heavens, and the Mass of the Earth; when to Thee, the Stars have lost their light and the Lamp of the Moon is veiled’. This may influence lines 17–18, 22 and 34 of the poem, as well as having an effect more gener­ ally on WBY’s design. Kinahan’s contention that ‘this most obscure of the Rose lyrics is Yeats’s attempt to describe the esoteric equivalent of the dark night of the soul’ may be more generally relevant than it is specifically applicable: certainly, the GD provides the poem with one of its contexts, and the order was sufficiently Victorian to make sure that even a quasi-religion should not go without some provision for doubts. Nevertheless, the ‘Battle’ of the title (in both forms of the title, in fact) is more than an inwardly facing

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

43

mystical conflict; furthermore, WBY’s imagery, and the organization of his poem, may not be altogether intentionally a ‘labyrinth’. The poet’s statement in 1925 that ‘The Rose differs from the Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spenser in that I have imagined it as suffering with man and not as some­ thing pursued and seen from afar’ (first printed in CP33) may to some extent remember the situation of this rose poem in particular. In 29–30, the poem is explicit in its asser­ tion that ‘Beauty [. . .] Made you [the Rose] of us’; and while the voice that addresses a numerous band in 7–24 is that of the first-person lyric and not the rose, the intimate link between symbol and what WBY calls ‘us’ is important throughout. A distinction, though one which the poem does not perhaps render altogether clearly, occurs in the address of 7–24: those who are urged to ‘turn [. . .] from battles never done’ because they are successfully hearing ‘love sing’ ‘beside her clean-swept hearth’; and those ‘for whom no love hath made | A woven silence’, who are to be recruited into the ‘battle’. The Rose presides over both courses of action, or modes of existence; and WBY himself is not consistently to be placed in either category: though wishing to be a successful lover, he is drawn by circumstance amongst ‘The sad, the lonely, the insatiable’ (21) for whom there is ‘no love’. A degree of biographical speculation is possible, though it may add little critically to an understanding of the poem: WBY in 1891 was becoming more aware of the tensions between his romantic attachment to MG, in which he hoped for some kind of resolution through reciprocation and possibly marriage, and the demands of Irish cultural nationalism as an ongoing struggle, caught up always in political necessity and contingency (a struggle, though, in which MG was herself deeply implicated). The ‘little cry’ (24) is firstly that of the pained and love-denied combatants; by the end of the poem (35) it is a cry which will at last no longer be heard (though this is once the battle has been lost, rather than won). In both cases, the adjective is indicative of a sense of rela­ tive insignificance, rather than momentous importance; and perhaps, in this sense, of personal failure rather than consummation. (See note to 23, 35 on the possibility of an earlier ‘bitter’ here, linking the phrase to the MG-related ‘The Sorrow of Love’). The poem’s title in CK, which derives from Ossian by way of Arnold (see note on Title) makes it clear that the ‘battle’ is one that is repeatedly lost. In terms of WBY’s national­ ist involvements at the time, this may seem unduly negative (and it is certainly contrary to the spirit with which MG approached such things). Although the poem is soaked in defeat, it is far from being a poem of (or about) defeatism. In gathering together as many elements as possible under the rose’s banner, WBY succeeds in projecting a feeling of unity of purpose amongst diverse ‘sad hearts’. Inevitably (and especially given the early presence of Arnold), the suggestion is that of the common character of ‘the Celt’. The term itself was not one particularly favoured by WBY; indeed, by 1900 he would disown it in public, saying ‘I have avoided “Celtic note” and “Celtic renaissance” partly because both are vague and one is grandiloquent, and partly because the journalist has laid his ugly hands upon them’ (letter to The Leader, CL 2, 568). Even so, this poem is unmistak­ ably fixing its sights on the aspect of national character that Arnold referred to as ‘Celtic’: the ‘sad hearts’ here are Celtic ones. In addition to the temper of ‘The Rose of Battle’, there is plenty of evidence for WBY’s having accepted and made use of Arnold’s conception

44

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

of the Celt as a national type marked by, and marked out for, continual defeats at the hands of history. In his ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (which first appeared in 1898), WBY presents this as a naturally generated racial condition of ‘melancholy’. His terms here (‘loneliness’, ‘beauty’, ‘little’, ‘sweet’) recall the atmosphere of the poem (CW 4, 134): Life was so weighted down by the emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and by the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness of much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief, that nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended in death and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning; but because they had been born and must die with their great thirst unslaked. WBY’s more immediate sense of nationalist defeats, at the likely time of composition, must have included the fall from political pre-eminence of Parnell (and perhaps his death, which took place on 7 Oct. 1891): MG’s presence in Dublin at the time of the funeral (11 Oct.) might well have added to WBY’s sense of conflicted feelings. Emigration and the Irish emigrant poem. The poem alludes throughout to ships and the sea in relation to some decisive and momentous commitment. As such, it gestures towards a genre which, though the poem is not itself within it, brings overtones of Irish experience on a large historical scale. WBY makes use of these overtones to deepen and complicate the meaning of ‘battle’. Nineteenth-century Irish poetry had quite naturally found one of its subjects in the mass emigration that followed the famine years of the 1840s and left continuing scars on the national psyche. These ‘threnodies of exile’ are discussed by F. Kinahan, who says of the ‘emigrant poem’: ‘One of the more perva­ sive forms adopted was the dialogue, with the seaward crowds passing by an unnamed interlocutor whose task it was to ask them where they were going and why’ (173). WBY’s poem is perhaps only vestigially a dialogue, but it shows clear signs of the poet’s awareness of the genre here described and shares with many such poems an initial focus on the departing ship. One such is T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘The Emigrant’s Voyage’, 1–4: The white sails are filled, and the wind from the shore

Blows sad from the hills we shall visit no more;

And the ship slowly moves o’er the ocean at rest,

From the land of our hearts, in the light of the West.

This scenario, albeit stereotypical, informs both the opening and lines 26–28 of WBY’s poem, as do lines 17–20: Full stretched are the sails, dim and dewy the spars;

On the spray-wetted deck falls the light of the stars;

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

45

And the blue lonely morning breaks coldly, as we,

In the wind, cleave the hurrying heaps of the sea.

The pathos of emigration was balanced, from early on, by a sense of the larger conflicts to which it was a reaction, or of which it might be seen as a kind of evasion. The novelist Charles J. Kickham, celebrated by WBY in his 1899 article on ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ as ‘Fenian leader and convict, most rambling and yet withal most vivid, humor­ ous, and most sincere of Irish novelists’ (CW 9, 107), published in 1849 a poem ‘To My Emigrant Brother’, urging the would-be emigrant to stay at home and fight (7–12): If all like you, the tried, the true, thus fly beyond the main,

Ah! then must our lov’d land become a grave of famine slain!

But if, like men, we dare the worst, while life and strength remain,

It still may be for us to burst her soul degrading chain.

So think a while, e’er from this isle – your native home – you flee;

If we but stand a trusty band, ’twill yet be proud and free!

The genre continued to be viable for popular poetry into the 1880s, and Denis Florence MacCarthy, in Poems (1884), ‘The Irish Emigrant’s Mother’ pitches the arguments of the emigrating family against the attachments to the homeland of the non-emigrating mother. The family pleads (5–8): Oh! come, and leave this land of death – this isle of desolation – This speck upon the sunbright face of God’s sublime creation, Since now o’er all our fatal stars the most malign hath risen, When Labour seeks the poorhouse, and Innocence the prison. The mother remains stubbornly attached to Ireland (41–44): But though I feel how sharp the pang from thee and thine to sever,

To look upon these darling ones the last time and for ever;

Yet in this sad and dark old land, by desolation haunted,

My heart has struck its roots too deep ever to be transplanted.

In more sophisticated poetry, the theme was also used. William Allingham, in Poems (1850), ‘The Emigrant’s Dream’ imagines the process of travel into exile darkly, and in terms that may resonate with the further-flung imagination of J.C. Mangan’s ‘Siberia’ (see note to 24, 36): Once I dreamed that I was crossing,

Exile sad, the lonely ocean,

Ever plunging, ever tossing

In monotony of motion;

46

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

All too cramped, and yet too free,

Smothered in a shaking jail,

Driven by the wandering gale

Over wastes of sea.

Swift the senseless ship is cleaving

Death-dark waters, that dissever

Weary hearts, out-worn with grieving,

Weary hearts and homes for ever.

Another poem of Allingham’s, ‘The Winding Banks of Erne’, was subtitled ‘The Emi­ grant’s Adieu to his Birthplace’; despite its hopes for some future prosperous return, the poem’s celebrations of a rural world are tempered throughout by the knowledge that (63–64) ‘The mournful song of exile is now for me to learn – | Adieu, my dear com­ panions on the winding banks of Erne!’ This was one of the poems by Allingham that WBY called ‘serious and beautiful’ in a review of the collected edition of the poet’s works in Dec. 1891 (CW 9, 151), and he mentions it favourably also in his 1900 letter to D.P. Moran in the Leader (CL 2, 566). Critical interpretation. The poem attracted little comment when first published, and it flies largely beneath the radar of many of WBY’s modern critics, when it tends to be listed along with the other ‘rose’ poems, but seldom given much in the way of individual discussion. As such, R. Ellmann (Identity, 73) has most to offer in the way of insight, when he remarks that the rose here is ‘less transcendent’ than other such roses, that ‘she is closer to incarnation’, and ‘She may even long for anthropomorphosis’, and con­ cludes that here ‘Sorrow comes from being human, and from not being human’. The most extensive and valuable modern discussion is that of F. Kinahan already quoted, though this is predicated on the judgement that ‘the poem places major demands on the reader without being good enough to repay the effort spent’ (171–172). Less nuanced disap­ proval is visible in E. Cullingford’s short but sweeping dismissal: ‘Ireland’s long history of ineffective rebellion, combined with the Arnoldian imperialist rhetoric that insisted that failure was an essential part of the Irish character, caused many Irish writers to insist that defeat was more desirable than success: Yeats, who used Arnold’s most famous Ossianic tag [. . .] as the variant title of “The Rose of Battle”, was one of those who displaced the cheerful copulations of Maeve and Mor by the blood sacrifice of the anxious male’ (67). Text and publication history. The poem was first published in CK, and next in Wil­ liam Sharp’s 1895 Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry (the text as published by Sharp was identical with that of CK, and not the P95 (and after) text as revised by WBY; this remained the case even when the anthology entered a second edi­ tion in 1924). Although no MS survives, there are corrections by WBY in three sets of CK proofs: the earliest is in the Beineke Collection, Yale (Proofs (Yale) below), followed by two sets now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Texas (Proofs (Texas) 1 and Proofs (Texas) 2). The text as revised for P95 remained stable in all future collected editions.

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

47

Copy-text: P49.

R

ose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled Above the tide of hours, trouble the air,

Title. They went forth to the Battle, but they always fell CK, Lyra Celtica. WBY takes this title from M. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Lit­ erature (1867), 103–104: And as in material civilization he has been ineffectual, so has the Celt been ineffec­ tual in politics. This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the Titan of the early world, who in primitive times fills so large a place on earth’s scene, dwindles and dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to what we now see him. For ages and ages the world has been constantly slip­ ping, ever more and more, out of the Celt’s grasp. ‘They went forth to the war,’ Ossian says most truly, ‘but they always fell.’ For Arnold’s ‘war’, WBY substitutes ‘Battle’. Arnold himself slightly misquotes his source in Macpherson’s Ossian, writing ‘went’ for ‘came’. The context in Ossian is of possible relevance to WBY’s poem (The Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), vol. 2, ‘Cath-Loda’, 317–318): Lochlin is rolled over her streams. The wrathful kings are lost in thought. They roll their silent eyes, over the flight of their land. The horn of Fingal was heard; the sons of woody Albion returned. But many lay, by Turthor’s stream, silent in their blood. ‘Chief of Crathmo,’ said the king, ‘Duth-maruno, hunter of boars! not harmless returns my eagle, from the field of foes! For this white-bosomed Lanul shall brighten, at her streams; Candona shall rejoice, as he wanders in Crathmo’s fields.’ ‘Colgorm,’ replied the chief, ‘was the first of my race in Albion; Colgorm, the rider of ocean, through its watry vales. He slew his brother in I-thorno: he left the land of his fathers. He chose his place, in silence, by rocky Crathmo-craulo.

His race came forth, in their years; they came forth to war, but they always fell. The wound of my fathers is mine, king of echoing isles!’ He drew an arrow from his side! He fell pale, in a land unknown. His soul came forth to his fathers, to their stormy isle. There they pursued boars of mist, along the skirts of wind. The chiefs stood silent around, as the stones of Loda on their hill. The traveller sees them, through the twilight, from his lonely path. He thinks them the ghosts of the aged, forming future wars. It is unlikely that WBY ever read Macpherson in anything other than a superficial way: at dinner with Lady Cunard and Arthur Balfour in 1915, while condemning Thomas Carlyle as a ‘sheer imposter’, the poet declared (to general approval) that ‘the French Revolution is now as unreadable as McPherson’s Ossian’ (InteLex 2821). In 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses has the character O’Madden Burke, in the newspaper office of the ‘Aeolus’ episode, almost quote WBY’s title in relation to ‘Pyrrhus, misled by an oracle’ and ‘Loyal to a lost cause’: ‘They went forth to battle, Mr. O’Madden Burke said greyly, but they always fell. – Boohoo! Lenehan wept with a little noise.’ 1. World!] World, CK. 2–3.] The flapping sails here are one element amongst others in the poem that may be indebted to Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1769), 395–406: Even now the devastation is begun,

And half the business of destruction done;

Even now, methinks, as pondering here

I stand, I see the rural virtues leave the land. Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail,

48 5

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

And God’s bell buoyed to be the water’s care; While hushed from fear, or loud with hope, a band With blown, spray-dabbled hair gather at hand.

That idly waiting flaps with every gale, Downward they move, a melancholy band, Pass from the shore and darken all the strand. Contented toil and hospitable care, And kind connubial tenderness are there; And piety, with wishes placed above, And steady loyalty and faithful love. This passage is cited by Kinahan (175): ‘Yeats does not merely take these lines out on loan, but adapts them to his own purposes. Aside from his more apparent borrowings  – the movement towards the shore, the waiting ships, the flapping sails – he takes Goldsmith’s triplet of “rural virtues” and makes it show a dark side; “contented toil”, “hospitable care”, and “kind connubial tenderness” become [in l. 21] sadness, loneliness, and insatiability.’ 3. trouble] rise on CK. WBY’s decision to revise here for P95 may reflect a willingness to point up the connection between the poem and its companion in CK, ‘The Sorrow of Love’, in which ‘trouble’ is a repeated, and an impor­ tant, word (‘ships’ and ‘lips’ may also mark points of contact: see notes on 20, 31 and 23, 35). the tide of hours] Cp. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘The slight and degenerate Nature of Man’, 1–3: ‘from whose hearts | The print of passions by the tide of hours | Is washed away’. 4. God’s bell] Cp. John Todhunter, The Banshee and Other Poems (1888), ‘The Doom of the Children of Lir’, VI, where Todhunter writes (36–47) about the church built by Mochaom Og, whose bell is heard by Lir’s children (transformed to swans): But steadfast in his deeds, not scanting prayer nor praise, He toiled; and the seventh day, in blessed bread and wine, Christ came to win the West. That grace the sacring bell

To wondering land and sea proclaimed with silver sound. And the Swans heard, far, faint, from some dim alien world, The bell’s mysterious tone; and on the brothers three Strange terror fell, and wild they dashed through the clear waves, Till, at Fianoula’s call, they waited on her word. “What ails you thus to fly?” she said. “What have ye heard?” And they: “We know not what  – a faint and fearful voice Thrills in the shuddering air!” “That is God’s bell,” said she, “The bell that brings us ease. Blest be the name of God!” 5–8.] And pressing on, or lingering slow with fear, The throngs with blown wet hair are gath­ ering near. ‘Turn if ye may,’ I call out to each one, ‘From the grey ships and battles never won. CK. 5. lingering slow] The conventional phrase here may contain a specific debt: cp. Gerard Griffin, Poetical and Dramatic Works (1857), ‘Shanid Castle’, 374–378 (describing the Earl of Desmond, forced into exile by ‘Saxon’ invaders: Their hearts are still with Desmond in his woe, Unchanged as when they saw their chieftan stand On yonder shore, at moonlight, linger­ ing slow. “Farewell!’ he cried, and wrung each eager hand, ‘Farewell, my faithful friends! farewell, my native land!’

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

10

15

20

49

Turn if you may from battles never done,

I call, as they go by me one by one,

Danger no refuge holds, and war no peace, For him who hears love sing and never cease, Beside her clean-swept hearth, her quiet shade: But gather all for whom no love has made A woven silence, or but come to cast A song into the air, and singing passed To smile on the pale dawn; and gather you Who have sought more than is in rain or dew Or in the sun and moon, or on the earth, Or sighs amid the wandering, starry mirth, Or comes in laughter from the sea’s sad lips, And wage God’s battles in the long grey ships. The sad, the lonely, the insatiable,

7–8.] The ships that go to battles never won: | ‘Turn if ye may,’ I call out to each one. Proofs (Yale). This is corr. by WBY to “Turn if ye may from battles never won | And from the long grey ships’ I call out to each one.’ In the subsequent Proofs (Texas) 2, WBY changes the corrected text to its final CK form. 10, 12. love] Love CK. 10. love sing and] Love’s singing never Proofs (Yale), corr. to final CK text. 11. Beside] Besides CK. clean-swept hearth] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems (1889), ‘By the Christmas Cottage Fire’ 44–46: ‘sweet the golden west, | When by our cottage door they play; | The clean swept hearth, the hour ere rest, | When by our side they kneel and play’. 15. on the pale dawn] upon her stars CK. 18. starry mirth] WBY’s phrase was to be used later by two poets among his friends: first, by AE, The Divine Vision, and Other Poems (1904), ‘The Feast of Age’, 11: ‘Let us mingle in the starry mirth’, and next by KT, The Holy War (1916), ‘The Only Son’, 9: ‘amid the starry mirth’. 20, 31. long  . . . ships] WBY is aware that the Vikings sailed in longships, and may intend this to resonate here; more generally, the sense is connected to ancient fighting vessels,

sometimes with an Irish provenance. The Viking longships were described in W.H. Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), in a note which may inform WBY’s descrip­ tion of the ships in this poem (Note to ‘The Lay of Magnus the Great’): Their voyages in the 9th and 10th centu­ ries, are sufficient proofs of the excellence of the Scandinavian ships. It is not, there­ fore, to be regarded as pure exaggeration if the Sagas use strong expressions in cele­ brating the war-ships of that time, partic­ ularly the galleys, or, as they were called, long ships. These long ships were also called ‘Dragons,’ because the stems were frequently ornamented with carved, and even gilded images of dragons, vultures, lions, and other animals. They had some­ times crews of several hundred men; – the sails were worked or embroidered with gold, the ropes were of a purple colour, and on the top of the gilded masts sat curiously carved images of birds, which spread out their wings to the breeze. In Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), a historical ‘ballad’ (set in a metre designedly close to that of ‘God Save the King’) celebrates the last pagan king of Ireland, in ‘The Fate of King Dathi’. Davis

50

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

To these Old Night shall all her mystery tell; God’s bell has claimed them by the little cry Of their sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

has Dathi voice triumphal boasts of raiding and piracy (17–24): Fiercely their harpers sing, –

Led by their gallant king,

They will to Eire bring

Beauty and treasure.

Britain shall bend the knee –

Rich shall their households be –

When their long ships the sea

Homeward shall measure.

In Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), part of the heroic code is the burning of ships imme­ diately upon invading territory: ‘The mighty men of yore | Still burned the barques that landed them on whatsoever shore | They chose for conquest’ (III, 69–71). This habit is further celebrated (III, 83–89): Thus Nuad of the Silver-Hand from Dovar setting sail, Charged with the King-discerning might of vocal Lia Fail, When first for Erin’s coasts he steered, and made the sacred strand, Waited for no chance lightning-flash, but with his proper hand Fired all his long-ships, till the smoke that from that burning rose Went up before him, herald-like, de­ nouncing to his foes Death and despair. WBY’s ‘long grey ships’ are also to be destroyed (see esp. 31–2), here in the context of a battle that is always lost (see title in CK). 22. To these] To them Proofs (Texas) 2, corr. to final CK text Old Night] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost I, 543: ‘chaos and old night’. WBY had also used the phrase in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889) I, 447.

23, 35. the little cry] the bitter cry Proofs (Yale) corr. to the little cry. In the absence of any MS  evidence, it is difficult to know what weight should be attached to the text as set in this proof: that WBY’s handwritten ‘little’ should be ‘misread as ‘bitter’ is very plausible, and may be the case. On the other hand, it is possible that WBY’s first thought was ‘bit­ ter cry’: the same phrase was important in ‘The Sorrow of Love’, where it was changed to ‘weary cry’ as late as Proofs (Texas) 2: it was ‘bitter cry’ in both Proofs (Yale) and Proofs (Texas) 1. The present poem retains a con­ nection with ‘The Sorrow of Love’ in its use of the ‘lips’/ ‘ships’ rhyme (19–20; cp. ‘The Sor­ row of Love’ 5, 7 [and see note]), and perhaps ‘bitter cry’ was initially another point where WBY had the two poems overlap. If that was the case, then corrections to Proofs (Yale) removed the repetition, while the phrase ‘bit­ ter cry’ was allowed to survive in ‘The Sor­ row of Love’ until almost the last moment. (See also note on 3.) It may be relevant also that ‘bitter’ is an important word in the poem that immediately precedes this one in CK, ‘The Two Trees’, where ‘the bitter glass’ both begins and ends the second half of the poem. 24, 36. that may not live nor die] Cp. J.C. Man­ gan, ‘Siberia’ (1846), 16–20: Pain as in a dream,

When years go by

Funeral-paced, yet fugitive,

When man lives, and doth not live,

Doth not live – nor die.

The poem was an important one for WBY (who included it in A Book of Irish Verse [1895]) as early as his Irish Fireside essay on Mangan of Mar. 1887. There, he quotes this stanza as ‘a sort of type of that Siberia within, where his [Mangan’s] thoughts wandered and mur­ mured, like outlaws cast from the world’s soft places for some unknown offence’ (CW 9, 43).

THE ROSE OF BATTLE

25

30

35

51

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing. Beauty grown sad with its eternity Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea. Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait, For God has bid them share an equal fate; And when at last, defeated in His wars, They have gone down under the same white stars, We shall no longer hear the little cry Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

25. World!] World, CK. 27. the wharves of sorrow] G. Bornstein (57) sees WBY here ‘displaying a Shelleyan pre­ dilection for water’, the influence being in line with an interpretation of the poem in which ‘The battle is not military but Intel­ lectual, between the ideal form of beauty and the flawed world of appearances.’ However, WBY may have something less abstract (and less Shelleyan) in mind. Wharves as sites of human misery were prominent in a poem in Tennyson’s most recent book, Demeter, and Other Poems (1889), ‘Vastness’, 14: ‘Desolate offing, sailorless harbours, famishing popu­ lace, wharves forlorn’. Here, Tennyson almost certainly gestures towards the effects of the

Irish famine half a century before and to the sorrows of emigrants then and afterwards. For the possible resonances of the emigrant theme in WBY’s poem, see headnote. In 1945, WBY’s friend the writer Ethel Mannin used ‘The Wharves of Sorrow’ as a chapter title in her novel Lucifer and the Child. 31.] Our long grey ships flap their tall sails and wait, Proofs (Yale) corr. to final text of CK and after. 32. an equal fate] A  poetic commonplace, describing a situation in which both con­ tending parties are losers. Cp. Homer trans. Alexander Pope, Iliad XV, 154–155: ‘Guilty and guiltless find an equal Fate, | And one vast Ruin whelm th’ Olympian State’.

107

A DREAM OF A BLESSED

SPIRIT

Date of composition. There is no evidence for a precise date of composition, but it is likely that the poem was composed in Ireland in summer or early autumn 1891. Text and publication history. There is no early MS  of the poem, which first appeared in the National Observer for 31 Oct. 1891 (NO). It next appeared as part of the verse-play The Countess Kathleen in CK (reproduced after the poem’s text in the present edition) and then as a poem in ‘The Rose’ section of P95, and editions of P up to P24, and finally in EPS (1925). In 1927, WBY returned to this poem – which he called, in a letter to OS, ‘a poor threadbare poem of my youth’ (InteLex 5040) – and rewrote it as ‘The Countess Kathleen in Paradise’ (edited separately in the present edition). Reception and interpretation. Once the poem emerged from its context in WBY’s Countess Kathleen verse-play (in P95) it attracted some comment. Approval could run to the avowedly ecstatic, as with Dora M. Jones on the final stanza (London Quarterly Review, Jul. 1900): Here is the tender Celtic fancy, the delight in bright and soft colour, a pathetic fragrance as of the violets that they strew in Wales on the graves of girls who die unwedded, and above all, that lift of wings, that imaginative ecstasy, which bears one suddenly, as it were, to spiritual mountain-tops and opens a window into heaven. Not all readers were quite so carried away, and the extent of WBY’s revisions to the origi­ nal CK text made the poem evidence in the case put by one critic against ‘The Poet as Tinkerer’. Here, the details of both blame and praise are informative about early readers’ reactions (The Academy, 11 May 1901): For all that, we have one thing against [WBY]: he has not wholly escaped the pitfalls of revision – or not to our mind. It is in ‘The Dream of a Blessed Spirit.’ The last stanza now runs thus: With the feet of angels seven

Her white feet go glimmering;

And above the deep of heaven

Flame on flame and wing on wing.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-109

A DREAM OF A BLESSED SPIRIT

53

Lovely? Yes; but the original: She goes down the floor of heaven,

Shining bright as a new lance;

And her guides are angels seven,

While young stars around her dance.

The new version, of course, has an amplitude of effect; but the original is so much more fresh, more daring, more radiant. The revision is Mr. Yeats’s own in expression; but in idea it is far from original; it suggests many associated pictures [. . .] all probably suggested by the Italian paintings, early or mature, of wings ranked and flaming in spaces of heaven. Whereas, the first version is as new and shining as a field of daisies in the sun. True, ‘bright as a new lance’ is an old and familiar expression in the romances. But it is applied to material things; the application of it to a young girl is perfectly fresh and bold – so appar­ ently incongruous with all its associations, so beautifully fit and right when once the poet has captured it and flashed it before our eyes. The suggestion of maiden slenderness, the fearless comparison between the immaterial glitter of her beauty and the material glitter of the steel – not customarily applied to female beauty, which rejoices rather in the softer images of light and flowers or snow – these things make the worn image virginal. The stars are ‘young,’ and close in the morning brightness of the passage. No; with our souls we protest against this substitution, and beg Mr. Yeats to ‘think well on’t’. A case for the defence was mounted quickly by one of WBY’s long-standing advocates, William Sharp, who quoted the poem in full in his Poets of the Younger Generation (1902), comparing the final stanza with that of the song in CK: Mr. Yeats’s alterations, unlike those of most poets, are always amendments, but this is more than an amendment – it is a transfiguration. What a glorious moment it must have been in which the poet conceived that sudden soaring transition from the almost infantile tenderness of ‘With white feet of angels seven | Her white feet go glimmering’ to the rapturous vision of the close: ‘And above the deep of heaven, | Flame on flame and wing on wing’. Although WBY was to engage in full-scale revision of the text a quarter of a century later, it is useful to remember that the poem had already been much revised (and those revi­ sions had been disputed) by the turn of the century. The poem’s ability to float free of an original dramatic context does not mean that the play is without any relevance to it. The Countess’s victory over demonic powers is one that appears to have been snatched from the jaws of Catholic orthodoxy in the play for, despite having given her soul in return for the safety of her starving tenants, the Countess is still redeemed in death; and the song is in that sense a song of victory. The approbation (and

54

A DREAM OF A BLESSED SPIRIT

perhaps even the saving intervention) of the Virgin are mentioned in line 9, and this is part of the play’s overall testing of the limits of religious imagination. In making the song into a separate poem, and in the process moving the subject from Kathleen (whose name was also the title in the NO publication in 1891) to ‘A Blessed Spirit’, WBY removed the specific circumstances bearing upon these lines in the drama, leaving a female spirit being received into heaven. Arguably, this lessens the poem’s original pressures in favour of a more ecstatic orientation, and this is realized most fully in the 1895 revision of the final stanza, where the individual spirit now seems to vanish into a mass of flames and wings. The effect is spectacular without being definite, and the earlier vision of the Countess Kathleen – too individual, and too holy, to obey the rules of the Church, finally vindi­ cated and received into bliss in her full individuality – is made to vanish in visual (rather painterly) effects. Technically, the poem is an interesting example of WBY’s abilities in the handling of trochaic metre, which here (even in the earliest version) he does without undue stiffness or awkwardness, and with moments of effective rhythmic variation. Copy-text: EPS.

A

ll the heavy days are over; Leave the body’s coloured pride Underneath the grass and clover, With the feet laid side by side.

Version in CK, 85–86: [A row of spirits carrying the lifeless body of the COUNTESS KATHLEEN descend slowly from the oratory. OONA has crouched down upon the floor. The spirits lay the body upon the ground with the head upon the knees of OONA. While descending from the oratory they sing.] SONG. All the heavy days are over;

Leave the body’s coloured pride

Underneath the grass and clover

With the feet laid side by side.

One with her are mirth and duty, Bear the gold embroidered dress – For she needs not her sad beauty – To the scented oaken press. Hers the kiss of mother Mary,

The long hair is on her face,

Still she goes with footsteps wary, Full of earth’s old timid grace. She goes down the floor of heaven,

Shining bright as a new lance,

And her guides are angels seven,

While young stars about her dance.

The text of the poem in NO (as ‘Kathleen’) is near-identical to the earlier text, but the verses are not there set in italics. 1. heavy days] Cp. William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘The Music Master’, st. lxxvi, 1–2: ‘Thereafter follow many heavy days, | Like wet clouds moving through a sullen sky’. 2. coloured pride] Perhaps cp. Henry KirkeWhite, Poetical Works (1830), ‘Childhood’, 196–197: ‘the clouds, whose coloured pride | Was scattered thinly o’er the welkin wide’. 3–4.] Cp. Jean Ingelow, Poems (1888), ‘Not in vain I waited’, 21–2: ‘Sweet dews, dry early on the grass and clover, | Lest the bride wet her feet while she walks over’.

A DREAM OF A BLESSED SPIRIT

5

10

15

55

One with her are mirth and duty; Bear the gold embroidered dress, For she needs not her sad beauty, To the scented oaken press. Hers the kiss of Mother Mary, The long hair is on her face; Still she goes with footsteps wary, Full of earth’s old timid grace. With white feet of angels seven Her white feet go glimmering And above the deep of heaven, Flame on flame and wing on wing.

7. her sad beauty] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, Part Second, st. lvii, 1–2: ‘I looked my last | On the sad beauty of that slumbering face’. 10.] P99-EPS. The long hair shadows her face P95. In 1937, WBY recalled that (ten years before) ‘I started re-writing because the line ‘The long hair is on her face’ suggested a bearded lady when I  read it out’ (letter to Margot Collis, 23 Oct. 1937, InteLex 7102).

12. timid grace] Not an uncommon phrase in poetry, but possibly cp. T.C. Irwin, Songs and Romances (1878), ‘Summer Wanderings’, 92–93: ‘Sweet faces touched with lady light | And timid grace and tender smile’. 15. the deep of heaven] Cp. W. Blake, Poetical Sketches (1783), ‘To Summer’, 8–9: ‘when noon upon his fervid car | Rode o’er the deep of heaven’.

108

MOURN   – AND THEN

ONWARD!

Date of composition. The poem was composed between 7 and 9 Oct. 1891. In a letter to SMY of 11 Oct., WBY writes: ‘I send you a copy of United Ireland with a poem of mine on Parnell written the day he died to be in time for the press that evening’ (CL 1, 265). Parnell died on the evening of Tuesday 6 Oct., and news of his death broke on Wednes­ day morning; WBY may then mean Wednesday when he speaks here of ‘the day of his death’. United Ireland (which was a weekly) appeared on Saturday 10 Oct., the day before Parnell’s funeral; it would have gone to press late on Friday 9 Oct. Context and interpretation. WBY’s spur-of-the-moment elegy for Charles Stewart Par­ nell, produced in great haste on the news of his death, is the closest the young poet ever came to the idioms and sentiments of conventional nationalist poetry. Its intended read­ ership was, in the first place, that of Parnell’s party newspaper, United Ireland; the poem is addressed, then, to a public of loyal followers. However, by the time of his death Par­ nell had become a figure who sharply divided opinion in Ireland: the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he had led in the long campaign for Home Rule, split in the aftermath of the public scandal involving him and his relationship with Katharine O’Shea, the wife of one of his party lieutenants, resulting in high levels of political rancour on both sides. As the years passed, Parnell’s significance became more complex and problematic for WBY, and the long-dead politician continued to haunt and energise the poet’s creative imagination as late as the 1930s. The combined nuance and sweep of historical perspective which could produce autobiographical work as involved and subtle as ‘Ireland After Parnell’ (The Trembling of the Veil [1922]) are alien to this poem of instant reaction and rhetorical impulse. It is worth noting, though, that WBY could still make a speech on Parnell as a guiding hero some four years later, addressing a London Parnell commemoration meet­ ing on 6 Oct. 1895. One press account is as follows (Morning Post, 7 Oct. 1895): Mr. W.B. Yeats, in an address on the life and work of Mr. Parnell, said that the still, strong, silent man was sure to succeed. Parnell was such a man. On his death, indeed, many Englishmen opposed to him in politics spoke of him with enthusiasm, one writer going so far as to say: – ‘England has outlived the Armada: England has outlived Parnell.’ Mr. Yeats pleaded for a better organiza­ tion of the political forces in Ireland and, in conclusion, remarked, ‘Into our hands has come a great cause; it is our duty now to watch over, to guard that sacred fire of Irish nationality; it is our duty to see that the words of our leaders – Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Davis, O’Neil, Parnell – do not come to naught.’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-110

MOURN – AND THEN ONWARD!

57

Another report of this event has WBY say that ‘the man they met to honour was the type of man whom Irishmen had been taught to worship all through the centuries,’ while ‘His opponents were one and all of them commonplace: even Mr. Gladstone was full of commonplace – eloquent and golden commonplace, but still commonplace’ (Freeman’s Journal, 7 Oct. 1895). Perhaps WBY remembered his own instant recourse to common­ place in the 1891 poem as he gave this speech; or perhaps he did not. At all events, he soon preferred the poem forgotten. Publication history. The poem first appeared in Dublin, in United Ireland on 10 Oct. 1891. It was reprinted in The Irish Weekly Independent of 20 May 1893, as well as in 1922, when it appeared in connection with the death of Arthur Griffith; but it was never col­ lected or reprinted by WBY. AG mentions WBY being ‘very indignant’ when the poem was reprinted without his permission as a memorial to his recently deceased enemy Arthur Griffith in 1922, saying that he could find ‘no trace of merit’ in this poem which he had ‘hoped forgotten’. She goes on to record another moment when WBY mentioned the poem, quoting him thus (Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory ed. C. Smythe (1974), 128): I remember once seeing a quotation on a wooden shield on the wall of a National League Hall that I thought was from the Bible; and then I found that it was from myself. It was in a poem that I had written on Parnell’s death and that I hope has never been reprinted – something about his ‘leading us from the tomb’. Critical silence around the poem was maintained largely successfully thereafter, though the work was mentioned in J.M. Hone’s biography of WBY in 1943, where the biographer noted that these ‘lines on Parnell had little merit, and many years passed before [WBY] again attempted ‘occasional’ political verse’ (Hone, 90). Copy-text: United Ireland, 10 Oct. 1891.

Y

e on the broad high mountains of old Eri,

Mourn all the night and day,

The man is gone who guided ye, unweary,

Through the long bitter way.

1. Eri] Ireland. The more familiar nineteenthcentury term is Erin, but this is not used here by WBY. The word Eri comes twice in this poem: here, it may appear to be present (rather than Erin) for the sake of rhyme: but in fact it is ‘unweary’ in line 3 that seems to be the somewhat forced choice. In the ‘Dedi­ cation’, prefaced to his Representative Irish Tales (1891), WBY wrote of ‘wave-worn Eri’

(2): there, the rhyme is to ‘faery’ (and also to ‘weary’). WBY uses this term again in ‘The Watch-Fire’, as well in his stories such as e.g. ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’, where he mentions ‘the four provinces of Eri’ (National Observer, Mar. 1894). The term was a favoured one for Ireland in the work of John Todhunter (it is common in his Three Irish Bardic Tales [1896]), and was to be adopted in moments of

58 5

10

15

MOURN – AND THEN ONWARD!

Ye by the waves that close in our sad nation, Be full of sudden fears, The man is gone who from his lonely station Has moulded the hard years. Mourn ye on grass-green plains of Eri fated, For closed in darkness now Is he who laboured on, derided, hated, And made the tyrant bow. 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!

millennial excitement by George Russell, who informed WBY that ‘the gods have returned to Eri’, and exhorted him to ‘Be like one of those swift doers of deeds the heroes of ancient Eri’ (letter of Dec. 1896, LTWBY 1, 27). The term itself, whatever its antiquity, had a somewhat dubious modern history, since it was known mostly from its prominence in the work by delusional ex-United Irishman and pseudophilologist/cultural historian Roger O’Connor, Chronicles of Eri . . . Translated from the Origi­ nal Manuscripts in the Phoenician Dialect of the Scythian Language (1822).

4. long bitter way] Perhaps cp. William Alling­ ham, Flower Pieces (1888), ‘Angela’, 1: ‘After the long bitter days, and nights weighed down with my sadness’. 9. grass-green plains] Perhaps cp. Barry Corn­ wall, The Flood of Thessaly (1823), I, 650–651: ‘the branching stag | Fled from his shadow on the grass-green plain’. 15–16.] The figure is from Exodus 13.21: ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light to go by day and night’.

109

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

Date of composition. The earliest surviving MS version of this poem is that inscribed in the Flame of the Spirit notebook (MS1): beneath is the date ‘Oct 20 1891’, but it is likely than the poem had been written before this. WBY dates three other poems in the notebook ‘October 1891’, and this poem (number VII in his ordering) is the last poem inscribed there, with 20 Oct. being also the date on which The Flame of the Spirit was presented to MG. Despite the fact that this version contains three alterations in the form of phrasal deletions and replacements, it is very unlikely that it is a first draft, and just as unlikely that WBY wrote the poem on the day of his giving the notebook to MG. It is not possible to assume, given how carefully WBY thought about sequencing of pieces in shorter as well as longer collections, that the poem’s position as the closing lyric in this highly personal and significant notebook means that it is therefore the most recently completed. The poem is, on the other hand, almost certainly one composed at around the same time as the others in the notebook, so that it was written in the summer or early autumn of 1891, when WBY was intensely preoccupied with MG. In a letter to KT of 2 Mar. 1892, WBY included a fair copy of the poem (MS2), offering it (unsuccessfully) as an item for her anthology Irish Love-Songs (1892), and saying only that it was written ‘some months ago’ (CL 1, 288): in all but spelling, this version is identical to the one in CK. Source. The poem has long been recognized as, in part, a version of a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Quand vous serez bien vielle’ (from his Sonets pour Hélène [1578]):

Q

uand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle, Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant: Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle. Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle, Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant, Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant, Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle. Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os: Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos: Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie, Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain. Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain: Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-111

60

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

[When you are very old, in the evening, by the candlelight, seated beside the fire, spin­ ning and winding wool, say as you sing my verse, marvelling at yourself: ‘Ronsard used to praise me in the days when I was beautiful.’ Then, you’ll have no servant who hears such a piece of news who does not, at the sound of my name, rouse herself to bless your name of immortal praise. I shall be under the ground, and a spirit without bones: among the myrtle shadows I will take my rest: while you by the hearth will be a crouched old woman, regretting my love and the hard disdain you had for it. Live now, trust me, and don’t wait for tomorrow: pluck the roses of life today.] WBY’s French was not of any advanced standard in 1891; Arthur Symons, who would serve as his occasional tutor in French poetry after 1895, was known to WBY (partly through the Rhymers’ Club) by 1891, but was not to hand at the likely time of composi­ tion (though, of course, other competent French readers were in WBY’s Dublin circle then). A French source is, perhaps, appropriate in a poem addressed specifically to MG (who spoke that language fluently); nevertheless, it is unlikely that WBY would have found, and then gone on to tackle, the Ronsard poem without some kind of help. A pos­ sible place for WBY to have encountered the poem in translation is a volume from the publishers Walter Scott (with whom WBY had links), edited by Samuel Waddington: The Sonnets of Europe: A Volume of Translations (1886). Here, two translations of the Ronsard poem are given. The first is by Andrew Lang: When you are very old, at evening

You’ll sit and spin beside the fire, and say,

Humming my songs, “Ah well, ah well-a-day!

When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing.”

None of your maidens that doth hear the thing,

Albeit with her weary task foredone,

But wakens at my name, and calls you one

Blest, to be held in long remembering.

I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid

On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade,

While you beside the fire, a granddame grey,

My love, your pride, remember and regret;

Ah, love me, love! we may be happy yet,

And gather roses, while ’tis called today.

The second translation is by Charles Kegan Paul: When very old, at eve, while candles flare,

Chatting and spinning by the fire you sit,

And, marvelling, you hum the lines I writ,

Say: Ronsard sang me once when I was fair.

Then every serving-maid who slumbers there,

Nodding above her task with drowsy wit,

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

61

Hearing my name, will rouse at sound of it

And bless your name, your deathless praise declare.

A disembodied ghost, I shall have laid

My bones to rest beneath the myrtle shade,

While you, a crone, crouch o’er the embers’ glow,

Mourning my love, and your sublime disdain;

Live, trust me, wait not for tomorrow’s pain,

But cull to-day life’s roses as they blow.

It is possible that Lang’s translation of ‘une vielle accroupie’ [literally, a crouched old woman] as ‘a granddame grey’ provides WBY with the ‘old and gray’ of line 1 (there is no mention of greyness anywhere in the Ronsard poem); additionally, Lang’s transla­ tion of ‘dédain’ as ‘pride’ in the phrase ‘My love, your pride’ anticipates WBY’s ‘Pride dwells with Love’ in the MS1 version of line 10. Ronsard’s ‘Bénissant votre nom’, han­ dled very awkwardly by Lang but more competently by Kegan Paul, might well exert some pressure on a later poem by WBY about MG, ‘Broken Dreams’, where ‘maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing | Because it was your prayer | Recovered him upon the bed of death’. Text and publication history. Two MS versions exist, one in The Flame of the Spirit and the other in a letter to KT (see Date of composition): transcriptions of both are in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 286. The poem was first published in CK, then in P95 and all subsequent collected editions. The final stanza was rewritten for CP33. Copy-text: P49.

W

hen you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

1. full of sleep] Cp. A. Swinburne, Songs of Two Nations (1875), ‘Song of Italy’, 518–520: ‘Stretch out thine hand to his | That raised and gave thee life to run and leap | When thou wast full of sleep’. WBY uses the phrase again in the play The Countess Kathleen (1892), where the character Oona speaks of ‘growing old and full of sleep’ (CK, Sc. II, 6). 2. this book] In the first instance, the ‘book’ must be The Flame of the Spirit, the vellumbound manuscript notebook presented by

WBY to MG in Dublin on 20 Oct. 1891, in which this poem is the last item. This entirely private meaning is supplanted once the poem appears in a printed volume the following year, and again from then on. 3. read, and ] reading MS1. soft look] Cp. Keats, ‘Lamia’ (1819), 256; ‘Her soft look growing coy’. 4. shadows deep] Cp. W. Blake, Songs of Expe­ rience, ‘The Little Girl Found’, 9–10: ‘Seven nights they sleep | Among shadows deep’.

62 5

10

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

5. How many loved] Dream how men loved MS1. 6. love] loves MS1. 7. pilgrim soul] Perhaps cp. Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (1864), ‘La Via Dolorosa’, 3: ‘No joy on earth for the pilgrim soul’, and William Allingham, Life and Phantasy (1889), ‘I know not if it may be mine’, 23–4: ‘To touch upon his earthly way | Some brother pilgrim-soul’. 8.] And loved [long years del.] the sorrow in your ^changing^ face MS1. your changing face] Cp. Jean Ingelow, A Rhyming Chronicle (1850), ‘The Two Marga­ rets: II, Margaret by the Mereside’, 36: ‘The lights and shadows on thy changing face’. Also perhaps cp. Henry Vaughan, Poems (1646), ‘Les Amours’, 1–5: ‘Tyrant farewell: this heart, the prize | And triumph of thy scornful eyes, | I sacrifice to Heaven, and give | To quit my sins, that durst believe | A woman’s easy faith, and place | True joys in a changing face’. 9–12.] Bending your brows beside the [ashy del.] glowing bars You then will say perhaps “Pride dwells with Love[:]

He paced along the mountains high above And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” MS1 10–12.] CP33. Since this late change affects only these three lines, the poem is not edited again separately for the present edi­ tion. It is important to note, however, that in print from 1892–1933, the poem ended differently: Murmur, a little sad, From us fled Love; He paced upon the mountains far above, And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. CK, P95 and all editions before CP33. 12.] Cp. W.S. Landor, ‘The Maid’s Lament’, 11: ‘He hid his face amid the shades of death’. Landor’s poem, first published as part of his Citation and Examination of William Shake­ speare (1834) became an anthology-piece: see e.g. Robert Chambers, Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1844), II, 351. WBY’s final line, with its ‘crowd of stars’, recalls and adapts the ‘crown of stars’ at the end of ‘A Dream of Other Lives’, the fifth poem in the sequence of The Flame of the Spirit.

110

[‘HE WHO BIDS

THE WHITE PLAINS

OF THE POLE’]

Date of composition. Probably composed Oct. 1891, though it is possible that this is the date when WBY finished the poem, rather than when he began it. MS versions. Two versions of this single-quatrain poem exist in MS. The first is in WBY’s The Flame of the Spirit notebook, presented to Maud Gonne on Oct 20, 1891 (MS1); the second is in The Rosy Cross. Lyrics (MS2 later), also dating from 1891 and retained by WBY (NLI 30318). The poem was never published by WBY, and was first printed in 1948 in Ellmann, The Man and the Masks (155). In MS1, this is the third poem in the seven-poem sequence (a mistaken numeral ‘IV’ is crossed out by WBY and replaced with the correct ‘III’), and in MS2 it is the fifth of the six poems. Transcriptions of both MSS are included in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 486. Context and interpretation. The poem is clearly addressed to MG, and it records one of the points of frustration in WBY’s attempts as a suitor to win her hand. As with the other poems in the sequences in the two MSS, it brings God into the romantic drama, here pinning the blame for the speaker’s frustrated wooing on a malevolent (though in other ways creative and fostering) deity. The problem which the poem faces is made clearer, perhaps, once its main metaphor is stripped of the Creator and his involvement: the speaker and the beloved find themselves ‘poles apart’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-112

64

[‘HE WHO BIDS THE WHITE PLAINS OF THE POLE’]

Copy-text: NLI 30318.

H

e who bids the white plains of the pole From His brooding warm years be apart – He has made me the friend of your soul – Ah he keeps for another your heart.

1. bids] bade MS1. white plains of the pole] Cp. T. C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘St. Columba’s Spell’ II, 25: ‘Now, o’er the white plains of the snow’. 2. His] the MS1. brooding] This word’s connotations of feminine parental care are in context mildly ironic, for the Creator’s ‘brooding warm years’ do not extend to hatching a romantic bond between the speaker and the beloved. WBY may take the word from Milton, Para­ dise Lost I  21–22: ‘[Thou] Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss | And mad’st  it pregnant’. brooding warm years] Perhaps cp. Tenny­ son, Poems (1842), ‘The Day Dream’, ‘Pro­ logue’ 10–11: ‘Across my fancy, brooding warm, | The reflex of a legend passed’, and Edward Bulwer Lytton, Chronicles and Char­ acters (1868), ‘Elisabetta Sirani’, 124–125: ‘Safely the warm years increased | Among us’. 3. the friend of your soul] WBY’s courtship of MG, especially in the summer and early autumn of 1891, frequently ran into the buf­ fers of her professed friendship for him, which she associated with a (non-sexual) affinity between souls. MG was inclined to trace this spiritual friendship back into past lives and to figure it as that between brother and sister

(see ‘A Dream of the Life Before This One’), but to be ‘the friend of your soul’ was decid­ edly second-best in WBY’s view at this time. It is possible that somewhere in this phrase is a memory of 1 Samuel 18.3: ‘Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul’; and the phrase ‘friend of my soul’ is not uncommon in poetry. One poem which WBY certainly knew, however, may be casting its shadow over the phrase here: Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘Anacreonta’ is in its entirety relevant to a reflection on romantic failure: Friend of my soul, this goblet sip,

Twill chase that pensive tear;

’Tis not so sweet as woman’s lip,

But, oh! ’tis more sincere.

Like her delusive beam,

’Twill steal away thy mind:

But, truer than love’s dream,

It leaves no sting behind.

Come, twine the wreath, thy brows to shade;

These flow’rs were cull’d at noon; –

Like woman’s love the rose will fade,

But, ah! not half so soon.

For though the flower’s decay’d,

Its fragrance is not o’er;

But once when love’s betray’d,

Its sweet life blooms no more.

111

A DREAM OF OTHER

LIVES

Date of composition. The poem is dated in WBY’s hand ‘Dublin | October  1891’. This records the date of its inscription in the notebook, The Flame of the Spirit (MS) but not necessarily the date of composition, which might have been at any time since early Aug. Biographical and critical contexts and reception. WBY was thoroughly familiar with mystical theories of reincarnation some years before writing this poem, through theoso­ phy and other sources, but the topic was not as significant for his thought as it was for (e.g.) his friend George Russell. However, reincarnation was a theme that came readily to hand for MG, especially in romantic contexts. WBY remembered one such moment, which took place in Jul. 1891 – he had met MG at the Nassau Hotel in Dublin on 3 Aug., having returned to Dublin from Charles Johnston’s family home in Ballykillibeg imme­ diately on receiving a letter from MG (Mem., 46): I was not, it seems – not altogether – captive; but presently came from her a let­ ter touching a little upon her sadness, and telling of a dream of some past life. She and I had been brother and sister somewhere on the edge of the Arabian desert, and sold together into slavery. She had an impression of some long jour­ ney and of miles upon miles of the desert sand. I returned to Dublin at once, and that evening, but a few minutes after we had met, asked her to marry me. This dream is clearly to be identified with ‘your dream one July night’ in the MS subtitle. MG’s decision to offer a past life in which she and the poet had been brother and sister might have been intended to apply the brakes to their developing romantic attachment – not so drastically, however, as to bring it to a dead halt. WBY had, after all, long ago read and taken to heart Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, where love between brother and sister is rendered in an intensely romantic (and erotic) way; the poet also had two real sisters of his own, who held for him no elements of past-life tragic glamour. It should be noted, moreover, that where WBY in his memoir of 1916–1917 recalls MG claiming that ‘She and I had been brother and sister’, the 1891 poem has the beloved claim first ‘We were as if brother and sister’, and finally ‘You were more to me than a brother’ (9). Although she often mentioned it, the intensity of MG’s belief in reincarnation is not easily gauged. Certainly, she embraced the concept warmly on occasions in the early 1890s when she sought to avoid (while not definitively discouraging) the non-metaphysical embraces of WBY. It is possible that MG found herself similarly situated with others, too: when she remembered her appearances as the belle of the St Patrick Society’s balls in Paris around DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-113

66

A DREAM OF OTHER LIVES

the same time, MG wrote of being on the receiving end of the fervent attentions of the Compte de Crémont, who ‘was very proud of his Irish descent, but he was also proud of some former incarnation in which he remembered he had been a tiger and also he recognized me as having been his tigress mother’ (MG, A Servant of the Queen (1938), 169). Later, in the run-up to her marriage to John MacBride, she pleaded reincarnation as an excuse for resisting entry into the Roman Catholic Church. When asked by a priest, ‘Why are you not a Catholic like your Nation?’, she replied (A Servant of the Queen, 330): Because I believe in reincarnation; I believe I have lived in this beautiful world before. Some of the people I meet are people I have already known so well that I know the things they are going to say. Some I like, some I don’t, and if I try to get over these instinctive dislikes I  always regret it, for such people prove generally hostile and dangerous to the things I love, while those I remember with love usually help my work. Our friend, Millevoye, for instance, – I was so certain we had met before that I told him so when we were introduced. It would appear from this that MG had felt reincarnation to be in the air when she was first attracted to Lucien Millevoye, just as she detected it when becoming romantically closer to WBY. The poem’s form is one that was almost repeated in a poem WBY published soon afterwards. ‘The White Birds’ originates in a walk taken at Howth with MG the day after her discussion of her past-life dream with WBY and his immediate (and immediately declined) proposal of marriage. Each of the two poems is in four-line stanzas, in triple rhythm and lines of six beats, rhymed aabb. The only formal difference is one of length, since ‘The White Birds’ has just three stanzas. It is clear that the poems are to some degree interdependent, in terms of imagery as much as in their links to WBY’s and MG’s thoughts about otherworldly analogues for their romantic connection in 1891–1892. It is not known when WBY took the decision to remove this poem from CK, but the fact that the change was made late in the proofing process (after some verbal changes being made to the proof page itself) suggests that the removal took place after the first publication of ‘The White Birds’: CK (which would have contained this poem as the seventh piece following ‘The White Birds’) was published by 20 Aug. 1892. Apart from the critical essay accompanying its first publication by W. Gould and D. Toomey, (‘ “Cycles Ago . . .”, Maud Gonne and the Lyrics of 1891’, YA 7 (1990), 184–193), this poem has received little critical attention. In their article, Gould and Toomey main­ tain plausibly that ‘a shared language of Theosophy was a central feature of Yeats’s rela­ tionship with Maud Gonne at the time’ and that, ‘despite his Rosicrucian ambitions for them both, his poems [in the two MS notebooks directed towards MG of 1891] are in fact predominantly “Theosophical” rather than “Rosicrucian” ’ (185). Gould and Toom­ ey’s other observation, that after it had been dropped from CK, ‘the poem was, to some extent, broken for spares’ by WBY (188) is also true. Text. The poem was first presented to MG in the sequence of lyrics contained in The Flame of the Spirit, where it is the fifth of seven poems (MS). WBY originally included the poem in CK, and it is found in the volume’s page proofs (Beinecke Library, Yale)

A DREAM OF OTHER LIVES

67

on p. 120 (following ‘A Fairy Song’ and preceding ‘The Pity of Love’): here, the text as set shows revisions to the MS text, and further changes are made to the poem by hand (including most extensively to the title, both on the proof of the poem itself and in the table of contents). The poem was first published (from the MS text) by Gould and Toomey, and next by G. Bornstein, in diplomatic transcriptions of both MS and the CK page proof, in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 487–488, and subsequently (under the title of ‘A Dream of the Life Before This One’) in UM, 97. Copy-text. CK page proofs.

T

he cries of the curlew and peewit, the honey-pale orb of the moon, The dew-covered grass of the valley, our mother the sea with her croon, The leaping green leaves of the woodland, the flame of the stars in the skies Were dearer than long white fingers, and more than your soft dark eyes;

Title. Cycles Ago | In memory of your dream one July night MS. [Remembrance del.] A  dream of a life before this one CK proof; [Reminiscences del.] A Dream of Other Lives CK proof (Contents page). It is clear that WBY had great trouble settling on a title, and never did so decisively. The present edition adopts the title as given in the proof Contents, rather than that on the proof page of the poem itself. 1. The cries of the curlew] The low crying cur­ lew MS. In 1896, WBY published the first version of his poem ‘He Reproves the Curlew’ as ‘O Sullivan Rua to the Curlew’, with its first line, ‘O curlew, cry no more in the air’. Much later, in ‘Paudeen’, first published in 1914, WBY gives profound personal significance to the moment when ‘a curlew cried and in the luminous wind | A  curlew answered’ (4–5). At the end of his play The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), WBY has his Musicians say ‘My heart ran wild when it heard | The cur­ lew cry before dawn’ (CW 2, 316). The curlew (Numenius arquata) is largely a winter bird around much of the Irish coast, but is pres­ ent year-round in parts of the West (and in particular on the Burren). peewit] A  common name of the lapwing (Vanellus vanellus). In ‘The Withering of the Boughs’, first published in 1900, the poet

brings this bird together again with the cur­ lew (2): ‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will’. honey-pale orb of the moon] ‘Honey-pale’ is WBY’s coinage; ‘pale orb’, however, is a con­ ventional phrase with regard to the moon, e.g. Robert Burns, Poetical Works (1844), ‘The Lament Occasioned by the Unfortunate Issue of a Friend’s Amour’ (1786), 1–2: ‘O thou pale orb that silent shines | While careuntroubled mortals sleep’, and S.T. Coleridge, Poems on Various Subjects (1796), ‘Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon’ (1788), 5: ‘when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud’. Later in the 1890s, in one draft version of The Shadowy Waters, WBY calls the moon ‘the honey-pale murderess of the stars’ (DC, 200). 2. of the valley] in the [woodland del.] ^valley^ MS. 3. leaping green leaves] Perhaps cp. George Meredith, ‘Love in the Valley’, (revised ver­ sion, first in Macmillan’s Magazine Oct. 1878), 126: ‘the waves leaping green’. (Freder­ ick York Powell, the Yeats family friend, was a particular admirer of this poem.) of the woodland] in the woodland MS. 4.] Are tossed in Love’s robe for he passes, and mad with Love’s feet for he flies.MS. long white fingers] Possibly another echo of George Meredith (see 3): here, perhaps cp.

68 5

10

A DREAM OF OTHER LIVES

You came and moved near me a little, with tender, remembering grace, The sad rose colours of autumn with weariness mixed in your face, My world was fallen and over, for soft dark eyes on it shone; A thousand years it had waited, and now it is overgone! ‘You were more to me than a brother of old in the desert land.’ How softly you spake it, how softly – ‘I give but a friendly hand. They sold us in slavery together, before this life had begun, But love bides nobody’s bidding, being older than moon or sun.’

Modern Love (1862), xxxix, 10–12: ‘where she shook | Her long white fingers down the shadowy brook, | That sings her song’. 5. tender, remembering grace] ‘Tender grace’ is a popular commonplace in nineteenth-century poems, one which WBY’s ‘remembering’ is presumably intended to render less usual. For ‘remembering’ as an adjective, OED cites A. Swinburne’s ‘Death of Sir Henry Taylor’ (1886), 12: ‘reverence of remembering hearts’ (Poems and Ballads: Third Series [1889]). 8. it is overgone] it is gone, it is gone. MS In the CK proof, the text as set is: ‘now it is gone it is gone!’ WBY has struck out ‘gone it is’, and written in the word ‘over’. If this were incorporated exactly, it would produce the result ‘it is over gone’. While the word ‘over­ gone’ does exist (OED:‘Gone out of use, past, obsolete; gone beyond bounds; far gone’) it was obsolete by the late nineteenth century; also, the metrical effect of ‘now it is overgone’ does not match that of the ‘now it is gone it is gone’ which it replaces. Bornstein (UM, 97, 126) emends to ‘it is over and gone’, finding ‘it is over gone’ an ‘unlikely phrase’, and supplying ‘and’ ‘for the sake of sense and metre’. However, ‘it is overgone’ is not impossible on metrical grounds here: the comparison must be with the final lines of two of the other stanzas, where stresses are crowded together at line-ends – ‘your soft

dark eyes’, ‘older than moon or sun’. In terms of sense, also, ‘overgone’ cannot be ruled out, and its archaic nature did not banish it from some of the poems WBY knew: cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), II, 388: ‘a thousand mazes overgone’, Christina Rossetti, Goblin Mar­ ket, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems (1875),‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’, 15: ‘The road by all men overgone’, and A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), Prelude, 151: ‘The embers of the harvest overgone’. WBY’s earlier text, with its repeated ‘gone . . . gone’ makes obvious play with MG’s surname; at the late stage of proof revision, the poet clearly intended to dampen down this effect (albeit any amendment here is in the con­ text of the subsequent decision to take out the poem altogether). Although WBY’s early verse may be open to occasional charges of verbal pleonasm, the phrase ‘over and gone’ still seems uncharacteristically slack. 9.] “We were as if brother ^and sister^ of old in the desert land,” MS. 10. I give but a friendly hand] In CK proof, inverted commas are closed with hand, but they are closed again at the end of 12. This error goes uncorrected by WBY, but the first closure of the inverted commas is removed in the present text (in keeping also with the speech marks at this point in the MS text). 12. love] Love MS.

A DREAM OF OTHER LIVES

15

69

Nine ages ago did I meet you, and mingle my gaze with your gaze; They mingled a moment and parted, and weariness fell on our days, And we went alone on our journey, and envied the grass-covered dead, For love had gone by us unheeding, a crown of stars on his head.

13. Nine ages ago] Ah cycles ago MS [Gould and Toomey give ‘All cycles ago’ from ‘a tran­ scription now in an English private collec­ tion’]; [Ah, whiles del.] ^Nine ages^ ago CK proof. Perhaps cp. W. Blake, The Book of Los IV, 32: ‘Nine ages completed their circles | When Los heated the glowing mass’. 15. journey] journeys MS. 16.] The personification of love here, which WBY intends as both masculine and pagan in its associations, also bears traces of

Revelation 12.1: ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’. The poem which closes the Flame of the Spirit sequence, ‘When You Are Old’, ends with ‘a crowd of stars’. The two poems are so close together (fifth and seventh pieces, respec­ tively) in the notebook that it seems likely that WBY intends this echo and alteration to be noticed.

112

THE SORROW OF LOVE

Date of composition. Composed by Oct. 1891, when included in The Flame of the Spirit MS presentation notebook for MG. Publication. First published in CK, reprinted with minor revisions in P95 and P99, then in successive editions of P to P24 (before radical revision). Text. The copy-text here is P24, with variants recorded from CK, P95, and P99. The text of the poem remained stable from P99 to P24. Two sets of proof sheets for CK (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas) with WBY’s corrections show that small revisions were still being tried out in 1892 (Proof 1 and Proof 2). No MS draft is extant, but there are two MS fair copies: one is poem IV (altered from V) in The Flame of the Spirit (MS), the vellum notebook given by WBY to Maud Gonne on 20 Oct. 1891. The poem has at its foot ‘Dublin | 1891’. The second, a fair copy, was sent (through an inter­ mediary, Douglas Sladen) to the New York weekly, The Independent in Dec. 1891 (now in collection of Queen’s University Ontario [QUO]). Partly owing to editorial difficulties in reading WBY’s hand, the poem did not appear in this American paper until 20 Oct. 1892 (a month later than the publication in Britain of CK). WBY made textual changes next for P95, and again for P99. The poem underwent wholesale revision for EPS in 1925, and some of that version’s main features seem to have been anticipated in revisions made by WBY in Lady Gregory’s copy of P95, where a sheet with a new version of stanza 2 is marked (though not in WBY’s hand, but in that of AG) ‘Altered at Coole – Autumn 1894’. Although the new second stanza here is (not exactly, but substantially) that of EPS, a revision date of 1894 seems deeply improbable: first, P95 did not physically exist in autumn 1894 (though the revisions are on a tipped-in separate sheet, so might con­ ceivably have been made to the CK version of the poem); second, although WBY was in Ireland in the autumn of 1894, there is no recorded visit by him then to Coole Park, whose owner AG he had met for the first time only in Jun. 1893: his first protracted stay at Coole was from Jul. to Sept. 1897. The date of the revision, then, looks wrong; but how far wrong? AG laid in the slip of paper to her copy of P95, and this might perhaps indicate that she did so before P99 (or a later edition) was available. WBY could have made the revision during his 1897 stay at Coole (in Sept., which would account at least for AG’s ‘Autumn’, if not for her ‘1894’). In this case, though, WBY would have taken suf­ ficiently little notice of his own rewriting as to have left it behind him, not coming upon it again until he was at Coole in 1924 (having been there very often and for long periods in the meantime), and then making the EPS revision on its basis. In his detailed study of this poem (‘Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy’, YA 18, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-114

THE SORROW OF LOVE

71

15–55), W. Gould examines the problem of the laid-in revision sheet, and says candidly that ‘I cannot explain why it had not been incorporated into the 1899 edition, except to suggest that Yeats was as yet unsatisfied with it’ (27). The tentativeness of this suggestion needs to be more tentative still, and it is surely simpler to suppose that the poet did not begin extensive revision until a much later date. In a journal entry of 1929 (as quoted by R. Ellmann), WBY records how ‘ I have felt when re-writing every poem – ‘The Sorrow of Love’ for instance – that by assuming a self of past years, as remote from that of today as some dramatic creation, I touched a stronger passion, a greater confidence than I pos­ sess, or ever did possess’ (Identity, 239–240): this hardly suggests a radical revision made some thirty-five years before the time of writing. The same conclusion should be drawn from WBY’s letter to MG about the EPS revised version (1925). When noting how ‘Some of the poems however have nothing of their old selves but the titles’, the poet claims to be ‘especially pleased’ with ‘The Sorrow of Love’, adding (no doubt needlessly) ‘You may perhaps recognize the model for that particular portrait.’ He clearly implies that the rewriting is a relatively recent business: ‘I felt as I wrote that I had recalled the exact impression of that time and that I had seen it at last as I could not when I was young and dimmed the window glass with my hot breath’ (27 Sept. 1925, G-YL, 430). Another relevant piece of information is the fact that AG recorded the 1924 Coole revision in her journal: ‘[WBY] Says you can’t write well without self-control, and he had not that when it was first written’ (Journals ed. D.J. Murphy (1978) I, 603): again, this does not sound like the recovery of very long-standing revisions on WBY’s part. WBY was indeed dis­ satisfied with the poem from early on, as the initial revisions show. The poet wrote to Robert Bridges on 20 Jul. 1901 that he was ‘not very proud of ’ the piece (CL 3, 91), but P99 had made only small changes to the printed text of P95 at this time, and this ver­ sion remained relatively stable textually up to and including the 1924 edition of Poems. WBY was at Coole on 13 Nov. 1924, when he wrote to his wife that ‘I have just turned an absurd old poem of mine called ‘The Sorrow of Love’ into a finer thing’ (Kelly Chronol­ ogy (239) dates WBY’s rewriting of the poem accordingly to Nov. 12, 1924). Given the closeness of this revision to the one made in AG’s copy of P04 which is marked ‘altered in 1924’, and since none of the specific changes made is to be found in the P95 text, which WBY was indeed preparing over the autumn of 1894, these particular MS variants are recorded in the present edition in the separate commentary to the 1925 (and after) text. Interpretation and critical reception. There was little specific mention of the poem in the early reception of CK, but subsequent changes to the text were noticed early on, when a review of P99 in The Outlook, mentioning that ‘In the lyrics the corrections are slight enough,’ went on to state the view that ‘one prefers the old form of the second verse of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ [. . .] In the new version the word ‘trouble’ has been substituted both for ‘sorrows’ and ‘burden’ – a change which results in a slight tedium of effect’ (22 Jul. 1899). This seemed less troublesome to a reviewer of CWVP08, who praised the poem as having in revision been ‘only touched to give an added grace’ (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1909). Some contemporaries felt that there was relatively little to be lost in revision, and AE, writing on the radically changed text in EPS, and approving the rewriting, remarked that the original poem was ‘one of the weaker lyrics in The Rose’ (‘Yeats’s Early Poems’,

72

THE SORROW OF LOVE

The Living Age, 28 Nov. 1925). Critical discussion of the poem began in earnest, however, with the question of revision as its focus. In 1941, Louis MacNeice valued this earlier ver­ sion more highly than its 1925 successor, though as ‘a very attractive poem of its kind, in the languid, self-pitying, late Victorian manner’. Insisting that ‘the poem is all of a piece,’ MacNeice claimed that ‘It is clear what it is about – Nature set over against the troubles of humanity’ (MacNeice, 70): In the first verse the poet escapes to nature and forgets humanity; in the second verse he falls in love, the beloved, according to late Romantic precepts, being essentially a lady of sorrows; in the third verse this contact brings him violently back to humanity and human troubles infest that world of nature which just now had seemed immune from them. (Though he does not say so, MacNeice works from the CK text rather than that of P95 and after, praising phrases like ‘the crumbling moon’ which had only lasted in WBY’s text for three years.) T. Parkinson’s 1951 study of WBY examined the poem in the light of its revisions, seeing these as improvements on the ‘pallid atmosphere and sad mood’ of the first versions (166). A negative verdict on the early text was returned by R. Ell­ mann in 1954, who saw the need for revision of a ‘style’ that was ‘inadequate’. Seeing the poem’s intent as being ‘to use natural scenery exclusively to portray aspects or moods of the soul,’ so that ‘At the beginning of the poem nature seems for a moment to have an independent power, but at the end it is entirely a symbolic reflection of man,’ Ellmann claimed that ‘the second stanza read as sentimental hyperbole, and the contrast between the first and the third stanzas was ineptly arranged’. The adjectives, Ellmann added, were ‘undistinguished and even [. . .] trite’, though he admired (like MacNeice) the adjective that had in fact vanished from line 10 in 1895, ‘crumbling’ (Identity, 121–122). After G.B. Saul’s verdict that the pre-1925 versions were ‘inherently more logical and less pretentious, and hence more charming’ (Prolegomena, 56), in 1963 J. Stallworthy made the poem the subject of a chapter in his Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (1963), finding the earlier versions less rewarding, since there ‘WBY has not yet brought his subject into focus’: ‘The emotional colour is there, but the intellectual outlines are everywhere indistinct’ (50). More strictures on the early poem were voiced in 1964 by E. Engelberg, who wrote that ‘the second stanza of the early version collapses from an overburdening metaphysical conceit,’ while the third ‘murmurs somewhat indistinctly of sparrows, chaunting leaves, and a weary cry; there is a blurring’ (Engleberg,145). Modern interpretation of the early text is much less common than critical attention to its post-1925 successor. However, F. Kinahan provides a useful analysis, free from quar­ rels about revision, in which he sees this as ‘a Rose poem in all but its title’. With the first stanza ‘set within a framework of contented domesticity’ where ‘all the natural world is alive’, the second stanza ‘describes the banishment of content, a banishment effected by the same force that ‘The Rose of the World’ had described as responsible for the destruc­ tion of Troy’. In the final stanza, WBY returns to ‘the grounded belief that a natural hap­ piness cannot survive the intrusion of a supernatural force’; the juxtaposition of the first stanza’s ‘star-laden sky’ with ‘the white stars in the sky’ of the third ‘conveys a growing

THE SORROW OF LOVE

73

sense of the disintegration that the other images in the stanza support to the full’ (Kina­ han, 160–161). One reading in particular is of importance in considering the biographi­ cal and historical bearings of this poem as originally composed: this is M. Campbell’s suggestion that there is a connection between WBY’s composition of the poem in Oct. 1891 and his meeting MG off the boat that was carrying the body of Parnell on 10 Oct., so that ‘The first version of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ unpacks loved one and dead hero from the ‘labouring ships’’. The poem’s moon and stars, which undergo mysterious change in the course of the poem, are read as parts of ‘an astrology made manifest in the meteo­ rological events of that day of Parnell’s funeral’ (Campbell, 161). This suggestion is well worth considering; and it is notable that the Julius Caesar-like strange signs in the air observed at the funeral of Parnell continued to haunt WBY creatively into the 1930s, just as this poem’s drama of arrival and irreversible change continued to be a live subject for the poet in his new version of 1925. It is the extent of the 1925 revision that has dominated critical reception of the poem, and while this is critically productive in its own right, it has also had the effect of slightly obscuring the nature and merits of the earlier version. The poem was, of course, always subject to revision (and the two fair copies [see Text] show how revision was an issue even in relatively ‘finished’ versions in advance of its first publication). The phrase that sounds through both the beginning and the end of the poem, ‘earth’s old and weary cry’, is plainly a key aspect of its lyric situation – the oldness is repeated, but it is also proved through repetition, for to be old is to be weary, and to be weary is to have heard the same things more than once (to have heard, for instance, this unchanging phrase). Yet ‘weary’ had first been ‘bitter’ (see notes to 4 and 12), and had even briefly been ‘heavy’. The development glimpsed here is from a bitterness to a borne weight to a weariness; already by the time of CK the poem seems to have a certain amount of experience under its belt. MacNeice’s ‘languid’ does not answer to the complexity of this, though it may report a possible effect. Formally, the poem departs from a pattern which a number of MG-related lyrics of the time (and over years to come, including WATR material) were setting, of eight-line developments of a single thought (cp. e.g. in CK ‘The Pity of Love’, whose title puts it in alignment with the present poem). Instead, WBY writes a poem whose stanzas are part of its argumentative logic: the third stanza is a version of the first, with the changes being brought about by the events of the second (central) stanza. A house’s eaves with sparrows, the moon and stars, and the leaves of a tree are the three clusters of observed reality to be transformed by that middle stanza, and the question at issue is of their relation to ‘earth’s old and weary cry’. The birds go from ‘quarrelling’ to ‘warring’, the moon from being ‘full round’ to first ‘crumbling’ then ‘curd-pale’ (where the uneven and breaking shapes of curds are as important to the effect as the colour), while the leaves’ ‘loud song’ is refigured as ‘loud chaunting’ (the implication being one of mystical or religious purposefulness). That ‘cry’, in the process, goes from being ‘hid away’ to being an agent capable of shaking the leaves – and shaking their purpose too, perhaps. WBY’s meticulous parallelisms are interrupted by the second stanza, which is itself shaped by repetition: ‘And then you came . . . And with you came’, ‘And all the’ . . . And all the’). The apparent specificity of ‘you’ and ‘those red mournful lips’ is important: ‘those’ is more particular than ‘your’ – a word tried out in The Flame of the Spirit, but for

74

THE SORROW OF LOVE

this text the sole intended reader was MG herself, so ‘those’ might have been otiose in context. However, no sooner has the specificity been established than it becomes (almost oppressively) universal, with ‘the whole of the world’s tears’, and this comprehensiveness is driven home with the repeated ‘And all of ’ in 7–8. The second stanza apprehends the completely individual, here the one woman loved exclusively by this particular compos­ ing voice, as the suddenly usurping (and catastrophic) universal; and the objective world of which she might have seemed to be a part is experienced, in the third stanza, as a new (and grievous) reality which she has brought into being. WBY’s economy of means, and his tight formal control that manages at the same time to feel ‘languid’, make the poem a significant achievement. Copy-text: P24.

T

he quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves, The full round moon and the star-laden sky, And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves, Had hid away earth’s old and weary cry. 5

And then you came with those red mournful lips,

And with you came the whole of the world’s tears

Title] No title in MS. ‘The Sorrow[?s] of the World’, QUO [reading uncertain: published in The Independent as ‘The Sorrow of the World’]. 1. quarrel] quarrelling, QUO. 1–3.] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868) II, ‘July: The Watching of the Falcon’, 210–214: Then round he gazed oppressed with awe,

And there no living thing he saw

Except the sparrows in the eaves,

As restless as light autumn leaves

Blown by the fitful rainy wind.

3.] Cp. Dora Greenwell Poems (1861), ‘Poets’, 6: ‘The wind-song, the bird-song, the song of the leaves’. (This was repr. as the first poem in Greenwood’s Selected Poems, 1889). loud song] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘Answer to a Child’s Question’ (1802), 1–4: ‘Do you ask

what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove, |

The Linnet and Thrush say, ‘I love and I love!’

| In the winter they’re silent  – the wind is

so strong; | What it says, I  don’t know, but

it sings a loud song’, and John Todhunter,

Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘May Sun­ shine’, 126: ‘The air is full of the loud song of

thrushes’.

leaves,] leaves QUO, CK.

4. Had hid] had hushed MS. weary] bitter MS, QUO bitter corr. to heavy Proof 2. 5. those red mournful lips] your red mournful [mouth del] lips MS. 6.] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost XI, 626–627: ‘for which | The world erelong a world of tears must weep’. With 6–7 cp. also WBY’s ‘When you are sad’, 12: ‘the whole world’s trouble weeps with you’.

THE SORROW OF LOVE

75

And all the trouble of her labouring ships, And all the trouble of her myriad years. 10

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves, Are shaken with earth’s old and weary cry.

7.] trouble] sorrows MS, QUO, CK, P95. This change, first made for P99, is discussed by T. Parkinson (167): ‘By 1899 [WBY] evidently felt that the ‘sorrow’ of love was plain enough, not only in this particular poem, but also in the entire book of Poems; and he saw ‘trouble’ as a word both descriptive and evaluative and with sufficient ambiguity that the repetition of it would strengthen and extend meaning’. ‘Trouble’ tended to carry sexual connota­ tions for WBY, and he certainly associated the word with his relationship with MG: in 1915, remembering his first meeting with MG, he began a section of his draft autobiog­ raphy with the sentence, ‘I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began’ (Mem., 40). D. Toomey makes this point, and associates the revision for P99 with the crisis in WBY’s relations with MG in Dec. 1898, when MG revealed her long love-affair with Lucien Millevoye to the hitherto-ignorant poet; as Toomey says, this is ‘a poem utterly bound up with her [MG] and his image of her’ (10). her] his corr. to her Proof 1. 8. the trouble] the burden MS, QUO, P95 bur­ den CK. her] his corr. to her Proof 1. myriad years] million years MS. Cp. Robert Browning, ‘Christmas Eve’ (1850), 353–355: ‘While the stupid earth on which I stay | Suf­ fers no change, but passive adds | Its myriad years to myriads’; Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Among the Rocks’, 63: ‘amassed through myriad years’. 9. sparrows warring] angry sparrows MS, war­ ring sparrows QUO. 10. curd-pale] withered MS, QUO crumbling CK. As J. Stallworthy notices (Between the Lines, 51), the adjective ‘crumbling’ was to make a return in ‘The Phases of the Moon’ (1919), 87: ‘And after that the crumbling of the moon’.

white] pale QUO. white stars] Perhaps cp. Tennyson, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1842), 223: ‘We saw the large white stars rise, one by one’; and M. Arnold, Tristram and Iseult (1852) II, 481–482: ‘and there, | Strung like white stars, the pearls still are’. 11.] The wearisome loud chanting of the leaves MS, QUO, And the loud chanting of the unquiet leaves, CK. The change to ‘chaunt­ ing’ made for P95 and kept afterwards, was matched by that to ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’ 21 (‘And learn to chant a tongue men do not know’ (CK), also changed to ‘chaunt’). This is a decision to archaise, and it probably reflects a wish to make the leaves’ singing more ritualistic, and pos­ sibly magical, than a naturally conditioned sound. The verb here is OED chant 1.b: ‘To sing (a song, tune, etc.). Frequently (esp. in later use): spec. to sing (a song, esp. a repeti­ tive one) in a monotone, or with a prolonged intonation.’ As the OED adds, this is also used figuratively  – but WBY’s use (to refer to leaves) pushes the word’s figurative limits. There is possibly a link  – whether or not a conscious one on WBY’s part – to Tennyson’s ‘The Poet’s Song’ (1842), where poet, song, birds, and the heavens are all present: And he sat him down in a lonely place, And chanted a melody loud and sweet, That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, And the lark drop down at his feet. (5–8) unquiet leaves] The is an echo here (in all like­ lihood, but not certainly, a coincidental one) of the Tractarian poet, Isaac Williams (1802– 1865), and his poem ‘Whitsuntide’ (The Chris­ tian Seasons (1854)), 160: ‘The sudden risings of the unquiet leaves’. 12. weary] bitter MS, QUO, bitter corr. to heavy Proof 2.

113

A SONG OF THE

ROSY-CROSS

Date of composition. In MS1, WBY writes beneath the poem the date ‘November 15th’. This day in 1891 is probably the date of composition. It was just under a fortnight after MG’s initiation into the GD, and her subsequent departure from London (where WBY was remaining) for Paris. Text and publication history. The earliest MS  version is in a notebook, The Rosy Cross. Lyrics (NLI 30318), where this poem is the opening piece (MS1). Two other MS  versions (MS2, MS3) are found in the notebook begun by WBY in Aug. 1893 (Burns Collection, Boston College). MS2 is written at the beginning of Sept. 1893, in the midst of drafts for another MG-related poem, ‘On a Child’s Death’; one phrase from that poem, ‘She needed love’, was already on the notebook page used for MS2, and was deleted in the process of composition. Although it is a pencil draft in a hurried and unclear hand, MS2 makes only one substantive change to the wording of MS1 (which it subsequently cancels, restoring the earlier version). It is possible that WBY copied out an already-finished poem in order to help him clarify his thoughts in the process of composing ‘On a Child’s Death’. However, the same notebook contains another copy (MS3), which follows material dated ‘August  29’ [1895] and immediately precedes draft material dated ‘Sept 24’ [1895]. MS3 is a fair copy, again very close indeed to the form the poem had taken in MS1, and was probably made at the same time as WBY prepared a text for the 1895 periodical publication. All three MSS are transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 354–355. The poem was published in The Bookman, Oct. 1895, and never reprinted by WBY. Criticism and interpretation. R. Ellmann called this ‘one of the more cryptic of Yeats’s early poems’ and offered a commentary (Identity, 66–7): The magical-mystical-religious symbolism is appropriated here for special amorous and poetic purposes. The poet says that, since his beloved is endowed with perfect beauty, and since he has the obligation of suffering for her in a way which seems divinely appointed if only because uniquely unpleasant, he can find consolation for his pain in the conviction that perfect beauty and perfect suffering reflect the archetype of perfect union, and thus reflect the basic prin­ ciples of world order. The rose and cross are emphatic symbols, while earth and water are cooperative. Yeats evidently decided that the poem was too arcane in its references, or too lavish in its apportionment of attributes to lover and beloved, so he did not reprint it. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-115

A SONG OF THE ROSY-CROSS

77

Nevertheless, this poem remained in play for WBY from 1891 until 1895, longer than many of the short lyrics in his 1891 MS sequences for MG. Formally, it is an intricate piece: the trochaic lines work with only two rhyme sounds (and these are themselves not very distinct from each other), and the first three lines are repeated as the final three lines in the poem. The effect is akin to the (numerous) French-derived forms (the Triolet e.g.) which were in vogue in the 1890s amongst English poets. The content, on the other hand, is distinctly Yeatsian. Although he published a number of ‘rose’-titled poems in the 1890s, this is perhaps in some ways WBY’s most explicitly Rosicrucian: a key symbolic image of Rosicrucianism was the rose blossoming at the centre of Christ’s cross. The GD absorbed Rosicrucian beliefs and symbolism wholesale, incorporating them in its more broadly Kabbalistic system of symbolic expression and ritual. Here, addressing MG (a Soror in the GD in Nov. 1891, though no longer active in it by 1895), the poet puts rose and cross asunder in a way that is alien to the practices of symbolic magic that were known to him: the speaker of the lyric is apportioned the cross as his lot, and the addressee is given possession of the rose. One pos­ sible reason for this is that the poem creates a situation in which resolution is possible only by the reuniting of rose and cross, in the conjunction of the female and the male, so that a sexual consummation becomes also a mystical union. But that is what the poem may wish for, rather than anything it is able to record. The responsibility for the uncompleted situation is (as with WBY’s other short mystical love lyrics in 1891) one borne by the Deity – ‘He who measures gain and loss’. The poem takes full measure of loss, which is a matter of profound separation; but any ‘gain’ is a future prospect, perhaps (hence the speaker’s ‘joy’) one implicit in the initial act of measuring and division: what is distinct promises to be undivided again, as when the rose blossoms on the cross-beams in Rosicrucian symbolism. Given that this poem is (or rather, eventually in 1895 becomes) a public piece of writing, WBYs decision to interpret mystical religious belief in terms of romantic love seems quite boldly heterodox; certainly, it allows the suspicion to be generated that the mysticism is being applied to solve the romantic problem. At the same time, the poem also struck WBY as no longer worthy of a place in his oeuvre after its 1895 outing – perhaps, as Ellmann suggested, finding it alto­ gether ‘too lavish’ in its imaginative range. Copy-text: The Bookman Oct. 1895.

H

e who measures gain and loss,

When he gave to thee the Rose,

Gave to me alone the Cross;

Where the blood-red blossom blows

Title: No title (MS1), A Ryme of the Rosy Cross (MS2), ‘A Song of the Rosy Cross’ (MS3). 1.] Perhaps cp. John Keble, Miscellaneous Poems (1869), “Ye of nice touch’, 1–2: ‘and keen true eye | To measure gain and loss’. 2. When he] He who del. When he MS2.

4. the blood-red blossom] Cp. Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama (1855) III vi 53: ‘The blood-red blossom of war’ and A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Ilicet’, 74–5: ‘reddening round the blood-red blossom, | The slow delicious bright soft blood’.

78 5

10

A SONG OF THE ROSY-CROSS

In a wood of dew and moss, There thy wandering pathway goes, Mine where waters brood and toss; Yet one joy have I, hid close, He who measures gain and loss, When he gave to thee the Rose, Gave to me alone the Cross.

5–6.] Cp. Harriet Eleanor Hamilton King, A Book of Dreams (1883), ‘A Holiday’, 123, 125–126 (on butterflies): ‘Folded in dew and moss . . . | . . . a mist of starry shapes | They rise, to wander down the noonward way’.

7. where waters brood] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Sonnets on the Poetry and Problems of Life (1881), ‘I wake of summer morn .  .  .’, 5–6: ‘Over the glimmering waters brood and flow, | Divine as a pale rose’. 8. one joy have I] have I  one joy MS1 one thought have I MS2.

114

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

Date of composition. There is no evidence for an exact date, but the poem’s composition must have been completed by around Christmas, 1891; the numerous corrections in the Yale CK proofs may perhaps suggest that the poem was present in the first batch of materials sent to Unwin by WBY in Nov. 1891. Context. The poem is almost certainly directed to MG. A story told by George Russell suggests that it consisted originally of only the first two stanzas, with the third (again related to MG) being added later (see note to 13). The basic conceit is nothing if not extravagant, for the owner of ‘these red lips’ is being located as the Rose of the World – ‘Rosa Mundi’ is the first published title – as well as a version of both Helen of Troy and Deirdre, the tragic heroine of the Ulster Cycle. Read alongside the other love-poems for MG from 1891, this poem fits into a pattern of quasi-religious adoration (the final lines, e.g., are close to the governing metaphor of ‘Your Pathway,’ while the identification of MG with the Rose brings with it a series of mystical parallels which promote her, effec­ tively, to a semi-divine status). None of this is to say that WBY’s heightened imagination is to be taken at face value, or is indeed offered as such. The religious register is, in any case, one already freighted with ironies for WBY, since the adoration of a female Godsubstitute is something the poet was conditioned to regard with scepticism because of his own Irish Protestant background. In CK, the poem is placed by WBY before ‘The Peace of the Rose’ (later ‘The Rose of Peace’) to form a pair of poems on facing pages, preceded by ‘Fergus and the Druid’ and followed by ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ – two mystical/personal lyrics between two pieces of Irish narrative verse. Criticism and interpretation. The poem was singled out for praise in a number of reviews of CK. Lionel Johnson called the verse in this poem ‘stately,’ ‘wistful and mel­ ancholy, an aerial murmur of sad things without any affectation’ (The Academy, 1 Oct. 1892). There is, however, little discussion of what the poem might mean in the early decades of criticism. Somewhat mysteriously, William Sharp (as ‘Fiona MacLeod’) declared this poem one ‘where Mr. Yeats is neither Irish nor English, but a poet whose utterance is English’ (North American Review, 1 Nov. 1904). Hardly more illuminatingly, F. Reid waxed lyrical on the poem’s lyric qualities: ‘Sometimes a poem opens out slowly, with a sort of spreading, increasing movement that breaks at last into a proud, lonely magnificence of phrasing, as in the concluding lines of “The Rose of the World” ’ (Reid, 86). With modern criticism, the poem comes occasionally into different kinds of focus. R. Ellmann used it as an example of how WBY either begins ‘with a symbolic abstraction and humanizes it, or begins with a woman and renders her symbolically impersonal,’ so DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-116

80

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

that the poet ‘starts with a genuine woman, red lips and all, and then proceeds to apo­ theosize her’: ‘The present woman quickly becomes Helen of Troy (an insertion of Greek mythology which is unusual for Yeats in the 1890s), then Deirdre, for whom the sons of Usna died, then beauty herself before God’s throne, a conception familiar to Shelley and Spenser, and indebted to the Kabbalistic and neo-Platonic theory that the Shekhinah or eternal womanhood is coeval with God’ (Identity, 73). The same Kabbalistic perspective was employed by T.R. Whitaker (47): According to the Book of Enoch, Sophia descended from heaven to earth but was rejected by men and now awaits the Messianic age. Elsewhere, we learn that she was, as a harlot, married by the gnostic prophet Simon Magus. She was not only identified with Helen, with the moon, and with the mother of all, but was also called the ‘lost sheep’ whom Simon had descended from heaven to release from the flesh [. . .] In Kabbalistic terms, she is he Holy Shekhinah, the fallen or exiled presence of God, whose reunion with God is the apocalyptic event but who may be ‘lifted up’ in daily redemptive acts of men who microcosmically undergo that apocalypse. Yeats himself, in ‘The Rose of the World,’ had associ­ ated that divine harlot with Helen and Deirdre. Much later, E. Cullingford identified the Rose of the World as ‘a version of Ennoia, the Wisdom figure of the gnostics, who is the first emanation of the Deity, existing with God before the creation’; this is why ‘The love poet lays himself and the world at her feet’ (Cullingford, 41). WBY would certainly have understood these references (better at any rate than MG might have done), and his poem can be read legitimately in their light; but it is also possible to suppose that the references came to the poem’s aid in supplying a suitably extravagant superstructure for the praise of the beloved. If the poem is Kabbalis­ tic, it is so not as an exposition of anything, but as an exercise in using such knowledge to inflate the rhetorical impact of a series of extraordinarily lavish compliments. H. Adams is just as close to the poem’s dynamics when he omits all mention of this Kabbalistic ele­ ment, writing that ‘The poem tells us that beauty appears in many guises, that dreams have been dreamed about her and the great tragic actions taken in her name’ (52–53): But here a new element is introduced. In the past, beauty has been ephemeral. Now the poet claims that it is we and all things that are ephemeral, beauty (the rose) having been at God’s side even before the archangels were created [. . .] The rose referred to here is the rose of the world because it descends as sexual beauty. The poem’s balancing of sexual with esoteric excitement is not necessarily successful throughout; and it is probably true that its carefully modulated internal dynamics of form (each stanza being essentially a abba quatrain, protracted into a shorter fifth line which returns to the b rhyme while concluding the stanza-long syntactic unit) are those of three completed rhythmic and rhyming movements, each one coming to conclu­ sion with something of a ‘dying fall’. The subliminal suggestion thus effected is one of

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

81

repetition and weariness: this is a poem in which nothing can change, or at least in which there is no change to report. Such a situation may indeed be mapped onto the Kabbalistic (and other mystical) matrices with which WBY was familiar; but its applicability to MG’s ongoing reluctance to change her attitude towards the poet’s advances is a truth stub­ bornly present in even the apocalyptic matter of the poem’s imagery. Text and publication history. There is no surviving MS material for this poem. It was published first in The National Observer, 2 Jan. 1892 (NO), and subsequently in CK, then P95 and all subsequent collected editions. Proofs of CK in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, show nine corrections to this poem (Proofs). Copy-text: P49.

W

5

ho dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna’s children died.

Title: Rosa Mundi NO. ‘The Rose of the World’ had been used as a title by Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (1854), IV, ‘The Accom­ paniments’, I. 1.] Perhaps cp. the opening of a short song in Tennyson, Queen Mary (1875) V ii. 208–209: ‘Hapless doom of woman happy in betroth­ ing! | Beauty passes like a breath and love is lost in loathing’. 2. mournful pride] This phrase had been hit upon before, by Abraham Cowley, ‘On the Death of Mr. Jordan’, 16–17: ‘his death the mournful pride | Of England’; although WBY was later to read and make use of Cowley’s poetry, it is unlikely (though not impossible) that he should have come across this particu­ lar poem in the early 1890s. 3. Mournful that] WBY’s construction here is very unusual. However, cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Grave of a Poetess’, 17: ‘Mournful that thou wert slumbering low’. 4. Troy passed away] The phrasal verb ‘to pass away’ is defined by OED as ‘Of a thing: to cease to exist; to perish or disappear; to be

dissolved’ (1.a.): For this sense, cp. Matthew 25: 35, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’. 5.] The reference is to the Irish story of Deir­ dre, the heroine of one of the best-known sto­ ries in the Ulster cycle. Betrothed to the king Conchubar, Deirdre loved Naoise, who was one of ‘the sons of Usna’, and escaped with him to lowland Scotland, supported by his two brothers Ainle and Ardan. The king sent Fergus to negotiate a return to Ulster which, when accepted, turned out to be a trap, and all three ‘sons of Usna’ were killed by the vengeful Conchubar in Fergus’s absence. WBY’s ‘Usna’s children’ replicates the phrase favoured by Standish J. O’Grady. O’Grady’s version is as follows (History of Ireland: The Heroic Period Vol. 1 [1878], 119): After this, they rowed on in silence, and came to Dun Kermnah, and the chil­ dren of Usna hastened onward to Emain Macha, trusting in the High King, that he would not violate the protection of [Fer­ gus] Mac Roy. Nay-the-less, Concobar Mac Nessa gave no heed to the protection

82

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race,

of Fergus, for he saw that his authority and sovereignty were set aside, and that now the wars predicted by Cathvah were about to burst, and that Fergus and the children of Usna were confederate against him. Therefore, he made a swift and sudden excursion into the north, with his bravest and most agile warriors; but Fergus Mac Roy had delayed at Dun Kermnah, having been detained there by a stratagem, and Bewney the Ruthless Red, went over to his side, and betrayed the children of Usna. But Concobar Mac Nessa seized Deirdre and Naysi, Anly and Ardan, and he slew the children of Usna, and Illan the fair, and many of the Clan Usna, and despised the protection of Fergus Mac Roy. The Deirdre story was treated repeatedly and extensively by Irish writers in WBY’s time, and the poet’s earliest contact with it may have been his reading of Samuel Ferguson’s Lays of the Western Gael (1865), and its poem ‘Deirdra’s Lament for the Sons of Usnach’. John Todhunter’s Three Irish Bardic Tales (1896) included ‘The Fate of the Sons of Usna’, a long poem which WBY had heard in performance from its author in 1888 (see CL 1, 59). Usna was not a person, but a place: Uisnech, a hill in Co. Westmeath. This place seems to have been regarded in ancient Ire­ land as the central point of the country. WBY’s first stanza brings the Irish matter into direct parallel with the (for most of his readers) much more familiar Homeric story of the fall of Troy, implicitly (for he names neither of them) align­ ing Helen with Deirdre. Both are women who elope; and the consequences of their elopements for their entire societies are grave. 6. the labouring world] WBY’s poetry of the 1890s makes much use of both ‘labouring’ and ‘unlabouring’ (cp. ‘the ever-labouring wave’ in a deleted portion of the 1884 ‘When to its end o’er-ripened July nears’ (see note to 36),

‘the unlabouring stars’ in ‘A Salutation’ 8 (and later in ‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’), and ‘the unlabouring dead’ in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1895 version) II, 79). Most pertinent to the present poem is ‘labouring’ in stanza 2 of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (completed by Oct. 1891), where ‘then you came with those red mournful lips, | And with you came the whole of the world’s tears | And all the trouble of her labouring ships’ (5–7): here, both ‘red [.  .  .] lips’ and ‘labouring’ establish a direct con­ nection with the present poem. ‘Labouring’ is something from which the beloved – ‘weary’ as she may be – is symbolically removed; in so far as the word carries connotations of child­ bearing (and this dimension is unlikely to be at the front of WBY’s mind in this instance), it makes the world at least partly feminine, with ‘The Rose of the World’ at a remove from its travails. This may be relevant once the ‘Rose’ figure is understood – as she is perhaps partly projected by WBY  – as a mystical/personal equivalent to the Virgin Mary. Some years later, in the 1897–1898 version of WBY’s ulti­ mately abandoned novel, The Speckled Bird, the hero’s father delivers himself of some eccentric theology: ‘He held that when we see a beautiful thing we see a moment of the spiri­ tual paradise [. . .] she [the Virgin] is beauty, and [. . .] beauty is the ancient stillness from which all labouring things, the maker of the world and the saviour of the world and the ministering angels, have come and whither they shall return at the consummation of days’ (SB, 98). 7–8.] Revised thus for SP29, and retained in all collected edns. thereafter. Amid men’s souls that day by day give place, | More weary than the sea’s foam-fickle face NO, CK, P95-P29. This correction is entered in pencil in a copy of CK in the Department of Special Collec­ tions, Ohio State University Library, where a

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

10

Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face.

15

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet.

note at the bottom of the page records: ‘Writ­ ten by the author when he read the proofs of new edition’: presumably, this refers to SP29. lonely] lovely corr. to lonely Proofs. 11. dim abode] Perhaps cp. Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), 360–361: ‘The darkness of my dim abode | Fell on me as a heavy load’, or Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), II, 308– 310: ‘notes that are | The ghostly language of the ancient earth, | Or make their dim abode in distant winds’. 12–13.] The syntax of these lines is very com­ pressed, and is either mysterious or faulty. One likely meaning is: Before you existed, or before any hearts that are yet to beat [i.e. before those still to be born], one who is weary and kind lingered [. . .] you were] ye were CK. 13. Weary and kind] Jeffares, Commentary (27) relates a story of George Russell’s, which had been told to him in turn by E.R. Dodds: in this account, WBY recited

83

the poem to Russell and some others after returning from a long walk with MG. Origi­ nally, the poem consisted of only the first two stanzas; but WBY was concerned for MG, who was exhausted from her walk, and added the third stanza with its reference to her as ‘Weary and kind’. Russell, apparently, thought this (and the stanza as a whole) needless, telling Dodds ‘that he disliked these lines for their sentimentality,’ and that ‘He thought the word ‘kind’ meaningless in its context and explained that it was there because Maud Gonne though tired and footsore, was in a gentler mood than usual after the long walk’. Russell, according to Jeffares, ‘told the story to illustrate how fine poetry can be ruined by the intrusion of the transient and incidental’. 14. world] worlds NO. world to] corr. to world, to in Proof, and this punctuation is then followed in CK. Subse­ quent editions revert to ‘world to’.

115

A DREAM OF DEATH

Date of composition. 22 Nov. 1891. Background and circumstances of composition. There is no doubt that this is one of the 1891 poems by WBY which are written with MG in mind, both as a subject and as the immediate recipient. In her 1938 memoirs, MG writes of how while recuperating from illness in the South of France she received the poem: ‘I was getting steadily better and was greatly amused when Willie Yeats sent me a poem, my epitaph he had written with much feeling’ (A Servant of the Queen (1938), 147). This must be inaccurate how­ ever, since WBY composed the poem in Nov. 1891 and published it in Dec. when MG was in Paris: she was not recovering from illness there, although she was still grieving for her child, Georges, who had died in Jul. 1891. WBY knew nothing of these personal circumstances at the time. Much letter, in his draft Memoirs of 1916–1917, WBY did remember hearing from the portrait-painter Sarah Purser reports of MG being seri­ ously ill; but this is likely to be a memory of 1890 or the first part of 1891 (Mem., 44): She [Sarah Purser] met me with the sentence, ‘So Maud Gonne is dying in the South of France, and her portrait is on sale,’ and went on to tell how she had lunched with Maud Gonne in Paris and there was a very tall Frenchman there – and I thought she dwelt upon his presence for my sake – and a doctor, and the doctor had said to her, ‘They will both be dead in six months.’ The ‘very tall Frenchman’ was Lucien Millevoye, MG’s lover (of whom, again, WBY as yet knew little); yet this does not fit easily with the composition of what MG calls ‘my epitaph’. Again, the sojourn in the South of France is much more likely to be one made in the winter of 1890 than in the short time from 3 Nov. 1891 (when MG left London (and WBY) for Paris) and 25 Nov. (when WBY reported to John O’Leary that ‘Miss Gonne will be in Dublin in 10 days or less – She returns to London from Paris in two or three days’(CL 1, 273)). It is unlikely that MG travelled south for just over a fortnight, and another letter from WBY to O’Leary, from 9 Nov., says that ‘Miss Gonne [. . .] has now departed for Paris where she stays for a week or ten days more, probably’ (CL 1, 270). Circumstantial confirmation for winter 1890 as the time spent in the South of France comes from MG herself, whose account of winter in St Raphael on the Medi­ terranean coast in Millevoye’s company is unshadowed by any suggestion of personal grief, and mentions the illness of the poet Rose Kavanagh, who died ‘a few months later’ (A Servant of the Queen, 147): Kavanagh died on 26 Feb. 1891. So, despite Gonne’s later presentation of this poem as an instance of WBY’s amusing pre-emptive mourning, it DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-117

A DREAM OF DEATH

85

is in fact much more closely connected with the poet’s intense courtship of her, which had continued from Jul. 1891, and in which the notebook it is found in, The Rosy Cross. Lyrics, is an important part. (In this, the notebook is comparable to the 1891 The Flame of the Spirit, which WBY gave to MG in October, and in which he subsequently put aside a page for this poem to be entered, as the first of twelve additional – and never, in the event, transcribed – pieces.) In this context, WBY’s interest in supernatural auguries, in the form of dreams and visions either experienced by MG, or with relevance to her, is a significant part of the poem’s inspiration. One vision in particular, experienced by Moina MacGregor Mathers in Paris, may have a bearing on the poem’s vision of the death of the beloved. In a letter of 20 Nov. (just a couple of days before composition of the poem), WBY tells George Russell about this vision (CL 1, 272): She made Miss G – a priestess of a temple in Tyre and connected her with some one, whom, she said afterwards, resembled me, though she was not quite cer­ tain. The man lived in the desert and had much the same story as yours except that there was an episode apparently later than anything you arrived at in which he helped her to escape from the Temple. She afterwards went away by herself into the desert and died there. This was corroborated by a dream continually recurring with Miss G – of journeying on and on in a desert. Although the poem imagines ‘a strange place’ which is funereally wooded rather than ‘a desert’, the idea of MG dying alone and far from society is carried over from this vision. In a poem of wooing, this scenario, and this turn of thought, seem unorthodox. (The vision should also be compared with that in a poem by WBY written in Oct. 1891, ‘A Dream of Other Lives’.) A reason why the poem should depict the beloved in terms of her death is not immediately obvious, and may suggest some psychological morbidity, or even morbid narcissism, on the part of the lover. But it is possible that WBY interpreted this visionary material in a different way. It is important that the poem begins ‘I dreamed’, for the serious import of dreams was something in which WBY could safely presume that MG had at this time an intense interest. MG mentions in her memoirs a dream she had had as a girl, of a coffin loaded from a gun carriage on to a boat, which she had just before her father’s death; and it is possible that she discussed this with WBY (A Servant of the Queen, 44): The dream was vivid; when the nurse brought me tea, I asked her what it meant to dream of a funeral. ‘Dreams go by contrary,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You will hear of a wedding.’ It was not only her nurse with whom MG discussed the import of dreams, and over the summer of 1891 (in the wake of her child’s death) she had numerous consultations about visionary meaning with both Russell and WBY. It is entirely possible that, in writing about an imagined death and interment, WBY is suggesting to MG a romantic meaning for the dream, in its foretelling of their destined union. Text and publication history. Three MS versions of this poem survive and are tran­ scribed here. The poem was first published in the National Observer 12 Dec. 1891 (NO);

86

A DREAM OF DEATH

then The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) (BRC), CK, and P95, and five subsequent impressions of P to P12. A substantially revised text featured in the 1913 impression of P, and in all collected editions thereafter; it is edited separately in the present edition. Copy-text: P12.

I

dreamed that one had died in a strange place

Near no accustomed hand;

And they had nailed the boards above her face,

MS  draft materials: The earliest extant draft for this poem is on a leaf detached from NLI 30318, the 1891 ‘Rosy Cross’ notebook (MS1); this notebook also includes two subsequent drafts (MS2, MS3). Both MS1 and MS2 carry the date ‘November  22nd 91.’ These three MS versions show the poem in the process of composition, probably on the one day, and are reproduced in full here: MS1 version: I dream they laid her where the [?shad­ owy] trees I dreamed that [you del.] one lay buried where tall trees In hateful quiet grew. ‘Mourn with the mourning of the world’s old breeze And with her falling dew.’ I, warring vainly with oblivion dull, Whose home is in the cypress and the yew, Graved on the stone above, ‘For one lies here who was more beautiful Than thy first love.’

MS2 version: I dreamed [that one lay buried where tall del.] they laid thee where the shadowing trees In hateful quiet grew: – ‘Mourn with the mourning of the world’s old breeze And with her falling dew.’ I, [fighting del.] warring vainly with obliv­ ion dull Whose home is in the cypress and the yew,

Carved on the cross above,

‘For one lies here who was more beautiful

Than thy first love.’

MS3 version: I dreamed that [she del.] one had died in a strange [land del.] place Near no accustomed hand And they had nailed the boards above her face The peasants of that land, And wondering [set to guard del.] planted by her solitude A cypress and a yew I came and [carved del.] wrote upon a cross of wood –

Man had no more to do: –

‘She was more beautiful than thy first love Who lies beneath these trees’ And gazed upon the mournful stars above And heard the mournful breeze God mourns with all his stars above Mourn, traveller, with the mournful stars above And with the mournful breeze She was more beauteous than thy first love [Who lies below these del.] This lady by the trees Title] An Epitaph NO, BRC, CK. 1. died in a strange place] Perhaps cp. Caroline Bowles Southey (1786–1854), Poetical Works (1867), ‘An Evening Walk’, 238: ‘Send me not hence, in a strange place to die’.

A DREAM OF DEATH

5

10

87

The peasants of that land, And, wondering, planted by her solitude A cypress and a yew: I came, and wrote upon a cross of wood, Man had no more to do: She was more beautiful than thy first love, This lady by the trees; And gazed upon the mournful star above, And heard the mournful breeze.

8^9.] Stanza break NO. 11. the mournful star] perhaps cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘The Omnipresence of the Deity’ II, 796–797:

‘some mild and mournful star, | That throned its beauty in the sky afar’, and “The Dying Girl: Consumption’, 6: ‘beneath some mournful star’.

116

THE DEATH OF

CUCHULAIN

Date of composition. Probably composed in late 1891 or early 1892. There is no firm evidence for a date, but it is likely that when WBY writes to John O’Leary on 9 Nov. 1891 about ‘the book’ lent to him by one Mrs Miles, he has Jeremiah Curtin’s Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (1890) in mind: ‘It would not have mattered,’ WBY goes on, ‘but for a notion I have of doing a poem on one of the stories to put into a book with the Countess Kathleen’ (CL 1, 269). If this is so, the possibility of composition beginning in Nov. 1891 is plausible. Certainly, the poem was finished some time before 12 Apr. 1892, when WBY consulted KT about the price he should ask for from United Ireland, which by then had evidently accepted the piece for publication (CL 1, 293). Sources. WBY’s note in CK identifies the principal source of this poem as Jer­ emiah Curtin’s Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (1890). The Irish American writer was one of the authors named by WBY in a letter printed in United Ireland for 17 Dec. 1892 as ‘setting before us a table spread with strange Gaelic fruits, from which an ever-growing band of makers of song and story shall draw food for their souls’ (CL 1, 339). Curtin’s account of the events that feed into WBY’s narrative is as follows (324–326): When Cucúlin went from Erin he left a son whose mother was called the Virago of Alba: she was still alive and the son was eighteen years old. When she heard that Cucúlin had brought Gil an Og to Erin, she was enraged with jealousy and madness. She had reared the son, whose name was Conlán, like any king’s son, and now giving him his arms of a champion she told him to go to his father. ‘I would,’ said he, ‘if I knew who my father is.’ ‘His name is Cucúlin, and he is with Fin MacCumhail. I bind you not to yield to any man,’ said she to her son, ‘nor tell your name to any man till you fight him out.’ Conlán started from Ulster where his mother was, and never stopped till he was facing Fin and his men, who were hunting that day along the cliffs of KilConaly. When the young man came up Fin said, ‘There is a single man facing us.’ Conan Maol said, ‘Let some one go against him, ask who he is and what he wants.’ ‘I  never give an account of myself to any man,’ said Conlán, ‘till I  get an account from him.’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-118

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

89

‘There is no man among us,’ said Conan, ‘bound in that way but Cucúlin.’ They called on Cucúlin; he came up and the two fought. Conlán knew by the description his mother had given that Cucúlin was his father, but Cucú­ lin did not know his son. Every time Conlán aimed his spear he threw it so as to strike the ground in front of Cucúlin’s toe, but Cucúlin aimed straight at him. They were at one another three days and three nights. The son always sparing the father, the father never sparing the son. Conan Maol came to them the fourth morning. ‘Cucúlin,’ said he, ‘I didn’t expect to see any man standing against you three days, and you such a champion.’ When Conlán heard Conan Maol urging the father to kill him, he gave a bit­ ter look at Conan, and forgot his guard. Cucúlin’s spear went through his head that minute, and he fell. ‘I die of that blow from my father,’ said he. ‘Are you my son?’ said Cucúlin.

‘I am,’ said Conlán.

Cucúlin took his sword and cut the head off him sooner than leave him in

the punishment and pain he was in. Then he faced all the people, and Fin was looking on. ‘There’s trouble on Cucúlin,’ said Fin. ‘Chew your thumb, said Conan Maol, ‘to know what’s on him.’ Fin chewed his thumb, and said, ‘Cucúlin is after killing his own son, and if I and all my men were to face him before his passion cools, at the end of seven days, he’d destroy every man of us.’ ‘Go now,’ said Conan, ‘and bind him to go down to Bale strand and give seven days’ fighting against the waves of the sea, rather than kill us all.’ So Fin bound him to go down. When he went to Bale strand Cucúlin found a great white stone. He grasped his sword in his right hand and cried out: ‘If I had the head of the woman who sent her son into peril of death at my hand, I’d split it as I split this stone,’ and he made four quarters of the stone. Then he strove with the waves seven days and nights till he fell from hunger and weak­ ness, and the waves went over him. Curtin’s narrative is (as WBY’s CK note acknowledges) in many ways distinct from the versions contained in the Irish bardic literature. Of these, WBY was most likely aware of the Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer), which had appeared in transla­ tion in 1890 (see note to 2). It is possible (see note to 22) that he had a second-hand knowledge of the other major bardic source, the Aided Oenfhir Aife (The Death of the Only Son of Aife). At all events, WBY departs decisively from the early Irish sources, in the direction of Curtin, whose version he considered one that preserved an alternative, orally derived form of the Cuchulain narrative. More recent literary sources are just as significant, and while there are several of versions of the narra­ tive in which a father unwittingly kills his son in combat, Matthew Arnold’s poem

90

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

Sohram and Rustum (1853) is undoubtedly here an influence on WBY. Although a concentrated narrative, Arnold’s mini-epic is nevertheless much longer than WBY’s poem; but it concerns the encounter on the field of battle between a mighty war­ rior father, Rustum, and the son of whose existence he is unaware, Sohrab. Rustum will not reveal his name before they enter combat, and it is only once a mortal blow has been struck that he understands that Sohrab is indeed his natural son. The two enjoy a lengthy exchange of affectionate and heroic farewells before Sohrab expires – something to which the curt exclamations of WBY’s lines 73–5 stand in a contrast so marked as to suggest some measure of deliberate departure on the poet’s part. Like WBY’s Cuchulain, Arnold’s poem comes to a watery end, as the waters of the Oxus come to ‘the longed-for dash of waves’ of the Aral Sea. In 1886, WBY chose to slight Arnold’s studied (though in fact effective) classicism by comparison with the stylistic strengths of Sir Samuel Ferguson, who was ‘like the ancients; not that he was an imitator, as Matthew Arnold in Sohrab and Rustum, but for a much better reason; he was like them – like them in nature, for his spirit had sat with the old heroes of his country’ (CW 9, 14). Ferguson is a marked influence on WBY’s poem, and in particular the shorter narrative treatments of bardic-derived material such as ‘Fer­ gus Wry-Mouth’ (Poems, 1880), where the formal medium of pentameter couplets is perhaps imitated by ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ (see note to 93–4). Fergus there wages a battle against the Muirduis, a monster living under the waters of Loch Rury, where his victory proves fatal to him (65–70): And, to Loch Rury’s bank in haste conveyed, [Fergus] Went in at Fertais. For a day and night Beneath the waves he rested out of sight: But all Ultonians on the bank who stood, Saw the loch boil and redden with the blood. When next at sunrise skies grew also red, He rose – and in his hand the Muirdris’ head. Critical reception. Critics have seldom paid great attention to this poem apart from WBY’s other (and much later) Cuchulain-related works. G. Bornstein’s remarks include, but are not limited to, this first Cuchulain poem: ‘The attack on the sea,’ he writes, ‘is an implicit attack upon the unavoidable tragic irony of life [. . .] Cuchulain dies a martyr to a past social order which there is no hope of redeeming’ (Bornstein, 132). The most enthusiastic account of the poem is that of H. Bloom, for whom it is ‘the most ambitious’ of the pieces later grouped by WBY as The Rose, which he reads in Bleakean terms as ‘a chant of Experience’s triumph, particularly in its [the poem’s] original form’ (114): This first ‘Death of Cuchulain’ was improved greatly in revision, but the rhe­ torical gain is a thematic loss, obscuring Yeats’s original design. The sea is the generative tide, the watery welter of mere Experience, but in it the Rose that is also the sun, that is also the man-god Cuchulain, must drown.

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

91

Alongside study of the poem’s sources and analogues, Birgit Bramsbäck’s Interpreta­ tion of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W.B. Yeats (1950), claims that it ‘sym­ bolizes Yeats’s own anxieties. . . . The despair Yeats himself experiences over his own frustrated love is like that of Cuchulain, when he finds out that he has killed the son he had by the only woman he had loved passionately’ (38). This biographical inter­ est is expressed also in J. Unterecker’s description of WBY here finding ‘of compel­ ling interest the archetypal tales of father-son conflict,’ and seeing ‘in Cuchulain a Mask both for himself and for his nation’ (A Reader’s Guide to W.B. Yeats [1959], 78). There has been little general enthusiasm for WBY’s style in this early version, and it has been called ‘Stylistically a mixture of actively direct and evocative writing with verbose effects [. . .] marred by artificially archaic touches of the sort that could infect even the best verse of the nineteenth century’ (M.L. Rosenthal Yeats’s Poetic Art: Running to Paradise (1994) 136). The most far-reaching and detailed engage­ ment with the poem is that of E. Cullingford, ‘The Death of Cuchulain’s Only Son’, in M. Howes and J. Valente (eds.) Yeats and Afterwords (2014) 42–79. Cullingford makes a detailed case for the poem as part of WBY’s longer engagement with Cuchu­ lain’s tragic self-imposition of a childless fate, drawing both psychological and politi­ cal conclusions (partly in relation to the legacy of Parnell): ‘The unspeakable loss represented by the death of an only child stands as a synecdoche for what Yeats con­ sidered the larger cultural failure of post-Independence Ireland’ (73). That WBY’s 1891 poem had already foreseen this failure is a problematic thesis, though the link between its first place of publication, United Ireland, and Parnell’s party is undoubt­ edly real. It is not clear, however, that WBY in 1891 gave thought primarily to any parallels between Parnell and Cuchulain, and Cullingford’s claim that ‘the place­ ment [of the poem] in United Ireland brings Parnell into imaginative alignment with Cuchulain’ (54) requires her to adduce evidence from some fifteen years later, which is much more relevant to WBY’s play On Baile’s Strand: the imagination in any such ‘imaginative alignment’ in the early 1890s may not belong to WBY. Text and publication history. The poem first appeared in United Ireland on 11 Jun. 1892 (UI), and next in CK, published in Aug. of that year. WBY revised the poem for P95, and it was included in all successive editions of P (with occasional light revision) up to the edition of 1924. In 1925, the poem was included in substantially rewritten form in Early Poems and Stories: this text, which was carried through to all future collections of WBY’s verse, is edited separately in the present edition. No MS draft materials survive; the page proofs of CK in the Beineke Library (Yale) feature MS corrections and changes made by WBY (Proof).

92

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

Copy-text: P24.

A

man came slowly from the setting sun To Forgail’s daughter, Emer, in her dun, And found her dyeing cloth with subtle care, And said, casting aside his draggled hair:

WBY’s notes: In CK, WBY writes: Cuhillin (pronounced Cahoolin) was the great warrior of the Conorian cycle. My poem is founded on a West of Ireland leg­ end given by Curtin in ‘Myths and Folk lore of Ireland.’ The bardic tale of the death of Cuchullin is very different. A slightly briefer version of this note (‘Founded upon a story given by Mr. Curtin in his Myths and Folklore of Ireland. The bardic tradition is very different’) appeared in P95, P99 and P01. Title: P04 and after] The Death of Cuchullin UI, CK; The Death of Cuhoollin P95, P99, P01. 2.] To Emer of Borda, in her clay-piled dun, UI, CK, P95. It is not clear where WBY intends by ‘Borda’; possibly, he came across the word as a place name in Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), The Foray of Queen Maeve I, 117: ‘From Oileen Arda on to Borda Lu’. Forgail] Forgall Manach (Forgall the wily) had made Cuchulain undergo a series of trials before agreeing to marriage with his daughter Emer: these are narrated in the Irish Wooing of Emer (Tochmarc Emire). In this story, Cuchulain as one of his trials must spend time in Scotland, where he fathers a child with Aoife: it is this child whom he will later kill in combat. The Tochmarc Emire was translated by Kuno Meyer in Revue Cel­ tique 11 (1890), and was discussed in detail by John Rhys in Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (1888).

Emer] The wife of Cuchulain. In making her the mother of Cuchulain’s ill-fated son, WBY departs from the Irish sources. It is worth noting, in the light of Jeffares’s com­ ment that here the poet ‘may have confused Aoife and Emer’ (Commentary, 26) and E. Larrissy’s claim that ‘At this stage in his read­ ing of Irish tradition, Yeats seems not to have realized that it identifies Aoife as the mother, and not his wife Emer’ (E. Larrissy ed. The First Yeats (2010), 178) that WBY’s declara­ tion of his reliance on Curtin’s version of the story proves that he is here deliberately making Emer the mother of Cuchulain’s son, rather than Aoife (Curtin’s ‘Gil an Og’, the ‘Virago of Alba’). dun] OED n.3: ‘An ancient hill-fortress or fortified eminence (in the Highlands of Scot­ land, or in Ireland)’. WBY would have come across this word in Eugene O’Curry, Man­ ners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), III, 3: ‘The Dun was of the same form as the Rath, but consisting of at least two concentric circular mounds or walls, with a deep trench full of water between them’. WBY does not gloss this word, which recurs three times in the poem, in the notes to CK or the various editions of Poems. The term is used by e.g. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), where it is glossed as ‘town’, and in John Todhunter’s The Fate of the Sons of Usna (see note on 4). 4. draggled hair] Cp. John Todhunter, ‘The Fate of the Sons of Usna’, Eighth Duan, 278: ‘Blood on her piteous lips, blood on her draggled hair’. Todhunter’s poem did not appear in print until his Three Irish Bardic Tales (1896), but the author read it to WBY in Apr. 1888.

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

5

10

93

‘I am Aleel, the swineherd, whom you bid Go dwell upon the sea cliffs, vapour hid; But now my years of watching are no more.’ Then Emer cast the web upon the floor, And stretching out her arms, red with the dye, Parted her lips with a loud sudden cry. Looking on her, Aleel, the swineherd, said: ‘Not any god alive, nor mortal dead, Has slain so mighty armies, so great kings, Nor won the gold that now Cuchulain brings.’

15

‘Why do you tremble thus from feet to crown?’ Aleel, the swineherd, wept and cast him down Upon the web-heaped floor, and thus his word: ‘With him is one sweet-throated like a bird.’

5. [and passim] Aleel] Aileel UI, CK. Aleel, the swineherd] The name is a com­ mon one in Irish material, and WBY does not appear to have any specific Aileel of the Ulster Cycle in mind. 8. the web] E. Cullingford (‘The Death of Cuchulain’s Only Son’, 59) sees here an allu­ sion to Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon, and the net in which she entangles her husband for his murder. But if a classical dimension is present, this ‘web’ is much more likely to allude to the handiwork of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, and her long work at the loom. WBY may be remember­ ing a specific moment in Aubrey De Vere’s The Foray of Queen Maeve, where a pro­ phetic vision of Cuchulain is announced to Maeve by the witch Faythleen: the witch is encountered ‘Bent o’er her web’, and the Queen demands ‘What see’st  thou in that web?’, eliciting the answer ‘I see a kingdom’s destinies; | And they are like a countenance dashed with blood | . . . | The hue of blood, sunset on sunset charged’ (De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), The Foray of Queen Maeve I, 183–199).

14. [and passim] Cuchulain] Cuchullin UI, CK Cuhoollin P95, P99, P01. Cuchulain is the cen­ tral hero-figure in the bardic Ulster cycle. His name, which means ‘the hound of Culaan’, is explained in the tales of the cycle relating to his boyhood, when he kills a ferocious guard dog belonging to the smith Culaan, then voluntarily does its job himself as a form of compensation. Although Cuchulain was even­ tually to become a pivotal figure in WBY’s literary myth-making (in drama principally, but significantly in poetry also), at this point he is more simply a character in a poem: his encounter with the waves, which this poem has as its climax, is the subject of the frontis­ piece illustration to CK by Edwin Ellis, and alluded to early in the volume’s first poem (‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’, 3: ‘Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide’); further dimen­ sions offered by the many Tain-related Cuchu­ lain stories remain, for now, unexplored. 18. sweet-throated] Perhaps cp. Jean Ingelow, A Rhyming Chronicle (1850), ‘Mimie’s GrassNest’, 27–9 [of a bird]: ‘Madam, we await your telling | Of what sweet-throated tribe or nation | You may be’.

94 20

25

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

‘Who bade you tell these things?’ and then she cried To those about, ‘Beat him with thongs of hide And drive him from the door.’ And thus it was: And where her son, Finmole, on the smooth grass Was driving cattle, came she with swift feet, And called out to him, ‘Son, it is not meet That you stay idling here with flocks and herds.’ ‘I have long waited, mother, for those words; But wherefore now?’ ‘There is a man to die; You have the heaviest arm under the sky.’

30

‘My father dwells among the sea-worn bands, And breaks the ridge of battle with his hands.’ ‘Nay, you are taller than Cuchulain, son.’ ‘He is the mightiest man in ship or dun.’ ‘Nay, he is old and sad with many wars, And weary of the crash of battle cars.’

18^19.] And lovelier than the moon upon the sea; | He made for her an army cease to be. UI, CK, and all editions of P to P06; removed for CWVP08. 19–21.] ‘Who bade you tell these things upon my floor?’ Then to her servants, ‘Beat him from the door With thongs of leather.’ As she spake it was; UI, CK. 22. Finmole] WBY appears to have invented this name for Cuchulain’s son: in the Ulster Cycle, the boy’s name is Connla. Connla is the son of Cuchulain by Aoife, the warrior woman whom he vanquished in Scotland in the Tochmarc Emire. Another narrative of the Ulster Cycle, the Aided Oenfhir Aife (The Death of the Only Son of Aoife) tells of how Connla came to Ireland and encoun­ tered his father. In this version, Emer is with Cuchulain, and suspecting the young man’s

true identity pleads with her husband not to engage in combat, but she fails to avert the tragedy. 23. with swift feet] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 287–288: ‘and Love | Trampled the ember and crushed it with swift feet’. 24. called] cried UI, CK. 25. flocks] flock P95, P99. The reading ‘flocks’, which is in both UI and CK, is adopted again in P01. 26. I have long] Long have I UI, CK. 29–30.] ‘My father,’ made he smiling answer then, | Still treads the world amid his armed men’ UI, CK. 30. ridge of battle] Cp. William Drummond, Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland (1826), Canto IV, 280–281: ‘Through the dense ridge of battle he hews a broad pass, | And mows down the soldiers of Albyn like grass’, and Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘Deirdra’s Lament for the Sons of Unach’, 50: ‘Rulers of the ridge of war’.

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

35

40

45

95

‘I only ask what way my journey lies, For God, who made you bitter, made you wise.’ ‘The Red Branch kings a tireless banquet keep,

Where the sun falls into the Western deep.

Go there and dwell on the green forest rim;

But tell alone your name and house to him Whose blade compels, and bid them send you one Who has a like vow from their triple dun.’ Between the lavish shelter of a wood And the grey tide, the Red Branch multitude Feasted, and with them old Cuchulain dwelt, And his young dear one close beside him knelt, And gazed upon the wisdom of his eyes, More mournful than the depth of starry skies,

37. The Red Branch kings] In a note contained in CK (to a reference in the play The Count­ ess Kathleen), WBY wrote that Red Branch ‘was the name of the circle of warriors who preceded the Fenian cycle by about two hun­ dred years, according to bardic chronology, and gathered around “Concobar” or “Conor,” as the later circle gathered around Fin’. The name derives from one of Conchubar’s strongholds in Ulaid (eastern Ulster), ‘Cráeb­ ruad’, the red roof-branch (roof-beam). 38. the Western deep] By no means an uncom­ mon phrase on poetry, but cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), The Legends of Saint Patrick, ‘The Striving of Saint Patrick on Mount Cruachan’, 55–6: ‘Huge Cruachan, that o’er the western deep | Hung through seamist’, and The Children of Lir: An Ancient Irish Romance, 289–290: ‘where the Eagle-Crest | O’er-looks the western deep’. It is possible that WBY is here registering the influence of John Rhys’s Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (1888), where Cuchulain is given an anthro­ pological analysis as ‘The Sun Hero’.

39.forest rim] Perhaps cp. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, The Lays of France (1874), ‘The Lay of Eliduc’, 436:’the low dusky forest rim’. 40.] But tell your name to one man only, him Proof. This imposition of a binding condition is the laying on of a geis, characteristic of the narratives in Irish bardic literature. 43. shelter of a wood] Perhaps cp. John Dryden, Virgil Aeneid (1697), III, 500: ‘in the shady shelter of a wood’. 45. old Cuchulain] WBY innovates here by declaring Cuchulain ‘old’: the bardic sources do not have the hero as a figure of any great age, nor is this implied in Curtin’s story (cp. 33–4). 46. his young dear one] WBY gives no name here to Cuchulain’s consort: she is not Aoife, but may perhaps be identified with Eithne Inguba, who will figure in the much later poetic drama by WBY, The Only Jealousy of Emer, as Cuchulain’s mistress. 47–8.] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Songs Before Sunrise (1871), ‘Mater Dolorosa’, 5–6: ‘and her eyes, | Worn through with her tears, are deep as the depth of skies’.

96 50

55

60

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

And pondered on the wonder of his days; And all around the harp-string told his praise, And Concobar, the Red Branch king of kings, With his own finger touched the brazen strings. At last Cuchulain spake, ‘A young man strays Driving the deer along the woody ways. I often hear him singing to and fro, I often hear the sweet sound of his bow. Seek out what man he is.’ One went and came. ‘He bade me let all know he gives his name At the sword point, and bade me bring him one Who had a like vow from our triple dun.’ ‘I only of the Red Branch hosted now,’

Cuchulain cried, ‘have made and keep that vow.’

65

After short fighting in the leafy shade,

He spake to the young man, ‘Is there no maid

Who loves you, no white arms to wrap you round, Or do you long for the dim sleepy ground, That you come here to meet this ancient sword?’ ‘The dooms of men are in God’s hidden hoard.’

70

‘Your head a while seemed like a woman’s head That I loved once.’

51. Concobar] The king of Ulster, Conchobar MacNessa, in the bardic Ulster cycle. There are various spellings of his name, but here WBY adopts that of Standish O’Grady in his History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878). 53–4.] A youth there is | Who dwells among the woody silences del. in Proof. [A young man | [Has made his home del.] [Lived in the glade del.] Lived merrily where the polecats leaped and ran del.] A young man [dwells del.] strays | Driving the deer along the woody ways corr. Proof. 61–2.] I only of the Red Branch gathered now [Between the tide and wood del.] have made that vow.’

[Cuchullin cried, and drawing on a light Of golden mail strode forth for this last fight. del.] Proof gathered del. hosted Proof. ‘Hosted’ is OED host v.1 2. intr., ‘To be assembled or gather in a host’. 63–4.] [A while they battled by the woody shade, | And then Cuchullin spake del.] Proof. 68.] [You del.] only see what doom for me lies stored Proof ‘God only sees what doom for me lies stored.’ UI, CK. the dooms of men] WBY’s phrase was to be echoed in Thomas MacDonagh, Poetical Works (1916), ‘The Suicide’, 16: ‘the deeds and the dooms of men’.

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

97

Again the fighting sped, But now the war rage in Cuchulain woke, And through the other’s shield his long blade broke, And pierced him. ‘Speak before your breath is done.’ ‘I am Finmole, mighty Cuchulain’s son.’ 75

80

85

‘I put you from your pain. I can no more.’ While day its burden on to evening bore,

With head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed;

Then Concobar sent that sweet-throated maid,

And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed:

In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast. Then Concobar, the subtlest of all men, Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten, Spake thus, ‘Cuchulain will dwell there and brood, For three days more in dreadful quietude, And then arise, and raving slay us all. Go, cast on him delusions magical, That he may fight the waves of the loud sea.’

82–3.] Sent for his druids twenty score and ten, | And cried, UI, CK. 83–4. brood  .  .  .  quietude] This rhyme occurs also in ‘Apologia addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days’, 15–16. There, where the rhyme was originally with ‘holy quietude’, perhaps cp. Isaac Williams, The Baptistery (1858), ‘The Death of the Righteous’, 9–10: ‘Around the very place doth brood | A strange and holy Quietude’. 88. quicken tree] In his note to the poem ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’ (publ. 1893), WBY wrote: ‘Quicken is the old Irish name for the mountain ash’. The tree in question is Sorbus aucuparia (the rowan), and in both Irish and English folklore it is known for its power against witches and their works. Cp. KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diar­ muid and Grainne’, VII, 15: ‘the wizards of the quicken tree’. 88–92.] They cast round him their woven wizardry, And in three days he stood up with a moan,

And he went down to the long sands alone, Proof. The text as set here is heavily amended in WBY’s hand: The druids burned boughs from a quicken tree And raised their arms to the new risen moon And chanted softly to a harp’s low tune. [The druids standing round a quicken tree del.] Sang to the moon, and swayed in their old hands Their wands of alder and white quicken wands [Cuchullin in three days stood with a moan del.] [Then del.] standing near him round a quicken tree The druids chanted, swaying in their hands Tall wands of alder and white quicken wands.

98

90

THE DEATH OF CUCHULAIN

And ten by ten under a quicken tree,

The Druids chaunted, swaying in their hands

Tall wands of alder and white quicken wands.

In three days’ time, Cuchulain with a moan

Stood up, and came to the long sands alone:

For four days warred he with the bitter tide;

And the waves flowed above him, and he died.

88.] Near to Cuchullin, round a quicken tree, UI, CK. 89–90.] These lines may owe something to Wordsworth’s imagining of the ancient Dru­ ids on Salisbury Plain (The Prelude (1850), XIII, 342–346): gently was I charmed Into a waking dream, a reverie That, with believing eyes, where’er I turned, Beheld long-bearded teachers, with white wands Uplifted, pointing to the starry sky. 91–2.] In three days time he stood up with a moan, | And he went down to the long sands alone, UI, CK. 92. the long sands] Perhaps cp. the close of Book VI of A. Swinburne, Tristram of

Lyonesse (1882), 494–496: ‘They, watching till the day should wholly die, | Saw the far sea sweep to the far grey sky, | Saw the long sands sweep to the long grey sea’. 93–4.] Cp. the movement of Samuel Fergu­ son, Poems (1880), ‘Fergus Wry-Mouth’, 76–7 (the end of the poem): ‘He smiled; he cast his trophy to the bank, | Said, “I, survivor, Ulstermen!” and sank.’ The supe­ riority of WBY’s ending here compared to that of his 1925 revision is maintained by H. Bloom (114–115): ‘In the original ver­ sion, the end is inevitable. [.  .  .] This is a finer death than Cuchulain was to die in the vision of the aged Yeats, who no lon­ ger abode in the dialectic of Innocence and Experience.’

117

THE PIT Y OF LOVE

Date of composition. Composed probably in late 1891, but possibly in early-mid 1892. There is no evidence for a more exact date of composition. Speculatively, a circumstan­ tial case could be made for the poem’s composition in late 1891: it is both a love-poem directed at MG and is, like a number of the pieces in the two MS compilations WBY made in Nov. 1891 for MG (The Flame of the Spirit and The Rosy Cross. Lyrics), an eightline lyric. The fact that the poem is absent from both of these sequences may suggest that it was written too late for them: the final poem in The Rosy Cross. Lyrics was dated Nov. 22 by WBY (a version of ‘A Dream of Death’). On 25 Nov. WBY delivered the copy for CK (where the present poem first appeared) to Unwin. The surviving CK proofs show that WBY first gave his publisher a different version of the opening lines, so it may be that the poem was only very recently composed when it was added to the material for the book. However, since CK was not in fact published until Aug. 1892, it is also possible that the poem was composed and added to the volume in that year; WBY was revising proofs in Apr. 1892. The poem’s theme and approach, as well as its form, would seem however to place it closer to the work of late 1891. Context and interpretation. It is likely that this is a poem occasioned by WBY’s feel­ ings for MG: the lyric voice is one of protective (but possibly also powerless) concern for the safety or well-being of the loved one. WBY’s anxieties about his own prospects as a suitor were often mixed with those about MG’s welfare in late 1891; and the word on which this poem turns, ‘pity’, points in a number of directions: the suitor feels pity for the plight of the beloved, and at the same time hopes that the beloved will show pity for him by accepting his love. The word may be one with Blakean dimensions for WBY, who at this time was completing work on his edition of Blake with E.J. Ellis: it is especially double-edged in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and is seldom an unmixed good in Blake’s Prophetic Books (e.g. The Book of Urizen, Pl. 14: ‘For pity divides the soul | In pangs eternity on eternity’). Some traces of Blakean complexity in the word are present when WBY uses it a few years letter, in a letter to OS (with whom he is engaging in another, quite different, kind of courtship), referring to his prose piece ‘The Eaters of Precious Stones’ (11 Jul. 1895, CL 1, 268): The end of my story seems to me the end of all mere hunger for possession, even for the possession of the ideal, but not the end of affection – the pity one feels for all temporal things the moment that one loves them. It is the end of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-119

100

THE PITY OF LOVE

that warp of the clay which even the noblest must, and perhaps should, weave into the woof of their spirits. [. . .] But the love that is half pity is of eternity. This suggests depths of complexity in the word ‘pity’ which do arguably remain largely ‘hid’ in the poem itself: and ‘pity’ in the first line had evidently begun as ‘dreadful pity’ (see note to 1–2). Yet WBY is plainly attempting a simplicity of diction and lyric form which he may understand as in part Blakean, and this is implicit when in 1897 he gives an account of his work to Richard Ashe-King, claiming to ‘express simple feeling without any circumstance or with merely universal circumstance as in ‘The Pity of Love’’ in one aspect of his practice (letter of 5 Aug. 1897, CL 2, 130). That the ‘universal’ can be ‘mere’ is a paradox made possible by WBY’s years of work over Blake; but the pride in simplicity of expression is real. In CK, WBY places this poem between ‘A Fairy Song’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ – between, that is, a poem about the supernatural world’s intent to watch over escaping lovers, and a poem about the wish to return to a state of unthreatened self-sufficiency and ‘peace’. The three poems, in their different ways, pivot on what WBY calls ‘simple feeling’: all three are concerned with protective impulse – from the world of the sidhe, from lover towards the beloved, and finally from the natural world towards a solitary inhabitant. Simplicity of diction is a common factor; though it does not follow that these are therefore simple poems. For critics, such simplicity of means is a temptation to avoid considering the com­ plexities of achievement. This was perhaps the case for F. Reid in 1915, in his rapt appre­ ciation of the poem (Reid, 49–50): Already, you see, [WBY] has got rid of all rhetorical ornament, of all that artifi­ ciality which comes in with what is called poetic diction, with those redundan­ cies for the sake of metre or rhyme which a poet like Swinburne habitually uses, those inversions which even an artist so scrupulous as Mr. Bridges tolerates. The language in this poem has that nakedness so dear to Wordsworth, though he did not always quite attain to it himself. [. . .] Each word is directly expres­ sive. That is to say, it is not there for its own sake, for any merely ornamental quality it may possess, but is there to help the sense, and the whole thing, while remaining as simple and direct as ‘good prose,’ has at the same time a wonderful emotional force and poetic beauty. Reid may be underrating the difficulty of an emotion such as ‘love’ in keeping something hidden; and he is certainly failing to see the troublesome potential in the word ‘pity’. Nor does this analysis take the force of a surprising word in the poem’s final line: ‘head’ – a puzzling (if haunting) rendering of what would surely, in the work of a lesser artist, be ‘the one that I love’. Also, Reid misses the overwhelming nature of the odds which that head is facing, for these are the elements themselves, air, earth, and water: there is no fire anywhere in the poem’s imagery after 1895, and its absence in this context makes the omission seem deliberate. (R. Ellmann, Identity, 33, sees that the elements ‘symbolize [WBY’s] anxieties’, but feels that ‘Their appearance is not very impressive’.) The threat which the would-be lover cannot fend off is one from all of reality in nature, and from

THE PITY OF LOVE

101

all of the elements – at first: with P95, the poet takes fire out of the symbolic register, now with a colour palette restricted to grey, perhaps in order to leave room for its even­ tual provision in the form of a requited love. The poem is seldom accorded much more than a cursory mention in modern criticism of WBY, where its apparent simplicity is perhaps too often mistaken for a lack of challenge. It is, though, a very carefully pitched lyric which poses problems for the poet as well as the reader about the meaning and the efficacy of ‘pity’ in love. Text and publication history. A fair copy of the MS is in the collections of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, but no draft materials survive. The proofs of CK (Harry Ran­ som Center, University of Texas at Austin) have MS  corrections from WBY (Proofs). An earlier set of proofs in Texas contains a significant correction (see 3). The poem first appeared in CK, and was included in all collected editions thereafter; WBY made changes for P95 (see notes), but otherwise the text remained stable. Copy-text. P49.

A

5

pity beyond all telling Is hid in the heart of love: The folk who are buying and selling, The clouds on their journey above, The cold wet winds ever blowing, And the shadowy hazel grove Where mouse-grey waters are flowing, Threaten the head that I love.

1–2.] A dreadful pity is dwelling | In the deep heart of love Proof (corr. to publ. version). 1. beyond all telling] Perhaps cp. Spenser, A Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, 101–102: ‘Yet is that highest farre beyond all telling, | Fairer than all the rest which there appeare’. 2. the heart of love] This is a common phrase in nineteenth-century poetry, used by D.G. Rossetti, A. Swinburne, and many others.

3. The folk who are buying] Corrected to this from ‘The crowd who are crying’ in proofs of CK, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 4–8.] The stars of God where they move, The mouse-grey waters on-flowing, The clouds on their journey above, And the cold wet winds ever blowing, All threaten the head that I love. CK.

118

THE T WO TREES

Date and circumstances of composition. There is no secure evidence for an exact date of composition: circumstantial evidence points, however, to late 1891. The two surviving MS versions are in a cheap exercise book of a kind likely to have been purchased in Lon­ don. WBY returned to London from Dublin (where he had been since mid-Jul.) at the end of Oct. 1891; this return followed by a week that of MG, to whom WBY had just pre­ sented his Flame of the Spirit MS collection of lyrics. While in London, WBY facilitated MG’s initiation into the GD, which took place on 2 Nov. (with MacGregor Mathers pre­ siding). MG then departed immediately for Paris (and – unbeknownst to WBY – for her lover there, Lucien Millevoye). If MG is to be identified with the ‘Beloved’ of this poem (as seems reasonable), WBY’s use of the Sephiroth/Qliphoth imagery hints at some con­ nection with her initiation in the GD, in which members passed through degrees cor­ responding to the ten points on the Tree of the Sephiroth. On arrival in London, WBY wrote to George Russell to report that he was working steadily on Blake, but also to give an account of developments with regard to MG (?1 Nov. 1891, CL 1, 266): I have seen Miss Gonne several times [. . .] Tomorrow Miss Gonne is to be initi­ ated into the G.D. [. . .] Go and see her when she gets to Dublin and keep her from forgetting me and Occultism. Your vision about her has been curiously corroborated in all the main points by the Kaballistic seership of the Mathers helped out by Miss  Gonne’s own clairvoyance. The story was worked out in great detail. Labouring under the burden of grief for her dead child Georges (about which the poet was at this stage entirely ignorant), MG presented to WBY, Russell, and Mathers and his wife Moina a quasi-allegorical version of her distress. In her later memoirs, she wrote about how she informed her advisors of her vision of ‘a beautiful dark woman’, and had been told by Mathers that this was ‘part of my personality’ which ‘had survived death’; Moina Mathers later evoked this ‘grey lady’ (though at the séance, ‘Willie couldn’t see her’): ‘They said she had confessed to having killed a child [. . .] I began to think she must be evil and decided to get rid of her’ (A Servant to the Queen (1938), 254). This theme of the sorting out of good from evil influence, associated so explicitly with the esoteric advice and procedures of both Mathers and WBY himself, is highly suggestive in relation to ‘The Two Trees’, if the poem is taken to frame Kabbalistic advice for MG. WBY’s own later account of events at this time also leans heavily on the separating of good from evil influence on MG, by means of esoteric interpretation and intervention (Mem., 48–9): DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-120

THE TWO TREES

103

She [MG] now told me of an apparition of a woman dressed in grey and with a grey veil covering the lower part of her face, which had appeared to her [in] childhood. Perhaps when one loves one is not quite sane, or perhaps one can pierce – in sudden intuition – behind the veil. [I have wondered if I did great evil. del.] I decided to make this woman visible at will. I had come to believe that she was an evil spirit troubling Maud Gonne’s life unseen, weakening affec­ tions and above all creating a desire for power and excitement. But, if it were visible, it would speak, it would put its temptation into words and she would face it with her intellect, and at last banish it. Earlier than the writing of this, in a letter of Feb. 1899, WBY told AG about the vision and his interpretation of it: ‘I am sure that if things remain as they are she [MG] will never leave this life of hatred, which a vision I made her see years ago told her was her deepest hell, and contrasted with the life of labour from the divine love, which was her highest heaven’ (CL 2, 355). ‘The Two Trees’ may be understood in this general context as a part of WBY’s involvement with MG’s situation and personality. It is possible, then, that the poem was written just after MG’s GD initiation. This was a time when WBY was hurriedly finalizing lyrics for his new book, CK. Shortly before he left Dublin in Oct., WBY told SMY that ‘I have finished “the Countess Kathleen” and am doing stray lyrics and things” (CL 1, 265 [dated by eds. 11 Oct. 1891]), and on 20 Nov. he told George Rus­ sell that CK ‘has not gone to Unwin yet for I am slowly correcting it and getting other verses ready to go with it’ (CL 1, 271). ‘The Two Trees’ is not included in the notebook The Flame of the Spirit (presented by WBY to MG on 20 Oct.), and neither is it among the poems of WBY’s other MG-related notebook The Rosy Cross. Lyrics, where the lat­ est poem is dated 22 Nov. 1891: by this time, though, it had very probably already been composed. After his initial presentation of The Flame of the Spirit to MG, WBY entered a series of extra poem-titles, writing that these ‘were written and added later’. In fact, the additional poems were never copied into this notebook, but ‘The Two Trees’ is men­ tioned in this list of titles, and two pages of MS are left blank to receive it. While it is possible that the poem had been conceived, or its composition begun, before 20 Oct., its completion must be at a date later than this. WBY gave the copy for CK, probably includ­ ing this poem, to his publisher Unwin on 25 Nov. Background, symbolism, and sources. The key symbol is that of the Kabbalistic Tree of the Sephiroth. WBY’s knowledge of the complex interpretations of this symbol was extensive, and by the early 1890s it was significantly involved in his knowledge of the symbolic language of the GD. A secondary and related role (though still an important one) is played by the poetry of William Blake, on whose writings WBY was working at the time of composition of the poem. In his essay ‘Magic’ (first published in Oct. 1900), WBY included an anecdote related indirectly to this poem (CW 4, 36): I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into a pro­ found trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple you can buy at the greengrocer’s, but in her trance she saw the Tree of Life with ever-sighing souls

104

THE TWO TREES

moving in its branches instead of sap, and among its leaves all the fowl of the air, and on its highest bough one white fowl wearing a crown. This vision corresponds with WBY’s fictional casting of it in his abandoned novel The Speckled Bird (final version of 1902), when the hero, Michael Herne, asks his beloved, Margaret, about a dream she has just experienced (SB, 77): At first, she said, it had been quite foolish. Something about Noah, but all at once everything had got very full of light and she began to see forms and colours more distinctly than she had ever seen them with her ordinary eyes. She saw enormous multitudes of birds and in the midst of them was one very beautiful bird wearing a crown, a bird like a great white eagle. It had lit on a great tree, the others were perching among the branches. The identity of this visionary tree is supplied in ‘Magic’, where WBY claims to have cor­ roborated it partly by chance (CW 4, 36): When I went home I took from the shelf a translation of The Book of Concealed Mystery, an old Jewish book, and cutting the pages came upon this passage, which I cannot think I had ever read: ‘The Tree, . . . is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . in its branches the birds lodge and build their nests, the souls and the angels have their place’. The book in question (as WBY noted when reprinting the essay in 1924) is Kabbala Denu­ data: The Kabbalah Unveiled, by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1887). This is in fact the translation of a translation: Mathers’s text was a Latin account of the Kabbalistic writing from thirteenth-century Spain, the Siphra Dtzenioutha [‘Book of Concealed Mys­ tery’, in Mathers’s version], Kabbala Denudata seu Doctrina Hebraeorum Transcendentalis et Metaphysica atque Theologica (1677), by Christian Knorr van Rosenroth (1636–1689). Rosenroth was a Silesian-born Hebrew scholar, who was known to the Platonist Henry More but also to John Locke, and who interpreted the Kabbalah in a broadly Christianizing way. WBY’s ‘old Jewish book’ may or may not already have had its pages cut when he took it down from the shelf; the poet had, however, known Mathers since at least 1890; and it was Mathers who had initiated the poet into the GD on 7 Mar. of that year. In The Kab­ balah Unveiled, Mathers gives an extensive commentary on Kabbalistic doctrine, including importantly the Sephiroth, or the ten emanations of God, as figured in diagrams of a tree with branches: it is this figuration which is associated with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (from the account of Eden in the Book of Genesis). Where the Sephiroth express different aspects of the Creator’s goodness, another aspect of the Tree is the Qli­ photh, ten negative inversions of those aspects, thus corresponding to the Evil which is on the other side of the Edenic Tree. In Mathers’s interpretation, the Qliphoth are associated with what he calls ‘Demons’ in ‘the world of action, called also the world of shells . . . Olamh Ha-Qliphoth’: ‘In it is also the abode of the evil spirits which are called ‘the shells’ by the Qabalah, QLIPVTH, Qliphoth, material shells’ (Mathers, 29–30). (The Hebrew word can

THE TWO TREES

105

also be translated as ‘rinds’, as well as ‘husks’ – a term taken up by WBY much later in the symbolic language of A Vision.) The dual aspects of the Tree, the Sephiroth and the Qli­ photh, are separated in the poem into two distinct trees: the first is beheld by the beloved ‘in thine own heart’, and the second (also seen by this beloved) in ‘the bitter glass’. The Kab­ balistic and ritualistic background to this poem is extensive, and intricate: a comprehensive account would involve vast swathes of WBY’s esoteric reading, as well as an account of the teachings of those with whom he was most closely involved, from Madame Blavatsky’s theosophists to Mathers and the members of the GD. None of this necessarily adds a great deal to any literary assessment of how the poem works and of the extent to which it uses its sources as an imaginative stimulus rather than a determining and constricting matrix of arcane doctrine. Mysticism was in general more important to the making of WBY’s poetry than to its achievement, and it remains the case that, as R. Ellmann summarized matters in 1954, ‘Although [‘The Two Trees’] is comprehensible without the esoteric source, the source helps to explain how it came to be written’ (Identity, 76). A less specific, but perhaps equally important, influence is the poetry of William Blake. The first half of his ‘Song’, from Poetical Sketches (1789), has particular bearing on the conceit of two lovers in relation to trees (1–8): Love and harmony combine,

And around our souls entwine,

While thy branches mix with mine,

And our roots together join.

Joys upon our branches sit,

Chirping loud, and singing sweet;

Like gentle streams beneath our feet

Innocence and Virtue meet.

F. Kermode (Romantic Image (1957), 111), in citing this poem as a likely source, also drew attention to Blake’s aphorism ‘Art is the Tree of Life . . . Science is the Tree of Death’ (annotation to his print Laocoön, 1827) as relevant to the poem’s overall conception. A more general influence on the second half of the poem may be Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’ from Songs of Experience; a line spoken by Enion in Night the Second of Blake’s The Four Zoas (which WBY, with E.J. Ellis, was the first to edit), may also colour the general con­ ception: ‘I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a poison tree’ (Night the Second, 388). ‘The Human Abstract’, also from Songs of Experience, contributes to the poem and may help supply images such as fruit, root, and ravens (11–24): Then Humility takes its root

Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade

Of Mystery over his head;

And the Caterpillar and Fly

Feed on the Mystery.

106

THE TWO TREES

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,

Ruddy and sweet to eat;

And the Raven his nest has made

In its thickest shade.

The Gods of the earth and sea

Sought thro’ nature to find this Tree.

But their search was all in vain:

There grows one in the Human Brain.

In The Book of Ahania (1795), Blake’s Urizen carries the body of Fuzon to where ‘A Tree hung over the immensity’ (III, 8), and ‘Soon shot the pained root | Of Mystery under his heel: | It grew a thick Tree’ (III, 15–17, 29–35): The Tree still grows over the Void

Enrooting itself all around

An endless labyrinth of woe!

The corse of his first begotten

On the accursed Tree of Mystery:

On the topmost stem of this Tree

Urizen nail’d Fuzon’s corse.

An instance of WBY’s association of Blake with symbolic trees comes in his 1896 essay on ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy’ (CW 4, 97–98): The kingdom that was passing was, he [Blake] held, the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets; men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget even that love and death and old age are an imaginative art. In the essay as it originally appeared in the Savoy, WBY identified Blake as ‘certainly the first great symboliste of modern times’ (CW 4, 378). Some time after the poem’s publication, WBY continued to show an interest in Blake, supernatural or symbolic mirrors, and good and evil. In his article (signed ‘Rosicrux’) on ‘High Crosses of Ireland’ for the Dublin Daily Express (18 Jan. 1899), he told a story from Aran (where he had visited with Arthur Symons in 1896) (CW 9, 432): Mediaeval mystics represented this ultimate paradise as a round mirror [. . .] It was almost certainly a familiar symbol in ancient Ireland, for two years ago an old man on the north island of Aran told me of it. Nobody, he said, might look into it but God and this vexed Satan, who was then an angel, and Satan looked in ‘and Hell was made in a minute’. Jacob Boehme describes God the Father as

THE TWO TREES

107

seeing Himself in it as God the Son, and meditating about what He saw, and so making God the Holy Spirit. Blake called it ‘the looking-glass of Enitharmon’, his name for the mother of all, and ‘the imagination of God’, and many names besides. Blake’s ‘looking glass of Enitharmon’ is found in Jerusalem Plates 63, 21 and 38; but ‘the imagination of God’ appears to be WBY’s phrase, and not Blake’s. The same story from Aran appears in the 1902 version of The Speckled Bird. After a discussion of a small painting of the Virgin Mary giving an apple to the Christ child, the young hero Michael asks his father ‘What do the apples mean?’, receiving the reply, ‘Oh, I suppose they are the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil or something of that kind’. Immedi­ ately after this, an old man enters, sees and admires the painting as ‘a blessed thing’, and is asked by Michael ‘Do you think the whole, whole world was once as beautiful as this picture is?’ (SB, 12): The old man said, ‘That’s certain, for did not God make it [and] say it was good? He had a looking-glass and he looked into it and he saw his face in the glass and that was the world. Nobody but God was allowed to look in the glass, but Satan could not bear the thought that [his] Master had anything [that] man might not look at, and he looked in too. Hell was made in a minute and out of hell have come all the ugly things and ugly people and cold and drought and famine and death. But there’s little of the world left as it was when only God could look in the glass and that is heaven.’ The mention of ‘famine and death’ here may indicate that WBY was thinking back to the famine which had given its setting to his play The Countess Kathleen. Interpretation and criticism. According to Virginia Moore (The Unicorn [1954], 425), this was MG’s favourite poem by WBY (though MG misremembered the title oddly as ‘The Two Thorn Trees’). WBY himself expressed a liking for the poem when he wrote to OS (12 Apr. 1895) that ‘I am delighted at your liking ‘the Two Trees’. It is a favourite of mine and you and one other person are the only people who have said they liked it. The other person, by the bye, is a Miss Eva Gore Booth, daughter of Lady Gore Booth of Lissadell, Sligo’. WBY’s keenness to let OS (who had not yet become his lover) know that the poem had admirers in high social places comes after a paragraph of supernatural diagnosis of a vision she had experienced: ‘You had better not try to go on with the vision yourself. [. . .] Every [symbol has del.] influence has a shadow, as it were, an unbalanced – the unbalanced is the Kaballistic definition of evil – duplicate of itself.’ Both the circumstances here and the Kabbalistic terms in which WBY offers his advice present clear parallels with his ministrations to MG at the time the poem was written; striking, too, is the extent to which the meaning of supernatural vision becomes again a matter of optics (as in the poem): ‘You may be seeing these things very faintly – merely as phantasies – but you can never tell when they may become vivid and masterful, so had best try and see no more for the present’ (CL 1, 463). How much, or how little, MG herself was able to see in all of this is perhaps to be gleaned from her remark that ‘I never indulged in self-analysis and often used to get impatient

108

THE TWO TREES

with Willie Yeats, who, like all writers, was terribly introspective, and tried to make me so’ (A Servant of the Queen, 308). Louis MacNeice’s disapproving reading of the poem, as ‘self-brooding’, assumed that ‘Such writing as this was accepted by most of [WBY’s] contemporaries in the Nineties, and is still accepted by some people to-day, as typically Irish’ (MacNeice, 53). Y. Winters went (as usual) further, calling it ‘obviously a bad poem . . . sentimental and stereotyped at every point’ (The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1960), 3). Many  – effectively, all  – modern critics of WBY have disagreed with this. T. Parkinson offered a straightforward account which serves to affirm the poem’s structural integrity as also an integrity of intellectual focus (15–16): Yeats took the material of the basic conflicts in his own life, generalized it, and attempted to explore its universal bearings and communicate his sense of the mood it suggested through the symbols derived from his occult studies. He arranged those symbols in a formal pattern of balance and antithesis making for clear contrast between two views of life, and arguing for the superiority of the divine to the natural, the eternal to the temporal. F. Kermode’s reading of the poem was critically important, especially in its drawing atten­ tion to the role of Blake; his summary that ‘The good tree is desire and divine energy, the bad is morality and nature, the fallen world, selfhood and abstraction’ captures the perspective taken by WBY on the poem’s governing symbol. Kermode’s judgement that this ‘is one of the poems Yeats improved by revision’ is partly justified by the view that ‘the reason is probably that he had never ceased to live with its images, so early taken from Blake to become part of his own mind’ (Kermode, 117, 120). H. Bloom’s reading, however, centred on the less-revised version of the poem and disagreed with the Blakean interpretation in Kermode’s discussion (Parkinson, 15–16): In the first [verse paragraph], Maud Gonne is urged to gaze within, to find the holy Tree of Life growing in her own heart. There is nothing Blakean about this unless this were to be taken as an irony, since Blake saw only selfish ‘virtues’ as growing in the natural heart. Even without the matching contrary in the poem’s second half, there would be something equivocal in the poem’s opening vision, particularly in its original form. [. . .] Songs of Innocence, in Yeats as in Blake, can fall into the category Blake called unorganized Innocence, or ignorance. Though the vitalism of Maud Gonne, her ‘joy,’ inspires her poet to ‘a wizard song,’ it also gives ‘the waves their melody,’ the incessant song that takes no account of his yearnings or the power of his creativity. [. . .] Innocence here is a solipsism, and her centripetal gaze is consonant with an element in Roman­ tic vision from Spenser through Shelley. Still, this is preferred to her outward gaze, for ‘the bitter glass’ of the poem’s second half is Blake’s Vegetable glass of Nature, and her self-absorbed Innocence suits her better than the barren fruit of knowledge, since like Thel she is unfit for Experience. [. . .] If Maud Gonne gazes too long upon the fallen world, the Tree may grow in her brain. [. . .] The poem is a warning to her, but surely the warning has a sardonic aspect, since

THE TWO TREES

109

either way her kindness is not for Yeats. On this reading, ‘The Two Trees’ is the most bitter of Yeats’s early lyrics, and a prophecy of many of his later attitudes toward his own frustrated love. Bloom’s reading – especially that of the first stanza – is heavily dependent upon his own understanding of certain dynamics in Romantic poetry, applying this to an uncharacter­ istically straightforward biographical view of WBY’s address in the poem. Later, another critic well-versed in Blake finds more of interest in the centrally important image of the mirror itself. For E. Larrissy, ‘The first stanza asks the beloved to be confident in subjectivity. [. . .] The emphasis is on the peaceful love that can be realized by trusting to the sources of joy within us’. With ‘the bitter glass,’ however, ‘it is important to realize that this “glass of outer weariness” is just that: externality, a dead reflector of life. [. . .] The mirror itself is a husk in the sense of a hard reflecting wall around life, which has no contact with that life except the very function of reflecting’ (Larrissy, 69). In terms of a critical assessment of the poem, it is perhaps too easy to get lost in the labyrinths of its esoteric dimension, forgetting that these are themselves keyed to WBY’s sense of how to write a symbolic poem. The most important discussion of the poem as an artistic experi­ ment is E. Longley’s chapter, ‘Intricate Trees: The Survival of Symbolism’ in her Yeats and Modern Poetry. Here, an extended analysis of ‘The Two Trees’ places WBY’s thought in the context of his poetic abilities and influences, proving by detailed reading how ‘With its deliberate stylization, its self-commentary, [the poem] exemplifies the origins of Yeats’s formal intricacy and lyric reflexivity in aesthetic poetry’ (74–75): ‘The Two Trees’ advertises its own concentrated technique, as in the syntacti­ cal and verbal parallels between mirror-imaged stanzas. [. . .] In both stanzas, the need to persuade Gonne, rather than simply adore her, has already begun to introduce rhetoric into Yeatsian incantation: cumulative catalogues, com­ peting adjectives (‘holy,’ ‘broken’), imperative refrains. Each stanza’s dynamic overrides the quatrains, as a tree its branches; while the dynamic between them leaves unresolved an ultimately psychological conflict between ‘grief ’, linked with ‘unresting thought’ (the speaker’s too) and ‘joy’ or ‘surety’. Gazing into its own mirrors, ‘The Two Trees’ dramatizes, if in rudimentary fashion, the con­ flicted inner sources of Yeats’s lyric and what these will require of form. Text and publication history. The poem has two MS  drafts, both contained on the six remaining leaves of an exercise book (originally of some 60 pp.), which has on its cover an image of St  Paul’s Cathedral, and is branded as ‘The St  Paul’s Exercise Book’ (NLI 30473). The drafts (in ink) show two distinct phases of composition, with the first ver­ sion (MS1) bearing numerous cancellations and changes, and the second (MS2) being more of a fair copy. MS1 is given in the notes here in its entirety; and reproductions and transcriptions of both MS1 and MS2 are found in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 302–315. MS2 is not identical with the first printed version, being three lines short of this in terms of length. The poem first appeared in print in CK, and was next printed (with very minor revision of punctuation) in P95. It was reprinted in all collected editions of WBY there­ after, but with significant revision for SP29, carried through to all subsequent collections.

110

THE TWO TREES

That later version of ‘The Two Trees’ is separately edited in the present edition. Copy-text: P29.

B

5

10

eloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start,

And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours of its fruit

Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root

Has planted quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

1. gaze in thine own heart] Perhaps cp. Byron, The Corsair: A Tale (1814), Canto III, VI, 16–18: ‘To pine, they prey of every changing mood; | To gaze on thine own heart  – and meditate | Irrevocable faults, and coming fate’, and Shelley, The Revolt of Islam (1818) Canto IX, St. xxvi, 4–6: ‘Alas! Gaze not on me, but turn thine eyes | On thine own heart – it is a paradise | Which everlasting Spring has made its own’. 2–4.] The holy tree within it grows. | In joy the holy branches start, | And all the trembling flowers unclose. MS2. 8–9.] And surety of its sunken root | Planted a quiet in the night MS2. Perhaps cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘A Song of Secrets’, 133–134: ‘All my oaks and almond-trees | Bathe their hidden roots in these’. There are traces of this poem in WBY’s verse as early as Love and Death (1884) I iii 59 (see note), and also a letter of 1889 to KT about in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, where Todhunter’s ‘A land of infinite repose’ (19) becomes ‘infinite feeling, infinite battle, infinite repose’. 12. Murmuring a wizard song] Chanting this druid song for thee MS2. WBY’s adjective ‘druid’ is attested in the eighteenth century and after (e.g. George Dyer, Poems (1801), ‘Ode XI: On Genius’, 32: ‘The Cambrian

youth shall wake the Druid song’), but here cp. John Todhunter, ‘The Fate of the Sons of Usna’, First Duan, 140–141: ‘Then Cath­ vah took the child | And o’er its new-born head murmured his druid song’. Todhunter’s poem was not printed until its inclusion in his Three Irish Bardic Tales (1896), but WBY had encountered it earlier: in a letter to KT of 11 Apr. 1888, he mentions how ‘Last night Todhunter read out the latter part of his Deir­ dre’ (CL 1, 58), referring to this poem. When WBY changes the ‘Singing’ and ‘Chanting’ of MS1 and MS2 to ‘Murmuring’, he lessens the obviousness of his debt to Todhunter (who also has ‘murmured’) by changing ‘druid’ to ‘wizard’. The adjective ‘druid’ is also used prominently in another CK poem, the vol­ ume’s closing lyric ‘Apologia addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days’, 32: ‘A druid land, a druid tune!’ (In revising ‘The Wan­ derings of Oisin’ for P95, WBY on three occasions introduced ‘druid’ as an adjec­ tive.) For later critical attention to ‘druid’ as a distinctively Yeatsian adjective, see note to ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, 32. With ‘wizard song’ cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Bridal of Triermain’, xxv, 1–2: ‘The wizard song at distance died, | As if in distance borne away’.

THE TWO TREES

15

20

25

111

There, through bewildered branches, go Winged Loves borne on in gentle strife, Tossing and tossing to and fro The flaming circle of our life. When looking on their shaken hair, And dreaming how they dance and dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows, With broken boughs, and blackened leaves, And roots half hidden under snows

13–14, 19.] H. Bloom comments on these lines: ‘The oxymoron does not alter the bewilderment or the strife, which is the lov­ er’s judgment upon what is most intrinsic to the beloved, and gives a subtly bitter flavor to his observation: ‘Thine eyes grow full of tender care,’ since what provokes her tender­ ness is not Yeats but a struggle within her own heart’ (117). 15–17.] Not in MS2. 18–19.] And see them leap and dance and dart | [Your del.] Thine eyes grow kind with tender care MS2. 21. Gaze no more [on del.] in the bitter glass MS2. 22. The demons] This term echoes in CK the ‘demons’ who are major figures in The Count­ ess Kathleen. But WBY also uses the term here in accordance with Mathers’s translation of Rosenruth in Kabbala Denudata, where the nature of the Qliphoth is discussed (Kabbala Denudata, 29–30): The fourth is the Asiatic world, OVLM HOSHIM, Olamh Ha-Asia, the world of action, called also the world of shells, OVLM QLIPVTH, Olamh Ha-Qliphoth, which is this world of matter, made up of the grosser elements of the other three.

In it is also the abode of the evil spirits which are called ‘the shells’ by the Qa­ balah, QLIPVTH, Qliphoth, material shells. The devils are also divided into ten classes, and have suitable habitations. The Demons are the grossest and most deficient of all forms. Their ten degrees answer to the decad of the Sephiroth, but in inverse ratio, as darkness and impurity increase with the descent of each degree. The two first are nothing but absence of visible form and organization. The third is the abode of darkness. Next follow seven Hells occupied by those demons which represent incarnate human vices, and tor­ ture those who have given themselves up to such vices in earth-life. 22. with] on del. with MS2. 25. For there] Therein MS2. 25. a fatal image] In his translation of Book 2 of the Aeneid, Dryden twice uses ‘fatal image’ for the statue of Pallas (combining ‘fatale.. Palladium’ (165–166) and ‘sacram effigiem’ (167), then for ‘simulacrum’ (172)): ‘And false Ulysses, that inventive head, | Her fatal image from the temple drew’ (219– 220), ‘When first her fatal image touched the ground’ (230).

112

30

35

40

THE TWO TREES

Driven by a storm that ever grieves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Peering and flying to and fro To see men’s souls bartered and bought. When they are heard upon the wind, And when they shake their wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

27. half hidden] half buried MS2. 30. the dim glass] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Song of the Brigade’, 7–9 (where a woman speaks to a river about her soldier husband, fighting in France): ‘Tell him thy flowers for him I twine | When first the slow sad mornings shine | In thy dim glass; for he is mine.’ 32.] E. Larrissy (69) sees here a reference to the Lurianic Kabbalah (a dominant form of teaching, originating with a sixteenth-cen­ tury Rabbi, Isaac Luria), and its doctrine of the Tzimtzum, where the primordial Divin­ ity contracts (or sleeps), leaving a void that is filled by created nature. For Larrissy, this ‘withdrawal from the universe’ corresponds with Blake’s Urizen. WBY was certainly familiar with both the doctrine and with Blake’s creator-god, and he could well have seen parallels between them. 33. through] in MS2. 35. Peering and flying] Flying and peering MS2. 36.] men’s souls bartered and bought] WBY makes a clear allusion to the plot of his play The Countess Kathleen (the opening piece in CK), in which the souls of famine-struck peasants are bargained for and purchased by a pair of merchants, who are on the busi­ ness of Satan. The term used throughout the play for these characters is ‘demons’ (‘Two demons, disguised throughout as merchants’:

Dramatis Personae). The merchant-demons of the play also several times take the form of birds, though these birds are horned owls and not ravens. The Countess Kathleen (which was not to have a performance until 1899, and then in heavily revised form) is dedicated in CK to ‘My friend, Miss  Maud Gonne, at whose suggestion it was planned out and begun some three years ago’ (5); in P95 it is dedicated more simply ‘To Miss  Maud Gonne’ (63). 37–39.] And when you hear them on the wind | And watch them shake their wings, alas, | Your tender eyes grow all unkind MS2. 40. in] on del. in MS2. MS1 of ‘The Two Trees’: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,

The holy tree within it grows.

In joy the holy branches start,

In joy the holy flowers unclose.

The changing colour of its fruit 5

Has dowered the stars with merry light;

The [?sower] of its sunken root

Planted a quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head

Has given the tides their melody 10

And made my lips and music wed,

Singing this druid song for thee.

There, through bewildered branches go

The gentle loves in a playful strife

THE TWO TREES

Tossing and tossing to and fro 15

The flaming [?sphere] of human life.

When you look on their shaken hair,

And see them leap and dance and dart,

Your eyes grow kind with tender care:

Beloved gaze in thine own heart. 20

Look [no] more in the bitter glass

The demons in their subtle guile

Lift up before us as they pass,

Or only gaze a little while;

There is a fallen image grows 25

With fatal boughs and fatal leaves,

And roots half buried under snows,

Driven by a storm that ever grieves.

They see men’s souls bartered and bought,

And when you hear them in the

wind 30 And watch them shake their wings, alas, Your eyes grow bright but all unkind: Gaze no more on the bitter glass.

113

Title] No title in MS. 3^4.] In joy the holy fruit it grows del. 6.] Has made the stars the lamps they be del. 7. [?sower]] farmer del.

7^8.] Made quiet grow out of dim night del.

8^9.] And made old earth a foothold be del.

11.] And made ^man’s my^ lips and music wed MS.

11^12.] And druid tunes for thee and me del.

To weave wild [song del.] tunes for thee and me del. In Druid tunes songs for thee and me del. MS. 13. There, through bewildered] And always through the del. 14. gentle] kindly uncancelled. 16. human] mortal del. 21. [no]] [Supplied here by present editor]: Look more MS. 26. boughs] stars del. 29. They] The MS.

119

TO THE ROSE UPON THE

ROOD OF TIME

Date of composition. The exact date is unknown, but it is likely that the poem is one of the last to have been completed before WBY sent Unwin the material for CK on 25 Nov. 1891: its references to ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ and ‘Fergus and the Druid’ (3–5) are likely to have been have been made after the completion (or at least substantial comple­ tion) of those poems. There remains the possibility that WBY wrote the poem later than this, for the book itself was not published until Aug. 1892. Context, interpretation, and critical reception. To some extent, the poem is a pro­ grammatic piece, designed to introduce the poems of the ‘Legends and Lyrics’ sec­ tion in CK, just as ‘Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Times’ is intended to conclude them (both poems are set entirely in italics, perhaps to point up their status as quasi-commentaries). WBY preserved (and in some ways reinforced) the poem’s programmatic status when he positioned it as the first piece in the section of P95 entitled ‘The Rose’, a grouping (and position) which was retained thereafter in his collected editions. The Rose was to be a centrally important symbol for much of WBY’s creative work of the 1890s, and the poems of CK mark its first sustained and (to some extent) systematic deployment in his published writings. As a symbol, however, the rose possesses both public and more private aspects for WBY. In mate­ rial published alongside these poems, and in relation to this poem in particular, WBY gave his versions of the symbol for the benefit of an audience. First, in CK, the author’s note reads: The rose is a favourite symbol with the Irish poets. It has given a name to more than one poem, both Gaelic and English, and is used, not merely in love poems, but in addresses to Ireland, as in De Vere’s line, ‘The little black rose shall be red at last,’ and in Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen.’ I do not, of course, use it in this latter sense. This is altered for P95 and editions up to P24 as follows: The rose is a favourite symbol with the Irish poets, and has given a name to several poems both Gaelic and English, and is used in love poems, in addresses to Ireland like Mr. Aubrey De Vere’s poem telling how ‘The little black rose shall be red at last,’ and in religious poems, like the old Gaelic one which speaks of ‘the Rose of Friday,’ meaning the Rose of Austerity. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-121

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

115

WBY’s initial emphasis is on the Irish provenance of the Rose as a poetic symbol. In fact, while this is true, it is true only of Irish writing since the eighteenth century and has little or no basis in older symbolic representations. Both of the poems mentioned by WBY in the 1892 version of his note are reproduced in his own A Book of Irish Verse (1895). Aubrey De Vere’s ‘The Little Black Rose’ (one of just four poems by De Vere in WBY’s selection) is a short piece, the symbolism of which has nationalist overtones: The Little Black Rose shall be red at last;

What made it black but the March wind dry,

And the tear of the widow that fell on it fast?

It shall redden the hills when June is nigh.

The Silk of the Kine shall rest at last;

What drove her forth but the dragon-fly?

In the golden vale she shall feed full fast,

With her mild gold horn and her slow, dark eye.

The wounded wood-dove lies dead at last!

The pine long bleeding, it shall not die!

This song is secret. Mine ear it passed

In a wind o’er the plains at Athenry.

Although De Vere’s symbols extend beyond that of the little black rose itself (translating the Irish roisin dubh, small dark rose), the poem signals clearly that this, like ‘the Silk of the Kine’ and ‘The wounded wood-dove’ is indeed a symbol, or an emblem of something which cannot be spoken about openly (‘This song is secret’). WBY called De Vere’s poem ‘at once quaint and beautiful’ in 1895 (CW9, 286), and this, like his other expressed opin­ ions on De Vere generally, shows little eagerness to explore any nationalist dimension – partly, perhaps, because WBY was aware of that poet’s odd relation to Irish Nationalism: De Vere regarded nationalism as being both Roman Catholic in essence, and entirely compatible with a fervent belief in the British Empire, whose reach it might one day inherit. The CK note, unlike its successor in P95 and after, adds James Clarence Man­ gan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’ to the rose-centred ‘addresses to Ireland’; by maintaining that ‘I do not, of course, use it in this latter sense’, WBY attempts to set his own rose symbolism apart from the nationalist tradition he has just invoked. Mangan’s poem (in fact, the sec­ ond of two treatments by him, but the better-known of them) was first published in The Nation in 1846. It conveys much more in the way of both erotic and nationalist excite­ ment than De Vere’s lyric, as e.g. in the second stanza: Over hills and through dales,

Have I roamed for your sake;

All yesterday I sailed with sails

On river and on lake,

The Erne, at its highest flood,

116

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

I dashed across unseen,

For there was lightning in my blood,

My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!

O there was lightning in my blood,

Red lightning lightened through my blood,

My Dark Rosaleen!

Mangan’s version strongly emphasizes elements of violence and upheaval and comes to something of an apocalyptic ending: O! the Erne hall run red

With redundance of blood,

The earth shall rock beneath our tread,

And flames wrap hill and wood,

And gun-peal, and slogan cry,

Wake many a glen serene,

Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!

The Judgment Hour must first be nigh

Ere you can fade, ere you can die,

My Dark Rosaleen!

This tone informs at least a part of WBY’s sense of the Rose as a symbol; but it should be noted, even so, that Mangan’s poem vanishes from the note in its P95 version, when WBY guides the reader towards more of a religious, and less of a political account of the symbol­ ism. An interesting parallel in interpretation can be found in KT’s account of the poem around the same time as CK, where she understands Mangan in terms of the transforma­ tion of nationalist symbolism to private romantic fixation: she writes about ‘the wild and passionate love-song which the genius of Mangan created upon an Irish cry by some bard of Elizabethan days to his distressed Motherland’, and says that ‘Dark Rosaleen’ ‘seems to me the most beautiful poem of our Anglo-Irish literature [. . .] if anyone is dissatisfied with this reason he can figure it to himself a genuine love-song, as one may conceive the Song of Solomon a lover’s rhapsody to his Eastern mistress’ (KT, Irish Love-Songs (1892), 7). KT’s awareness of the co-existence of religious, erotic, and nationalist meanings attempts to reconcile an older quarrel about this poem. The Irish original behind these nineteenthcentury versions, ‘Roisin Dubh’, was available in Thomas Furlong’s verse translation for James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy: Or, Bardic Remains of Ireland (1831), I, 255–257: Oh! my sweet little rose, cease to pine for the past,

For the friends that come eastward shall see thee at last;

They bring blessings – they bring favours which the past never knew,

To pour forth in gladness on my Roisin Dubh.

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

117

Long, long with my dearest, thro’ strange scenes I’ve gone,

O’er mountains and broad valleys I have still toll’d on;

O’er the Erne I have sail’d as the rough gales blew,

While the heart pour’d its music for my Rosin Dubh.

Tho’ wearied oh! my fair one! do not slight my song,

For my heart dearly loves thee, and hath lov’d thee long;

In sadness and in sorrow I shall still be true,

And cling with wild fondness round my Roisin Dubh.

There’s no flower that e’er bloom’d can my rose excel,

There’s no tongue that e’er moved half my love can tell;

Had I strength, had I skill the wide world to subdue,

Oh! the queen of that wide world should be Roisin Dubh.

The mountains, high and misty, thro’ the moors must go,

The rivers shall run backward, and the lakes overflow;

And the wild waves of old ocean wear a crimson hue,

Ere the world sees the ruin of my Roisin Dubh.

While Hardiman had admitted that the Irish poem was ‘an allegorical ballad, in which strong political feelings are conveyed, as a personal address from a lover to his fair one’, he also maintained that such a meaning was ‘long since forgotten’, and that the poem was now simply ‘a plaintive love-ditty’. Nevertheless, Hardiman pointed out how ‘The song concludes with a bold declaration of the dreadful struggle which would be made before the country should be surrendered to the embraces of our hero’s hated and implacable rival’ (Irish Minstrelsy I, 351). In the course of his important articles on Hardiman’s book in 1834, the young Samuel Ferguson gave a closer translation of the Irish text, adding his own, distinctively acerbic (and partly sectarian) interpretation of the allegory, as the work of a lovestruck ‘bold priest’ and ‘sanguine son of the church’ (Dublin University Magazine Aug. 1834): This, says Mr. Hardiman, is an allegorical political ballad – it seems to us to be the song of a priest in love, of a priest in love, too, who had broken his vow, of a priest in love who was expecting a dispensation for his paramour, of a priest in love who was willing to turn ploughman for his love’s sake – nay, to practise the very calling of a priest to support her. Ferguson’s own version is notably franker in terms of erotic content, e.g: If I had a plough I would plough against the hills;

And I would make the gospel in the middle of the mass for my black

rose-bed: I would give a kiss to the young girl that would give her youth to me, And I would make delights behind the fort with my Roiseen dubh.

118

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

In M. Campbell’s critical account, Ferguson read the Irish poem as ‘a love poem of trans­ gressive desire between the speaker – an exiled priest – and his lover – figured as a little black rose’, so that ‘Blasphemy shades into illicit desire, while pandering to one sectarian prejudice of Ferguson’s Protestant readers, of the shortcomings of Roman Catholicism’s celibate priesthood’ (Campbell, 128). WBY would have been aware of Ferguson’s inter­ pretation, one that charges the poem’s English incarnations from the beginning with issues of (anti-) Catholicism and sexuality. By positioning the symbol of the Rose so centrally in the foreground of CK, WBY chose to place his own new poetry in the context of a symbol-led aesthetic in which lines between religion, eroticism, and nationalism were inevitably blurred. In fact, CK itself was not the end of this process, and his volume of prose fiction, The Secret Rose (1897) was to continue with this determined intermixture of unstable elements. The specifically religious aspects of the symbol were to become increasingly prominent in the 1890s (culminating with the significance of the poem ‘The Secret Rose’ in WATR) as aspects of fundamentally occult belief; and the sources of this lie in CK, where the religious resonances of the Rose are heard, and amplified, by WBY in mystical and occult ways. Insofar as the Rose has Roman Catholic associations, in epithets applied in devotional contexts to the Virgin Mary (such as the title Rosa Mystica in the sixteenth-century Litany of Loreto), WBY uses the symbol in a spirit of Protestantderived freedom of appropriation; this cannot be dissociated from an element of sub­ versiveness in religious matters (but especially, in Ireland, the subversion of Roman Catholicism) which was significant for the modern occult tradition to which WBY had now wholeheartedly subscribed. An appropriation of the Marian Rose for nonChristian purposes was not without recent Irish precedent; WBY would have known of the ‘Rosa Mystica’ sequence of Italian-inspired items in Oscar Wilde’s Poems (1881), the last section of which addresses Helen of Troy as a classical, erotic antithesis to the Virgin Mary: ‘Lily of love, pure and inviolate! | Tower of ivory! red rose of fire!’ (‘The New Helen’, 91–2). (It is possible that the movement of lines 71–2 of the same piece influences that of lines 13–14 of WBY’s poem: Wilde has ‘O Helen! Helen! Helen! yet awhile, | Yet for a little while, O tarry here’, and WBY achieves a similar effect in ‘Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still | A little space for the rose-breath to fill!’) Appropriation on a grander and more systematic scale took place in the occult society of which WBY was a member, the GD. Since 1890, the poet had been an initiate, and was to enter its second, inner order, the Ordo Rosae Rubae et Aureae Crucis, early in 1893. It is possible to see the GD as a distinctively late-Victorian manifestation of occultist ambition, of a sort that was combined with a large measure of social network­ ing. As such, its quasi-religious rituals – or rather, perhaps, its religion of ritualism – derived from and stood in an uneasy relation to those of Freemasonry. Ritual language for the GD, as instituted largely by WBY’s friend MacGregor Mathers, tended strongly towards an eclectically assembled symbolic liturgy. Here, the Order’s proclaimed links to an ‘ancient’ tradition of Rosicrucianism strongly favoured the introduction of roserelated symbolism. In the admission (or ‘Neophyte’) ritual, e.g., a central altar had a rose placed upon it, and the new member was told to inhale the rose’s perfume as ‘a

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

119

symbol of air’; and in other rituals symbolic offerings of rose-leaves were made, while an inner sanctum of the temple was decorated with a rose on the ceiling and another on the floor (see Gould and Toomey in M, 380–381). WBY’s decision to make the Rose a central symbol undoubtedly has one eye on the otherwise-secret dimension of the GD, whose ranks he had joined and in which he hoped to rise. WBY’s attraction to the symbolic possibilities was not solely on account of the Rose’s prominence in GD rites. The Rosicrucianism from which Mathers drew so heavily was also important to WBY, who had read deeply in some of the more arcane source material concerned. Through this in part, he learned of the poetic history of the Rose as a mystical symbol. The climactic representations of the Rose in Dante’s Paradiso 30 and 31, e.g., probably came WBY’s way first in the pages of A.E. Waite’s The Real History of the Rosicru­ cians (1887); and in the same book he would have read of how ‘From the time of the Guelphs and Ghibellines a common device in heraldry is the Rose-emblem . . . it is associated above all with the great medieval cultus of the Mother of God, being Our Lady’s flower par excellence’ (17). Here, too, WBY would have gathered the tradition that Mary’s rose was more likely to be white than red, the red being reserved for more erotically linked mystical uses. In his introductory note to P95, WBY explained his arrangement of the CK material for that volume as a separate section, entitled ‘The Rose’ in mystical-religious terms: ‘for in them he [the author] has found, he believes, the only pathway whereon he can hope to see with his own eyes the Eternal Rose of Beauty and of Peace’. This develops somewhat the interpretation of the Rose which prevails for the poet at the time of CK, and is in line with the removal from the notes of Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’. In 1891, Irish culture and nationalism were still very much present alongside mystical elements, and their fraught relations with religion were still potentially complicating factors in the meta-religious symbolic world of WBY’s occult involvements. The poem’s critical reception has often been in the context of wider discussion of WBY’s 1890s Rose symbolism. Louis MacNeice was perceptive early on, in seeing in the Rose ‘the Irish ideal fusing with Shelley’s ideal of Intellectual Beauty’ (MacNeice, 66), and H. Bloom later allowed the romantic poet’s influence to eclipse the Irish picture altogether: ‘the Rose is most directly derived from Shelley’s Intellectual Beauty, in itself not a mystical entity but simply all of beauty that is apprehended beyond the range of the senses’ (Bloom, 114). A case for Shelley’s specific influence on this poem is put most fully by G. Bornstein, who calls WBY’s piece ‘an Irish variation on Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (Bornstein, 52–3): Both poets treat beauty as a kind of muse, who both informs the shapes of the external world and stimulates the poet to sing the glory of that immanence. [. . .] In the Hymn Shelley longs for union with beauty [. . .] he implores it to return and transfigure him. In contrast, although Yeats, too, wants the Rose to return, he characteristically warns it to keep its distance as well. He wants beauty to return but not to engulf him so completely that he forsakes the world of ‘common things’.

120

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

Nevertheless, Shelley’s Platonism is only one ingredient in the poem’s symbol. R. Ellmann’s pithy summary of WBY’s debt to ritual magic offers a more accurate account of what is in play at the time of this poem (Man and the Masks, 94): The rituals of the order [the GD] also fascinated him. Each member was encouraged to meditate upon the central symbol of the rose, the exact meaning of which was hard to determine, though it signified mainly the flower of love that blossoms from the cross of sacrifice. Yeats was entirely within his occult rights when, in the apostrophes or prayers – one knows not what to call them – to the rose [in CK], he made it a symbol of beauty, of transcendental love, of mystic rapture, of the inner reality, of divinity. This breadth of referential reach for the symbol is best summed up in J. Unterecker’s formulation, that the Rose ‘represents that intersection of mortality and immortality which seemed to Yeats man’s richest experience’ (A Reader’s Guide to W.B. Yeats (1957), 72). Modern criticism has recognized the importance of Irish sources, and E. Cullingford does this when she writes that ‘Although the Rose as a figure for Ireland comes not from Celtic antiquity, as Yeats once speculated, but from the nineteenth century, the imbrication of love and patriotism in the tradition of Irish popular verse, ballads and aislingi alike, underwrites his invocations’ (Cullingford, 60–61). In an account of the poem, S. Regan acknowledges that it ‘draws on a specifically Irish tradition of national­ ist iconography’, but also notes that it ‘functions as a twofold invocation, summoning the Rose as muse to transform the poet’s vision of mundane realities and then pleading for some remnants of common ordinariness to be left within his life’ (in Holdeman and Levitas, 28). For E. Larrissy, the Rose is early WBY’s ‘chief symbol’ for ‘a boundary between Time and Eternity’ which at the same time ‘bears on his Irish identity [. . .] for the Rose is a symbol for the poet’s unity with Celtic sensibility and of his ability to express this in suitable measure for the instruction and nurture of modern Irish sensi­ bility’ (Larrissy, 60). Text and publication history. The only surviving MS material is a single sheet, con­ taining lines 1–17 (NLI 30419). It is likely that this leaf was detached from copy sent to Unwin for CK (perhaps because it was replaced by a revised version): the text is under­ lined throughout, indicating the need for it to be set in italics. This MS is transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 277. Once the poem was set, WBY undertook some revisions for the first proofs (in Beinecke Library, Yale University, Proofs (Yale) below); the two other sets of CK proofs (in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin) show almost no subsequent revision. After appearing as the first of the poems in the ‘Legends and Lyrics’ section of CK, the poem was reprinted in P95 and all collected editions there­ after, with very little revision.

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

121

Copy-text: P49.

R 5

ed Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!

Come near me, while I sing of ancient ways:

Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;

The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,

Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;

And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old

In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,

Sing in their high and lonely melody.

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,

1. Red Rose] It is worth noticing that WBY’s Rose here is ‘Red’ rather than ‘Dark’ (‘Dark’ would have been in line with the Roisin dubh provenance of his symbol). The primary asso­ ciation of the phrase (which WBY is not espe­ cially putting to work as an allusion, but which he cannot plausibly avoid) is Robert Burns’s famous ‘O my love is like a red, red rose’. The colour certainly puts the rose firmly in the orbit of Rosicrucian symbolism and also, to some extent, distances it from Marian associa­ tions (where the Rose is more often white). proud Rose] Both ‘proud’ and red’ are used to describe a rose in Frances Ridley Havergal, Poet­ ical Works (1884), ‘The Shower’, 5: ‘The shower hath bowed the proud red rose’. This might rea­ sonably the thought nothing more than a coinci­ dence; but WBY also possibly echoes Harvergal (a popular religious poet) in ‘Maid Quiet’ in all its versions, including that first completed in 1892. ‘Proud rose’ is used by R. Burns, but as a symbol of England in his ‘The Banks of the Devon’, 13–14: ‘Let Bourbon exult in his gay gilded lilies, | And England triumphant display her proud rose’. The briefly-celebrated Joseph Skipsey (whom WBY had met, and to whom he had presented a copy of WO) also published a poem addressing ‘thou, proud rose’ at the time of CK, the brief (and unremarkable) ‘See, Essie goes!’ in his Songs and Lyrics (1892). of all my days] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 892–895: But thou, O well-beloved, of all my days Bid it be fruitful, and a crown for all,

To bring forth leaves and bind round all my hair With perfect chaplets woven for thine of thee. The case for WBY recalling these lines is strengthened by the likelihood that he remem­ bers a phrase from a dozen lines later (‘no flash of swift white feet’) at the end of ‘To Some I have Talked with by the Fire’, publ. 1895. 2. of ancient ways] Perhaps cp. an exchange in Aubrey de Vere, St. Thomas of Can­ terbury: A Dramatic Poem (1876) IV vii, 164–167: ‘[King Henry] A  king perforce | Reveres the ancient ways. [Beckett] O never in you | Was tender reverence for the ancient ways!’ 6–7. stars  .  .  .  silver-sandalled] The phrase is to be found in some nineteenth-century verse, but here perhaps cp. Nicholas Michell, The Ruins of Many Lands (1849), Bk.I Pt.1, 113–114: ‘Then, Peri-like, they swim in mea­ sures fleet; | Twinkle like stars their silver­ sandalled feet’. Michell (1807–1880) was a Cornish poet, whose book with its compre­ hensive treatment of all the world’s notable ancient monuments had some success in the 1850s. By WBY’s time it would have been largely forgotten; but it is possible that the poet happened upon it at some point, and perhaps remembered these lines from its description (at the long poem’s very begin­ ning) of ancient Babylon.

122 10

15

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way. Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Lest I no more hear common things that crave;

11–12.] In a review of CK (The Academy (1892)) these lines were quoted approvingly as a summary of the poet’s achievement. For a time, WBY was inclined to quote the couplet as something of a personal aesthetic motto: altering it to: ‘To find in all poor fool­ ish things that live a day | Eternal beauty wan­ dering on her way’, he inscribed it in copies of WO and In the Seven Woods (1903) (Univer­ sity of Texas, Austin) and Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) (F.W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland), and in a copy dated by the author as Mar. 1904 of the first American edn. of WATR (Wake Forest University), in the form ‘To find in foolish things that live a day | Eter­ nal beauty wandering on her way’. At around the time of these inscriptions, the couplet was used by AE (George Russell) in the course of an article with the argument that ‘it is a curi­ ous thing that while we commonly regard ourselves as the most religious people in Europe, the reverse is probably true’ (Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought, Jun. 1904): The country which has never produced a great spiritual thinker or religious teacher of whom men have heard [.  .  .] cannot pride itself on its spiritual achievement; and it might seem even more paradoxi­ cal [. . .] to say that the first spiritual note in our literature was struck when a poet generally regarded as pagan wrote it as the aim of his art to reveal In all poor foolish things that live a day Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.

[.  .  .] I  call Mr. Yeats’s poetry spiritual when it declares as in the lines I quoted, that there is nothing so trivial that it is not the shadow of Eternal Beauty. 12. beauty] Beauty MS, CK-P99. 13–14.] ah let there be | A little roseate air from [me to del.] thee to me MS and let there be | A little roseate air from thee to me del. Proofs (Yale). 13–14.] Cp. Harriet Eleanor Hamilton King, A Book of Dreams (1883), ‘A Starry Sign’, 176–179: Not yet, not yet;

Be not too quick in coming; leave me still

The shadowy glories of the unfulfilled,

The faint far snatches echoing worlds away.

(WBY echoes another poem from this vol­ ume in ‘A Song of the Rosy Cross’, wr. in Nov. 1891.) Perhaps also cp. Oscar Wilde, Poems (1881), ‘Rosa Mystica’, ‘The New Helen’, 71–2: ‘O Helen! Helen! Helen! yet awhile, | Yet for a little while, O tarry here’ (see headnote). 14. the rose-breath] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Legends of the Saxon Saints (1879), ‘Prologue’, 59–61: ‘They are brave and strong: | ’Tis but the rose-breath of their vale that rots | Their destiny’s bud unblown’, and ‘Saint Frideswida’, 91: ‘Rose-breath celestial’. 15. common things that crave] Perhaps cp. Wordsworth, Poetical Works (1850), ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’, 49: ‘In common things that round us lie’. WBY’s intransitive use of ‘crave’ is relatively uncommon, but cp. John Dryden, trans. of Persius, Satires (1693), IV, 50–1: ‘Who spite of all his store | Is ever craving, and will still be poor’.

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

20

123

The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,

The field-mouse running by me in the grass,

And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;

But seek alone to hear the strange things said

By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,

And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.

Come near; I would, before my time to go,

Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

16.] Cp. W. Blake, The Book of Thel (1789), II, 27–9: fear not and I will call The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice. Come forth worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen. 18. And heavy mortal hopes] Nor all men’s heavy hopes del. Proofs (Yale). 20. the bright hearts of those long dead] Per­ haps cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘Marriage’ 75–6: ‘On wings of love recalled the times of old, | And wept o’er all bright hearts had been’ (WBY may also recall a line of Montgomery’s in a another poem of late 1891, ‘A Dream of Death’). In The Trem­ bling of the Veil (1922), WBY commented

that ‘I do not remember what I meant by ‘the bright hearts’, but a little later I wrote of spirits ‘with mirrors in their hearts’’ (CW 3, 205). In ‘The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red’, first publ. in Apr. 1896 (subsequently ‘The Vision of Hanrahan the Red’ in The Secret Rose (1897)), ‘They came nearer and nearer, and subse­ quently O’Sullivan [Hanrahan] saw that they also were lovers, and that they had heartshaped mirrors instead of hearts, and that they were looking and ever looking on their own faces in one another’s mirrors’ (M, 163). 21. chaunt] chant CK. WBY also changed ‘chanting’ to ‘chaunting’ in ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (11) for P95. The archaic spelling is probably intended to add to a sense of ritual or magic. 23. Eire] Eri CK, P95.

120

TO IRELAND IN THE

COMING TIMES

Date of composition. The poem was first published in CK. The copy for the book went to Unwin on 25 Nov. 1891 (CL 1, 273), but it is not certain that the poem was included with it at this time. WBY was correcting proofs in Apr. 1892, and this poem receives correc­ tion including insertion of new lines in the set of proofs preserved at Yale: this may be circumstantial evidence for its having been quite recently composed. Another circum­ stantial factor is the poem’s relation to one by KT (see Context, criticism, and interpreta­ tion); the book in which this piece was included was not published until late 1891 (WBY wrote to KT about it on 2 Dec. 1891, and his review of her book appeared on 2 Jan. 1892), but WBY had seen the proofs by the beginning of Nov. 1891, when he told this to Fr Mat­ thew Russell (CL 1, 268). On the assumption that KT’s poem inspired WBY’s, the date of composition would be between the beginning of Nov. 1891 and either 25 Nov. (when CK copy went to Unwin) or any time before Unwin’s production of proofs in Apr. 1892. Context, criticism, and interpretation. The poem is the final piece in CK; as such, it is something of a summing up of the book’s main themes, most notably those of Irish myth and more esoteric mystical visionary experience. The principal symbol is (as it had been in many of the volume’s lyrics) the Rose. Here, again, the symbol is made to carry both its Irish nationalist associations as the Roisin Dubh, the little dark rose of national essence which waits its moment to come into bloom, and the Rose of WBY’s magical studies, of Rosicrucianism, and of the GD. The poem’s status as (in its first title) an ‘Apo­ logia’ necessitates some kind of reconciliation (or at least, a bringing together) of these nationalist and mystical symbolic identities. WBY’s inclusion of the names of Irish poets of the mid-century, ‘Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’ introduces another tension, since as lines 17–22 acknowledge, his own kind of poetry differs so widely from theirs. Nor were WBY’s proclaimed nationalist cultural bearings uncomplicated: the mystical associations of the Rose symbol are kept to some degree secret even while their presence is being proclaimed, so the nature of WBY’s nationalism remains unspecified – if Fenianism, for example, is present it is nevertheless unannounced – just out of sight, perhaps, like the GD. R. Fos­ ter’s description of the poem as a ‘manifesto’ is part of an argument that it ‘announced [WBY’s] arrival as a frankly political poet’ (Foster 1, 123). If there is frankness, though, it is the kind of frankness that is not accompanied by any great clarity. One political context, certainly, is that of the climate in Ireland following the death of Parnell; and M. Campbell maintains that the poem ‘invoked the stirrings of cultural revival in the seeming politi­ cal vacuum created in the aftermath of Parnell’s disgrace and death’ (Campbell, 159). Yet there are plainly personal dimensions to the poem too, and there may well be a level on DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-122

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

125

which it explains itself, and the poems that have come before it, specifically to the book’s dedicatee, MG. Only a few months after composition, at the time of publication of CK, WBY found himself making another apologia, this time in private, to John O’Leary. In the wake of a losing battle with J.F. Taylor and Charles Gavan Duffy (who were able to sniff out the poet’s underlying Fenian allegiances) over an Irish National Library series of books, WBY defended himself vehemently (letter of week ending 23 Jul. 1892, CL 1, 303): The probable explanation however of your somewhat testy post card is that you were out at Bedford Park and heard my father discoursing about my magical pursuits out of the immense depths of his ignorance as to everything that I am doing and thinking. If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book nor would ‘The Countess Kathleen’ have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. While this recalls the poem in some ways, it also indicates how little that poem had in fact served to resolve. A very useful analysis of the poem’s unreconciled tensions between the life of cultural nationalism and the mystical calling is provided by E. Larissy (71): Does the poet ask to be deemed patriotic in spite or because of his occult depth? If the latter, then problems soon cease, for the occult things are also Druid things. If the former, then he is asserting that he possesses an evidently patriotic surface and that the deeper matter is a bonus for ‘him who ponders well’. There is no way of resolving this ambiguity, which corresponds to a substantial doubt as to the patri­ otic role of such poetry. The doubt is enabled by a distinction between ‘My rhymes’ and ‘their rhyming’, in which the former is understood as the fullness of the wellpondered poem and the latter as an external part of that fullness: both form and symbolic integument; ‘measure’ in the widest sense, but externality nevertheless. The fullness corresponds to the hem, but it would cease to be confined even to this beautiful border were it not for its time-bound dependence on ‘rhyming’. These lines are profoundly revealing, for they show Yeats, for all his fervour, divided by that hem, and uncertain which side of it should truly be called Irish. Building on the paradox that ‘After the event that the poem most desires, the birth of the nation, it continues to speak to Ireland throughout the very future to which it is addressed,’ M. Campbell offers a lucid and subtle reading in his ‘Yeats in the Coming Times’, Essays in Criticism, 53/1 (Jan. 2003), 10–32. In this article, the process of pub­ lished revision is interpreted as one that carries deeper relevance for the poet’s con­ ceptions of poetry and occasion, and the poetic realization of changing time. WBY’s revisions to the poem for EPS reveal a poet still struggling to bring different strains of his youthful ambition into harmony, though now with a longer perspective. A term running through the poem in this revision is that of ‘measure’ – poetic measure, in the first place, but measure of other kinds as well: ‘The measure of her flying feet’, ‘a measured quietude’,

126

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

‘unmeasured mind’, ‘measured ways’, and ‘measurer Time’ all bring an entirely new note to the poem. The older WBY is, in one sense at least, taking the measure of his younger aspirations and determinations, and locating the true measure of all these somewhere beyond the conscious agendas of his former nationalism and magical mysticism. Such insistence on measure and measuring is perhaps unfortunately placed in relation to the unaltered earlier image of a ‘red-rose-bordered hem’, unwittingly introducing unhelpful connotations of dressmaking for mother Ireland. E. Loizeaux believes the image ‘evokes the paintings and embroidery of the pre-Raphaelites’, but she also notes how (in the revised version) ‘She of the “red-rose-bordered hem” is both the principle of order in the world and the muse of all the arts’, adding that ‘As both, her measures make hearts beat’ (Loizeaux, 222). WBY’s announcement of ‘The love I  lived’ (34) brings his own love-poetry in CK into the orbit of the general defence that is being mounted here; as E. Cullingford observes, the poet ‘stakes out his claim to belong to the masculine tradition of cultural nationalism, despite the fact that his own poetics are marked as feminine’ (Howes and Kelly eds., 172). This holds true for the revision also, though the nature of WBY’s engagement with a ‘feminine’ poetics has by this time deepened and evolved. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that the poem’s origins may very well lie with WBY’s reading of the work of a woman poet, one with whom he had been for several years on very close terms. KT’s volume Ballads and Lyrics was published in late 1891. Its first item is a poem entitled ‘Apologia’, written (like WBY’s poem) in iambic tetrameter couplets gathered into verse-paragraphs, and set in italics. Here in my book there will be found

No gleanings from a foreign ground:

The quiet thoughts of one whose feet

Have scarcely left her green retreat;

A little dew, a little scent,

A little measure of content,

A robin’s song, perchance to stir

Some heart-untravelled traveller.

A low horizon hems me in,

Low hills with fields of gold between,

Woods that are waving, veiled with grey,

A little river far away,

Birds on the boughs, and on the sward

Daisies that dancing praise the Lord.

Outside my window I can see

The bent boughs of an apple-tree,

Where little fruits turn rosier;

And every evening of the year

I watch the golden sunsets die

Yonder in the wide Western sky.

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

127

The doves are crooning wild and soft,

Where elm and beech stand up aloft,

Houses of birds that build and fly.

The wind is the birds’ lullaby,

Rocking small cradles to and fro,

As a fond mother’s foot might go

And in my garden, all in white,

The Mary-lilies take the light,

And southern-wood and lavender

Welcome the bee, in golden fur

A splendid lover, and on high

Hovers the spangled butterfly,

Where roses, old and sweet, dream on,

Fading to rich oblivion.

And in my thatch the birds will build,

And still for me the sunshine gild

The world, though it be Winter day.

The rain will seem upon the spray

But showers of jewels, and the rime

Pale splendours raise in Winter time.

So in my book there will be found

No gleanings from a foreign ground.

If such you seek, go buy, go buy

Of some more travelled folk than I.

Kind Master Critic, say not, please,

How that her world so narrow is,

Since here she warns expectant eyes

That homely is her merchandise!

In his review of the book for the Dublin Evening Herald (2 Jan. 1892), WBY quoted thirty lines of the poem, prefacing them by saying that ‘The landscapes [of the book] are no more taken from the tapestry-like scenery of Rossetti and his imitators, but from her own Clondalkin fields, and from the grey Dublin hills,’ adding ‘She apologizes for this charming provincialism in an ‘Apologia’ as exquisite as Allingham at his best, but with an added richness’ (CW 9, 154). Text and publication history. No MS material survives. There are three sets of proofs for CK, which preserve early variants: these are a set in the Beineke Library, Yale (Proofs (Yale)), and two sets at the HRC, University of Texas at Austin (Proofs1 (Texas) and Proofs2 (Texas)). Revisions made for the 1925 EPS are in a set of proofs for that book in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (EPS Proofs (Berg)). After CK, the poem was included in all future collected editions.

128

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

Copy-text: P49.

K

5

10

now, that I would accounted be

True brother of a company

That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,

Ballad and story, rann and song;

Nor be I any less of them,

Because the red-rose-bordered hem

Of her, whose history began

Before God made the angelic clan,

Trails all about the written page.

When Time began to rant and rage The measure of her flying feet Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat; And Time bade all his candles flare

Title: Apologia addressed to Ireland in the coming days CK. 2. a company] CP33 and after; that company CK and all editions to SP29 (and 1936 2nd. revised edn. of P29). 3. That sang] CP33 Who sang CK-SP29. 4. rann] This Irish term describes a piece of verse, usually a quatrain. It is not common in nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish verse, but is found in J.C. Mangan, Poems (1859), ‘Lament for the Princes of Tyrone and Tyrconnel’, 95: ‘chant aloud the exulting rann’. 6. the red rose-bordered hem] Cp. W. Blake, Milton Book I, Pl. 26: ‘These the Visions of Eternity | But we see only as it were the hem of their garments | When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond’rous Visions’. WBY’s echo of Blake was first pointed out by E. Lar­ rissy (70). It may be added that Blake here mediates for WBY Matthew 9:21, ‘If I  may but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be made whole’ and 14: 36 ‘And [they] besought him that they might only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole’. WBY made use of this image again in his 1894 story ‘The Cru­ cifixion of the Outcast’, whose protagonist

declares: ‘I have been the more alone upon the roads and by the sea because I heard in my heart the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of her who is more subtle than Aengus the Subtle-hearted . . .’ (M, 103–104). 10–16.] EPS and after. Pre-1925 text: 10

15

For in the world’s first blossoming age The light fall of her flying feet Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat, And still the starry candles flare To help her light foot here and there: And still the thoughts of Ireland brood Upon her holy quietude. CK-P24.

13–14.] This couplet inserted by hand in Proofs (Yale). 13. starry candles] Perhaps cp. Walter Thornbury, Historical and Legendary Bal­ lads and Songs (1876), ‘In my Gondola’, 41–2: ‘No starry candles glimmer bright | Through the dim balmy air’. 14.] Cp. with this line, but also with 14–16 generally, a mischievous stanza concern­ ing St. Kevin and a ‘Kathleen’, Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘By that lake, whose gloomy shore’, 9–16: ’Twas from Kathleen’s eyes he flew, – Eyes of most unholy blue!

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

15

129

To light a measure here and there; And may the thoughts of Ireland brood Upon a measured quietude. Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,

She had loved him well and long,

Wished him hers, nor thought it wrong.

Wheresoe’er the Saint would fly,

Still he heard her light foot nigh;

East or west, where’er he turned,

Still her eyes before him burned.

15–16.] The rhyme of ‘brood and ‘quietude’ is used by WBY in ‘The Death of Cuchu­ lain’ 83–4. It is not possible to establish whether that or the present poem was composed first. Perhaps cp. Isaac Williams, The Baptistery (1858), ‘The Death of the Righteous’, 9–10: ‘Around the very place doth brood | A strange and holy Quietude’. 12. Ireland’s heart] A commonplace, verging on cliché, in Irish nationalist rhetoric, especially from the 1840s onwards. This heart generally throbs rather than simply beating, and is sub­ ject to extreme general pressures of grief and hope. By the late 1880s, this image’s vitality was still unabated, as e.g. in the adaptation of F.W. Faber’s hymn ‘Faith of our fathers’ printed in the Journal of the Home Rule Union 1 (1888): Land of our fathers! living still

In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword!

Oh! Ireland’s heart beats high with joy

Whene’er it hears that glorious word.

WBY’s image here is an attempt to move back towards an originary point of the national heartbeat, rather than being a report on its loud excitement in the present. 16.^17.] Two lines here in Proofs (Yale) are cancelled: ‘And still God lights the starry skies | From the clear candles of her eyes.’

18. Davis, Mangan, Ferguson] The three poets listed here by WBY are Thomas Davis (1814– 1845), James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849), and Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886). All three (though to differing degrees, and with differing measures of acknowledgement on his part) had been significant influences on WBY’s verse, and continued to influence it at the time of composition. Davis’s reputa­ tion was primarily that of being the popular poetic voice of the nationalist movement in the 1840s known as Young Ireland, through his contributions to and editorship of its jour­ nal The Nation. WBY was often inclined to play down Davis’s specifically poetic impor­ tance, though he was keen to see the cultural nationalism of the Young Ireland movement bear fruit in his own generation, and was in any case closely connected to that movement through his intimacy with some of its survi­ vors, notably John O’Leary. WBY could also trumpet Davis’s praise, in certain contexts: at a public meeting of the Young Ireland League in Dublin on 14 Oct. 1893 he delivered a speech of unstinting praise where Davis was presented in a light that suggested his living legacy in the likes of John O’Leary (report in Freeman’s Journal, 16 Oct. 1893): Mr. W. B. Yeats said societies like the Young Ireland League were bringing into Irish homes and hearts a knowledge of the lessons which Davis taught. It was strange that so many orators who in their time had swayed thousands by their speeches had been long forgotten, while Davis, and the message which he gave, who perhaps

130 20

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

Because, to him who ponders well,

My rhymes more than their rhyming tell

Of things discovered in the deep,

When only body’s laid asleep.

never made a speech in his life but one, were now stronger and more active than they were during his own life (hear, hear). The Irish were said to be an oratorical peo­ ple, fond of sounding phrases and sound­ ing sentiments, but they had chosen as one of the National heroes in modern days one of the quietest workers and least brilliant men, in an oratorical sense, of all those who had laboured in the National move­ ment. One of the lessons they could learn from the life of a man like Davis was that in carrying on any National movement the methods adopted were more impor­ tant than anything else. They might think that by turning aside sometimes from the absolutely righteous and just method they would hasten the end for which they were striving. If the end were absolutely certain there might be something said for such a course; but Davis throughout all his life was always striving after what was just and right. This was evident in all his writings, and for practical purposes he thought this was the best part of the message which Davis had left them (applause). A poet much more germane to WBY’s own artistic tastes was Mangan, a figure less ‘politi­ cal’ in general bearing, but deeply admired by the young WBY as an example of Roman­ tic ambition and intensity in poetry, whose translations were as significant as his original work in establishing a mid-century tradition of distinctively Irish lyric. Ferguson was enor­ mously important to the work of WBY’s youth, and not least to his mini-epic ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, which emulates his verse retellings of Irish bardic legend. Ferguson’s antiquari­ anism in poetry was a crucial spur to WBY; nevertheless, his own early work both absorbs and surpasses this, avoiding Ferguson’s gen­ eral stiffness and conventionality of verse and

diction. The trio of poets assembled by WBY in these lines have relatively little in common aesthetically; they do not match one another in terms of politics (Ferguson was a Unionist, and Mangan, though with Young Ireland con­ nections, was far from a committedly political writer), and so WBY’s bringing together of the three names is in some ways surprising. All they have in common, strictly speaking, is that they are Irish; they are united, also, in having had an influence on the young WBY. Other palpable Irish poetic influences on the poet are notable for their absence: there is no mention of De Vere, for example, and none of Allingham (to go no further). The metrically felicitous order of names here is almost (but not quite) anticipated in WBY’s essay of the late 1880s, ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’, published in The Leisure Hour in Nov. 1889: ‘In Duffy’s ballad book [C.G. Duffy, Ballad Poetry of Ireland] what was to grow plainer as years went on was already plain  – that three men, Davis, Ferguson, and Mangan, stood above all other Irish writers of that day’ (CW 9, 98). 17–22.] These lines have attracted a great deal of critical notice and commentary. This began with the publication of CK, when the Sunday Sun (28 Aug. 1892) suggested ‘a word in this young poet’s ear’: He is young, and modesty will better be­ come him. Is it not rather too soon for him to rate himself – and somewhat queer to do so himself – as ‘one with Davis Man­ gan and Ferguson,’ names, we believe, rated amongst the highest in Ireland. Within a couple of weeks, WBY used United Ireland as his platform to reply to such criti­ cisms (CL 1, 315): Two or three of the reviews of my ‘Countess Kathleen’ have misread my rhyming claim to be considered ‘one with Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,’ and one of them has based on

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

25

30

131

For the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro, That hurry from unmeasured mind To rant and rage in flood and wind; Yet he who treads in measured ways May surely barter gaze for gaze. Man ever journeys on with them After the red-rose-bordered hem. Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, A Druid land, a Druid tune!

this misconception a reproof for my sup­ posed lack of modesty. I did not in the least intend the lines to claim equality of emi­ nence, nor does the context bear out such a reading, but only community in the treat­ ment of Irish subjects after an Irish fashion. I send this letter to you as the matter con­ cerns my Nationalist readers, if it concerns anybody at all, and but little the readers of the papers that made the comment. WBY’s syntax in the poem is, in fact, relatively easy to misread. What is meant is along the lines of ‘Nor may I be less considered as much of an Irish poet as Davis, Mangan, or Ferguson, merely on account of the fact that my poetry, unlike theirs, addresses mystical and metaphysi­ cal visionary experience’. WBY’s phrasing, how­ ever, makes a claim on his part to be ‘one’ with the three poets, and a subsequent boast to be doing ‘more’ than them, easy to (mis)hear. Mod­ ern criticism still sometimes chooses to under­ stand WBY here as ‘confidently claim[ing] his nationalist verse joined the venerable tradition of nineteenth-century Young Ireland poetry’ (Karen Steele, in Holdeman and Levitas, 214). For G. Bornstein, WBY in these lines ‘explicitly asks to be ‘counted one | With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’’ (Howes and Kelly, 23), and M. Camp­ bell reads them as part of a ‘manifesto for the brotherhood of Irish poets’ (Campbell, 15). An important early reading of these lines (albeit a hostile one) is offered in James Joyce’s poem The Holy Office (1904): ‘But I must not accounted be | One of that mumming company’.

21–28.] EPS and after. Pre-1925 text: Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,

That God gives unto man in sleep.

For the elemental beings go

About my table to and fro.

In flood and fire and clay and wind, 25

They huddle from man’s pondering mind;

Yet he who treads in austere ways

May surely meet their ancient gaze. CK-P24.

25–26.] This very paper is a dress | To hide some spirit’s nakedness del. Proofs (Yale), Proofs1 (Texas). 25.] This earlier version of the line makes clearer the identification of the ‘elemental beings’ with the four elements of water, fire, earth, and air: WBY’s revised text can find room for only two of the elements. 26. pondering] wandering del. pondering Proofs2 (Texas). 27. Yet] And del. But Proofs (Yale). 21. discovered in the deep] dragged up out of a deep EPS Proofs (Berg). 23–24.] For round about my table go | The magical powers to and fro. CK. magician’s powers del. magical powers Proofs (Yale). 32. Druid] WBY’s term here may be prompted by the wish to make this final lyric in CK touch on a major element in one of the first poems in the book, ‘Fergus and the Druid’. The adjective ‘druid’ is attested in the eigh­ teenth century and after (e.g. George Dyer, Poems (1801), ‘Ode XI: On Genius’, 32: ‘The

132

35

40

45

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew. From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye; And we, our singing and our love, What measurer Time has lit above, And all benighted things that go About my table to and fro, Are passing on to where may be, In truth’s consuming ecstasy, No place for love and dream at all; For God goes by with white footfall. I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.

Cambrian youth shall wake the Druid song’), and was employed much more recently by John Todhunter, ‘The Fate of the Sons of Usna’, First Duan, 140–141: ‘Then Cathvah took the child | And o’er its new-born head murmured his druid song’. WBY’s fondness for this adjective came to be pronounced, or at least pronounced upon: William Sharp (writing as Fiona Macleod) mentioned it in connection with ‘the overuse of certain words’ (‘The Later Work of Mr. W.B. Yeats’, North American Review, 1 Oct. 1902): Mannerism threatens disillusion when it becomes a common use, as when in close conjunction Mr. Yeats thrice uses a favourite, but at best dubious, epithet druid, uses it as an adjective for ‘mystic’ or kindred word [. . .] It has a contagion, for a day or two ago I saw in a paper an allusion to ‘the druid spell of Mr. Yeats’s poetry, its druid lights and shadows.’ I can understand a druid spell, though ‘druidic’ is the fit word: but not druid lights and shadows. 33. write for you] write out true CK. 37–40.] EPS and after. Pre-1925 text:

And we, our singing and our love,

The mariners of night above,

And all the wizard things that go CK-P24.

38. measurer Time has lit] starry candles set EPS Proofs (Berg). 39. benighted] This is OED ‘benight’ 1.a., pass., ‘To be overtaken by the darkness of night (before reaching a place of shelter)’, rather than the more current 2.b., ‘To involve in intellectual or moral darkness, in the ‘night’ of error or superstition’. 41–42.] Are passing on to where [there is del.] may be, | In truth’s consuming [silences del.] ecstasy Proofs (Yale). On this revision, R. Ell­ mann notes ‘two implications that Yeats felt obliged to alter’: ‘one was the dogmatic certainty of the state described, the other was the unpal­ atableness of even truth’s transcending love and dream. [.  .  .] Now his emphasis is not on the ideal state itself but on the possible peril to love and dream within it, and certainty or uncer­ tainty are equally irrelevant’ (Identity, 49). With ‘consuming ecstasy’, cp. Shelley, ‘To Constantia, Singing’, 31: ‘I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies’ (as noted by G. Bornstein, 59). 44. footfall] foot-fall CK-SP29 and 1936 SP29 2nd. rev. edn.

121

THE ROSE OF PEACE

Date of composition. There is no evidence for when this poem was composed, but it is likely that it was written not long before WBY gave it to W.E. Henley for The National Observer in Jan. 1892. Although the poet had delivered copy for CK to Unwin in Nov. 1891, it is possible that this poem was added at a later stage (the book was not published until Aug. 1892). Context and interpretation. The general thematic context here is that of the war in heaven, as described in the New Testament. The relevant account is in Revelation 12: 3–10: And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew a third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be deliv­ ered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all notions with a rod of iron, and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand, two hundred and threescore days. And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels. And prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I  heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. The archangel Michael comes from the Old Testament, where he is mentioned in the Book of Daniel; he is depicted often as the warrior angel. WBY takes an unusual approach to this figure, enlisting him in a compliment to ‘you’ (who may be presumed to be the speaker’s beloved): making a chaplet for her head and bowing down before her, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-123

134

THE ROSE OF PEACE

thus giving the lead to others in heaven, who troop into ‘God’s great town’ to witness the declaration of peace in God’s ‘warfare’. As a conceit, all this is elaborate, artificial, and somewhat forced. WBY treads a delicate line between the sublime and the banal, not entirely successfully: the ‘door-post’ of the opening stanza is disconcertingly homely, while the ‘divine homestead’ of the second stanza makes the ‘great town’ of the third sound disarmingly small-town: detailed real estate and the biblical sublime do not read­ ily mix. The poem’s ambitions are probably shaped by William Blake, if only in a very general way, and somewhere behind the determined symmetries of the last stanza is his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, though with little of the sophistication of understand­ ing that WBY was perfectly able in other contexts to apply to such multi-dimensional work. The poet never seems to have thought of dislodging this poem from his oeuvre; but it may also be said that he never drew particular attention to it, and critics in turn have almost never thought it worth much of their time. H. Adams detects ‘the intrusion of some wishful thinking into the situation’ of the poem, and notes how it ‘expresses an attitude as far as is imaginable from what the poet later comes to believe about the beloved. [. . .] It becomes unbelievable that the angel Michael, who is the closest thing to a war god that the poet can find in the Christian “pantheon,” would take up weaving in emulation of someone whom the poet finally names Maud Gonne’ (Adams, 53). Text and publication history. The poem was first published in The National Observer, 13 Feb. 1891 (NO). A  fair-copy MS  in the Berg Collection, NYPL, matches this text exactly, and is possibly a copy of the poem as sent to W.E. Henley, the editor. (This is transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 278.) The poem was next published in CK: WBY changed the text from its NO version to its final form (with the exception of the title) at proof stage (proofs in Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin). The poem appeared with its new title in P95 and all subsequent collected editions. Copy-text: P49.

I

f Michael, leader of God’s host, When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven’s door-post He would his deeds forget. 5

Brooding no more upon God’s wars

In his divine homestead,

1. host] hosts NO. leader of God’s host] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), Inisfail, ‘The War Song of Tyrconnell’s Bard’, 88: ‘him that ruled God’s host of yore’. Lionel Johnson, Poetical

Works (1915), ‘Christmas’ III, has Michael describe himself as ‘Captain of the Lord God’s host’ (71). 2.] When they for war are met NO. 3. door-post] door-posts NO.

THE ROSE OF PEACE

135

He would go weave out of the stars A chaplet for your head. 10

15

And all folk seeing him bow down, And white stars tell your praise, Would come at last to God’s great town, Led on by gentle ways; And God would bid his warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.

8. a chaplet for your head] Cp. Horace, Odes 4.11, trans. John Duncombe (1757), 3–4: ‘To weave a chaplet for your head, | My garden is with parsley spread’. 12.] Perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), [‘Neither do I condemn thee . . .’], 1–4:

Of woman, if through sinful wile

Thy soul hath strayed from honour’s track,

’Tis mercy only can beguile,

By gentle ways, the wanderer back.

13. his] man’s NO.

122

WHERE MY BOOKS GO

Date of composition. Jan. 1892 is WBY’s appended date; no evidence survives for any­ thing more precise. However, the poet mentioned that ‘My own “Irish Fairy Stories” will be out very soon now’ in a letter of 18/19 Jan. (CL 1, 281), so it is possible that the copy (including the short prefatory poem) had been sent to Unwin’s by this point. Textual and publication history. WBY’s Irish Fairy Tales, in which this poem was first published, was a volume in T. Fisher Unwin’s Children’s Library series, publ. in May 1892. WBY never reprinted the poem, and no MS material survives, but it was included in the first edition of Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). Quiller Couch (who may well have been helped in his task by the Yeats family friend F. York Powell) changed ‘gather’ in the first line to ‘utter’ and ‘Storm darkened’ in 8 to ‘Storm­ darken’d’: there is no evidence of any kind for WBY’s involvement in or approbation of these revisions. The poem was not printed again until VE. Context and interpretation. Clearly, WBY’s verses here are occasional. They are on one level suited to a book of edited selections from the writings of others; on another level, though, the way in which this short poem is addressed presents a slight puzzle. The target audience is a young one (the series is, after all, the ‘Children’s Library’), and so talk of words that go to minister to a ‘sad, sad heart’ is at least a little incongruous. The poem’s fit is not so much with this particular book, then, as with ‘My Books’ in general (and WBY does appear on the title page as the author of WO); the nocturnal visits of his writings to sing to a heart across the waters are perhaps to be understood as parts of the courtship of a beloved from whom he is often separated by great distances. The poem’s eight lines put it in a relation to a number of eight-line poems of the early 1890s which WBY intended as love poems (mystical and otherwise) to MG. The quick disappear­ ance of this poem from WBY’s canon is not the same thing as its actual disappearance: besides the life of Irish Fairy Tales itself, its continued prominence as one of three poems by WBY in Quiller Couch’s Oxford Book gave it a longer lease of life than the poet might have envisaged or maybe desired.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-124

WHERE MY BOOKS GO

137

Copy-text: W.B. Yeats (ed.), Irish Fairy Tales (1892).

A 5

ll the words that I gather, And all the words that I write, Must spread out their wings untiring, And never rest in their flight, Till they come where your sad, sad heart is, And sing to you in the night, Beyond where the waters are moving, Storm darkened or starry bright.

1. gather] Quiller Couch’s change to ‘utter’ (see Textual and publication history) discards the appropriateness of WBY’s verb, since Irish Fairy Tales was a collection of the writings of others, as gathered by the editor who writes this poem. 3. their wings untiring] The inversion here gives the impression that WBY is obliged to

position words for a rhyme – cp. e.g. F.T. Palgrave, Idylls and Songs (1854), ‘Song: Sleep, Passion, sleep’, 8–9: ‘thy wings untiring | Alone can scale the heaven of vain desiring’. In fact WBY puts himself under no such obli­ gation, since the first and third lines, like the fifth and seventh, have feminine endings but no rhymes.

123

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

Date of composition. There is no firm evidence for when WBY composed this poem. However, it is likely that this was one of the last poems for CK to have been completed. The text of its periodical publication in the National Observer (21 May 1892) (NO) was one which WBY wished to revise quite extensively for CK, and this suggests that com­ position was relatively recent. One set of CK proofs shows that WBY was in two minds about whether or not to use the ending of the poem as it stands in the NO text, while other verbal details appear still to be in something of a fluid state. These proofs seem to have been the first set, requested by WBY from his publishers, Fisher Unwin, late in Apr. 1892, when he was arranging for a copyright performance of The Countess Kathleen (this took place on 6 May). Two surviving subsequent sets of proofs show no corrections to the text of the poem, so it seems reasonable to suppose that WBY had finished composi­ tion (on the first proofs) at the end of Apr., even though an earlier version of the poem was to be published in the NO later in May. When composition began is unknown, but it is likely to have been at some time in early 1892. Subject and sources. WBY’s subject here, along with ‘The Death of Cuchulain’, repre­ sents one of his earliest engagements with the Ulster cycle of bardic materials. Fergus MacRoigh is an important figure in Irish bardic tradition: a king of Ulster who abdicated in favour of the younger Conor MacNessa and was celebrated as the poet responsible for handing on the material of the Tain cycle, in whose events he was himself a protagonist. In 1899, in the Notes to WATR, WBY explained his ‘proud dreaming king’ in ‘The Secret Rose’ with reference to Fergus: I have founded ‘the proud dreaming king’ upon Fergus, the son of Roigh, the legendary poet of ‘the quest for the bull of Cualge,’ as he is in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in some modern poems by Ferguson. He married Nessa, and Ferguson makes him tell how she ‘took him captive in a single look.’ [. . .] Pres­ ently, because of his great love, he gave up his throne to Conchubar, her son by another, and lived out his days feasting, and fighting, and hunting. His promise never to refuse a feast from a certain comrade, and the mischief that came by his promise, and the vengeance he took afterwards, are a principal theme of the poets. I have explained my imagination of him in ‘Fergus and the Druid,’ and in a little song in the second act of ‘The Countess Kathleen.’ WBY’s phrase, ‘my imagination of him’, perhaps tacitly acknowledges that ‘Fergus and the Druid’ has only very tenuous links to the Fergus of bardic tradition, whose involvement DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-125

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

139

with druids is much less notable than his role in the tragedy of Deirdre, or his relation­ ship with Queen Mebdh of Connaught. Although there is no note specifically on Fergus or this poem in CK, WBY provided a short note on Fergus in P95: He was a poet of the Red Branch cycle, as Usheen was of the Fenian. He was once king of all Ireland, but gave up his throne that he might live at peace hunt­ ing in the woods. In P99 and P01, WBY altered the note slightly to indicate that its story is ‘as the legend is shaped by Ferguson’. Samuel Ferguson is indeed WBY’s major source, even though the poem treats the older poet’s Fergus in a markedly different way. Ferguson’s ‘The Abdica­ tion of Fergus Mac Roy’ was included in his Lays of the Western Gael (1865). The poem itself, which is in forty-two quatrains, each made up of trochaic tetrameter couplets, is not amongst Ferguson’s best: it draws little directly from the bardic narratives, but weaves its own fanciful version of King Fergus’s fatigue in a life of seemingly endless legal hearings, where he must give judgement in long and tedious disputes. Nessa’s son Conor proves not only to be a prodigy of judicial sense and learning, but to actually enjoy the complex and seemingly interminable litigation for which Fergus has no more patience. So wonderful is the boy’s jurisprudential ability that, when he ‘gave judgement sure and sound’, it was not only ‘Praises’ that ‘filled the hall around’, but ‘Yea, the man that lost the cause | Hardly could withhold applause’. The King therefore abdicates, and the poem ends with Fergus happy in his abdication: ‘So I laid the kingship down; | Laying with it as I went | All I knew of discontent’. The status of Fergus as a poet, and lover of poetry, is one of the few points at which this poem achieves some power: Rather would I, all alone, Care and state behind me thrown, Walk the dew through showery gleams O’er the meads, or by the streams, Chanting, as the thoughts might rise, Unimagined melodies; While with sweetly-pungent smart Secret happy tears would start. Ferguson voices the poem for a Fergus who speaks in the present about these events in the very remote past (‘I am but an empty shade, | Far from life and passion laid’); in the poem, all takes place ‘Once, ere God was crucified’, but a note attempts to fix some his­ torical specificity to this (Lays of the Western Gael, 235): The petty kings of Uladh (Ulster) who reigned at Emania, claimed to derive their pedigree through Rory More, of the line of Ir, one of the fabled sons of Milesius, as other provincial Reguli traced theirs to Eber and Heremon. A list of thirty-one of these occupants of Emania before its destruction, in A.D. 332,

140

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

compiled from the oldest of the Irish annals, has been published by O’Conor, in which Fergus, son of Leide, the fourteenth in succession from Cimbaeth the founder, has twelve years assigned to him, ending in the year B.C. 31; after whom appears Conor, son of Nessa, having a reign of sixty years. A pre-Christian point in time has some importance for the Fergus theme in WBY’s work: here, it makes possible an encounter with a druid, which may perhaps serve as a parallel with the meeting of Oisin, another hero-poet figure in a later generation, with the newly arrived St Patrick. Whereas, however, Oisin rejects Patrick’s religion, Fergus embraces the mystical life offered by the druid; and whereas Oisin finds himself con­ firmed and strengthened in his heroic identity by this rejection, Fergus is bewildered and unsettled by what he accepts. St Patrick urges submission to his religion, while the druid cautions against submission to his. No druids of any kind, however, are to be met with in Ferguson’s poem, which is altogether simpler in content and intention. In his early article for the Dublin University Review on Ferguson (Nov. 1886), WBY mentioned this poem, quoting from and summarizing it: ‘The poet-king, who loves hunting and the freedom of the great wood, far better than the councils is delighted by the wisdom with which his stepson who sits beside him on the judgment seat, arrays in some most tangled case argument against argument – “As a sheep-dog sorts his cattle, | As a king arrays his battle.” He takes from his head the crown and lays it beside him on the bench’ (CW 9, 13). Ferguson gives more detail on the abdication in a general note on ‘The Tain-Quest’ (Lays of the Western Gael, 1–2): [Conor] owed his first accession to the monarchy to the arts of his mother Nessa, on whom Fergus, his predecessor in the kingly office and step-father, doated so fondly that she had been enabled to stipulate, as a condition of bestowing her hand, that Fergus should abdicate for a year in favour of her youthful son. The year had been indefinitely prolonged by the fascinations of Nessa, aided by the ability of Conor, who, although he concealed a treacherous and cruel disposition under attractive graces of manners and person, ultimately became too popular to be displaced; and Fergus, whose nature disinclined him to the labours of government, had acquiesced in accepting as an equivalent the excitements of war and the chase, and unrestricted pleasures of the revel. While Ferguson’s poem depicts the abdication as a career choice on Fergus’s part, the giving up of a life of boring legal dispute in favour of artistic self-fulfilment, his Irish sources do not support such an interpretation. Fergus’s abdication of the throne of Ulster is partly a trick practised by Nessa and not primarily a consciously made choice. Fergu­ son’s note accepts as much, and a similar version of events is followed by Aubrey De Vere, in his The Foray of Queen Maeve (1882), ‘The Sons of Usnach’, Canto I, 91–114: While yet a child, the stepson of that king

Who reigned in Uladh, Fergus son of Roy,

Conor had shared his home. That prince would bring

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

141

Oft to his judgment court Queen Nessa’s boy

Whose forward wit unravelled every suit,

Delighting in the wrangling clan’s dispute.

Fergus was loftier-minded: evermore

He loathed the sordid plea, the varnished wrong,

And inly scorned the Ollamb’s learnèd lore:

More dear to him the chase, the feast, the song:

Wearied one day, he cried with laughing face,

‘Conor! speak thou the judgment in my place!’

The boy made answer none; but instant bowed,

And judgment gave so full, so just, so clear,

A shout rang upward from the astonished crowd,

‘Worthy of kingship thou!’ His crowned compeer,

Fergus arose: incensed he made reply:

‘Throne him your king, if worthier he than I!’

Conor since then had ruled the Ulidian race,

And ever waxed in subtlety and power,

Though better loved was Fergus’ honest face

And princely port, forth issuing from his tower

At times with horse and hound to chase the boar,

Crowning at times the topmost ridge of war.

Neither Ferguson nor De Vere chooses to mention what is in fact a major aspect of Fergus’s character in the Ulster cycle: his sexual voraciousness. The name Mac Roigh, which associates him with a horse, plays a role in Fergus’s portrayal as prodigiously wellendowed, requiring multiple women to satisfy his sexual appetites, and only meeting his match in the equally voracious figure of Queen Medbh. There is nothing unusual in such adaptations of the material to a standard of Victorian acceptability; but WBY’s Fergus is notable, even so, for his post-abdication pursuit of out-and-out otherworld­ liness. There exists no source material that would suggest any ambition for druidical status on the part of Fergus, though WBY could have been aware of Eugene O’Curry’s passing remark that ‘it would appear that kings and chiefs, as well as learned men, were also frequently Druids’ (On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), II 227). The Druid. Druids are a significant part of the world described by the Ulster Cycle, and of ancient Irish society in general. WBY was aware that they constituted a distinct social class. Accounts from ancient Roman sources saw the druids of Europe as a kind of clerisy, sometimes one sub-divided into different orders: Diodorus Siculus, e.g., delin­ eates these as druidae, an order of theologian/priests; vates, who are ritual soothsayers and interpreters; and bardi, who correspond to official poets and historians. Ancient Irish society seems to have inherited a version of these classes within the druidic caste in the shape of druidh, filidh, and baird. The historical reality of druids, however, became somewhat blurred by the historical imaginations of the eighteenth century and later: in

142

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

this respect, WBY inherits as much the romanticized mystics and magicians of Macpher­ son’s Ossian and the numerous books like Godfrey Higgins’s The Celtic Druids Or, An Attempt to Show the Druids were the Priests of Oriental Colonies who Emigrated from India (1829), as he does the druids in Irish bardic literature. If, as one critic has claimed, ‘It is appropriate that the druid . . . should be evoked as “A thin grey man half lost in gathering night” because “The darkening memory of the archaic pagan figure is only to be barely glimpsed in the modern world of the late nineteenth century” ’ (N. Grene, 7, 222), it should be added that druids were not at all uncommon in at least the poetry of that century (and the one before it). One potent influence here is inevitably the Merlin of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: the ‘dreams’ so important to WBY’s poem may, e.g., be indebted to the melancholy portrait Tennyson offers of Merlin in ‘Merlin and Vivien’ (187–192): Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy;

He walked with dreams and darkness, and he found

A doom that ever poised itself to fall,

An ever-moaning battle in the mist,

World-war of dying flesh against the life,

Death in all life and lying in all love.

The figure of the druid is important to CK, and is pointed up by its prominence in the opening poem of the ‘Legends and Lyrics’ section, and its mention of ‘the druid, grey, wood nurtured, quiet eyed, | Who cast round Fergus dreams and ruin untold’ (4–5). Druids play a crucial role in the action of ‘The Death of Cuchulain’, ‘Druid twilight’ is evoked in ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland’ (7) and ‘a Druid kindness’ in ‘Dedica­ tion of ‘Irish Tales’’ (4), while the book’s final poem, ‘Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Times’ announces ‘A druid land, a druid tune!’ (the ‘wizard song’ of ‘The Two Trees’ (12) had also originally been a ‘druid song’). This importance is carried over to the revisions of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ for P95, which introduced ‘druid’ as an adjective three times to the (originally druid-free) text of the WO version. Criticism and interpretation. Early discussion of the poem is summed up in Louis MacNeice’s observations that ‘[WBY’s] most typical persona perhaps in the early period is that of Fergus who sold his birthright for a mist of dreams’, and his identification in the poem of ‘This nostalgia for another world, for a dream-world which is all knowl­ edge and no action’ (MacNeice, 74). H. Bloom considers this to be one of the poems ‘crucial to an understanding of early Yeats’, and reads its narrative as one in which ‘What the Druid does know is what it pained Yeats to know for very long, that his “dreaming wisdom” is not what Fergus seeks’; this renders the poem ‘an urgent warning made to Yeats’s imagination by itself, but not one that he could heed’ (Bloom, 110–111). More generally, criticism has read the poem in terms of WBY’s sense of the aesthetic (and political) choices facing him as an Irish poet, and ‘a self-reflexive tale about a deliber­ ate choice of the poetic over the political’ (Gregory A. Schirmer, Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English (1998), 223). E. Larrissy offers a sustained interpreta­ tion in terms of WBY’s dramatization of ‘the dangers of heading in a purely spiritual

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

143

direction’, and claims that WBY portrays Fergus as ‘too sensitive and wanting in vigour [. . .] Fergus possesses a heart undeniably but inexplicably weak’ (Larrissy, 69). Although H. Vendler’s interpretation of the poem’s ‘impulse’ as a ‘desire to find a way to become one of the “most wise of living souls” and impart to others instruction concerning that path’ is not especially original, her discussion’s insistence on the poem’s ‘terse modulated blank verse’, especially in places where ‘quickening of the pace by means of a rapid mon­ tage suggests that Yeats has begun to understand how to create urgency’ is a valuable one (Vendler, 248–249). Text and publication history. The poem was first published in the National Observer, 21 May  1892 (NO), and next appeared soon afterwards in CK. No MSS of the poem survive, though one of the three surviving sets of CK proofs (in the Beineke Library, Yale University) shows quite extensive revision (Proofs (Yale)). The poem was included in P95, and retained in all collected editions thereafter. WBY made a number of revisions for EPS in 1925. Copy-text: P49.

F

5

ergus. This whole day have I followed in the rocks,

And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,

First as a raven on whose ancient wings

Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed

A weasel moving on from stone to stone,

And now at last you wear a human shape,

A thin grey man half lost in gathering night.

Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

10

Fergus. This would I say, most wise of living souls: Young subtle Conchubar sat close by me When I gave judgment, and his words were wise, And what to me was burden without end, To him seemed easy, so I laid the crown Upon his head to cast away my sorrow.

1. This] CP33 The NO-P29. 3. as a] corr. to like a Proofs (Yale). a raven] Eugene O’Curry in his chapter on druids cites an Old Irish tract on divi­ nation which dwells on ravens, noting that these seem to have been ‘domesticated birds (probably domesticated for the very purpose of these auguries)’: ‘If the Raven should accompany or precede you on an

expedition, and that he is joyous, your journey will be prosperous. If it is to the left he goes, and croaks at you in front, it is at a coward he croaks in that manner, or his croaking denotes disgrace to some one of the party’ (Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, II, 224). 6. wear a] take on NO, CK. 14. sorrow] EPS and after; care NO-P24.

144

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

15

Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

20

Fergus. A king and proud! and that is my despair.

I feast amid my people on the hill,

And pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels

In the white border of the murmuring sea;

And still I feel the crown upon my head. Druid. What would you, Fergus? Fergus. Be no more a king, But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.

25

Druid. Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks And on these hands that may not lift the sword, This body trembling like a wind-blown reed. No woman’s loved me, no man sought my help. Fergus. A king is but a foolish labourer

Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.

30

Druid. Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams; Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

16.] Added for EPS and after. On this revision, T. Parkinson writes how Fergus echoes the Druid’s words: ‘This type of answer does not disturb the rhapsodic tone of Fergus’ speech, but it does show that he is not entirely uncon­ scious of his surroundings. [. . .] This particu­ lar change clarifies and exploits the dramatic structure of the poem without altering the tone of the original’ (Parkinson, 137). 18. And pace] corr. to I pace Proofs (Yale). 19. the murmuring sea] A  commonplace, but cp. Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve (1882), I, 228–231: ‘Due north she sped, | Far fleeting, wind up-borne, ’twixt hill and cloud, | To Uladh’s cliffs, and thence with prone descent | Sank to the myriad-murmur­ ing sea’. 20. And still] But still corr. to Yet still Proofs (Yale). Cp. Charles Mackay, Collected Songs (1859), ‘The Death-Song of Thaliessen’, 29–30: ‘A King of Bards, though scorned and poor, | I feel the crown upon my head’.

21.]

Druid. What would you? Fergus. I would be no more a king, NO­ P04, P08, P12-P24. Druid. What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings? Fergus. I’d put away the foolish might of a king, PW06, CWVP08.

26^27.] Because I be not of the things I dream. NO-P24. Many years later, WBY alluded to this line in a letter to Ethel Mannin, 15 Nov. 1936: ‘All my life it has been hard for me to keep from action, as I wrote when a boy, – ‘To be not of the things I dream’ (InteLex 6716). 26. No woman’s loved me] No maiden loves me NO-CWVP08; No woman loves me P12-P24. 27–28.] EPS and after; A  wild and foolish labourer is a king | To do and do and do and never dream. NO-P24. 29.] [Take, if you must, this little del.] Take then this small slate-coloured bag Proofs

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

35

145

Fergus. I see my life go drifting like a river

From change to change; I have been many things –

A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light

Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,

An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,

(Yale); Take then this small slate-coloured bag of dreams; NO, CK. 31.] Fergus. (having unloosed the cord) I  see my life go dripping like a stream NO, CK Fergus. I  see my life go dripping like a stream P95-P24. G. Borstein sees a parallel here with Shelley’s Alastor, which he pin­ points in the word ‘stream’ (citing Alastor 504–505: ‘O stream  .  .  . Thou imagest my life’), remarking that, like WBY’s ‘other out­ casts, Fergus has a Shelleyan fondness for water’, and proposing that ‘Merging Fergus with ‘Alastor’ helped Yeats both to fashion a unified tradition in support of Intellectual Beauty and to sustain his devotion to the English Shelley along with his allegiance to Ireland’ (Bornstein, 56). 31–36.] Fergus’s vision of his own changing physicality through swathes of time fore­ shadows an important addition made to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ in WBY’s 1895 revision, when the sea monster battled by the hero (II, 174–177) changed and ran Through many shapes; I  lunged at the smooth throat Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top. There may be some allusion in these lines to the association between druids and Pythagorean beliefs, with all matter, including that making up human life, being liable to a constant process of transformation. F. Kinahan draws attention to John Rhys as an influence on WBY here (Kina­ han, 38). Rhys compares Taliessen’s claim that ‘he has gone through all sorts of transformations, and has in some form or other assisted at all the great events through which the world has passed

since its beginning’ (Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Celtic Heathendom (1888), 549): The only pretensions closely resembling Taliessen’s, and decidedly of the same origin as his, known to me in Celtic lit­ erature, are those of Amorgen, the seer of the sons of Mile, on the occasion of their invading Ireland. There is, however, a difference between them: when Talies­ sen asserts that he was present at the great events of all previous ages, that is an intel­ ligible way of magnifying his own impor­ tance; but when he states that he has gone through many forms, and specifies that he had been a word, a book, a bridge, a cor­ acle, a sword, a drop in a shower, and the like, one fails to see the point of the brag; whereas Amorgen is clear; for he would not say, ‘I was’ or ‘I have been,’ but ‘I am:’ thus, among other things, he says he is the wind and the wave, a loch on the plain, a spear, a tear of the sun, and the like. [. . .] There remains enough to show that we have here to do with the self-glorification of the chief of the initiated, whether you call them bards or seers, poets or proph­ ets; by means of his knowledge and skill in druidism or magic, he can take any form he likes, and command the elements ac­ cording to his will. 34. fir-tree] fortress corr. to fir-tree Proofs (Yale). It is likely that ‘fortress’ was a setter’s misreading of WBY’s MS ‘fir-tree’. 35. quern] usually two large stones, between which corn could be ground. Quern stones from early Ireland were well-known to anti­ quarians and archaeologists.

146

40

FERGUS AND THE DRUID

A king sitting upon a chair of gold –

And all these things were wonderful and great;

But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.

Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow

Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!

38–40.] In relation to these lines, R. Ellmann observed that ‘So far from yielding to another world of the spirit, Yeats in his verse is always demonstrating that we had better cling to this one’ (Identity, xii). 38. knowing all] being old corr. to being all Proofs (Yale) being all NO-P24. 38^39.] And the whole world weighs down upon my heart canc. and ‘stet’ Proofs (Yale), then in CK-P24. 39–40.] canc. and ‘stet’ Proofs (Yale) 39. ff] The sorrows of the world bow down my head, And in my heart the demons and the gods Wage an eternal battle, and I feel The pain of wounds, the labour of the spear, But have no share in loss or victory. NO These lines are entered by hand in Proofs (Yale), with some differences from the NO version: The sorrows of the world weigh down my head And in my heart the demons and the gods Wage an eternal battle, and I feel The pain of wounds, the labour of the spear. But have no [part del.] share in [victory or defeat del.] loss or victory.

The lines are then canc., presumably as a result of WBY’s decision to mark 39–40. as ‘stet’. 40. thing] P95, P99-CWVP08 bag CK, P12­ P24 thing? P27, P29. Evidently, WBY found it hard to choose between the read­ ings here. In the early days of his corre­ spondence with WBY, Robert Bridges was sorry to see the change from ‘bag’ to ‘thing’ in the recently published P95, adding this regret to his praise: ‘I think you have hit off one form (and a really new one as you do it) perfectly  – in Cuchulin [for Fergus] and the bag of dreams. By the way let bag stand in last line  – why did you alter it?’ (Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W.B. Yeats ed. R. Finneran (1977), 5). In reply, WBY wrote: ‘You are probably right [the word is spelled by WBY ‘write’, in a perhaps revealing mistake] about the word ‘bag’. I changed it because of the urgency of some one or other who thought the word ugly for a close’ (CL 2, 71–2). It is not known who ‘some one or other’ was (and none of the reviews for CK has this complaint), but the extent to which this observation struck a chord for WBY is measurable by the fre­ quency of his to-and-fro revisions in future decades.

124

WHEN YOU ARE SAD

Date of composition. In a letter to KT dated 2 Mar. 1892 (CL 1, 287–290), WBY copied this poem, along with ‘When You Are Old’, telling her that ‘the following lyrics may perhaps help you to select something for your book’ (this was KT’s selection of Irish Love-Songs, published by Unwin in Dec. 1892). WBY says that this poem was written ‘the other day’: since this is the sole evidence, composition may be dated at the end of Feb. or the very beginning of Mar. 1892. Publication history. KT did not make use of this poem for her anthology, but it appeared in WBY’s CK in late Aug. 1892. If WBY’s claim of very recent composition to KT in Mar. is correct, the poem must have been introduced during the proof revision process for the book that took place in Apr. 1892. CK is the first and last instance of this poem’s appearing in WBY’s canon, for it was not included in P95, or any collected edition thereafter. However, WBY did include it in the draft list of ‘probable contents’ for P95 (then still entitled Under the Moon) which he sent to Unwin on 23 Nov. 1894 (CL 1, 411). Copy-text: CK.

W

hen you are sad,

The mother of the stars weeps too,

And all her starlight is with sorrow mad,

And tears of fire fall gently in the dew.

5

When you are sad,

The mother of the wind mourns too,

2. mother of the stars] Cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Helena’, 51–2: ‘I stand | The mother of the stars and winds of heaven’. 3. with sorrow mad] Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances, and Songs (1861), ‘The Dying Warrior’, 43–45: ‘In that dell at morn’s

first peeping, | Mad with sorrow, worn with weeping, | Mary bends the dead above’. 4. tears of fire] Perhaps cp. Laetitia Landon, The Zezana (1839), 611–612: ‘Ah, human tears are tears of fire, | That scorch and wither as they flow’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-126

148

WHEN YOU ARE SAD

And her old wind that no mirth ever had, Wanders and wails before my heart most true. 10

When you are sad, The mother of the wave sighs too, And her dim wave bids man be no more glad, And then the whole world’s trouble weeps with you.

8. Wanders and wails] With this (in fact uncommon) phrase, possibly cp. William Motherwell, Poetical Works (1849), ‘Super­ stition’, 33–34: ‘whose dark, guilty sprites | Wander and wail with glowworm lights’. Motherwell (1797–1835) was a well-known Scottish antiquarian and ballad collector, who was associated with W. Scott; his poems went into a third edition in 1881. He was edi­ tor of the Glasgow Courier, and his strongly conservative political views led him to

become a major figure in the history of the Orange Order in Scotland. WBY may echo him in the 1884 poetic drama Love and Death V 173–174 (see note). 11. her dim wave] Perhaps cp. J. Noel Paton, Spindrift (1867), ‘Ulysses in Ogygia’, 17: ‘And the dim wave moans on the shadowy shore’. 12. the whole world’s trouble] Cp. WBY’s ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (which was composed by Oct. 1891), 6: ‘And with you came the whole of the world’s tears’.

125

A MYSTICAL PRAYER TO

THE MASTERS OF THE

ELEMENTS, FINVARRA,

FEACRA, AND CAOLTE

Date of composition. There is no firm evidence for this poem’s date of composition, but it is likely that WBY wrote it in the summer of 1892. Since it was published at the begin­ ning of Oct., WBY must have arrived at a finished version in Dublin by the end of Sept. Context and interpretation. The mystical intensities of 1892’s CK notwithstanding, this new poem by the author of that book still struck an attitude of unusual esoteric for­ mality. Even with its first title, where the archangels bring an element at least of orthodox recognizability to proceedings, the poem is plainly one of ritualistic invocation  – the most explicitly magical lyric yet to be tried out in public by WBY. In terms of magic, it fits comfortably within the framework established for the poet by a great many of the ceremonies of the GD (as formulated largely by MacGregor Mathers, though drawing on many much older and eclectic sources). In addressing the ‘Masters of the Elements’, the poem treads closely upon the trail of GD ritual, where the archangels of the elements would be addressed in turn, often as a preparatory stage of the main business in hand. (The parallel with the GD is more marked in the nomenclature of the first published version: see Title.) Here, however, only three of the four elements are invoked: ‘wind, and wave, and fire’ (7): there is a missing element, and correspondingly a missing name and point of the compass, which is the element of earth, the archangel Uriel (WBY’s Celtic equivalent for him in 1894 is not known), and the North. So, despite the clear traces of ritual practice, the poem itself is something short of an actual ritual; instead, it shapes ritualistic formulae around a ‘prayer’ that should be read as a love poem, in that it is a prayer for the beloved to be protected. But protected against what or whom, and to what end? To answer this, it is necessary to accept that in encircling ‘her I love’ (9), the ‘powers’ are to protect MG: herself a member of the GD (WBY having encouraged her to undergo initiation on 2 Nov. 1891), MG had many interests that stretched well beyond the mystical realm, and by mid-1892 these were clearly the matters of her most pressing concern. By Oct. 1894, MG had resigned from the GD – suspecting (rightly) that it was a kind of ersatz Freemasonry. Importantly, MG was proving herself much more of a political being than a mystical one; and any magic she practised was in the political sphere. In the summer of 1892, WBY was preoccupied by cultural politics in Ireland, involving himself in intense advocacy and disagreement through the National DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-127

150

A MYSTICAL PRAYER TO THE MASTERS

Literary Society on the subject of an Irish publishing outlet for national books: one move in this tangled game even involved (in Sept.) co-opting MG herself to a new Library Sub-committee of the National Literary Society. All the while, MG was moving further not just from the mystical life, but from WBY’s romantic designs for her, which them­ selves depended heavily on the idea of cooperation in a magical bond. It is possible to read this poem as an acceptance on WBY’s part that MG must move in places that are apart from him and his influence, combined with an invocation of powers who are to influence her by the provision of ‘gentle silence’ in the violent and uproarious world she chooses to inhabit as a public figure. The cosmic context for this is one in which other, malign ‘Powers’ have effected a primordial theft of ‘the crimson Rose’: WBY will have understood this partly in a gnostic or Kabbalistic context as part of a universal origin myth (which would in turn be figured in William Blake’s imaginative system), but its interest here is perhaps principally that it brings into play a key symbolic property from the poems of CK, the Rose. Of the many aspects WBY had allowed that symbol to show, one may be of particular relevance in relation to MG: the roisin dubh, the little black rose of Irish poetry which the poet associated with Irish nationalism. If that is so, then the prayer that MG should ‘forget the wandering and the crimson gloom | Of the Rose in its doom’ (11–12) could be partly an expression of hope – however forlorn the poet would have known that hope to be – that MG might abandon the pursuit of the revolutionary political purity which had in fact long ago been pitched into the morass of daily politics, rivalry, and rancour. By 1894, when WBY removes the archangels to replace them with figures from Irish myth, the first stirrings may be visible of what in Apr. 1895 was to take form as an ambition for a Celtic Mystical Order – essentially, one that would translate the terminology and ritual of the GD into an Irish mythic medium. Another aspect of the poem deserves attention, for the short lyric is formally experimental in ways that were to prove productive for WBY later in the 1890s. Each of the three stanzas comprises three rhymed couplets, but each of these is pushed deliberately out of metrical balance by WBY’s decision to make the first line an alexandrine and the second a line of three feet. It is possible that WBY is developing here the effect of the final three-foot line in the (otherwise five-foot) lines of the stanza he used in ‘The Rose of the World’ (1891), but the result is a remarkably distinctive and original. The poem’s artistic success in this respect opens the way for further metrical adventurousness in lyrics through the 1890s. Text and publication history. No MS survives from before the poem’s first publication in The Bookman Oct. 1892 (B). Later, WBY copied this text into his notebook begun in Aug. 1893 (Burns Collection, Boston College), presumably in preparation for its next appearance in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1894). This MS version, however, shows no signs of revision from the title and text of B, so the changes for the 1894 text must have taken place subsequently. After this, WBY did not print the poem again, but rewrote it in a thoroughgoing way to produce ‘Aedh [later The Poet] Pleads wit the Ele­ mental Powers’ in WATR, first publ. in Dec. 1898, and separately edited in the present edition.

A MYSTICAL PRAYER TO THE MASTERS

151

Copy-text: The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1894).

T

he Powers, not kind like you, came where God’s garden blows, And stole the crimson Rose,

Title] A Mystical Prayer to the Masters of the Elements, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael B. In this first title, WBY names three archangels, who have magical significance. In ‘The Sym­ bolic System’ section of The Works of William Blake (1893), WBY and E.J. Ellis give an account of Blake’s four ‘Zoas’, saying ‘They are identical with the wheels of Ezekiel and with the four beasts of the Apocalypse, and resemble closely Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, the Kabalistic regents of the cardinal points, and like them preside over psychic and bodily affairs’ (vol. 2, 251). Michael in this scheme is associated with the South, Gabriel with the west, and Raphael with the East; these are the three archangels as recognized in Roman Catholicism, but the fourth, Uriel, who carries associations with the North, is recognized in (amongst other things) the world of ritual magic. In terms of the elements, Michael is identified with fire, Gabriel with water, Raphael with air, and Uriel with earth. In the GD’s Banishing ritual (preparatory to a number of formal rituals of the order), the Heirophant faced East, spread his arms outwards to form a cross, and said: ‘Before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel, at my right hand Michael, at my left hand Uriel’. The title in 1894 replaces these archangels with fig­ ures drawn from Irish myth. Finvarra is WBY’s spelling of Finnbheara, who was originally the ruler of the sidhe in Connaught, and one of the Tuatha De Danaan. In WBY’s time, he had become known as the king of the fairies in a more general sense, and is featured (with the same spelling as WBY’s) in e.g. Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Supersti­ tions of Ireland (1887). However, Wilde pres­ ents a figure far removed from the elemental god WBY’s title might have in mind: ‘Finvarra, the king of the fairies of the West, keeps up the most friendly relations with most of the best

families in Galway, especially with the Kirwans of Castle Hacket, for Finvarra is a gentleman, every inch of him, and the Kirwans always leave out kegs of wine for him at night of the best Spanish wine’ (vol. 2, 102). One account of Finvarra from around the time of the poem includes alongside a comparison with Shake­ speare’s Oberon a tentative alignment of the Irish figure with the Greek solar god Apollo (C.S. Boswell, ‘The Fairy Mythology of Ireland’, The National Review Feb. 1890, 745–746): Their [the ‘fairy folk’] chief dwelling is in the Sifra, or fairy house, deep down in the hill-side – a palace, whose walls are of crystal and pillars of silver, with a pave­ ment of gold, where Finvarra, the fairy king, and Oonagh, his lovely bride, hold their court. [. . .] King Finvarra is almost as boldlydefined and graceful a personality as the Apollo of Greek myth, whom, in many respects, he greatly resembles; like him, he is a lover of mortal maids, delights in the song and dance, and confers many and great benefits upon those whom he favours, though he can be very vindic­ tive towards all who offend him, and can inflict hardly less terrible maladies, both bodily and mental, by means of the ‘fairy stroke’, than could the King of the Silver Bow himself. In 1894, WBY includes ‘Finvarra of Knockmar’ among the ‘kings [. . .] of the demons’ in the short story ‘A Crucifixion’ (The National Observer, Mar. 1894; later ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’ in The Secret Rose (1897)). Also in 1894, WBY’s play The Land of Heart’s Desire makes mention of both Finvarra and Feacra (P95, 187): Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him

Who is the ruler of the western host,

152

5

10

A MYSTICAL PRAYER TO THE MASTERS

And hurled it from its place amid the pearly light

Into the blinding night, –

O, when shall Sorrow wander no more in the land

With Beauty hand in hand?

Great elemental Powers of wind, and wave, and fire, With your harmonious quire, Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease, And she forget the wandering and the crimson gloom Of the Rose in its doom. Great Rulers of stillness, let her no longer be As the light on the sea,

Finvarra, and their Land of Heart’s Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. Feacra (who here is aligned with water) is the Irish Fiachra: there are many figures with this name, and it is not clear which one WBY may have in mind. S. Putzel proposes a Fiachra who is one of the sons of Niall of the Nine Hostages, whose connection with water is that he goes to a well and finds there a crone who, on being kissed, is transformed into a beautiful woman, the spirit of Ireland (Putzel, 207). A Fiachra is also one of the five children of Lir in the medi­ eval Oidheadh Chlainne Lir (The Sorrowful Tale of the Children of Lir), the connection with water here being that these children are changed into swans, and spend nine hundred years in desolate ocean and lough environments. Caolte is the Fenian warrior Cailte mac Ronain, who was steward to Finn; he had appeared previously in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), III, 195. Before this, Caolte had made a brief appearance in KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diar­ muid and Grainne’, IV, 41 (as Cailte). In a long note in WATR, WBY was to explain that ‘Caolte was a companion of Fiann; and years after his death he appeared to a king in a forest, and was a flaming man, that he might lead him in the darkness. When the king asked him who he was, he said, “I am your candlestick” ’. (For more on Caolte, see notes to ‘The Host’ [1893] and ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ [1897].)

3–4. pearly light  .  .  .  blinding night] Although ‘pearly light’ is a commonplace, and ‘blinding night’ (though rarer) had been used before, this rhyming conjunction of 1894 creates a powerfully original effect. The reason for this is partly that ‘light’ pre-empts the almostheard cliché of ‘blinding light’, which takes the opposite turn into ‘night’, not day: it is darkness here, and not light, that blinds. 3. amid the pearly light] before His footstool white B. 7. Great elemental Powers] You great Angelic Powers B. 8. quire] This spelling of ‘choir’ remained possible at the time of publication, and was repeated in the first published version of WBY’s rewriting of this poem as ‘Aodh Pleads with the Elemental Powers’ (in The Dome, Dec. 1898); it became ‘choir’ when the poem appeared in WATR. 10. my old care] The ‘care’ here may be both sorrow (caused by love) and a duty of care, a job of protection. Both are presented as long­ standing commitments. 11. and the] and all the B. crimson gloom] Cp. Tennyson, Tiresias and Other Poems (1885), ‘The Ancient Sage’, 221: ‘The long last stripe of waning crimson gloom’. 13. of stillness] of the stillness B.

A MYSTICAL PRAYER TO THE MASTERS

15

153

Or as the changing spears flung by the golden stars Out of their whirling cars, But let a gentle silence enwrought with music flow Where her soft footsteps go.

15–16.] The obvious allusion here is to Wil­ liam Blake, Songs of Experience, ‘The Tyger’, 17–18: ‘When the stars threw down their spears | And watered heaven with their tears’. Blake used the same figure in the much less well-known (though known to WBY through his editorial work) Vala: Or,

The Four Zoas, ‘Night the Fifth’, 223–224: ‘I called the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark, | The stars threw down their spears and fled naked away’. For both Blake and WBY there is a reference to the rebellion in heaven, with the stars as the rebel angels.

126

THE WATCH-FIRE

Date of composition. Unknown, but perhaps 1892. Circumstantial evidence points to the early 1890s, and the poem’s formal and thematic overlap with ‘Mourn, and then Onward!’ suggests that it may belong to a time not very long after that poem’s composi­ tion (which was in the second week of Oct. 1891). The two instances of WBY’s using the term ‘watch-fire’ come from 1892 and 1893 (see Title). One possible context for the poem may suggest a date of composition: 1892 was a year in which WBY was heavily involved (especially from Sept. onwards) in negotiations and controversy on the New Irish Library project, and this poem, with its (for WBY) unusual formal and rhetorical reminiscences of Young Ireland poetry, fits well with the ambitions he had (which turned out to be largely unrealized) for his own role in this venture. It is conceivable that the single page of proof, carrying his name, is related to an envisaged Yeatsian Prospectus for the proposed series. Textual history and context. This poem survives as a single leaf of printed proof, with ‘W.B. Yeats’ printed at the foot of the text. It was found in a copy of vol. 2 of CWVP08 in the possession of WBY’s daughter Anne; there is, however, no likely connection with either that collection or that particular volume (where poems were prefaced to sections of CWVP08, they were set in italic, and unsigned; vol. 2, which consists of plays, would be a very unlikely place for a prefatory poem such as this). No MS material exists relating to the poem, and there are no annotations on the proof. In ‘A Note on “The Watch-Fire” ’, accompanying the poem’s first publication in Poetry 135/4 (Jan. 1980), C. H. Mahony and E. O’Shea see the poem in the tradition of Young Ireland and the verse of The Nation, while connecting it also with the more subtle approaches and techniques of J.C. Mangan, saying that it ‘has the themes of nocturnal vigilance, the need for faith and courage in a crucial nationalist period, and a subdued but metaphorically insistent call to arms’. G. Bornstein also makes the link between this poem and the poets of The Nation, claiming that, along with ‘Mourn, and Then Onward!’ it represents WBY’s ‘closest verse approach to the nationalist rhetoric of Young Ireland, which [he] admired for its ability to reach a wide audience but criticized for its lack of both sophisticated technique and emotional subtlety’ (UM, 122). Verse form. WBY’s stanza, rhymed abab, largely dactylic in rhythm and with five feet in the first and third lines, and two feet in the second and fourth (where the b-rhymes are feminine), bears a resemblance to that used in ‘Mourn, and then Onward!’ (abab, with first and third lines of five feet [dactylic] bearing feminine rhymes, and second and fourth lines of three feet [iambic]). The fact that this resemblance could almost be taken DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-128

THE WATCH-FIRE

155

as an inverted image of one stanza in that of the other poem suggests that some relation between these two poems is plausible. Copy-text: Detached proof page originally owned by Anne Yeats, transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 483.

T

his song unto all who would gather together and hold Brother by brother A watch and a ward by the watch-fire of Eri, our old And long-weeping mother.

Title] A watch-fire is a fire in an encampment, often one kept overnight for troops as they rest and prepare for action. WBY seems to have been attracted to this as a metaphor for the state of nationalist cultural (and perhaps revo­ lutionary) readiness in which Ireland should hold itself in the years immediately after the fall of Parnell in 1891. United Ireland on 18 Jun. 1892 reported WBY’s speech in Dublin on 9 Jun. on the establishment of a National Lit­ erary Society, when ‘He appealed to the young men of Ireland to keep the watch-fire of Irish Nationality burning, for it was a sacred charge which they had received from leaders and patriots of other days’. At the end of an inter­ view with D.N. Dunlop for The Irish Theoso­ phist, published on 15 Oct. 1893, WBY spoke of preparing ‘a collection of essays, and lectures dealing with Irish nationality and literature, which will probably appear under the title of the “Watch Fire” ’ (Mikhail 1, 22). 2. brother by brother] The proof page here punctuates with a semi-colon, ‘brother by brother;’: this punctuation is confusing, since it separates ‘hold’ from what would oth­ erwise be its natural object, ‘A watch and a ward’, thus obliging the reader to treat ‘hold’ as an intransitive verb. In the absence of any textual evidence beyond the proof page itself, the present text omits the semicolon. With the phrase ‘brother by brother’, cp. W. Mor­ ris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876), Book II, 1742:

‘And there lay brother by brother, a faded thing and wan’. 3. A watch and a ward] The common phrase ‘watch and ward’ derives from the legal obli­ gation (originally from medieval times) of keeping ‘watch and ward’ as part of the duty of a sentinel. As such, it is common in poetry with which WBY was familiar, e.g. Spenser, The Faerie Queene I.iii.40: ‘Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward’. By giv­ ing ‘ward’ an article, WBY produces a phrase which is otherwise unattested: this appears to be for the sake of metre only. Eri] A version of Eire or Eirann, the name of Ireland, pronounced by WBY to rhyme with ‘weary’: see notes to ‘Mourn, and Then Onward!’, where WBY also uses this word. 4. long-weeping mother] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘An Irish Moth­ er’s Dream’, 7–8: ‘with sad strained smile | And kind cheek of care, that long weeping had worn’. Irwin’s poem narrates a family’s grief for its son, who dies on military ser­ vice, ‘Where the poor frozen sentinel died on his post’. It may be of significance, also, that the poem uses the Irish term of endear­ ment ‘acushla’, which occurs in WBY’s ‘A Dawn Song’ as ‘ma cushla’. Ireland as mother figure is common as a motif in Irish poetry, and in the tradition of Gaelic poetry as WBY understood it; but it is perhaps relevant that Lionel Johnson’s poem, ‘Parnell’ (composed in 1893), has Ireland, ‘She of the mournful

156 5

10

THE WATCH-FIRE

This song unto all who would stand by the fire of her hope,

And droop not nor slumber;

But keep up the high and the mirthful proud courage to cope

With wrongs beyond number.

This song unto all who would gather and help yet once more Eri, our mother; And do nought that would anger the famous and great gone before Brother by brother.

eyes’, as a mother grieving for her dead son, one of ‘our dead, | Whom Ireland weeps so well’. Johnson’s poem employs the image of keeping watch through the dark on behalf of mother Ireland, and ends: Her son, our brother, lies

Dead, for her holy sake:

But from the dead arise

Voices, that bid us wake.

Not his, to hail the dawn:

His but the herald’s part.

Be ours to see withdrawn

Night from our Mother’s heart.

While such imagery is sufficiently common not to suggest a direct connection between ‘Par­ nell’ and WBY’s poem, it is nonetheless a point

of affinity between two poets who knew each other’s work well, and were in regular contact in the early 1890s; it also strengthens the case for reading ‘The Watch-Fire’ in the context of Par­ nell’s death and its immediate aftermath. 5. the fire of her hope] Cp. R. Southey, Poetical Works (1838), Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), XII, 463: ‘The strong and purifying fire of hope’. 6. droop not nor slumber] Cp. J.C. Mangan, The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849), ‘The Black-Haired Fair Rose’ (an earlier version of his more famous ‘Dark Rosaleen’), 9: ‘O Roisin mine! droop not nor pine’. 7. proud courage] Perhaps cp. Barry Cornwall, English Songs (1851), ‘The Fight of Ravenna’, 177–178: ‘Strong armour is riven, | Proud courage laid low’.

127

THE LOVER TELLS OF THE

ROSE IN HIS HEART

Date and circumstances of composition. WBY’s provision of a date and place to accom­ pany this poem’s first printing in The National Observer for 12 Nov. 1892, ‘Sligo, Novem­ ber 1892’, would appear to put the poem’s composition in the first two weeks of Nov. WBY was in Sligo at this time, having gone there in Oct. (when his grandmother Elizabeth Pol­ lexfen died), and stayed on because of the illness of his grandfather, William Pollexfen. An article written for the Boston Pilot (publ. 19 Nov. 1892) has the dateline ‘Dublin, Nov. 6’, and is set in the reading room of the National Library there; but WBY can have been in Dublin only very briefly (if at all) during that week: a letter to John O’Leary seems to be from Sat. 5th, saying that ‘I had meant to go [to Dublin] on Monday morning [31 Oct.] but have stayed on’ (CL 1, 327). Plainly, WBY does not anticipate being in Dublin within a day or a few days; and another letter (to Edward Garnett) is sent from Sligo around 9 Nov. (CL 1, 329). For the poem to be printed in the National Observer on Sat. 12th, WBY must have sent it to London by early in the week beginning Mon. 7 Nov. at the latest: date of composition, therefore, may be estimated between 1 Nov. and 7 Nov. 1892. These dates may have a bearing on the circumstances of composition. In the letter to John O’Leary of c. 5 Nov., WBY begins by reporting that ‘Miss Gonne has returned to Paris [. . .] She promises to return by the 12th or 14th’ (CL 1, 327); a fragmentary let­ ter to Edward Garnett (also probably from the first week of Nov.) says that ‘Miss Gonne has raised a certain amount of books and money. [. . .] We will start three libraries as soon as Miss Gonne returns from Paris which she does on the 12th or 14th’ (CL 1, 328): the poem’s publication on the weekend of MG’s anticipated arrival is unlikely to be a matter of coincidence. WBY’s thoughts about MG while staying in Sligo are attested by his memory of this time in his 1915 draft Autobiography. A brief period in which he became friendly with Eva Gore-Booth of Lissadell seems almost to have led to an ‘on the rebound’ declaration of love, though this (in WBY’s recollection) was prevented by the facts of his emotional life as represented in the new poem (Mem., 78): Eva was for a couple of happy weeks my close friend, and I told her all of my unhappiness in love; indeed so close at once that I nearly said to her, as William Blake said to Catherine Boucher, ‘You pity me, therefore I love you.’ ‘But no,’ I thought, ‘this house would never accept so penniless a suitor,’ and, besides, I was still deeply in love with that other and had but just written ‘All Things Uncomely and Broken’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-129

158

THE LOVER TELLS OF THE ROSE IN HIS HEART

Interpretation and reception. As a love poem for MG, this short piece develops from the poems of CK, especially in its use of the image of a rose: here, the image is unambigu­ ously one of romantic or sexual passion, and has shed any overt signs of nationalist or occult signification. It is not the poem’s addressee herself, but ‘your image’ which meta­ phorically blossoms as a rose in the speaker’s heart – this will be recalled in ‘The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love’ (also given to the speaker Aedh in WATR, and first publ. 1898), 5–6: ‘She looked in my heart one day | And saw your image was there’. ‘Image’ is in itself a strongly visual word, and this is contrasted with the predominantly sound-related components of the first stanza (a cry, a creak, heavy steps, and splashing); the silence that is implied by the second stanza is one in which something may be contemplated without interruption: the ‘casket of gold’ being in fact a simile used to describe the earth, the sky, and the heavens as a suitably elaborate and precious vessel to contain ‘your image’. In effect, MG is the object here of the speaker’s rapt contemplation, and the process is not, perhaps, entirely unlike that envisaged by WBY for the interaction between the indi­ vidual consciousness and the (magical or other) symbol; to this extent, the poem shares an aesthetic of mystical apprehension with its CK predecessors. Nevertheless, the sounds of the first stanza are all to be taken as specifically Irish sounds (and this, perhaps, is the point of WBY’s initial decision to identify the place of composition as Sligo), and line 2 in particular, with its crying child and lumbering cart, could well derive from the scenes of eviction in the west of Ireland to which MG had been a (very public) witness. These noises ‘are wronging’ the image of the beloved; but ‘wronging’ is a word which the poem does not fully account for, and it is tempting to see here an element of resentment on WBY’s part, as well as an awareness of the degree to which (as he saw it) MG’s Irish political commitments stood in the way of her romantic attachment to the poet. In that sense, the poem’s two stanzas attempt to preserve the ‘image’ of MG by turning her from a public figure to an occult object. ‘The deeps of my heart’ are finally inaccessible to all but the speaker himself; at the same time, the poem is left – at the end of both its stan­ zas – with a rose that is an ‘image’ rather than a living presence. Although the poem is quoted positively in a number of early reviews, and was suf­ ficiently popular to be anthologised and printed separately (by the Cuala Press) in later decades, there is little in the way of early critical reception to report. For J. Marshall, writing about WBY in the Canadian Queen’s Quarterly (1 Jul., 1905), the poem ‘was possibly a simple love story in its first intention, but it soon passed into a complaint of the idealist against the jangling discords of life and his yearning for a possible harmony in which they will be merged’. Modern criticism reads the poem alongside other WATR material as part of WBY’s 1890s love poetry. B. Hardy, conceding that ‘it has a certain plaintive charm and energy,’ sees the piece as ‘conceited but not witty, inviting irony or even ridicule in its preciousness of intent’; and she notes how it ‘usefully describes itself, and the larger poetic enterprise of which it is only a part, through the attempt to replace an awkwardly huge and various nature with something fine, skilfully wrought and man­ ageable, like a casket’ (The Advantage of Lyric (1977), 69). The artificiality of this image is picked up by S. Putzel, who sees the speaker, a ‘poet-alchemist [. . .] seated on his green knoll’, as ‘an early version of Yeats’s golden Byzantine bird,’ ‘the poet poised between the reality of dream and the reality of the decaying world’ (Putzel, 172). The degree to which

THE LOVER TELLS OF THE ROSE IN HIS HEART

159

this leaves the speaker isolated is noticed by E. Cullingford, who finds in the poem an instance of ‘The pervasive romantic construction of love as anti-social’ (104). Text and publication history. No MS of the poem prior to its first appearance in print in The National Observer (NO) survives; but before its second appearance, in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club, publ. in Jun. 1894 (SBRC), WBY wrote out a fair copy in his notebook begun in Aug. 1893 (Burns Collection, Boston College), either as preparation for the SBRC text, or in order to place it amongst other MS poems with a strong con­ nection to MG in that notebook (whose embroidered cover had been a gift from MG herself). Another MS fair copy, on a single sheet, made its way into AG’s copy of P95 (Emory University), evidently given to her by WBY himself (and perhaps produced for the occasion). WBY first met AG after the publication of SBRC in 1894, and the poem here contains the NO and SBRC version of line 5, where the only significant verbal revi­ sion is found in WATR. The revision itself occurs in a TS copy with MS additions, now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (TS), evidently produced by WBY in the process of arriving at a text for the poems in the WATR collection. After this, the poem remained in all of WBY’s collected editions, textually stable with the exception of the title, which was changed to its permanent form for PW06. Copy-text: P49.

A

ll things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

Title: The Rose in my Heart NO, SBRC; Aedh Tells of the Rose in his Heart WATR. 1. All things uncomely] Perhaps cp. J. Todhunter, Forest Songs (1881), ‘Love and Life’, 6–7: ‘things despised, | Weak, sad, uncomely things’, and W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘The Ring Given to Venus’, 127–128: ‘you tried in vain | To light on an uncomely thing’. 3. the wintry mould] Perhaps cp. the Young Ire­ land poet Mary Eva Kelly, Poems by ‘Eva’ of The Nation (1877), ‘Dead Leaves’, 7–8: ‘In every one some hope is gone, | Dead in the wintry mould’.

4, 8.] In a cancelled MS revision to line 4 of the TS, WBY first deletes ‘in the deeps of ’, then writes [hidden in del.] [covered up in del.], before abandoning the attempted revision with ‘stet’. He also then cancels revisions of [covered up del.] and [hidden in del.] at the same position in line 8. 4. deeps] WBY’s sense here is OED ‘deep’ 7.  ‘ fig. A deep (i.e. secret, mysterious, unfathom­ able, or vast) region of thought, feeling, or being; a ‘depth’, ‘abyss’.  poet.  and  rhetorical ‘. Cp. Shelley, ‘Ode to Liberty’, 131: ‘from the human spirit’s deepest deep’.

160 5

THE LOVER TELLS OF THE ROSE IN HIS HEART

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water, remade, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

5. unshapely things] the things misshapen NO, SBRC. a wrong] wrong NO, SBRC. This line in TS is as found in NO and SBRC: ‘The wrong of the things misshapen is wrong too great to be told’; this is then partly del. in WBY’s hand. Before cancelling the first eight words, WBY experiments with reversing the order of ‘things misshapen’ to produce ‘mis­ shapen things’, and entering the indefinite article before the second ‘wrong’, giving ‘a wrong’: the new first part of the line is itself cancelled, and WBY writes in: ‘And the evil of misshapen things is an evil’ [‘too great to be told,’ TS]. Again, this MS addition is del., and at the foot of the poem WBY enters what was to be the final form of the line, with the exception of its final word: ‘The wrong of misshapen things is a wrong too great to be born[e].’ Since there is no attempt to interfere with ‘gold’ in line 7, it is likely that ‘born[e]’ is in the nature of a momentary misremember­ ing of ‘told’ rather than a deliberated revision of that word. 6. a green knoll] Cp, Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), ‘Emmeline Talbot: A  Ballad of the Pale’, 3–4: ‘Emmeline Talbot lay | On a green knoll’. 7.] the earth and the sky and the water] WBY here includes three of the four elements;

the element that is missing, fire, may be an absence signifying the lack of recipro­ cated love; it may also, on the other hand, be implied by the image of ‘a casket of gold’. For the phrase itself, perhaps cp. R. Brown­ ing, Jocosaria (1883), ‘Ixion’, 13: ‘Flesh that he fashioned with sense of the earth and the sky and the ocean’. a casket of gold] WBY’s simile is probably part of a drive in the poem towards alchemi­ cal transmutation. It may also be worth comparing this with the Boston Pilot article WBY was writing at the same time as the poem, in which he reported from the read­ ing room of the National Library in Dublin on the plans for distributing books around Ireland  – listing the relevant committee of cultural activists without comment, until he comes to ‘Miss Maud Gonne, so well known for her oratory and her beauty’; here, as he concludes his short piece, he considers the ‘New Museum’ across the road, and wonders: ‘if history and the living present fail us, do there not lie hid among those spear heads and golden collars [.  .  .] suggestions of that age before history when the art legends and wild mythology of earliest Ireland rose out of the void?’ (The Boston Pilot, 19 Nov. 1892, CW 7, 66–7). The flash of gold here may be of relevance to this image in the poem.

128

THE FIDDLER OF DOONEY

Date and circumstances of composition. According to WBY in a line at the end of the poem’s first appearance in print, its date of composition was Nov. 1892. During that month, the poet was moving between Sligo (where his grandmother had died in Oct., and his grandfather would die on 12 Nov.) and Dublin (where he was embroiled in manoeuvrings relating to the New Irish Library proposals). It seems reasonable to sup­ pose that renewed contact with Sligo suggested the theme of this Sligo ballad to WBY. However, its scale and subject stand at some distance from the kind of heroic Irish lit­ erature he was recommending on 6 Nov., when he wrote his final piece for The Boston Pilot, from the new National Library in Dublin: ‘In England,’ he wrote, ‘I sometimes hear men complain that the old themes of verse and prose are used up,’ contrasting this with the situation in Ireland, where ‘the marble block is waiting for us almost untouched, and the statues will come as soon as we have learned to use the chisel’ (CW 7, 67). WBY’s recollection in 1931 that this poem was composed ‘in my twenty-fourth year’ (i.e. Jun. 1889–Jun. 1890) is inaccurate, though an idea for such a poem might well have occurred to him at that time. Text and publication history. No MS  prior to the poem’s first appearance survives: its first publication was in The Bookman, Dec. 1892 (B). The poem next appeared in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1894) (SBRC). A MS fair copy (sold by Doyle Auctions [New York], 4 May  2004) postdates the SBRC and predates the poem’s next publication, in WATR (MS). In the United States, the poem was several times reprinted from WATR: in The Living Age 22 Jul. 1899 and Eclectic Magazine Sept. 1899, and New York Times: Current Literature (Aug. 1899). Minor differences of spelling and punctua­ tion (e.g. ‘folks’ for ‘folk’ in line 2 of the New York Times version) from the WATR text are present, but these are highly unlikely to derive from WBY. After WATR, the poem was retained by WBY is all subsequent collected editions of his work; however, its position was changed from ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’ to ‘Early Poems: Ballads and Lyrics’ for CWVP08, and then for Poems: Second Series (1909) the poem was moved to become the final inclusion in ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’ section, where it remained in all later collected editions. Reception and interpretation. The poem was spotted quickly after its publication in WATR as a potentially popular piece. John Davidson’s review of WATR quoted the entire poem, remarking that ‘Although free of their company [‘the people of the Faery Hills’], Mr. Yeats has not yet lost human sympathies, as the delightful ‘Fiddler of Dooney’ will tell’ (The Speaker, 29 Apr. 1899). The poem was sometimes recommended as a relief from DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-130

162

THE FIDDLER OF DOONEY

the general pitch of the heavily symbolic and mythic lyrics of its collection. The Scotsman reported that ‘[WBY’s] present volume has a few pieces not specially referable, perhaps, to stories of the faeries and the legendary heroes’, instancing ‘the gravely merry piece about the fiddler of Dooney, an instrumentalist who has but little piety, but who reflects that he will be a deal more welcome in Heaven than his brother and his cousin, who are priests’ (21 Apr. 1899). In Dublin, there was still some need to insist that religion here was indeed a laughing matter, and the Freeman’s Journal expressed the hope that ‘some lack-wit will not on the score of this humorous tribute to the virtue of innocent joy charge Mr. Yeats with depreciating prayer in favour of dancing’; perhaps in the face of the contemporary evidence, this author added the reassurance that ‘Such malicious mis­ understanding is not, however, likely to be widespread in the land of the Gael; where Mr. Yeats’s essential idealism and spirituality are sure to find fair and sympathetic interpreta­ tion’ (28 Apr. 1899). The poem was clearly to American taste from the beginning also, and was reprinted several times in various newspapers and journals in 1899 (see Textual and publication history). An early notice of WATR in the New York Times quoted the poem in full as a ‘jolly lyric’, noting that in the volume ‘the author has sought to embody his feeling for Irish song. [. . .] He has endeavoured to voice the emotions of the humbler Irish people, and to view the poetic side of their life’ (17 Jun. 1899). A less pleasant side of this warm reception is visible in the attempted pleasantries of a parody, produced for the humorous New York magazine Puck (29 Jan. 1902). In ‘The Piper of Dooney’, ‘the humbler Irish people’ (not to mention Italian immigrants) are in the satirist’s sights: When the Dago comes round wid’ his organ,

And the childer’ all dance in the street,

’Tis nayther Eytalian nor organ I see

Through the dust and thremble av heat.

For his chunes sind the brick and the morthar

And the tenemints meltin’ away;

And plain as your arm there’s Dooney wanst more

Shtill sweet wid the smell av the May!

And up through the shtreets av auld Dooney

Wid his pipin’ comes Dinney Magee;

And, Oh! How the childer’ crowd round at his heels

And dance like the waves of the sea!

Thin we shlip through the wall beyant Tullagh,

And the childer’ all wandher away;

And sez Dinney to me: “If your lips were a pipe,

I’d be pipin’, Dear, all av the day!”

Sure, it’s twinty long years, and I’m thinkin’

’Tis many a mile o’er the sea;

But divil a chune can I hear without thought

Av my Dooney and Dinney Magee!

THE FIDDLER OF DOONEY

163

(The author of this was Arthur Stringer [1874–1950], a Canadian poet and later novelist and screen writer, then living in New York; his book Open Water [1914] is thought to be the first published book of Canadian free verse.) ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ was still suf­ ficiently popular for WBY to include it as a regular item in the public readings he gave on his tour of the United States from Jan. to Jun. 1920, as part of ‘My Own Poetry with Illustrative Readings’ (see Hone, 321). Widely known as it has remained, the poem is sel­ dom given detailed attention by WBY’s modern critics. Its movement from the middle of WATR to the final piece in the sections containing that volume, which was first made by the poet in 1909, has occasionally tempted critics to read it as the summative piece in the collection. C. Meir sees the poem as WBY’s ‘signature to a volume [. . .] whose aesthetic principle was to see art as an expression of the spiritual and mystical, and it is particu­ larly appropriate for an Irish audience since both poet and priest had for centuries been part of the life of the general community in the west of Ireland where the poem is set’ (The Ballads and Songs of W.B. Yeats (1974), 38). A more informed view is shaped by S. Putzel, who reads the poem in terms of its WATR placing between ‘The Song of the Old Mother’ and ‘The Heart of the Woman’ (181): In its original place [in WATR] ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ is a celebratory dance that breaks the melancholy mood of ‘The Song of the Old Mother’ and the heavy, dream-laden mood that has the reader half-mesmerised in the more mystical lyrics. Just as the protagonist of [WBY’s 1896 short story] ‘Rosa Alchemica’ is twice jolted out of a visionary state, so the reader is jolted out of visionary miasma by this fast-paced first-person ballad. The contrast between the Fid­ dler’s joy and the old mother’s misery reinforces the message that poetry rather than traditional religion is the path to immortality. When the Fiddler plays and ‘Folk dance like a wave of the sea’, the revellers are very like the Sidhe ‘Who danced on a level place’ in ‘The Host of the Air’; the poet’s song and the folk’s dance approximate the mystical dance of the Sidhe. ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’, simple as it is, is one of Yeats’s most successful attempts to harmonise his view of Irish peasant Christianity and his view of Irish folk tradition. This may accord too much weight to the poem’s placing in 1899, and give too definite an account of the contrast in the poem between the Church and ‘folk tradition’ (the Fiddler’s clerical relatives are hardly representatives of ‘peasant Christianity’), but it is true that WBY makes the most of an ironic realism in the ballad: H. Adams talks of ‘the poet’s emancipating himself from the dominating idea of the ‘miraculous’ symbol and the adoption of a ‘secular’ stance foreshadowed in ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’’ (61). The ear of the Freeman’s Journal, attuned in 1899 to Dublin’s sectarian hypersensitivities, perhaps did register WBY’s slightly mischievous distancing of human joy from religious ortho­ doxy and social standing in the poem. In one way, the poem affects a perfectly orthodox acceptance of St. Peter as the official in charge of welcome processing in the Christian afterlife; in another, it hints at the need (and the appetite) for ‘merry’ entertainment in that Christian Heaven. Of the four ballad narratives in WATR, the poem is related most closely to one composed five years later, ‘The Blessed’: where this poem recommends

164

THE FIDDLER OF DOONEY

dancing to music as a sign of what it is to be ‘good’ in a religious sense, ‘The Blessed’ sees drunkenness as a path to enlightenment of a quasi-saintly kind. In a more general way, in the context of the rest of WBY’s work, the poem belongs with his most enduringly popular verse – a fact which he seems to have regarded with more equanimity than he did the lasting success of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Its setting, though, is only a few miles away from that of the other poem; and WBY continued to think of this as a work which embodied a love for, and perhaps nostalgia about, the scenes of his early youth. Unlike ‘The Lake Isle’, it shows no sign of melancholy or (to put things less kindly) selfpity; and it may be for that reason that WBY thought it the stronger poem. Copy-text: P49.

W

hen I play on my fiddle at Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea; My cousin is priest at Kilvarnet, My brother in Mocharabuiee.

Title and 1. Dooney] The name is an anglicized form of the Irish Dun Aodh (the fort of Aodh [Hugh]). Dooney Rock is an elevation that overlooks Lough Gill, southeast of Sligo town. The spot is close to one that was used for out­ door Mass during penal times, and was known to WBY as the site of frequent small gatherings at times of local festivity, and often on Sunday nights. The poet was very familiar with the area where Dooney Rock is found, and often went walking and exploring there as a child and a young man. In 1922, he wrote of how ‘Certain woods at Sligo, the woods above Dooney Rock and those above the waterfall at Ben Bulben, though I  shall perhaps never walk there again, are so deep in my affections that I dream about them at night’ (CW 3, 283). According to J. McGarry, one musician who performed regu­ larly at the open-air venue during WBY’s youth was James Howley of Ballysodare, a blind fiddler (McGarry, 41). The poet was to mention this set­ ting relatively often in later life. In 1923, he told a Dublin audience that ‘His boyish ramblings around the rock of Dooney, a little way from Innisfree, were the inspiration of “The Fiddler of Dooney”’ (report in The Irish Times, 30 Jun. 1923). In his first radio broadcast of his own

work on 8 Sept. 1931, WBY said: ‘A couple of miles from Innisfree – no, four or five miles from Innisfree  – there is a great rock called Dooney Rock where I often picnicked when a child, and when in my twenty-fourth year I made a poem about a merry fiddler, I called him “The Fiddler of Dooney” in commemoration of that rock and of all those picnics’ (CW 10, 225). The same rec­ ollection of ‘many picnics’ was made in a broad­ cast of 29 Oct. 1937 (CW 10, 291). 2. a wave of the sea] T.R. Henn was the first to cp. here Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale IV iv 140–142, when Florizel addresses Perdita: ‘When you do dance, I wish you | A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do | Nothing but that’ (Henn 305). of] o’ B. It is worth noting that this contrac­ tion points up the Shakespearean allusion earlier. 3. cousin] brother B, SBRC. Kilvarnet] Kilbarnet B. As a civil parish to the south of Collooney in Co. Sligo, Kilvarnet contains upwards of twenty townlands. The name derives from the Irish Cill Bhearnais, the Church of the Gap. 4. brother] cousin B, SBRC.

THE FIDDLER OF DOONEY

5

10

15

20

165

I passed my brother and cousin: They read in their books of prayer; I read in my book of songs I bought at the Sligo fair. When we come at the end of time To Peter sitting in state, He will smile on the three old spirits, But call me first through the gate; For the good are always the merry, Save by an evil chance, And the merry love the fiddle, And the merry love to dance: And when the folk there spy me, They will all come up to me, With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’ And dance like a wave of the sea.

Mocharabuiee] Rosnaree B, SBRC. Mochar­ abuiee is, according to a note first placed (by GY) in P49, ‘Pronounced as if spelt “Mock­ rabwee” ’. The name derives from the Irish Machaire Buí (the yellow plain); the place is generally known, however, as Magheraboy, a small townland (with an area of half a square mile) on the southwest of Sligo town. Rosna­ ree lies further afield, in Co. Meath.

6. in their books of prayer] in a book of prayer B, SBRC. 7. my book] a book B, SBRC. 9. end] close B, SBRC; end del. close MS. 17–18.] And the folk there when they spy me | Will all come up to me B. 20. of] o’ B.

129

[‘I NEVER HAVE SEEN

MAID QUIET ’]

Date of composition. Probably Nov.–Dec. 1892. This is to assume that composition coin­ cides with that of the short story in which the poem first appeared; WBY was in Dublin from Nov. until just before Christmas, when he visited London. Context and interpretation. This poem appeared in WBY’s story ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ (1892). The hero, Owen Rua O’Sullivan, knocks at the door of a farmhouse, and announces himself, then enters singing his composition (The National Observer, 24 Dec. 1892): My name is O’Sullivan, and men call me Red that I may be known from that ignorant rhymer whom they have named ‘The Gaelic,’ and I  have written Shawn Bui and many another song known wherever the voice of the Gael finds any to listen. Give me a plate of meat and a bed. Happy are the stones of my house, and happy the yellow thatch upon it, to know that Owen O’Sullivan shall sit by the chimney corner. But why have you come out of your own country to eat your bread among foreigners? ‘There is a devil in the soles of my feet,’ replied the poet as he bent his head under the lintel. He entered singing in a low voice to himself [poem follows] The function of the lines is to establish the itinerant poet as subject to elemental powers of cosmic winds and lightning, which are both his irresistible inspiration and his worldly peril. It seems to have occurred to WBY by 1893 (if it had not done so before) that his own projected identity as a love poet might have the same bearings; and it is possible that it was by thinking over these verses that he first settled on the title for WATR, and there­ fore on much that would follow from that title in the imagery and apocalyptic/romantic horizons of his poems from later in the 1890s (see note on 3–4). Textual and publication history. There is no MS material relating to this first stage of a poem which was to have several later incarnations. Its first appearance in print was as part of ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ in The National Observer for 24 Dec. 1892 (NO). How­ ever, lines from the poem appear in the MS notebook in the Burns Collection, Boston College, three pages after an item dated by the poet 29 Aug. 1893 (MS). In this MS, only the first four lines are found, written diagonally on the page; immediately beneath, at the same angle, is WBY’s note: ‘Name for a Book of Verse | ‘The Wind Among the Reeds” ’ (reproduced and transcribed in Cornell WATR, 156–157). This suggests that WBY in 1893 was sourcing his projected volume title in the lines from a poem which had in fact already been printed. The lines next appeared when WBY’s story was included, now DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-131

[‘I NEVER HAVE SEEN MAID QUIET’]

167

as ‘The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’, in The Secret Rose (1897). Within months of this, WBY was to use the poem again as an independent piece substantially revised as ‘O’Sullivan the Red Upon His Wanderings’ (1897), which for WATR became ‘Hanrahan Laments because of his Wanderings’ (separately edited in the present edition). Ultimately, further revision resulted in the poem’s incarnation as ‘Maid Quiet’ (1907). Copy-text: The Secret Rose (1897).

I

5

never have seen maid Quiet,

Nodding her russet hood,

For the winds that awakened the stars

Are blowing through my blood.

I never have seen maid Quiet,

Nodding alone and apart,

For the words that called up the lightning

Are calling through my heart.

1. Maid Quiet] WBY’s personifications of Quiet include ‘lone Lady Quietness’ in ‘She Who Dwelt among the Sycamores’ 13, and ‘Quiet . . . eating her wild heart’ in ‘In the Seven Woods’ (1902) 10–11. In a letter of early Sept. 1903, WBY wrote of how ‘I am the slowest writer of rhyme I know of and cannot do it at all unless I have great quiet’ (CL 3, 422). 2. russet hood] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason II, 7: ‘His head was covered with a russet hood’ and 144: ‘Drew off the last fold of his russet hood’. ‘Russet’ may be a colour, a material, or both: ‘A subdued reddish-brown colour; a shade of this’ (OED A.2.), ‘A coarse woollen cloth of a reddishbrown or subdued colour, formerly used for clothing esp. by country people and the poor; a kind or make of this’ (OED A.1.a). 3–4.] For the wind that awakened the stars | Is blowing through my blood MS. This departure from the prior printed version may be a revision; it may also be simply a slight misremembering, since the plural

‘winds . . . are’ remains in the next appear­ ance in print (The Secret Rose). This singu­ lar ‘wind’, though, has a point: WBY writes below it (and clearly at the same time, since in exactly the same diagonal alignment on a page, in ink across the figures of what is probably a railway timetable in purple pen­ cil) his new ‘Name for a Book of Verse’ as ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’. 3. awakened the stars] Possibly cp. Frances Ridley Havergal, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Tyrolese Spring Song’, 10–11: ‘the bells, at the close of the day, | Awaken the stars of the night’. Havergal (1836–1879) was a popular religious poet and hymn-writer. stars] star, NO (almost certainly a misprint). 6. alone and apart] This conjunction of adjec­ tives was favoured by W. Morris: see e.g. The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876) III, 2874: ‘how he sitteth alone and apart’ and IV, 386: ‘will ye sit alone and apart’, and The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), X, 68–69: ‘but yet alone and apart | In the fields where I was’.

130

INTO THE T WILIGHT

Date of composition. The poem was composed either 17–24 Feb. 1893 or more possibly late Mar. to 20 Apr. 1893. The surviving MS is dated in WBY’s hand ‘30 of June’. Since this begins as a fair copy, the poem must have been drafted already. In Jun. 1893, WBY was in London, working at the British Museum and busy with putting in order the various materials for his prose volume The Celtic Twilight. It is possible that it was during Jun. that WBY decided to use this poem as an epilogue to the book and that the fair-copy MS was generated as part of this process; but the poem itself was (according to WBY’s recollection in 1915) composed in Sligo, where he was staying from 17–24 Feb. (during which week the poem might have been written) and then again from late Mar. 1893 until 20 Apr., when it was more probably brought into being, perhaps earlier rather than later in the poet’s stay. Circumstances and interpretation. In his draft autobiography (composed in 1915), WBY places this poem in relation to events during MG’s sojourn in Dublin in early 1893, remembered by him as a ‘serious quarrel’. WBY was at the time engaged in his habitual disputes with J.F. Taylor on National Literary Society matters (where even John O’Leary was siding with Taylor on ‘matters of detail’), and recalled this as a time of ‘great pain and disquiet’; on top of this, WBY had begun to regard Taylor as a rival for MG’s attention: ‘I had had much provocation and besides I was also jealous of him, not because I thought him a suitor, but because he seemed to influence her mind in things where I alone should have influence, I believed’ (Mem., 66). Matters were made worse by MG’s illness (probably a respiratory infection) which put her out of reach in Dublin (WBY blamed this supposed confinement on George Sigerson, then acting as her physi­ cian, with whom he had also recently quarrelled). A Dublin nurse hired by Sigerson was WBY’s only source of news, and this news was ‘melodramatic’: ‘I was to think no more of Maud Gonne – who was looking for some ground of quarrel – she loved another, indeed perhaps two others, for ill as she was she had decided to hurry back to France to be pres­ ent at a duel between them. [. . .] On other occasions she would report that I was not to see Maud Gonne again’ (Mem., 67). This nurse, ‘a woman with unhealthy clay-coloured complexion and moist, morbid hands’ in WBY’s recollection, was shortly to prove the source of scandalous gossip. MG’s sister May came to Dublin, and evidently filled WBY in on the details (Mem., 67): Maud Gonne was leaving  – she was so ill she was to be carried to the train and the doctor had protested in writing. For a long time I  knew nothing, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-132

INTO THE TWILIGHT

169

and then heard, no longer rumour, that this protégée, the first of many about whom I was to somewhat fail in cordiality, had repeated some story about me, apparently less melodramatic than that she had carried to my ears, for it had been believed. Presently I  found a horrible story circulated everywhere. I had been Maud Gonne’s lover, and there had been an illegal operation and I  had been present during the operation. In the wake of this, WBY continues, ‘I went to Sligo seeking to call to myself my courage once again with the lines “Into the Twilight”: did not the dew shine though love decayed “Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue”?’ (Mem., 68). The love that has decayed in the poem, then, is MG’s love; and, having decayed, it has been cremated by Dublin gossip about WBY’s presence at a secret abortion as well as  – more galling, because a thing which he would perhaps have wished to be true rather than false – the poet’s being MG’s lover. The poem is an act of escape from Dublin (and, whether or not WBY could quite acknowledge this, from MG and the turmoil she brought in her wake) to Sligo as the physical embodiment of ‘mother Eire’, with its imagery of dew and twilight, hills, hollows and woods, sun and moon, and river and stream. In many ways, then, the poem consti­ tutes a re-setting of the imaginative system for WBY in favour of an environment where ‘time and the world are ever in flight’ (14) – though in fact both contemporary political and cultural business, and a whole world of controversy and activity, continued to beat a path to WBY’s door, whatever his current address. The ‘heart’ belonging to this poem’s speaker is ‘outworn’ first in the sense that the present time is ‘outworn’ – that is, no longer up to the pressures of change and action – but it is also worn out, exhausted by effort and a frustration that is both political and romantic in nature. In framing an imaginative alternative, and thus coming ‘clear of the nets of wrong and right’, the poem opens lines of communication with another kind of time as figured in another manifestation of the world. This is largely the otherworldly location of WBY’s prose accounts of folklore from the west of Ireland, and Co. Sligo in particular, which goes into the material of The Celtic Twilight, and it makes the poem a natural inclusion in that book. The poem’s critical reception has seldom contained much close analysis. There was early praise, and a notice in The Speaker (11 May 1901) singled the poem out as being part of WBY’s ‘highest lyrical achievement’, and one of a number of ‘perfect little poems’. In the United States, the poem was also given early praise: ‘The grayness is here, the seeming intangibility, but is there not also a music and an indescribable charm – the very charm, set free from any law, of the wind blowing among the reeds?’ (The Literary World [Boston], 24 Jun. 1899). One interesting early interpretation saw the poem’s mes­ sage as being that ‘Love is only a deceptive show of passion,’ since ‘It is of time, dependent on fading beauty and passing powers, subject to every slanderous tongue’ (J. Marshall, Queen’s Quarterly [Canada], 1 Jul. 1905). Modern criticism took a different slant, and in 1951 T. Parkinson saw the poem as one in which ‘sexual satisfaction is identified with a vague mystical beatitude’ and ‘the summum bonum is symbolized in alchemical and covertly sexual terms’ (Parkinson, 160). This line of interpretation has not proved espe­ cially productive, despite S. Putzel’s insistence in 1986 that the poem ‘is literally [sic] a

170

INTO THE TWILIGHT

call to ritual, a call to enter the alchemical dance of the elements, for which God provides the music’ (Putzel, 178). For T.R. Whitaker, the poem ‘may seem a romantic leap into the void [. . .] but its negative force is important: it rejects the claustral and exhausted tem­ poral world and self [. . .] the encounter with the abyss – muted by a lush conventional rhetoric that serves both as a means of escaping the “time out-worn” and a protection against the full force of the abyss itself – is part of the ego’s strengthening dialogue with all that it has excluded or has yet to discover’ (Whitaker, 60). The poem’s reference to ‘your mother Eire’ suggests a less apocalyptic register in the poem, and M. Howes notes how it ‘presents Ireland as a benign mother [. . .] and invites the “outworn heart” of the speaker to return to a symbiosis with her’; she adds, however, that ‘the poem also depicts the twilight realm of mother Ireland as disturbingly devoid of human beings and human emotions like love and hope’ (Yeats’s Nations (1996), 73). N. Grene’s attention rests on the ‘heart’ in the poem, which is there ‘urged to renew itself and return to the pristine values of the Celtic Twilight’, while ‘The upbeat tone [. . .], the vigour of the imperatives, allows the heart no opportunity to respond’ (Grene, 184). Text and publication history. The sole complete MS is NLI 30349, a single sheet with the poem in an ink fair copy, to which WBY has made some alterations (MS). A repro­ duction and transcription are in Cornell WATR, 54–55. The poem was published in The National Observer (NO) for 29 Jul. 1893, and next appeared in Dec. 1893 as the final item in The Celtic Twilight (CT). It was included in WATR, and retained by WBY in all subsequent collected editions of his poems. However, the CT use of the poem, as a verse epilogue to the prose in that book, was continued when the CT material was included in e.g. CWVP08 and EPS, preserving textual divergences from the version appearing amongst the WATR material in the books’ gatherings of poems. WBY copied out the poem’s first four lines at the front of a copy of CT belonging to AG, now in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University (Emory). The divergence between the CT text and that of the poems was corrected when WBY dealt with the 1931 proofs for the projected ‘Coole’ edition of his works. Copy-text: P49.

O

ut-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Title] The Celtic Twilight NO. 1. Out-worn] Outworn MS, NO, Emory (but ‘time out worn’ MS). Perhaps cp. the final words in a poem included in a chapter of a fantasy novel by W. Morris, The House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of Mark (1889), p.  375: ‘the hearts outworn with the sword’. Another possible echo of Morris is with The

Earthly Paradise (1870) III ‘October: The Man who Never Laughed Again’, ‘Song’, 4–5: ‘Come, thirst of love thy lips too long have borne, | Hunger of love thy heart hath long outworn’. (WBY may allude to these lines in 1884’s IoS II ii 59.) 2. the nets of wrong and right] W. Gould and D. Toomey (M. 303) cp. William Blake, The Book of Urizen pl. 25 and Jerusalem pl. 42,

INTO THE TWILIGHT

171

Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. 5

10

Your mother Eire is always young, Dew ever shining and twilight grey; Though hope fall from you and love decay, Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue. Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood

‘the Nets of Religion’; additionally, they cite The Four Zoas, ‘Night the Second’, 153–157 The threads are spun and the cords are twisted and drawn out. Then the weak Begin their work and many a net is netted, many a net Spread, and many a spirit caught: innu­ merable the nets, Innumerable the gins and traps, and many a soothing flute Is formed, and many a corded lyre out­ spread over the immense. In the second part of his essay ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy (first publ. Aug. 1896), WBY returned to these Blakean nets (CW 4, 97–98): The kingdom that was passing was, he [Blake] held, the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge; the kingdom that was com­ ing was the kingdom of the Tree of Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger against one an­ other, and in taking one another captive in great nets; men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget that even love and death and old age are an imaginative art. Although ‘wrong and right’ is a commonplace, and one that is of obvious utility in rhyming verse, it may be worth comparing T.D. Sullivan, Green Leaves (1887), ‘Tom Moore’, iv, 26–28 [of the Irish people]: ‘To speak above their

breathing | The surging thoughts of wrong and right | In which their souls were seething’. 3. twilight,] twilight; CT (and later collected editions of the CT material). 4. the dew of the morn] WBY’s phrase is rarer than might be supposed, and its few poetic appearances are dominated by the work of John Todhunter, e.g. Laurella (1876), II, 262–262: ‘as the eye craves light, the opening bud | The dew of the morn’, and Alcestis (1879), I i 20–21: ‘achievement’s wings [.  .  .] | Flash in the dew of the morn’. An earlier instance in Irish poetry is R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘The Death of O’Donnell’, 56: ‘Where the May-heather gleams in the dew of the morn’. 5. Your mother Eire] Thy mother Eri MS, NO, CT. 6.] And dew is shining and twilight grey rev. to Dew always is shining and twilight grey MS. 7. hope fall from] [friendship fail del.] hope fall from MS. Perhaps cp. D.G. Rossetti, Dante and His Circle (1874), ‘Guido Cavalcanti: Canzone, A  Dispute with Death’, 67: ‘Cast sight and hearing from thee; let hope fall’. you and] thee or MS, NO, CT. 8.] See Circumstances and interpretation for details of scandalous rumours circulating in Dublin about WBY and MG at the time of composition. 9.] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘The Lost Bower’, 36–37: ‘Far out, kindled by each other, | Shining hills on hills arise’ 10. mystical] mystic MS, NO. Cp. AE (George Russell), Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), ‘Krishna’, 7–8: ‘For One who passed into their

172

INTO THE TWILIGHT

Of sun and moon and hollow and wood

And river and stream work out their will;

15

And God stands winding His lonely horn,

And time and the world are ever in flight;

And love is less kind than the grey twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

choir | Linked them in mystic brotherhood’. Although he has little specific to say about this poem, T.R. Henn does remark that as a whole it ‘might easily be taken for some of AE’s work’ (Henn, 73). 11.] Of the flood and flame, of the height and wood MS, NO, CT. Of hollow wood and the hilly wood CT (1902 edn.), CWVP08 vol.5. 12.] And laugh out their whimsy and work out their will MS, NO; Laugh out their whimsy and work out their will CT; And the chang­ ing moon work out their will CT (1902 edn.), CWVP08 vol.5. 13–14.] And Time and the Word [a misprint for MS  reading, ‘world’] are ever in flight, |

And God stands [is MS] winding his lonely horn, MS, NO, CT. 13.] OED wind 3a., ‘To sound by forcing the breath through, to blow (a wind-instrument, esp. a horn).’ This becomes a standard piece of poetic diction in the eighteenth and nine­ teenth centuries, but perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems (1866), ‘The Northman’s Foray’, 72: ‘the watch at midnight winds a lonely horn’. 14. time and the world] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Poems by the Way (1891), ‘Of the Three Seek­ ers’, 11–12: ‘I have found a love | That Time and the World shall never move’. 15. love is] Love seems MS. 16. hope is] hope looks MS.

131

THE DANAAN QUICKEN

TREE

Date of composition. There is no evidence for a firm date, but it is likely that the poem was written in Mar. or Apr. 1893. Speculatively, it could be thought that this poem’s links with work by KT are triggered partly by WBY’s last visit to her home in Ireland on 30 Apr., before she departed to be married. (The poem may perhaps be an attempt to approach a common mode of KT’s poetry in general, as a kind of compliment.) Context and sources. KT’s Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, V, has a stanza which contains the germ of this poem: There was a quicken-tree that had strange power:

He who should eat three berries of that tree

Henceforth from pain and sickness should go free;

Eating thereof, the old regained youth’s flower;

Like the red wine it gladdened, or rich mead.

’Twas a great race of wizards sowed that seed.

KT annotates these lines to gloss ‘quicken-tree’ as ‘the mountain ash’ (just as WBY will do in the note to his poem). A source for this story, known to both KT and WBY, is Standish H. O’Grady (ed. and trans.), The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, 1881), 11–12: ‘What berries are those that Fionn requires,’ asked Grainne, ‘that they cannot be got for him?’ ‘They are these,’ said Diarmuid: ‘the Tuatha De Danaan left a quicken tree in the cantred of Ui Fhiachrach, and in all berries that grow upon that tree there are many virtues, that is, there is in every berry of them the exhilaration of wine and the satisfying of old mead; and whoever should eat three berries of them, had he completed a hundred years, he would return to the age of thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a giant, hideous and foul to behold, keeping that quicken tree; [he is wont to be] every day at the foot of it, and to sleep every night at the top. Moreover he has made a desert of that cantred round about him, and he cannot be slain until three terrible strokes be struck upon him of an iron club that he has, and that club is thus; it has a thick ring of iron though its end, and the ring around his [i.e. the giant’s] body; he has moreover taken as a covenant from Fionn and from the Fenians of Erin not to hunt that cantred, and when Fionn outlawed me and became

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-133

174

THE DANAAN QUICKEN TREE

my enemy, I got of him leave to hunt, but that I should never meddle with the berries. In associating this story with the island of Innisfree in Lough Gill, WBY was linking the poem to his own ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (see notes to that poem for mythic narratives in connection with the island). A  little after the poem was published, George Russell (AE) came to the same story, giving it an esoteric explanation (‘Legends of Ancient Eire’, The Irish Theosophist, Apr. 1895): The following description of a giant, taken from the story of Diarmuid, refers to still another aspect of our occult nature. ‘He has, but one eye only in the fair middle of his black forehead [. . .] He is, moreover, so skilled in magic that fire could not burn him, water could not drown him, and weapons would not wound him. [. . .] He is fated not to die until there be struck upon him three blows of the iron club he has. He sleeps in the top of that Quicken tree by night, and he remains at its foot by day to watch it. [. . .] The berries of the tree have the virtues of the trees of faeryland.’ The Quicken tree is the network of nerves in the magnetic astral body. It is clear that WBY’s subject is one that places the poem on the border between folklore and romance: the more mystical interpretation of Russell, if present, is here at a subliminal level only. The address to a ‘beloved’ may in this case be more generic than specific: it is hard to imagine e.g. MG being receptive to this particu­ lar narrative, and the poem is in any case quite without the tensions and conflicted desires of WBY’s love poetry for her at this time. In many respects, the poem’s register and matter are puzzling, at least for WBY in 1893: the faeries here seem to belong much more to his poetry of the 1880s (and some of his weaker poetry then, in fact) than to the complex mythic and psychological realm of the Irish supernatu­ ral which he had by now made distinctively his own. The reference to Innisfree may attempt to draw on inherited interest from that poem without any fresh imaginative investment; and a cursory reference to ‘Niam’ perhaps attempts to do the same with ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. This (and the quality of the poem overall) may suggest a hurried composition, though one still good enough to be printed in (and paid for by) The Bookman. Text and publication history. There is no surviving MS material for the poem, which was published in The Bookman, May 1893; it was never reprinted by WBY.

THE DANAAN QUICKEN TREE

175

Copy-text: The Bookman, May 1893.

B 5

10

15

eloved, hear my bitter tale! – Now making busy with the oar, Now flinging loose the slanting sail, I hurried from the woody shore, And plucked small fruits on Innisfree. (Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!) A murmuring faery multitude, When flying to the heart of light From playing hurley in the wood With creatures of our heavy night, A berry threw for me – or thee. (Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!) And thereon grew a tender root, And thereon grew a tender stem, And thereon grew the ruddy fruit That are a poison to all men And meat to the Aslauga Shee.

WBY’s introductory note. Directly under the title in The Bookman, WBY had the following note: It is said that an enchanted tree grew once on the little lake-island of Innisfree, and that its berries were, according to one legend, poisonous to mortals, and accord­ ing to another, able to endow them with more than mortal powers. Both legends say that the berries were the food of the Tuatha de Danaan, or faeries. Quicken is the old Irish name for the mountain ash. The Dark Joan mentioned in the last verse is a famous faery who often goes about the roads disguised as a clutch of chick­ ens. Niam is the famous and beautiful faery who carried Oisin into Fearyland. Aslauga Shee means faery host. 2, 4. the oar  . . . the woody shore] Perhaps cp. Gerald Griffin, Poetical Works (1843), ‘Fare

thee well, my native dell’, 32–34: ‘No more I’ll press the bending oar, | To speed the painted wherry; | And glide along the woody shore’. 9. hurley] Hurling, the Irish form of hockey, was thought to be one kind of fairy sport­ ing pastime. WBY was not finished with this thought, and in a 1902 addition to The Celtic Twilight wrote of a man who claimed to have seen a troop of fairies: ‘He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been playing hurley, for ‘they looked as if it was that’’ (M, 7). In Dramatis Personae (1935), WBY recalled a conversation with ‘an old shepherd’ who ‘himself had stood at the roadside, watching spirits playing hurley in a field, until one came and pulled the cap over his eyes’ (CW 3, 299). 17. Aslauga Shee] These are the sluagh sidhe, taken by WBY to be the fairy host (and later distinguished from the sluagh gaoith, the demons of the air). See also notes to ‘The Host of the Air’.

176

THE DANAAN QUICKEN TREE

(Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!) 20

25

30

If when the battle is half won, I fling away my sword, blood dim, Or leave some service all undone, Beloved blame the Danaan whim, And blame the snare they set for me. (Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!) Cast out all hope, cast out all fear, And taste with me the faeries’ meat, For while I blamed them I could hear Dark Joan call the berries sweet, Where Niam heads the revelry. (Ah, mournful Danaan quicken tree!)

20. blood dim] Here, the sense is simply that the sword’s otherwise shining blade has been rendered dim by blood. It is possible that a long-buried memory of this phrase pushed up just below the surface of WBY’s altogether more arresting ‘blood-dimmed tide’ in ‘The Second Coming’.

28. Dark Joan] This fairy is related to the figure in the refrain of the winter song in Shake­ speare, Love’s Labour’s Lost V ii 986–1001 (‘When icicles hang by the wall’): ‘While Greasy Joan doth keel the pot’.

132

THE BALLAD OF EARL

PAUL

Date of composition. WBY appends a place and date to the poem in its first appearance of ‘Sligo, April 4th’. The poet was in Sligo then in 1893, having been there since late Mar.; the poem was published just four days later, on 8 Apr. 1893. Sources and context. This poem presents something of a puzzle: it appears that WBY wrote it only four days before its newspaper publication, then promptly discarded it in the process of gathering poems for P95 and WATR. WBY’s decision to append place and date to the printed text suggests that either (or both) must have some significance; yet it is very difficult to establish what that significance might be. In so far as the ballad has a political dimension – R. Foster calls it a ‘mournful nationalist’ poem (Foster 1, 563) – the publication might conceivably have been intended by WBY to speak to the political intensity of the Second Home Rule Bill (the Government of Ireland Bill brought to the Commons by Gladstone in Mar. was given its second reading in Apr.) Although the Bal­ lad’s transformation of John de Courcy into a would-be Irish home dweller, obedient to the English Crown whilst retaining (and in perpetuity) his rights to the visible sign of independence by keeping ‘a covered head’ in front of both the Crown and ‘thy race’, has a certain relevance to the daily politics of the Home Rule debate, this feels like something other than a very direct one. There remains, besides, WBY’s decision to give the printed poem a place and date: nationally eventful as the month of Apr. 1893 might have been, 4 Apr. in Sligo was not a day of any particular momentousness. The poem is also in some respects an anomalous one for WBY to have been writing in 1893. The poet had last experimented with narrative ballads in the late 1880s, and in 1895 he was to group these within his poetic past as a suite at the end of the ‘Crossways’ section of P95; when he next wrote in ballad form, later in 1893, he chose folkloric and mystical registers along with highly self-conscious poetic style (in ‘The Host of the Air’ and ‘The Cap and Bells’): the adventure-story medievalism of this ballad neither connects with previous work nor foreshadows what was to come. In fact, its origins (though not its composition) may be located in 1888, when WBY encountered a long ballad by KT, whose thirty-two-stanza ‘The Ballad of Courcey of Kinsale’ was published in the Weekly Freeman Christmas Sketch Book. WBY asked her to send him a copy of the poem in a letter of 14 Nov. 1888 (CL 1, 107), and subsequently wrote to her on 21 Dec. (CL 1, 118): I got the Xmas ‘Weekly Freeman’ with your long ballad (Miss  Kavanagh sent it me) and read it to papa. He objects to your describing the whole DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-134

178

THE BALLAD OF EARL PAUL

of England as in grief because of this French knight. It would only have affected the nobility. He also objects to the queen and her ladies going down the Thames from Windsor to bring from the Tower the Lord of Kinsale. The line he likes best is ‘Her grave would call me from all lands’. I like the ballad itself in all the latter parts best and think there is a deal of fine romantic energy about it; but do not think it one of your very best [.  .  .] I  am not very fond of retrospective art. I do not think that pleasure we get from old methods of looking at things – methods we have long given up ourselves – belongs to the best literature. KT herself perhaps shared this view; at all events, she never reprinted the poem. Never­ theless, the subject matter impressed WBY enough for him to ask KT at the end of Feb. 1889, ‘Where is that story of the Lord of Kinsale to be found?’ (CL 1, 150), suggesting that he was himself then thinking of treating the story in verse. The ‘story’ was to be treated by WBY four years later, by which time KT’s poem was probably no longer to hand, and his memories of both it and the story were somewhat blurred. It is possible to speculate on the sudden revival of interest in this material: by 4 Apr., WBY had been back in Sligo for a fortnight, but had visited KT (along with John O’Leary) in Clondalkin only three weeks before; it is possible that he encountered, among George Pollexfen’s books, one of the numerous accounts of the first Earl of Kinsale and his family’s unique privilege (while much less likely that he would have found there a Weekly Freeman Christmas Sketch Book from four years before). Besides KT’s original ballad, the sources of the story could include such accounts as that to be found in A Compendium of Irish Biography (1878): We are told that about a year after his arrest a quarrel arose between King John, and Philip Augustus of France, concerning the Duchy of Normandy. It was referred to single combat, and De Courcy was prevailed upon to act as cham­ pion, for King John. According to the chroniclers, his proportions and appear­ ance so terrified the French king’s champion, that he fled, and in recognition of this service the King restored him to his estates, and granted him and his successors the privilege of standing covered in the royal presence. [. . .] Lords of Kingsale, who claim to be descendants of Sir John de Courcy, asserted their privilege of standing covered in the royal presence in the reigns of William III and some of the Georges. A longer account, which mentions the breaking of armour (if not shields), is that given in J. Bernard Burke, Anecdotes of the Aristocracy and Episodes in Ancestral Story Vol.1 (1850), 292–293: Sir John de Courcy, the renowned conqueror of Ulster, created Earl of that province in 1181, performed prodigies of valour in the Irish wars, and stood high in the favour of his royal master, Henry II; but, upon the accession of

THE BALLAD OF EARL PAUL

179

King John, his splendour and rank having excited the envy of Hugh de Lacie, governor of Ireland, the earl of Ulster was treacherously seized, while perform­ ing penance, unarmed and bare-footed, in the churchyard of Downpatrick, and sent over to England, where the king condemned him to perpetual imprison­ ment in the Tower. After his lordship, however, had been in confinement about a year, a dispute happening to arise between King John and Philip Augustus of France, concerning the Duchy of Normandy, the decision was referred to single combat, and King John, more hasty than advised, appointed the day, against which the King of France provided his champion; but the English monarch, less fortunate, could find no one of his subjects willing to take up the gauntlet, until his captive in the Tower, the gallant Earl of Ulster, was prevailed upon to accept the challenge. But when everything was prepared for the contest, and the champions had entered the lists, in presence of the monarchs of England, France, and Spain, the opponent of the Earl, seized with a sudden panic, put spurs to his horse, and fled the arena; whereupon the victory was adjudged with acclamation to the champion of England. The French king, however, being informed of Ulster’s powerful strength, and wishing to witness some exhibition of it, his lordship, at the desire of King John, cleft a massive helmet in twain at a single blow. The king was so well satisfied with this signal performance, that he not only restored the earl to his estates and honours, but desired him to ask anything within his gift, and it should be granted. To which Ulster replied, that, having lands and titles enough, he desired that his successors might have the privilege (their first obeisance being paid) to remain covered in the presence of his highness and all future kings of England – which request was immediately granted. Thus arose this curious immunity, and generation after generation it has been since enjoyed by the Earl of Ulster’s descendants, the successive Lords Kingsale. Other sources are plausible, and it should be noted that the story features in Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Ch. 12. Text and publication history. No MS  survives for this poem, and the only text is that of The Irish Weekly Independent, 8 Apr. 1893. There are signs here of WBY’s haste: inconsistencies in punctuation (‘Shield breaker’ and ‘Shield-breaker’ rub shoulders) and, more tellingly, a missing rhyme in the seventh stanza (where ‘lane’ (26) and ‘Kinsale’ (28) come rather short of the rhyming mark: a fault which WBY would other­ wise not tolerate before submitting work, and would certainly not have perpetuated in a process of post-publication revision). It is possible, however, that WBY had some thoughts of keeping the poem, for although no MSS survive, there are three typed copies, each with place and date as with the newspaper publication, in the Univer­ sity of Texas at Austin: the typewriter responsible is likely to have been that avail­ able to George Pollexfen in Sligo. In The Dublin Magazine for Apr. to Jun. 1927, ‘R.H.’ reprinted parts of the poem in ‘An Old Yeats Ballad’: this version carries no textual authority.

180

THE BALLAD OF EARL PAUL

Copy-text: The Irish Weekly Independent, 8 Apr. 1893.

‘S

hield breaker, break a shield today, And John will pardon thee, And thou canst dwell in thine own home, On the cliff by the sea,

5

10

15

20

And half forget this bed of straw And this hard flag of stone, For a knight, come from Normandy Has twelve knights overthrown; And all down from Northumberland To the green Isle of Wight Men cry “Bring Paul, Shield breaker, To throw the Norman knight.” ’ Thus spoke the town Jailor To the Earl of Kinsale, And flung down clashing on the floor A coat of gilded mail. Earl Paul stood on the bed of straw, And answered unto him: ‘Go bring me my old armour That the red rust makes dim.’ When Paul rode from the town He blinked and blinked his eyes Like a grey owl men harry out Unto the white skies.

Title: WBY’s decision to re-name John De Courcy as Earl Paul has no obvious explana­ tion. The only Earl Paul he might have come across in his reading was a ruler of Orkney in the twelfth century. 4.] The historical John de Courcy built Car­ rickfergus Castle in Co. Antrim, which stands over a sheer drop to the Irish Sea (though only after a landslip in the seventeenth cen­ tury). WBY may have known of the connec­ tion, and could have had this spot in mind.

16. gilded mail] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘First Prologue: The Wanderers’, 7–8: ‘good store | Of swords and spears and gilded mail’. 20. the red rust] Perhaps cp. Mary Eva Kelly, Poems By ‘Eva’ of The Nation (1877), ‘The Ard-Ri’s Bride’, 22–3: ‘Lay sword and shield in thy father’s hall, | Let the red rust cover their brightness all’. 24. the white skies] Cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Hesperia’, 75: ‘the white skies thrill with a moon unrisen’.

THE BALLAD OF EARL PAUL

25

30

35

40

‘Shield breaker, great shield breaker,’ Was cried in street and lane When hundreds stood about to see The captive from Kinsale. Earl Paul came where the king sat, With many a lovely face And plumed heads about him, Before a sanded place; And stood in his dim armour, And looked on no one there Though the glad cry ‘Shield-breaker,’ Leaped up into the air. With shield and armour wrought with gold, A hurting beam of light, Amid a crowd of banners, Stood there the Norman knight. Singing a love rhyme to himself, And smiling from sweet thought, For he had overthrown twelve knights And made their glory naught.

45

50

55

60

The dim spear met the bright spear, And made the bright spear bend, For God gives power to the sad Till day and night time end. The dim spear breaks the bright shield And pierced the mirthful breast, For God gives power to the sad Till all things be at rest. The people cried ‘Shield-breaker!’ And John rose up and stood, Saying ‘Earl Paul is pardoned For his great hardihood. I bid him ask what gift he will, Then go to his own land, Or stay with me beside the Thames, Sitting on my right hand.’ ‘I ask that I and all my race,’ The Earl of Kinsale said, ‘May stand before thy race and thee And keep a covered head.’

181

182 65

THE BALLAD OF EARL PAUL

Then turned he from the king’s court, With a clang of his dim mail, And came and dwelt in his own house, On the cliff at Kinsale.

133

THE CAP AND BELLS

Date of composition. The poem was written in 1893, but more precise dating is difficult. A period of composition can be dated to late Aug./early Sept. 1893, but one MS may well precede this (see Textual and publication history): most likely, the poem took shape ini­ tially in the summer of 1893, and it is worth noting that there is a point of contact, pos­ sibly putting the first full draft no earlier than Jul. 1893, between the poem and WBY’s article ‘The Message of the Folk-lorist’, which appeared in The Speaker on 19 Aug. 1893 (see note to 33–4). Context and sources. WBY’s family members were apt to misremember the time and occasion of this poem. JBY seems to have believed it to have been the work of his son while ‘a boy’ or ‘a lad’ (though then pushing that forwards to 1891 – see note on Jeanne Foster MS), while SMY told J. Hone that the poem had been conceived a good four years after it had in fact been born: ‘Yeats spent the Christmas of 1897 with his family at Bed­ ford Park’, Hone wrote (correctly), adding that ‘His sister Lily remembers how he came down to breakfast one morning very much excited, and recounted the dream which gave him that strange and symbolic love poem, “The Cap and Bells” ’ (Hone, 151–152). That the poem did have its origin in a dream is something WBY insisted upon; and while it is of course quite possible that the poet had such a dream more than once, it must have happened first before the 1893 composition of his poem. Hone’s anecdote, however, is of interest for more than SMY’s mistaken dating of this poem: Hone (presumably fol­ lowing SMY’s lead) immediately goes on to connect the poem with ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, saying that ‘The Cap and Bells’ was ‘A poem of which [WBY] said long afterwards at some lecture that it was ‘the way to win a lady’, whereas the better known ‘Embroidered Cloths’ of the same period was the way to lose one’. Hone repeats this later (321), with WBY’s lecture identified as one he delivered on his U.S. tour in Jan.–May 1920. The conjunction of these two poems in both WBY’s and SMY’s minds may have its origin in what Hone adds next: ‘Maud Gonne was in the States, and WBY had had (he told Lady Gregory) some very nice letters from her; one began “my dear friend”, and ended “affectionately your friend” ’ (152). If ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ was seen later ruefully by the poet as ‘the way to lose’ the beloved, then this poem from much earlier is its companion, in that it articulates a model of symbolic courtship which WBY associates with happier outcomes. This is perhaps to suggest that the poem represents a romantic fantasy of the hopeful, and not the despairing, variety. It must be assumed that WBY’s primary source for the poem is, as he says, a dream. Dreams, though, have non-oneiric sources. There are of course plenty of medieval and DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-135

184

THE CAP AND BELLS

medieval-set stories in which a jester features alongside a queen, and these will have been liable to jump from the background of WBY’s knowledge into the foreground of his dream. But one contemporary literary story that may be relevant has no queen and no jester in it at all. Oscar Wilde’s children’s story, ‘The Happy Prince’, may contribute something to WBY’s narrative: the swallow who does a statue’s bidding, taking precious materials to the needy, is finally an example of self-sacrificing devotion – like the statue of the prince itself, which gives away its very substance. That substance has dominant colours which are matched in WBY’s story, of red and blue: ‘He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt’ (Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales [1888], 3). The jester’s heart, also, resembles the swallow in its ‘quivering’ flight to the queen. For both the swallow and the statue in Wilde’s story, self-offering entails death; and the moment of the swallow’s death is a single-sentence paragraph which may be echoed in WBY’s final line: ‘And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet’ (22). The story can be called nothing so definite as a source for WBY’s poem, but its imagery, style, and narrative procedure do perhaps offer the poet a model of how to tell a fable-like tale that remains simple in outline. In biographical terms, WBY had had experience of Wilde and the children’s story, when he joined the Wilde family for Christmas dinner in London in 1890, and found himself (unsuccessfully) trying to tell fairy stories to the Wilde children there: see The Trembling of the Veil (1922), CW 3 127–128. A case was made by F.L. Milne in 1972 (Ariel 3/3) for a specifically poetic source, in Tennyson’s Maud (1855). WBY never expressed any opinion on this particu­ lar work by Tennyson, though he did probably know it; and beyond the two moments of possible specific indebtedness (see notes) it is true that the title of the poem, and its scenes of an unsuccessful lover waiting for his beloved in a garden, must have had a certain resonance for the poet. The protagonist of Maud, however, has little really in common with the jester of WBY’s ballad, as he shows in his impatient outburst, ‘For often a man’s angry pride | Is cap and bells for a fool’ (I, 250–251). Modern commentary on this poem has shown an interest in WBY’s ideas of the ‘Fool of Faery’ or the ‘White Fool’ as shedding light on the meaning; but these ideas in fact come from later in the 1890s, when WBY was constructing an ever more elaborate ver­ sion of mythic symbol and narrative in relation to love, principally (in poetry) through the development of The Shadowy Waters and representations of the supposed Irish lovegod, Aengus. Certainly, the Fool who turns up in the later 1890s owes something to ‘The Cap and Bells’; but he has become a much more mythic/symbolic creature, and less a piece of medieval stage-property. In one post-1896 draft for The Shadowy Waters, Forgael brings the ‘white fool’ into some lines that touch also on the established ‘white birds’ motif (DC, 265): [The people in the boughs are light as the air,

None even among the gods del.] but the white fool

Whose touch gives madness even among the gods

Can see their bodies. Some think they are like birds

THE CAP AND BELLS

185

And that he makes them out of foam in the dawn, And others that they lived always, and still live When Time and change and gods have guttered out. The recollection here of ‘The White Birds’ (1891) is also necessarily a recollection of MG, so that by this point (possibly 1897 or 1898) fool, birds, and supernatural love are symbolically associated. This grows more explicit in the published The Shadowy Waters of 1900, where Forgael says of the sleeping Dectora (259–263): I grew as old as Time, and she grows young As the ageless birds of Aengus, or the birds The white fool makes at morning out of foam; For love is a-weaving when a woman’s heart Grows young and a man’s heart grows old in a twinkling. In some ways, this revisits the scene of ‘The Cap and Bells’ as one in which the lover’s heart grows old while the beloved’s heart grows young: the jester’s willing self-destruc­ tion is akin to this amorous ageing, while the queen’s acceptance of the gifts of his ‘heart and soul’ puts her in possession of ‘the quiet of love’. Birds are significant here – develop­ ing as they do from the ‘white birds on the foam of the sea’ in which MG and WBY were figured – as the kisses of the god Aengus, which had the form of fluttering birds. The fool, like the jester, is an agent of successful romantic love – how ‘to win a lady’. The 1893 poem did not end WBY’s business with jesters, and the figure of the White Fool who was to enter The Shadowy Waters made an appearance in Sligo to the poet and to George Pollexfen, after they had attempted to summon the god Aengus: announc­ ing himself as the ‘messenger of the true Aengus’, he was a ‘medieval fool’ who wore ‘a cap of pale violet with two ears of pink and a cap of the same colour and pointed shoes’ (MS quoted in CL 2, 364). Shortly after the publication of WATR, in Aug. 1899, WBY and George Russell, who were staying with AG at Coole Park, both experienced visions of a Fool whilst attempting to invoke Aengus. In a letter to Russell of 27 Aug., WBY told him that ‘I saw the white door today and the white fool he was followed out of the door by a marriage procession who had flowers and green bows’ (CL 2, 442–443). On 13 Sept., WBY recorded in a notebook a dream of ‘the white fool and two lovers who were being warned against the slanders and malice and watching eyes of the world by a blackbird (Aengus perhaps)’ (quoted CL 2, 443). A more public account of these visions came in WBY’s ‘The Fool of Faery’ (The Kensington, Jun. 1901): I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind’s eye an image of Aengus, the old Irish god of love and poetry and ecstasy, who changed four of his kisses into birds and suddenly the image of a man with a cap and bells rushed before his mind’s eye, and grew vivid and spoke and called itself ‘Aengus’s messenger’. And I knew another man, a truly great seer, who saw a white fool in a vision­ ary garden, where there was a tree with peacocks’ feathers instead of leaves,

186

THE CAP AND BELLS

and flowers that opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them with his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a pool and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating up from the pool. All ancient peoples have thought that death was the beginning of wisdom and power and beauty; and that foolishness was a kind of death. It is therefore natural that many should see a fool with a shining vessel of some enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in ‘every household of them’. It is natural, too, that there should be a queen to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The self, which is the foundation of knowledge, is broken in pieces by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and therefore fools may get, and women certainly get, glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The passage is, of course, one written long after the poem; but the poem is not, perhaps, all that far from WBY’s mind’s eye here. The first vision (which is WBY’s own) could be in a way a vision of his own poem returning to him, its meaning still unfixed, but its mythic identity now more definite. Aengus became an increasingly important fig­ ure for WBY in the later 1890s, and his association with love (relevant here) is also an association (through the medieval Irish Tochmarc Étaíne, ‘The Wooing of Étaín’) with a woman of great beauty who belonged to another (Midher): the earliest draft of ‘The Cap and Bells’ (the Jeanne Foster MS) begins by naming the queen as ‘queen Edane’, and although WBY abandoned that identification, enough of it remained to link the cap and bells of the fool with Aengus, god of love. The second vision, this time of the ‘white fool’, is subject to much more interpretation (possibly because it is Russell’s vision and not WBY’s own): the ‘images of many fair women’ here are more dangerous (and though WBY says nothing of this, he knew that Russell was in fact in danger of drown­ ing himself in the water that day). The key sentence, which again may be felt to count as something of an interpretation of the earlier poem on WBY’s part, is the observation that ‘All ancient peoples have thought that death was the beginning of wisdom and power and beauty; and that foolishness was a kind of death’. From the distance of 1901, ‘The Cap and Bells’ might be seen as a death poem, in the sense that the poet/lover/ jester is willing a kind of death upon himself, which sacrifice may prove acceptable to the wooed ‘queen’. WBY recorded a vision – again, it is a vision of a ‘meaning’, the term which persistently bothered the poet in considering this poem – on 6 Jan. 1899, when ‘I tried to see the meaning of the fool’s cap and bells and saw a red cock and remembered the cock’s comb and the cock of dawn the cock of March (?Aengus spring)’ (NLI 18749, quoted Putzel, 191). In time, more ironic perspectives on WBY’s part concerning this cluster of motifs were to prevail. In a fragmentary (and almost certainly unperformed) prologue for a 1905 staged version of The Shadowy Waters, the White Fool has turned into a ‘Black Jester’, who addresses the audience (DC, 303):

THE CAP AND BELLS

187

I am going to wave my fingers and you will begin to dream. These two are Aengus and Edaine. They are spirits and whenever I am in love it is not I that am in love but Aengus who is always looking for Edaine through somebody’s eyes. You will find all about them in the old Irish books. She was the wife of Midher another spirit in the hill but he grew jealous of her and he put her out of doors, and Aengus hid her in a tower of glass. That is why I carry the two of them in a glass bottle (holds bottle in front of me) [sic: WBY’s slip in pro­ nouns may indicate the degree of self-identification at this point]. O Aengus! O Edaine! be kind to me when I am in love and to everybody in this audience when they are in love and make us all believe that it is not you but us ourselves that love. Alongside the thought that myth finds its repeated iterations in the passions of indi­ viduals (rather than vice versa), WBY here shows how strange such myth can be: in the Tochmarc Étaíne, the beautiful woman is transformed into a fly, and Aengus’s ‘tower of glass’ is in fact more in the nature of what is provided here, a glass bottle. The Jester of 1893 has little capacity for jokes like these; but it may be that WBY came increasingly to see his story in the poem as emblematic of the loss and reduction involved in even an apparently successful courtship. Reception and interpretation. Early reviewers of WATR liked this poem and some­ times found it a welcome contrast to other more overtly mysterious pieces. WBY’s note and its confession that the poem did not always mean the same thing to him set a chal­ lenge for critics, and occasionally they rose to it (The Academy 6 May 1899): We might venture an interpretation. The mistress whom poets serve desires not a poet – a poet pure and simple – for his wisdom, his study, let us say, of solar mythologists (who are not even the chattering of owls, for owls see in the dark), nor for his much service, but just for – his cap and bells, his sweet intuitive gift of rhyme. That is the way of knowledge and of all else for him. Truly, if he follow that way, ‘the heart and the soul come through’. F. Reid in 1915 was aware that the poem might sail close to the shores of ‘pure poetry’ of the kind exemplified by some of E.A. Poe; instancing Poe’s ‘Ulalume’ as a poem of ‘suggestiveness unmingled with any other quality’ that ‘strikes many persons as morbid, almost insane’, he asserted that ‘From none of Mr. Yeats’s poems, not even from the lovely ‘Cap and Bells’, which is his nearest approach to this kind of work, do we get such an impression’ (Reid, 201). There is perhaps some residual uneasiness here that the poem might be, on the whole, light on specific meaning. WBY’s note, and in particular its confession of uncertainty about the poem’s meaning, struck H. Orel as late as 1968 as ‘the passion for meaningless rhetoric that Yeats never perhaps expressed more tellingly’ (Orel, 49). But for R. Ellmann in 1954, it was necessary to dismiss WBY’s note as ‘misleading’, and a brisk interpretation was supplied accord­ ingly (Identity, 251):

188

THE CAP AND BELLS

While the significance of the poem may have changed for [WBY], its immedi­ ate meaning was less obscure than it has been represented. The jester, after first sending the queen the trappings of common romance, finally offers the cap and bells which are his alone, and she, obdurate before the familiar and grandilo­ quent gifts of heart and soul, yields when the jester sends what is most essential and individual in him. This reading seems to rule out of court any element of identification between the poet and the jester. Such a critical situation was not to last; indeed, it had already been chal­ lenged by M.I. Seiden’s ‘A Psychoanalytical Essay on William Butler Yeats’ (Accent, Spring 1946), which dispatched the poem (and WBY) in two Freudian pages; as G.B. Saul wrote laconically, ‘Presumably there are some who would not be nauseated by Seiden’s han­ dling of this charming lyric’ (Saul 69–70). H. Bloom in 1970 did not take the poem to the psychoanalyst’s couch, but he still read it in terms that rejected Ellmann’s wilful straightforwardness. ‘Whether the poem is essentially dream or not,’ Bloom wrote, ‘it has a larger and more sinister meaning, in its essential or intrinsic idea of the relation between jester and queen, or poet and Muse, Yeats and Maud Gonne.’ Bloom summa­ rizes his reading, quoting lines 25–28 (128–129): What is this but a dream version of that central Yeatsian image, out of the Deca­ dence, of the dancer with the severed head? True, she proceeds to gather up the heart and the soul, who set up a cricket-song, ‘a chattering wise and sweet’, but this is not to say that she revives the presumably deceased jester. The dream­ poem’s bitterness is one with the central emotion of the volume [WATR], the defeated lover’s rejection of nature and his longing for cataclysm. This darkening of the poem’s atmosphere could be made to agree with the psycho­ analytic readings which continued to be offered. However far he might have been from the more thoroughgoing of such analyses, WBY was certainly aware of how much was personally at stake in the poem, especially as it figured in WATR; this has been usefully summarized by R. Foster as the poem presenting ‘the fulfilment of love as the loss of potency and of life itself ’ (Foster 1, 215). A.R. Grossman dwells at some length on ‘this consummate and difficult poem’ as ‘sacrifice’, and even ‘peni­ tential castration’; at the same time, he detects here a kind of symbolic map of the more hermetic side of the poet’s imagination and study: ‘The interpretative mystery of “The Cap and Bells” is the disappearance of its major symbol, the cockscomb, in the conclusion when body and soul are united beyond life in the symbol of the woman’ (192). The possible intricacies of the poet’s symbolism here are less inter­ esting than the idea that the poem is one in which the male (poetic/sexual) agent willingly obliterates his own identity by making his art the offering which is finally absorbed by – and makes more powerful still – the queenly object of his love. Like some other WATR poems, this ballad imagines a complete male subjection as itself not only the object of desire, but of desire’s artistic means. J. Ramazani has seen this

THE CAP AND BELLS

189

as the projection of an ‘erotic death’ on to the jester (Ramazani, 134), but this can be taken too narrowly as just another form of male sexual fantasy – as E. Cullingford takes it perhaps, when she leans on WBY’s ‘the way to win a lady’ remarks to read the poem itself as ‘a prescription for erotic success’: ‘the woman is not won by courtly abjection, but by ironic deployment of the jester’s professional mask, his cap and bells,’ yet ‘The problem [. . .] is that recognition of the erotic power of the mask long precedes the ability to assume it’ (Cullingford, 52). There can be little that is ‘ironic’ about the jester’s offering in this poem, but it has been seen in terms of a proleptic instance of WBY’s idea of the ‘mask’, notably by H. Adams (69–70): The poem has been interpreted as a sexual self-immolation, but that is at best a recognition of an overtone and at worst a case of Freudian symbol hunting. It should first be seen as one of the earliest steps in a dramatic movement toward the notion of the mask that later appears in The Green Helmet and Other Poems. What the jester has offered is his appearance, his role in life, the thing he has made himself into; and this, the dream implies, is the most important thing of all. [. . .] we have only a dream of [the mask], which prophesies the importance of locating true being not in the body or the soul or some combination of the two, but in an achieved role. Only when the role is offered up are the heart and the soul allowed to come into the beloved’s presence. This is to read considerably far ahead from 1893, but not really from 1899 and WATR; and the poem in 1899 and after could indeed have shown things to WBY of which he was largely unaware in 1893. It is this which is implied also in the poet’s acknowledgement that ‘The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing’. In WATR, the poem is, according to J. Harwood, ‘atypical on almost any reading of the volume’ (79), but this is far too confident a judgement. As a poem concerning the cost of devotion in love without hope, it resonates with a number of other pieces (most of them written in the years after it); its ballad narrative, too, links it formally as well as thematically to other poems in which romantic sacrifice and artistic exal­ tation are carefully implicated (such as ‘The Host of the Air’). At the same time, it is one poem in the collection which glimpses a beloved who accepts (indeed, takes delivery of) the lover’s art without an accompanying sorrow: whatever the presumed distresses of the jester/artist, the art made concrete in the gift of cap and bells is one that has transcended despair. WBY’s note. In WATR and all subsequent collected editions, WBY provided a note on the poem: I dreamed this story exactly as I  have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me the sense of illumination and exaltation

190

THE CAP AND BELLS

that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaning­ less. The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said ‘the authors are in eternity,’ and I  am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams. Announcing this as a poem begun in a dream, WBY also points out that it could have become a prose story as easily as a poem when it was first conceived. Another dream was needed to address this question – meaning and written genre being intertwined – but that dream turned out ‘confused and meaningless’. The apparently casual report which follows, that ‘The poem has always meant a great deal to me’, is thus hedged with ironies; and the failure of the interpretative second dream is also something of a warning to read­ ers about how to understand ‘symbolic poems’ (of which, in WATR, there are not a few). The note as a whole puts up a resistance to allegorical significance, while still taking for granted the authority of ‘vision’, where ‘authority’ is both a matter of personal experience and William Blake’s access to ‘eternity’. WBY quotes from a letter from Blake to Thomas Butts, 6 Jul. 1803; having mentioned his own ‘Sublime Allegory which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem’, Blake goes on: ‘I may praise it since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity’ (W. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose ed. D. Erdman, 730). The quotation (which is in relation to Blake’s Milton) is not found in the Yeats and Ellis Blake edition; but WBY would have met it in e.g. A. Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1880). Text and publication history. A copy of the poem, written by WBY in ink (with some ink revisions, and the ending still in an undecided form), was given to Mrs. Jeanne Fos­ ter, the companion in New York of John Quinn. This MS is transcribed and reproduced in Cornell WATR, 98–103; since it differs considerably from published versions, it is reproduced separately in edited form in the present edition. WBY worked on the poem further in the MS notebook begun in late Aug. 1892 (now in Burns Collection, Boston College), where three pages contain another full version of the poem, with numerous deletions and revisions (Notebook). The material comes just after the opening drafts in the book (for ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’) which end with a date of 30 Aug., while the next dated material, six pages further on, is given by WBY as 5 Sept. The poem was published in The National Observer for 17 Mar. 1894 (NO), and then again in 1894 in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (SBRC). A two-page TS with holograph revisions (Berg Col­ lection, NYPL) postdates the poem’s first and second publications, and shows it on the way towards its next appearance, in WATR (TS): this is reproduced and transcribed in Cornell WATR 110–113. After WATR, the poem was retained by WBY in all subsequent collected editions.

THE CAP AND BELLS

191

Copy-text: P49.

T

he jester walked in the garden;

The garden had fallen still;

He bade his soul rise upward

And stand on her window-sill.

5

10

It rose in a straight blue garment, When owls began to call; It had grown wise-tongued by thinking Of a quiet and light footfall; But the young queen would not listen; She rose in her pale night-gown; She drew in the heavy casement And pushed the latches down. He bade his heart go to her,

When the owls called out no more;

Title] [No title] Notebook; Cap and Bell NO. John Keats’s abandoned narrative poem (com­ posed 1819, publ. 1848) is entitled The Cap and Bells: Or, the Jealousies. 1–4.] A Queen was loved [beloved SBRC, TS] by a jester, And once, when the owls grew still, He made his soul go upward And stand on her window sill. NO, SBRC, TS. 3.] He made his soul [to mount del.] to go upward Notebook. 5–8.] In a long and straight blue garment It talked, ere the morn grew white. It had grown most wise with thinking On [Of S BRC] a foot-fall hushed and light, NO. 6.] It talked before ^ere the^ morn [was del.] grew white Notebook; It talked before morn

was white SBRC; corr. to When owls began to call TS. 7–8.] F.L. Milne (see Context and sources) sug­ gests cp. Tennyson, Maud (1855) I, 606–607: ‘Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk | Seemed her light foot along the garden walk’. 7.] And it had grown wise by [dreaming del.] thinking Notebook; And it had grown wise by thinking SBRC; corr. to It had grown wisetongued by thinking TS. 8.] On her footfall [gentle del.] hushed and light Notebook; Of a footfall hushed and light corr. to Of a quiet and light footfall TS. 11.] She drew in the brightening casement, NO, SBRC. 12.] And pushed a brazen ^brass^ bolt down Notebook; She snicked the brass bolts down. NO; And pushed the brass bolt down. SBRC. 14–15.] When the bats called out no more: | In a garment red and quivering, NO. 14.] When the bats cried out no more, Note­ book, SBRC.

192 15

20

THE CAP AND BELLS

In a red and quivering garment It sang to her through the door. It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming Of a flutter of flower-like hair; But she took up her fan from the table And waved it off on the air. ‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered, ‘I will send them to her and die’; And when the morning whitened He left them where she went by.

25

She laid them upon her bosom, Under a cloud of her hair, And her red lips sang them a love-song Till stars grew out of the air.

15.] F.L. Milne suggests cp. a climactic passage from Tennyson, Maud (1855), I, 916–923: She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. Although there is no specific verbal indebted­ ness here, there is certainly a general similarity of effect, concentrated on WBY’s ‘quivering’. The Tennyson lines were sufficiently famous to mean that they might well have exercised a subliminal influence, even if WBY was not familiar with Maud as a whole. In a quivering crimson ^red and a quiver­ ing^ garment Notebook. 17–20.] The tongue of it sweet with dreaming It had grown sweet tongued by dreaming [On del.] Of the flutter of flower-like hair But she took up her fan from the table And waved it out onto the air. Notebook. The tongue of it sweet with dreaming On a flutter of flower-like hair But she took [took up SBRC] her fan from the table,

And waved it out [off SBRC] on the air. NO, SBRC. 21.] [He said I  have cap and bell still del.] Notebook. I have] I’ve NO, SBRC I’ve corr. to I have TS. bells] bell SBRC. pondered] murmured overwritten with pondered Notebook. 23.] And as soon as the morn had whitened Note­ book, NO, SBRC. as soon as corr. to when TS. 25–28. Notebook has two versions of this stanza, interlineated on the page. The first is identical with Foster MS, and the second is: She laid them upon her bosom Under a cloud of her hair Her red lips sang them a love song And the stars grew into the air. 25. laid them upon] took them into NO. 26.] In her heart she found a tune NO. 27. And her] Her NO. 28.] The night smelled rich with June. NO. Till] The SBRC The corr. to Till TS. grew out of the air] In all likelihood, WBY produces this unusual figure entirely by his own imaginative work. The unusual phrase had been hit on before by F.W. Faber (1814– 1863), in The Rosary (1845), ‘The Willow Island’, 95: ‘And a cool flapping breeze grew out of the air’.

THE CAP AND BELLS

30

193

She opened her door and her window,

And the heart and the soul came through,

To her right hand came the red one,

To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,

A chattering wise and sweet,

28^29.] Notebook here first enters a stanza almost identical to Foster MS  29–32, then deletes it with purple pencil stroke. 29.] [She opened the darkening casement del.] Notebook. 30. And the] The NO. 31–32.] F.A.C. Wilson (W.B. Yeats and Tradi­ tion (1958), 251–252) was the first to point out the likely indebtedness here to W.Morris, The Defence of Guinevere (1858). At the beginning of the poem, Guinevere asks her hearers to imagine a situation in which they were presented with a terrible choice, on which the future of their souls would rest, between two coloured cloths (16–36): “Listen, suppose your time were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak; Yea, laid a dying while very mightily “The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands run­ ning well: Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak: “ ‘One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, Now choose one cloth for ever; which they be, I will not tell you, you must somehow tell “ ‘Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!’ Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, At foot of your familiar bed to see “A  great God’s angel standing, with such dyes, Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands

Held out two ways, light from the inner skies “Showing him well, and making his commands Seem to be God’s commands, moreover, too, Holding within his hands the cloths on wands; “And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue, Wavy and long, and one cut short and red; No man could tell the better of the two. The same passage is cited by A.R. Grossman, who points out that ‘in [Morris’s] poem the mind chooses wrongly when it chooses heaven, a meaning which could not have failed to attract Yeats’ (189). This passage from Morris’s narrative is important also for ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (1898), a fact that strengthens further the association WBY was wont to make between that poem and ‘The Cap and Bells’. 33.] This image is almost certainly drawn from T.F. Thistleton-Dyer, The Ghost World (1893), 40: ‘the Algonquin Indians of North America ‘could hear the shadow souls of the dead chirp like crickets’’ (quoting E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871)). In ‘The Message of the Folk-lorist’, an article he published in The Speaker for 19 Aug. 1893, WBY quotes this (CW 9, 211). Although WBY had been thinking of this article for some time, the Thistleton-Dyer book was published only in Jul. Since the image is present in the earli­ est surviving MS (see the Foster MS line 37), this may imply that WBY first arrived at a full version of the poem in Jul. 1893. 34, 36.] In the TS, where these lines are typed in the final version, WBY has entered by hand, and then deleted, two endings

194 35

THE CAP AND BELLS

And her hair was a folded flower And the quiet of love in her feet.

to lines that would have produced ‘A chat­ tering merry and wise’ (34) and ‘And the quiet of love in her eyes’ (36). Having deleted these changes, he enters by hand ‘stet’. 36.] And [quietness was del.] the quiet of love in her feet. Notebook. Early MS] The Jeanne Foster MS, which is the earliest surviving text of the poem, is given below. According to R. Londraville, who spoke to Jeanne Foster in 1968, JBY had presented her with the MS ‘When Yeats was making a lecture tour to the United States in 1913’; the poet’s father asked Fos­ ter to accompany him to a reading given by WBY and afterwards discussed with her his son’s prac­ tices as a reader and his poetic development: ‘To illustrate the gradual development of a poem, he showed her something Willie had written as a boy, which was “The Queen and the Jester”. When she asked him when it was written, he answered about 1891. [. . .] At the end of their talk, JBY gave the manuscript to Mrs. Foster’ (R. Londraville, ‘The Manuscript of ‘The Queen and the Jester’, Ariel 3/3 [Jul. 1972]). Foster’s memory was at fault to the extent that WBY was not in the United States in 1913; he was there, however, from 7 Feb. to 2 Apr. 1914, and read in New York on 10 Feb., 23 Mar., and 25 Mar., when the trip with JBY could have taken place. A  more accurate account was given by Londraville later (R. and J. Londraville,

Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle of Friends (2001), 67–68): Jeanne Foster met WBY after his lecture, and then returned with JBY to the latter’s room at the Petipas boarding-house. In the course of the evening, they discussed some of the differences between WBY’s earlier work and his current poetry. JBY suddenly got up and began to rummage in his papers. At length, he drew out two pieces of manuscript. ‘Here’s something Willie did when he was a lad,’ he said. ‘You can see the difference in the imag­ ery and the technique.’ What he brought forth was an early version of ‘The Cap and Bells,’ which was titled ‘The Queen and the Jester’. As she wrote on 3 Jun. 1968: ‘The Queen and the Jester’ was given to me by JBY after WBY’s lecture in 1914 at the National Arts Club, Gramercy Park. It had been enclosed in a letter to him by WBY, his father said (I judge that is why it lacks his signature.) JBY said, ‘Willie asked me to give him my opinion of a poem’. Although JBY thought this had been the work of his son when ‘a boy’ or ‘a lad’, even 1891 as a date of composition would make the poet a lad of 25 or 26. The version of the MS given here has some light editorial punctuation.

THE CAP AND BELLS

195

Foster MS The Queen and the Jester

T

he youngest that laughed in motley

Was in love with the queen Edane;

And he bade his soul talk to her,

And it went and tapped on the pane.

5

10

15

20

In a long and a straight blue garment

It talked before dawn grew white;

It had [got wisdom by dreaming del.] been made wise by thinking

[Of del.] On her footfall quiet and light.

And the young queen would not listen,

But rose in her long nightgown

And drew in the brightening casement,

And pushed a brazen bolt down.

And he bade his heart sing to her,

And it went in by the door.

In a fluttering crimson garment

It sang to her on the floor.

It had got a sweet tongue by dreaming

On a flutter of flower-like hair,

And she took her fan from the table

And [? waved] it away in the air.

He said ‘I have cap and bell still,

I will give them to her and die’

And when the morning had brightened

He left them where she went by.

25

30

She took them up in her white hands,

Her lips began a tune:

Her red lips sang them a love song

And the morn turned round to noon.

She took them into her chamber,

Her breast began to heave;

20. [?waved] There is no word in this position in the MS, but something is clearly wanted,

and is here supplied on the example of the other versions.

196

THE CAP AND BELLS

She laid them upon her white breast And the noon turned round to eve.

35

She opened the door and casement And his heart and soul came through: To her right hand came the red one, To her left hand came the blue. They set up a noise like crickets, A chattering wise and sweet, And her hair was a folded flower,

40

(And it fell upon) her light feet. (And it folded about) her feet.

40–41.] WBY here leaves two possible lines, inserting brackets around the first four words in each.

134

THE MOODS

Date of composition. The most likely date for the poem’s composition is the summer of 1893, but it is not possible to be more precise than this. Text and publication history. In WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston Col­ lege), a pencil draft of the poem is entered at the bottom of a page containing the end of ‘The Cap and Bells’. Since WBY has entered the date ‘August 29th 1893’ on the notebook’s title page, and since one the poems that follow shortly after is dated by WBY 5 Sept., there would appear to be a case for dating the poem between these two points. However, this is not possible; for on 29 Aug. 1893 the poem was already in print, being included in the Aug. number of The Bookman (B). It is this published version which is probably the earliest surviving text of the poem, and it may very well have been included in the mate­ rials for The Celtic Twilight, which WBY was assembling as early as 2 Jun. 1893 (see CL 1, 357). The notebook text of the poem (MS1) is in pencil and is clearly written at speed, but there are no deletions or substitutions: it does not resemble, in that respect, one of WBY’s first drafts. There is a possibility that WBY entered the lines in his notebook in order to help with his composition of other poems; but it departs slightly from the text in B, suggesting revision. In the periodical, line 3 is simply ‘The mountains and woods’, but the notebook has ‘and the mountains and woods’: not only does this anticipate the line as printed next, in Dec. 1893, when the poem becomes part of the prefatory material for The Celtic Twilight (CT), but it also matches the readings of two other MSS, loose leaves now preserved as NLI 30420 and NLI 30477 (MS2 and MS3). These are fair copies in ink; they may postdate the pencilled lines in the notebook, though there is no proof of this. It seems, on the balance of textual evidence, less likely that they are MS materials towards the B version, and more likely that, like MS1, they are parts of the poem’s evolution towards its CT version of Dec. (see variant readings in notes). In MS2, WBY begins to write the poem’s final line, deletes the one word he has written, and leaves the rest miss­ ing; he also blots the word ‘old’ in writing line 5: MS 3 may therefore represent a second attempt at a fair copy. At a point when CT was almost published, the poem appeared in print in United Ireland for 11 Nov. 1893 (where it was part of the ‘Preface to the Celtic Twilight’ which, effectively, advertised WBY’s forthcoming book). In the published vol­ ume, the poem is set in italics, the first of two poems that serve as prefaces (the second being ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, here ‘The Host’). This version in fact continued to be in print long afterwards, prefacing the pieces of short fiction in e.g. CWVP08, as well as future editions of CT itself until 1912. However, the piece’s life in the body of WBY’s poems was continued with more revision for WATR and subsequent collected editions, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-136

198

THE MOODS

with the result that from 1899 until 1912 there were two different versions, each of them current in the WBY oeuvre, albeit occupying different positions there. This anomaly apart, the revised version of 1899 was a stable text, and went without further revision is all subsequent collected editions of WBY’s poems. Sources. An essential account both of what WBY might have meant by ‘Moods’ and his sources for the concept is that provided in F. Kinahan, 223–228. The most eye-catch­ ing of the sources, however, postdates (in terms of its publication, at least) WBY’s poem. Madame Blavatsky’s summary of the state of Nirvana in the third volume of her The Secret Doctrine (1897), 400, comes extremely close to WBY’s simile: Nirvana, as some illustrious Orientalists have attempted to prove, does mean the ‘blowing-out’ of all sentient existence. It is like the flame of a candle burnt out to its last atom, and then suddenly extinguished. Quite so. Although vol.3 of Blavatsky’s book was not published until 1897, it is certainly possible that WBY had been exposed to her account of Nirvana while he was himself closely involved with theosophy and its followers in the late 1880s. The closeness of the verbal echo here argues against coincidence (though that remains possible); and it is certain that Blavatsky cannot be echoing Yeats, since she died two years before the poem was written. Another possible source cited by Kinahan is much more general, and looser: this is Franz Hartmann’s Magic White and Black (1888), where the author maintains that ‘Truth, wisdom, justice, beauty, goodness, etc., cannot be changed; it is merely the forms in which they become manifest that can be destroyed,’ and that ‘Eternal principles are self-existent, and therefore independent of forms, and not subject to change’ (quoted Kinahan, 224). WBY’s concept of ‘Moods’. Despite later critical conclusions that WBY began with a quasi-doctrine of the ‘moods’, the poem appears to have preceded any such theory or set of beliefs. Initially, the concept was applied in fiction. At the same time as he was positioning this poem at the beginning of CT, WBY was adding to the material on the storyteller Paddy Flynn which had been first used in his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) to produce the first chapter of that book, ‘A Teller of Tales’. Here, he concluded by introducing the ‘moods’ (edns. of CT until 1912; M, 441): What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and fairyland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and fairyland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? In the story ‘The Wisdom of the King’ (written in Jan. 1895), the otherworldly royal hero teaches ‘how the great Moods are alone immortal, and the creators of mortal things’,

THE MOODS

199

identifying these with Irish mythical figures, such as the Dagda, Lir, and Aengus: later, WBY was to remove this, putting in its place the summary, ‘he told a multitude of things even the Sidhe have forgotten’ (The Secret Rose, 92; M, 112). In the story ‘Rosa Alchem­ ica’ (1896), a book of magical wisdom expounds further on ‘moods’ when it considers the ‘forms’ given by the mind to ‘the evil powers’ (M, 187): The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world; for just as the magi­ cian or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a faint sigh into men’s minds and then changing their thoughts and their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as though they were but drifts of leaves. Given its fictional/mystical context, none of this can safely be considered a ‘doctrine’ of WBY’s; but it does in some ways foreshadow models of the influence of extra-human forces upon humanity and human history which he was later to formulate in the 1920s and 1930s, most elaborately in A Vision. But the first mention of ‘moods’ in WBY’s dis­ cursive prose comes two years after the poem had been composed and published. In the first of his four ‘Irish National Literature’ articles for The Bookman (Jul. 1895), WBY picked up on the poem in his discussion of Thomas Davis and John Mitchel as ‘pas­ sionate orators’, ‘not poets or romance-writers, priests of those Immortal Moods which are the true builders of nations, the secret transformers of the world, and need a subtle, appropriate language or a minute, manifold knowledge for their revelation’ (CW 9, 265). In the second article of the series (Aug. 1895), WBY became more expansive about the concept (CW 9, 270–271): Literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us par­ takers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient days still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the angels of more modern days ascending and descending upon their shining ladder; and that argument, theory, eru­ dition, observation, are merely what Blake called ‘little devils who fight for themselves,’ illusions of our visible passing life, who must be made serve the moods, or we have no part in eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched, measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imaginative artist

200

THE MOODS

nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible life, and deliv­ ers its ever new and ever ancient revelation. We hear much of his need for the restraints of reason, but the only restraint he can obey is the mysterious instinct that has made him an artist, and that teaches him to discover immor­ tal moods in mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual passion. WBY later incorporated this paragraph as a stand-alone piece for Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), dating it ’1895’ and giving it the title ‘The Moods’ (CW 4, 143). It is evident that a great deal had been developed since a short poem with its image of a burnt-out candle; but it is not obviously the case that such ideas were meaningfully implicit in the content of the original verses. Still further development is shown by the time of WBY’s Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), in which the poem is quoted in its entirety, preceded by mystical imagery of a kind far in advance even of that contained in WATR (CW 5, 26): 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 phantasy, and from thence come all the passions, and some have held, the very heat of the body. Although this may help explain how WBY read his poem in 1917, it reveals almost nothing of its meaning in either 1893 or 1899. Of all WBY’s writing relating to ‘The Moods’, the poem is the shortest, the clearest, and the simplest. F. Kinahan’s boilingdown of the initial idea is closest to the place where, conceptually, WBY starts from in 1893: ‘However intricate the vocabulary that surrounds it, the concept of the Moods proceeds, first from a simple fact, and then from a basic assumption: that men and women are possessed of emotions, and that one should be able to trace their source’ (Kinahan, 226–227). Clear summary as this is, the poem itself is even clearer: though it may be thought, reasonably, that in fact the link between WBY’s poem and his ‘con­ cept’ is not in the end very substantial, and the relation between ‘concept’ and poem (especially after 1893) somewhat opportunistic. At one point in the protracted com­ position of The Shadowy Waters, probably in mid-late 1896, WBY employs the term again, when a demon sees the sleeping protagonist, Forgael, and says ‘Awake him; I hear music laden with love | Such as the moods, builders of night and day, | Bring from the ever dying heart of man’ (DC, 130).

THE MOODS

201

Copy-text: P49.

T

5

ime drops in decay,

Like a candle burnt out,

And the mountains and woods

Have their day, have their day;

What one in the rout

Of the fire-born moods

Has fallen away?

Title] The definite article in WBY’s title for the poem probably does much to suggest that what follows will have (at least partially) the status of a philosophical (or quasi-philosophical) proposition, rather than a seven-line simile. Certainly, the article plays its part in later eleva­ tions (including some by WBY himself) of the poem into a statement of ‘doctrine’. Without its article, the title falls comfortably into a com­ fortable genre of Victorian verse of sentimental evocation: Aubrey De Vere has a short piece of this kind, ‘Moods’ (Poetical Works (1884)), and both William Allingham (Flower Pieces (1888)) and A.H. Clough (Poems (1869)) have poems of contrasting emotional responses entitled ‘Two Moods’. Situated squarely within this tra­ dition, but very likely to have been closer to the forefront of WBY’s experience of it at the time of composition, was a poem in KT’s Ballads and Lyrics (1891), with the title ‘Moods’. This piece (which is not one of her better produc­ tions) contrasts the mood of ‘a year ago’, when ‘Even mine angel seemed far’, with that of ‘This eve or any eve at all’, when (16–18): Through my low garden gate I see The Western glories facing me, God’s flower of fire that grows not cold. The poem ends with KT thoroughly cheered up: ‘Thanksgiving in my heart and mouth, | With the wind in the South’ (25–26). It seems clear that

the genre-title of ‘Moods’ regularly dictated a then/now contrast in emotional states, resolving in favour of the present and the positive: WBY’s use of ‘The Moods’ as a title arguably sets up this expectation, only to frustrate it deliberately, in terms of both length and singularity of focus. 1–2.] S. Putzel comments on this image, which he calls a ‘brilliantly simple simile’ where ‘linear, historical time is reduced to a melt­ ing candle and a disintegrated wick’, that it ‘seems to draw on the image of the dropping sand in an hourglass, but unlike the more common, recyclable hourglass of time, what drops in decay is gone for ever’ (Putzel, 171). It is fair to say, though, that any hourglass here is (at least) very far from the surface of WBY’s simile. 1.] Perhaps cp. the apocalyptic ending of R. Browning’s ‘Christmas Eve’, 583–585, where ‘Earth breaks up, time drops away, | In flows Heaven, with its new day | Of endless life’. 2. a candle burnt out] For a possible link between this image and Madame Blavatsky, see Sources. 3.] The mountain and woods B. 4.] Had their day, had their day MS3. With WBY’s repetition here, cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), opening section, 17–18: ‘Our little systems have their day; | They have their day and cease to be’.

202

THE MOODS

5–7.] But, kindly old rout | Of the fire-born moods, | You pass not away. B, MS1, MS2, MS3, CT. WBY’s revision makes a great change in the meaning of the poem: where initially the Moods are things that (unlike the candle) do not ‘pass away’, now the candle has become an image of one of them having indeed gone. 6.] fire-born] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches, and Songs (1889), ‘Angelo in the Alps’, 48–49: ‘forces of the depth, | Fireborn, unlike the imagery of the sun’. WBY’s phrase was taken up in AE (George Rus­ sell), The Earth-Breath and Other Poems (1906), ‘The Message of John’, 47–48: ‘To

the fire-born Self alone | The ancestral spheres are known’. 7.] The line as revised for WATR may suggest something fallen from heaven, and in partic­ ular the fall of one of the rebel angels. If this is so, there may be a connection to WBY’s original conclusion to ‘The Teller of Tales’ (see WBY’s concept of ‘Moods’) where Paddy Flynn, ‘unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, fairyland and earth, to people his stories’ (M, 441). WBY elsewhere alludes to the fairies as being some­ times identified in the peasant mind with the rebel angels, and the 1899 ending may at some level incorporate this association.

135

THE HOST

Date and circumstances of composition. WBY dates the earliest drafts as 29 and 30 Aug. 1893. The poet was in London, where he had been since May, writing a number of book reviews and heavily involved with work in the GD. The poem was the first one to be entered in the white MS notebook, for which an embroidered cover had been provided by MG, also dated by WBY 29 Aug. (now in Burns Collection, Boston College). Text and publication history. The Boston College notebook carries six continuous pages of composition for this poem, where there seem to be three main stages of com­ plete drafting (MSa, MSb, and MSc.). These notebook MS versions are presented here. The next version of the poem is a printed one, in The National Observer, 7 Oct. 1893 (NO), followed by its appearance at the beginning of The Celtic Twilight (CT), the book of prose fiction by WBY published on 10 Dec. 1893. After this, WBY embarked on major revision, resulting in ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ in WATR: that text is edited separately in the present edition.

MS versions in Boston College notebook. MSa. occupies the first page and the upper portion of the next in the notebook, and has the appearance of being the first phase of com­ position rather than a fair copy with altera­ tions. Given the extent of variants from later texts, it is transcribed in full here, with edito­ rial emendation of spelling and punctuation. For reproductions of MS pages and diplomatic transcription, see Cornell WATR, 2–5. For

another transcription, see Bradford, Yeats at Work, 19. 1.

[They call from the cairn on Knocknarea,

They call from the grave of Cluth-na-bare,]

They are calling, calling from Knocknarea,

And the [water del] pool that is over

Cluth-na-bare, Caolte tosses his burning hair But Niam murmurs ‘Away, come away’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-137

204

THE HOST

Copy-text: CT.

T

he host is riding from Knocknarea, And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;

2.

In the original first line, the first word, ‘[Why dost thou brood del.] Linger no

‘They’, was originally ‘The’, with the ‘y’ added later by WBY. While this is likely to be a sim­ more where the fire burns bright, ple correction of his handwriting, it is pos­ Filling thy heart with a mortal dream sible that a first thought was ‘The call’. [While del.] [^Our han^ del.] For hands St.3] Again, the bracketed first line here is one [wave to thee del.] are waving and eyes that is uncancelled, but is subject to revision [are del.] agleam on the facing verso page; the verso line is [To draw it away del.] Away, come away to incorporated here in its place in the stanza. the dim twilight.’ St.4] The bracketed first line is uncancelled, 3. but is replaced by WBY as he turns the page, [White arms are a-glimmering and red beginning the stanza again on the fresh one. lips are apart;] The second bracketed line is uncancelled, Their white breasts heave and [th[eir] but two alternatives are written on the facing del.] red lips part; page (between which WBY does not choose); If any man gaze on the Danaan band they are both given here in the body of the They come between him and the deeds of stanza. his hand, The next MS  versions of the poem, which They come between him and the hope of follow immediately in the notebook, are also his heart. subject to heavy revision and rewriting. In fact, there are two distinct sessions of draft­ 4.

ing visible here: the first is in pen, and occu­ [[But del.] Ah, some afar on their ringing

pies successive rectos, pages 4 and 6 of the way] notebook: this is dated ‘August [29 del.] 30’ by Ah, somewhere afar on their ringing way WBY. Next, in heavy pencil (like MSa), WBY [– No hope or deed was a whit so fair –] tackles the poem again, on the verso page 5, And no hope or deed is a whit so fair then in the space left under the conclusion And the world had not deed or hope as to the ink draft on page 6. The date of this is fair unknown, but is likely to be later than 30 Aug. Caolte tosses his burning hair (MSc.) Following is a transcription of MSb.: And Niam murmurs ‘Away, come away’. [They are calling, calling from Knocknarea, August 29. And the pool that is over Cluth-na-bare;] St.1] The bracketed lines here are WBY’s They rush from the cairn of Knocknarea uncancelled first version, with the rest of the To the pool that is over Cluth-na-bare; poem on the recto page of the notebook. On [They call and they rush from Knock­ the facing verso, he has written out revisions, narea del.] which are given here in the body of the tran­ Caolte tosses his burning hair, But Niam murmurs, ‘Away, come away’. scribed text.

THE HOST

205

Caolte tossing his burning hair,

And Niam calling, ‘Away, come away;

Linger no more where the fire is bright, Filling thy heart with a mortal dream, [For hands are waving and eyes [are bright del.] a-gleam.] For our breasts are heaving, our eyes a-gleam. Away, come away to the dim twilight. [Our white breasts heave and our red lips part;] Our [arms del.] white arms wave and our red lips part; If any man gaze on our [ringing del.] rushing band [And if any del.] And if any [gaze long del.] gazes on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart. They are rushing by on their ringing way,

And there is not a hope nor deed as fair;

Caolte tosses his burning hair,

But Niam whispers, ‘Away, come away’.

August [29 del.] 30

The lines in square brackets above (as with MSa.) are uncancelled, but have alternative versions on the facing page. The last phase of notebook composition (MSc.) is transcribed here: The host is calling from Knocknarea,

And the pool that is over Cluth-na-bare;

Caolte tosses his burning hair,

But Niam murmurs ‘Away, come away.

Linger no more where the fire is bright,

Filling thy heart with a mortal dream

For our breasts are heaving [our del.] and eyes a-gleam Away, come away to the dim twilight. [Our del.] And arms are waving, our lips apart, And if [a man del.] any gazes on our rush­ ing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart. The host [rushes by del.] is rushing twixt night and day, [And del.] [when was del.] there [was del.] is not a hope nor a [dream del.] deed as fair, Caolte tosses his burning hair,

But Niam murmurs ‘Away, come away’.

After three pages of other material in the notebook (occupied by ‘The Cap and Bells’, ‘The Moods’, and ‘God loves the road of glint and gleam’), WBY returns to the poem with another version of its opening stanza, now close in form to the first published one: The host is riding from Knocknarea, And over the grave of Cluth-na-bare, Caolte [is del.] tossing his burning hair, And Niam chanting ‘Away, come away’. Typeface: The poem appears in italic in CT; it is set in roman for NO. Title] No title MS1, MS2; ‘The Faery Host’ NO. With this, cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Children of Lir: An Ancient Irish Romance’, I, 481–486 (lines which also encapsulate WBY’s later views of the fairies as versions of the ancient Tuatha De Danaan):

206 5

THE HOST

‘And brood no more where the fire is bright, Filling thy heart with a mortal dream;

In that long strife the Gael the victory won: Tuatha’s race Dedannan disappeared; Yet still the conqueror whispered, sire to son, ‘Their progeny survives, half scorned, half feared, The Fairy Host; and mansions bright they hold On moonlight hills and under waters cold.’ Cp. also William Allingham, Irish Poems and Songs (1890), ‘Fairy Hill: Or The Poet’s Wed­ ding’, V, 1–2: ‘Fled from Britain’s, Alba’s coast, | Erin holds the Fairy Host’. 1.] The movement of this line is almost cer­ tainly not intended to recall that of a cel­ ebrated Irish poem by John Keegan Casey; but that poem was well-known, and known to WBY. Cp. John K. Casey, Reliques (1878), ‘Soggarth Aroon’, 35: ‘Black Johnson and his blood-hounds are riding from Rathmore’. Knocknarea] The 327-metre-high limestone hill overlooking Sligo town, familiar to and much mentioned by WBY. The name (in Irish Cnoc na Riabh) may mean ‘hill of the kings’ or (as thought by P.W. Joyce) ‘hill of the execu­ tions’. The large cairn at its top is generally associated with Queen Mebdh of Connacht, and is taken to be hers by WBY (despite the lack of any firm evidence from recorded leg­ end). In English-language poetry, Knocknarea appears before this only in Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 211–213 (where the Washer of the Ford is speaking): ‘my cave | For sleep is in the middle of the well-shaped Cairn of Maev, | High up on haunted Knocknarea’. 2.] the grave of Clooth-na-bare] In a chapter of CT, ‘The Untiring Ones’, WBY writes about this figure, whom he identifies with the Old Woman of Beare (Cailleach na Bheara), a

much-mentioned character in Irish legend and folklore: Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-Bare, who went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the Birds’ Mountain at Sligo. To this, WBY added a footnote (CT, 133–134): Doubtless Clooth-na-Bare should be Cailleac Beare, which would mean the old woman Beare. Beare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very famous per­ son, perhaps the Mother of the Gods herself. Standish O’Grady found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain in the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishear­ ing, or the story-teller’s mispronuncia­ tion of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths. The Old Woman of Beare was relatively fresh in WBY’s mind at the time of composition, since he had written about Kuno Meyer’s edi­ tion of The Vision of MacConglinne: A Middle Irish Wonder Tale in Feb. 1893 (see CW 9, 193–195), where Meyer gives attention to this figure. The ‘cairn of stones’ may provide a link between Clooth-na-bare and Knocknarea, by way of Mebdh’s cairn; ‘little Lough Ia’ (which is most likely Lough Daeane, situated on Slieve Daeane (Sliabh Da Ean, the mountain of two birds) to the south of Sligo town, above Lough Gill) is close enough to Knocknarea to make a leap from there by Clooth-na-bare plausible in mythic narrative. ‘The grave’, then, is in water and not on land; though this information

THE HOST

207

For breasts are heaving and eyes a-gleam: Away, come away, to the dim twilight.

could only be gleaned (for the great majority of the poem’s first readers) by reading further in CT itself. 3, 15. Caolte] Coulte NO (probably a mis­ reading of NO’s rather than a spelling given by WBY). The Fenian warrior Cailte mac Ronain, who was steward to Finn, had appeared previously, in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), III, 195. Before this, he had made a brief appearance in KT, Sham­ rocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, IV, 41 (as Cailte). tossing his burning hair] When giving a long note on this poem in WATR, WBY would explain: ‘Caolte was a companion of Fiann; and years after his death he appeared to a king in a forest, and was a flaming man, that he might lead him in the darkness. When the king asked him who he was, he said, “I  am your candle­ stick” ’. Although WBY adds ‘I do not remem­ ber where I  have read this story, and I  have, maybe, half forgotten it’, it is likely that he came across it in Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ire­ land Critical and Philosophical Vol.1, 354: The King of Ireland once lost his way in a dark forest, when suddenly a tall, slender warrior preceded him, bearing a torch. At parting, the King said, ‘What art thou?’ ‘Thy candlestick,’ answered the warrior. Said the Monarch: ‘Methinks the two eyes of Coelte are in the candlestick.’ ‘This Coelte,’ O’Grady goes on, has in his char­ acter something more weird than the others’ (i.e. the rest of the Fenians). A second possible source (suggested by Gould and Toomey, M, 438) is Thomas McLaughlan, The Dean of Lis­ more’s Book: a selection of ancient Gaelic Poetry (1862). Here, an Irish poem (ascribed by Eugene O’Curry to the ninth century) spoken

by Caolte is translated, and this also contains the ‘candlestick’ image: From whence it happened, it is true,

I became candlestick to Cormac.

Then did I many strange things do,

In presence of the King of Erin.

“Though ye may wonder at my speech,

Caoilte’s two eyes are in my candlestick.” (64)

While it is certainly possible that WBY had encountered this text, it is more likely that he was indebted to O’Grady’s account of this ‘can­ dlestick’ incident. ‘Tossing his burning hair’, however, is not accounted for in either of these two possible sources, and may very well be WBY’s own contribution to the story of Caolte. 4, 16.] This line compresses a piece of mythic narrative already used by WBY in ‘The Wan­ derings of Oisin’ (1889). In Irish mythology, Niamh was the daughter of the god Aengus, a king in the land of the young, and his queen Edain. The name itself is from the Irish níam, meaning brightness. In his earlier poem, WBY makes this figure one of the Tuatha De Dan­ aan, who lures away the Fenian hero Oisin to a world apart from the mortal one (‘The Wan­ derings of Oisin’ (1889), I, 102–109): ‘Oisin, thou must away with me

To my own kingdom in the sea –

Away, away with me,’ she cried,

‘To shores by the wash of the tremulous

tide, Where the voice of change is the voice of a tune, In the poppy-hung house of the twilight fluted; To shores where dying has never been known, And the flushes of first love never have flown [. . .]

208 10

15

THE HOST

‘Arms are a-waving and lips apart; And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart.’ The host is rushing ’twixt night and day; And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caolte tossing his burning hair, And Niam calling, ‘Away, come away.’

The function of the line in this poem may be to point readers back to WBY’s earlier narrative in a kind of cross-reference (and these read­ ers, when the poem appears in CT, are reading a book of prose: they may still remain unac­ quainted with the rest of the author’s poetry). The earlier poem’s ‘Away, away with me’ is here reconfigured as ‘Away, come away’: this phras­ ing is in fact something of a commonplace in poetry, and by the later nineteenth century it works as partly a gesture towards Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poetic diction (with its meaning of ‘Come to me [i.e. away from where you are now]’); cp. e.g. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘The Forsaken Merman’, 28–29: ‘She will not come though you call all day; Come away, come away!’ An instance of this which WBY would probably have known is J. C. Mangan, in Anthologia Germanica Vol.2 (1845), ‘Home-Sickness’, 1–8: There calleth me ever a marvellous Horn,

“Come away! Come away!”

Is it earthly music faring astray,

Or is it air-born?

Oh, whether it be a spirit-wile

Or a forest-voice,

It biddeth mine ailing heart rejoice,

Yet sorrow the while!

6. thy] your NO. a mortal dream] Cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King (1859), ‘Merlin and Vivien’, 114–115: ‘ride, and dream | The mortal dream that never yet was mine’.

8.] WBY’s metre here may be slightly awk­ ward. The word ‘twilight’ is put into a posi­ tion where the major degree of accent falls on its second syllable, against the word’s natural accentual tendency. Whether or not ‘twilight’ is accorded the status of a quasi-spondee, with two consecutive accents, the phrase ‘the dim twilight’ is metrically unwieldy, as may be seen when its use by Thomas Dermody necessitates the reversal of his iambic line’s first foot, along with a minimizing of accent on ‘dim’: ‘To the dim twilight of her veily lawn’ (The Harp of Erin (1807), II, 38). 11. the deed of his hand] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Chants for Socialists (1885), ‘The Day is Com­ ing’, 9: ‘Then shall a man work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand’. 12. the hope of his heart] This matching term for 11 above may also be an echo of Morris: perhaps cp. Sigurd the Volsung (1876), ‘The Birth of Sigurd’, 64: ‘And the hope of her heart was quickened, and her joy was a living fire’. 13. ’twixt night and day] In one sense, this phrase means simply the time between night­ fall and dawn; but WBY’s ‘’twixt’, combined with the ‘rushing’ of the host, creates an idea of time as a distance physically covered (and such distances have already been specified at the beginning of the poem). Almost certainly by coincidence, the phrase had had a figura­ tive use before, in the hands of W. Morris – cp. The Earthly Paradise (1870), IV, ‘Bellerophon at Argos’, 128–129: ‘a woman clad in grey, | Like to the lingering time ’twixt night and day’.

136

[‘HE TREADS A ROAD OF

GLINT AND GLEAM’]

MS sources and date, and copy-text. This quatrain appears twice in WBY’s MS notebook from 1893 (Burns Collection, Boston College): it is first in pencil draft on p. 10, above a draft of ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ (MS1), and next appears in ink on p.  46 (MS2), facing a draft of ‘The Heart of the Woman’, and above eight lines of MS revision to that poem. There is evidence of a third version, quoted in R. Ellmann, Identity, 24 (Ellmann): this is cited by the critic as being from an unpublished MS, but since this has not been traced, the present copy-text is MS2. Ellmann, however, may well be later than MS2; if so, it records a rejection by WBY of the change in MS2 that discards the ‘God loves . . .’ construction, though it also elaborates the first line with the introduction of ‘dim ways’ (see note). There can be no good reason to suppose error or elaboration on the part of R. Ellmann as transcriber, and so his version is recorded in full in the notes. The Boston College notebook begins with work from late Aug. 1893, and the MS1 draft occurs just before the pages devoted to ‘On a Child’s Death’ and other MG-related poems, with one draft in this sequence dated ‘Sept. 5th 1893’. It is likely, then, that the first draft of ‘He treads a road . . .’ was composed at the end of Aug. or the first days of Sept. 1893. The sec­ ond draft in the notebook comes four pages after ‘I will not in grey hours revoke’, dated by WBY ‘March 10th 94’, so it is likely that MS2 is from Mar. 1894 or shortly afterwards. The poem is printed in UM, 98, and diplomatic transcriptions of MS1 and MS2 are in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 489.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-138

210

[‘HE TREADS A ROAD OF GLINT AND GLEAM’]

Copy-text: MS notebook, Boston College (MS2).

H

e treads a road of glint and gleam; To please Him well my rhyme must be A dyed and figured mystery, Thought hid in thought, dream hid in dream.

‘glint’ in MS1 and MS2, and prints this in 1–4.] UM: the reading is possible in MS1, but God loves dim ways of glint and gleam;

less so in MS2, and ‘glint’ is corroborated To please him well my verse must be

by Ellmann. A dyed and figured mystery;

Thought hid in thought, dream hid in 2. Him] him MS1. MS2 writes the uppercase H over an original lowercase, perhaps to agree dream. Ellmann with the initial version of line 1, and its ‘God dim ways] This phrase occurs in lines near loves the road of ’. WBY lets the uppercase H the end of one of W. Morris’s narrative poems stand after revising the first line; it is worth which may influence WBY’s entire quatrain, in noting that the first letter of ‘please’ is also The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘September’: ‘The given an upper case in MS2. Death of Paris’, 710–714: 3.] Cp. WBY’s poem of 1884,‘When to its end And to their ancient eyes it well might o’er-ripened July nears . . .’, 4–5: ‘a song should seem be | A painted and be-pictured argosy’. Lay tale in tale, as dream within a dream, 4. dream hid in dream] dreams hid in dreams Untold now the beginning, and the end MS1. This is Bornstein’s transcription of Not to be heard by those whose feet MS1, and that of the present editor (though should wend the second plural is less definite than the Long ere that tide through the dim ways first). However, line 1 in MS1 is ‘gleam’ rather of death. than ‘gleams’ (which the rhyme might seem to demand). For a possible echo of W. Morris, 1.] [God loves the del.] road of glint and see the earlier note. gleam MS1. G. Bornstein reads ‘ghost’ for

137

WISDOM AND DREAMS

Date of composition. The poem appears in WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), where it occupies the lower half of a page in the midst of a draft version of ‘The Host of the Air’ (MS). The notebook carries on its first page WBY’s ‘August 29th, 1893’. It may not be safe to assume that WBY interrupted the draft of ‘The Host of the Air’ to compose ‘Wis­ dom and Dreams’: the eight lines in the notebook feature no corrections and do not look like a typical first draft. WBY breaks off composition of ‘The Host of the Air’ with a thick black line, resuming his work on the next page; it is at least arguable that ‘Wisdom and Dreams’ was already present, and was composed ‘around’ (so to speak) by the poet in the notebook. However, Cornell WATR is incorrect in stating (39) that ‘Wisdom and Dreams’ had already been published before the notebook was begun: this mistake derives from an error in VE, where the poem is assigned to The Bookman for Dec. 1892 (rather than 1893). The poem was written after 29 Aug. 1893, though not necessarily after the latest dated item in the notebook before the page on which it is found (the draft of ‘On a Child’s death’). Publication history. This poem was first printed in The Bookman, Dec. 1893; it was never reprinted by WBY. Copy-text: The Bookman.

I

pray that I ever be weaving

An intellectual tune,

But weaving it out of threads

From the distaff of the moon. 5

Wisdom and dreams are one, For dreams are the flowers ablow, And Wisdom the fruit of the garden: God planted him long ago.

6. ablow] a-blow MS. For this rare poeticism, cp. KT, Ballads and Lyrics (1891), ‘Queen’s Roses’, 25–26: ‘Then your gold gown let down shall show | The loveliest roses ever ablow’. WBY’s admirer Nora Hopper used the word in Songs of the Morning (1900), ‘Wind Song’, 3: ‘Daffodils ablow, ablow’; and the word appealed strongly to Alfred Austin, who used

it often, including in Lyrical Poems (1891), ‘Letter from Italy’, 181: ‘Is the golden gorse ablow?’ and  – with calamitous unintended effect – ‘A Defence of English Spring’ 206: ‘Woodland nosegays all ablow’. 8. God planted him] Cp. Genesis 2:8, ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-139

138

ON A CHILD’S DEATH

Date and circumstances of composition. Composed in early Sept. 1893, with the most finished of three drafts bearing the date ‘Sept 5’. Like ‘The Glove and the Cloak’, which was written at the same time, this poem is directed to MG in her mourning for a child who was, as WBY was told initially, her adopted son. In fact, the dead child was Georges Gonne (Jan. 1890–Jul. 1891), MG’s son by the French politician Lucien Millevoye. WBY witnessed MG’s grief in 1891, when in Oct. she arrived in Ireland from France; it was in that autumn that the two became romantically closer, with MG eventually being initi­ ated, under the sponsorship of WBY, into the GD. More than a quarter of a century later, WBY recalled MG in Ireland earlier that summer (just when news of the baby Georges’ illness in France was reaching her); in making her sudden departure, MG had initially ‘told me in confidence that she had joined a secret political society and though she had come to look upon its members as self-seekers and adventurers she could not disobey this, the first definite summons it had sent to her’ (Mem., 47). Whether WBY believed any of this is not known, but he continues with news that reached him from MG in France after Jul. (Mem., 47): Then came a letter of wild sorrow. She had adopted a little child, she told me, some three years ago, and now this child had died. Mixed into her incoherent grief were accounts of the death bird that had pecked at the nursery window the day when it was taken ill, and how at sight of the bird she had brought doctor after doctor. If WBY recalls this correctly, it means that he believed MG had lost a ward of more than three years of age, rather than a seventeen-month-old infant. The 1916–1917 draft autobiography then moves directly to MG’s arrival back in Dublin in Oct. (Mem., 47–8): She returned to Ireland in the same ship with Parnell’s body, arriving at Kings­ town a little after six in the morning. I met her on the pier and went with her to her hotel, where we breakfasted. She was dressed in extravagantly deep mourn­ ing, for Parnell, people thought, thinking her very theatrical. We spoke of the child’s death. She had built a memorial chapel, using some of her capital. ‘What did money matter to her now?’ From another I learned later that she had the body embalmed. That day and on later days she went over again the details of the death – speech was a relief to her. She was plainly very ill. [. . .] We were DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-140

ON A CHILD’S DEATH

213

continually together; my spiritual philosophy was evidently a great comfort to her. We spoke often of the state of death, and it was plain that she was thinking of the soul of her ‘Georgette.’ The ‘memorial chapel’ (a mausoleum erected by MG in the cemetery of Samois sur Seine, the town 68 kilometres southeast of Paris that served as her French retreat) was to figure in subsequent events related to Georges’ death, when in Dec. 1893 MG and Mil­ levoye attempted to re-conceive there the soul of their dead child (resulting in the birth of a daughter, Iseult, in Aug. 1894). In WBY’s memory, MG in 1891 had sought mystical guidance from both George Russell and himself (Mem., 48): He [Russell] spoke of reincarnation, and Maud Gonne asked him, ‘How soon a child was reborn, and if [reborn] where?’ He said, ‘It may be reborn in the same family.’ I could see that Maud Gonne was deeply impressed, and I quieted my more sceptical intelligence, as I have so often done in her presence. I remember a pang of conscience. This ‘pang of conscience’ – one unconnected with the macabre story of attempted reconception – may have a role to play in this poem’s composition in Sept. 1893. In the spring of that year, WBY and MG had quarrelled in Dublin (according to WBY later, this was a disagreement over his activities in the National Literary Society, and in particular MG’s failure to disown J.F. Taylor: ‘I was also jealous of him, not because I thought him a suitor, but because he seemed to influence her mind in things where I alone should have influence, I believed’ (Mem., 66)). MG promptly became ill, and left Dublin for France. WBY did not see MG for the rest of the year, but at the end of Aug. began using the notebook, with its embroidered cover which she had given him, to compose new poems including ‘On a Child’s Death’. WBY’s motive for returning to MG’s grief of 1891 may be part of a more general resolution of their quarrel; it may also reflect MG’s continued anxieties about the possibilities of reincarnation and his ‘pang of conscience’ about the advice he and Russell had given in this matter; above all, though, it is connected with his concern about ‘the tumult of [MG’s] days’, and the ‘foolish blame and praise’ to which she was continually subject. The intensive work on this poem (interrupted only by ‘The Glove and the Cloak’, which draws on the same occasion in MG’s life) ends with a dated fair copy, and it is possible that WBY sent to poem to MG in Sept. or Oct. In a postscript to a letter to WBY of 13 Oct., MG writes simply: ‘Thank you for the poem but I  must ask you most earnestly not to publish it’ (G-YL, 51), and this may well refer to ‘On a Child’s Death’, though it is also pos­ sible that it refers to ‘The Glove and the Cloak’, which was written at the same time. (Whether MG was returning to the reincarnation theme around then in communica­ tions with WBY is unknown, but she had arranged for Millevoye (from whom she had previously broken) to join her in Samois sur Seine by Dec. for the attempt at Georges’ re-conception.) The poem’s repeated question, ‘Why did you take the star-like head?’, may register more in the way of rueful reflection about MG since 1891 than conven­ tional grief for the death of the infant Georges himself.

214

ON A CHILD’S DEATH

MSS and printings. The poem is found first in WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collec­ tion, Boston College). The earliest draft here (MS1) is on p. 12; a second draft (on the facing verso) is on p. 11 (MS2): its opening lines are repeated exactly on p. 14 (which may constitute part of WBY’s initial version: see note to 12–13). A third version is on p. 16 (MS3). A single sheet containing a text of the poem is inserted into AG’s copy of P99 in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University (MS4). WBY never published the poem, and it was first printed (from MS4) in a private limited edition by Colin Smythe in 1978. The poem was next printed (again from MS4) in R. Schuchard, ‘Yeats’s ‘On a Child’s Death’: A Critical Note’, YA 3 (1985), 190–192; it was subsequently included in UM, 99. MS  copy of 1899. Presenting AG with the newly published P99 on 10 May  1899, WBY included a sheet containing a MS  copy of ‘On a Child’s Death’. This is almost identical to the most advanced of the notebook drafts and, like it, carries the date ‘Sept 5, 1893’. There is no direct evidence for WBY’s motives in including this poem with his presentation of the book to AG. However, it is likely that the personal history of MG was a topic about which both he and AG had spoken recently, in the wake of MG’s momentous revelations to WBY in Dec.1898 about her relationship with Millevoye, the birth of Iseult, and the true parentage of Georges. In Feb. 1899, WBY returned to London from a fortnight in Paris (where he was again unsuccessful in his attempts to propose to MG), and saw a lot of AG from then until late Mar. MG was undoubtedly a figure of major concern for both, though AG’s feelings for her were considerably different from those of WBY. A copy of P99 was sent by the poet ahead of publica­ tion to MG, who told him (c. 4 May) ‘how beautiful those poems are . . . I have read them many times, I read them at night’ (CL 2, 405). When he sent the same book to AG the next week, WBY enclosed a poem that was six years old, but which addressed a crucial event (as he by now knew, but had not known so clearly either at the time of composition or in 1891) in the life of MG, whose ‘days’ since then had advanced into an ever-increasing ‘tumult’. Criticism and interpretation. Apart from a few mentions in biographical contexts, there has been little critical discussion of the poem. The brief commentary provided by R. Schuchard reads WBY’s ‘sentiment’ in the light of a certain sentimentality of its own, as ‘the poet’s tender lament for the loss of a child he never knew’: ‘Yeats possibly believed, as he became even more dejected in his suit, that the “adopted” child, had it lived, could have been his child, that it could have been the object of their unification and mutual tranquillity’ (Schuchard, YA 3 (1985), 191).

ON A CHILD’S DEATH

215

Copy-text: MS4, with some additional punctuation.

Y

5

10

ou shadowy armies of the dead, Why did you take the star-like head, The faltering feet, the little hand? For purple kings are in your band, And there the hearts of poets beat; Why did you take the faltering feet? She had much need of some fair thing To make Love spread his quiet wing Above the tumult of her days And shut out foolish blame and praise. She has her squirrel and her birds,

1.] armies of the dead] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘Ode to the Departing Year’, 58–9: ‘Mighty armies of the dead | Dance, like death-fires, round her tomb!’ and Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Sceptic’, 389: ‘Call up the count­ less armies of the dead’. 3. faltering feet] laughing voice del. faltering feet MS1. 4. For] The del. For MS1, MS2. 4. purple kings] Cp. ‘purple hours’ in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889) III, 319; but here WBY’s meaning is closer to OED purple adj.1.b. ‘poet.  and  rhetorical. Of a person: wearing or entitled to wear this colour; of imperial or royal rank. Now  rare.’ WBY’s phrase has a wholly unintended horticultural resonance, since ‘purple kings’ is the name commonly given to a species of verbena, com­ mon in the gardens of his time. It is possible, however, that the poet had come upon a work by the celebrated Transcendentalist writer, Theodore Parker (1810–1860), A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1847), where the opening of a chapter on ‘The Catholic Party’ says of the Catholic church (p. 384): ‘It grew as the Christian spirit extended among ruins of the old world, by the might of truth borne in its bosom overpowering the old worship, the artifice of priests, the selfish­ ness of the affluent, the might of the strong,

the cherished forms of a thousand years, the impotent armies of purple kings.’ 4^5.] Dante an[d] del. MS1. 6. faltering feet] WBY used this unusual phrase again in The Countess Kathleen as revised for P95: there, Aleel says of the dead heroine, ‘you may hear no more her falter­ ing feet’. 6^7.] For she did need before all things | The shelter of love’s quiet wings del. MS1. 7–8.] She need[ed] love before all things | And the warm shelter of his wings MS1; She needed some [small del.] fair things to love | That love might spread his [?wings] above MS2. 9. The [idle del.] barren [indeciph.] of her days MS2 [G. Bornstein reads [?tumult], but the word as written does not resemble the ‘tumult’ of MS1]. 9–10.] To [?heal] the tumult of her days | The furious round of blame and praise del. MS1 (Bornstein reads [?halt] in 9). If WBY first wrote ‘To heal’, this may be a trace of the influence on these lines of Mary Tighe, Psyche (1811), II 259: ‘To calm the dismal tumult of her fears’. 11–14.] It was MG’s habit to travel with a small menagerie of pet animals, especially birds. In a letter of 1899, WBY reported ‘from her sitting room’ of how ‘the room is full of the

216

15

ON A CHILD’S DEATH

But these have no sweet human words

And cannot call her by her name:

Their love is but a woodland flame.

You wealthy armies of the dead,

Why did you take the star-like head?

chirrups of siskins and larks and bullfinches, which she bought yesterday amid all her pre­ occupations, to let out in Phoenix Park’ (CL 2, 454). 12.] But they know not sweet human words MS2. 12–13.] Of childish [loves del.] hopes and childish care | No[r] any sweet and child­ ish prayer MS1. With these lines, the draft on p.  12 of the notebook comes to an end; Bornstein (Cornell Early Poetry 2, 490) sug­ gests that another draft of the first six lines of the poem, found on p.  14, is a continua­ tion of MS1 (presumably, WBY is thought of as moving from one recto to the next in

the notebook, with the verso p. 11 being used for a more advanced draft (MS2), and p. 13 being occupied by ‘Song of the Rosy Cross’). If this is correct, WBY intended to finish his poem (at the MS1 stage) with an almost exact recapitulation of its first six lines. While the present edition concurs with Bornstein that the text on p.  12 is indeed an earlier stage of composition than that on p. 11 (MS1 and MS2 respectively), it regards the status of the six draft lines on p. 14 as uncertain. 13–14.] They cannot call her by her name | [Their love is but a [indeciph.] weak flame del.] Their love’s a feeble woodland flame MS2.

139

THE GLOVE AND

THE CLOAK

Date and circumstances of composition. This poem seems to have been composed along­ side ‘On a Child’s Death’ in early Sept. 1893. Just as that poem dwells on the death of a child closely associated with MG (WBY at this stage had no idea that the child, Georges, was MG’s own by Lucien Millevoye – a fact he did not know for certain until 1898), so this piece seems to carry memories of MG dressed in mourning, as when WBY met her on her arrival in Dublin in Oct. 1891. The specific memory may be more recent than this, for ‘She has fooled me enough’ (3) suggests a quarrel, and MG and WBY had had severe disagreements in the spring of 1893, after which she returned to France. D. Toomey, in ‘Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne’, mentions this and ‘On a Child’s Death’ as ‘poems concerning the death of a child whom Yeats believed to be adopted’ (Toomey, 7). Context, text, and publication history. WBY includes the poem in two draft lists of contents, both contained in the 1893 MS book in which the only draft is found, now in the Burns Collection, Boston College (MS). In the first list, it is ‘Glove and Cloak’, before ‘The Cap and Bells’ and following ‘Mystical Prayer’ [‘Aedh Pleads with the Elemental Powers’]. This list seems to have been drawn up in spring 1894. A second list, at the back of the Boston College notebook, is more difficult to date, but could be from any time from 1893 to 1895 (or possibly even later). Here, ‘The Glove’ comes between ‘Mystical Prayer’ and ‘The Folk of the Air’ [‘The Host of the Air’]. The poem’s only appearance in print in WBY’s lifetime was in the publication Roma, Receuil Artistique International (1897). This was a charitable venture, organized for the benefit of an Italian foundation (Carita e Lavoro) by the Princess Pallavicini. The book had contributors including J.K. Huysmans, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Anatole France, and Maurice Maeterlinck; in English, there were contributions from Vernon Lee, Alfred Austin, and Arthur Symons, along with WBY’s poem. There is no evidence for how WBY was brought into this project; but the presence of Symons as a contributor may offer a clue: Symons and WBY were together in Paris in Dec. 1896 (when they attended a performance of Jarry’s Ubu Roi), and it is possible that both were approached as contributors to the charitable venture then. Roma appeared in the spring of 1897, and received English publicity in The Athe­ naeum for 8 May, as ‘A numero unico which is really unique’: ‘It is a large folio of forty-six pages, containing poems, articles, pictures, music, and facsimiles by writers, artists, and musicians of many countries’. Why WBY chose to give the publication a poem written four years previously, and this poem in particular, is open to speculation: most prob­ ably, he wished to contribute something which would have no immediate commercial value in the outlets publishing his current verse, and found himself searching for this in DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-141

218

THE GLOVE AND THE CLOAK

the 1893 notebook, which had had stopped using for composition at the end of 1895. The poem was not printed again in WBY’s lifetime, but appeared in Marion Witt, ‘An Unknown Yeats Poem’, Modern Language Notes 70/1 (Jan. 1955), 26. Here, Witt noted that the poem ‘refers apparently to Maud Gonne (Madam MacBride), who died recently in Dublin’, and added that ‘after more than half a century of oblivion, these sentimental verses have perhaps some biographical interest’. In 1956, Allt and Alspach included the poem in VE; it is included by R. Finneran in CW1. Copy-text: Roma (1897).

I

saw her glitter and gleam,

And stood in my sorrow apart,

And said: ‘She has fooled me enough’,

And thought that she had no heart.

5

10

I stood with her cloak on my arm

And said: ‘I will see her no more’,

When something folded and small

Fell at my feet on the floor, –

The little old glove of a child: I felt a sudden tear start, And murmured: ‘O long grey cloak, Keep hidden and covered her heart!’

Title] The Glove in the Cloak MS. 1. glitter and gleam] Perhaps cp. Christina G. Rossetti, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), ‘The Prince’s Progress’, 68–70: ‘Was she a maid, or an evil dream? | Her eyes began to glitter and gleam; | He would have gone, but he stayed instead’.

4. thought] The word in this position in the MS version is difficult to read, but it does not much resemble ‘thought’: one possible read­ ing is ‘thinking’. 7. folded and] wrapped up and MS. 12. and covered] and warm MS.

140

THE HOST OF THE AIR

Date of composition. In its first publication, WBY appended the date ‘October 1st, 1893’ to the poem. There is no need to doubt this, even though there seems to be no particular reason for WBY’s decision (if it was his decision) to publish the date. On 1 Oct. 1893, the poet was in Dublin (having travelled there, in the company of Lionel Johnson, in mid-Sept.), and was busy with plans for a new Irish literary magazine, as well as with preparing for the Young Ireland League’s commemoration event for Thomas Davis, at which he would speak on 14 Oct. Sources. The narrative material behind this poem makes its first appearance in an article by WBY from 1889 (‘Kidnappers’, Scots Observer 15 Jun. 1889): Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy and tree-bordered pond, a great gathering-place of water-fowl, called, because of its form, the Heart Lake. It is haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe, or wild duck. Out of this lake, as from the white square stone in Ben Bulben, issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it; suddenly one of them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round, and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home to find it was but fairy glamour. To this hour on the border of the lake is shown a half-dug trench – the signet of their impiety. A little way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of fairy kid­ napping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap, who sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as though she remembered the dancing of her youth. A young man going at nightfall to the house of his just-married bride, met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were fairies, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band. To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when she saw her old love, bade him welcome, but was most fearful lest he should eat the fairy food, and so be glamoured out of the earth into that bloodless, dim nation, wherefore she set him down to play cards with three of the cavalcade, and he played on, real­ izing nothing until he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms. Immediately he started up, and knew that they were fairies; for slowly all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to the house of his beloved. As he drew near came to him the cry of the keeners. She had died some time before he came. Some noteless Gaelic poet had made this into DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-142

220

THE HOST OF THE AIR

a forgotten ballad, some odd verses of which my white-capped friend remem­ bered and sang for me. WBY reprinted this as a chapter in The Celtic Twilight (publ. in Dec. 1893, and so per­ haps fresh in his mind in Oct., when the poem was composed). In the poem’s first print­ ing, in The Bookman for Nov. 1893, WBY supplied a prefatory note: I heard the story on which this ballad is founded from an old woman of Baleso­ dare, Sligo. She repeated me a Gaelic poem on the subject, and then translated it to me. I have always regretted not having taken down her words, and as some amends for not having done so, have made this ballad. Any one who tastes fairy food or drink is glamoured and stolen by the fairies. This is why Bridget sets O’Driscoll to play cards. ‘The folk of the air’ is a Gaelic name for the fairies. It is tempting to identify the ‘old woman’ here with WBY’s declared source for ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ (1888), which he said was ‘an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo’. The setting of the poem is close to Ballysodare: Heart Lake is Lough Achree (the Lake of the Heart), in Lady’s Brae at the foot of Knockalongy, the highest of the Ox Mountains in Co. Sligo. WBY’s original spelling (in both stages of MS draft, then in two subsequent printed versions) of ‘Heart’ is the commonly accepted form; and the name has been associated both with the shape of the Lough itself, and with a local legend of how a farmer, obliged to set free to roam a favourite white horse, had discovered that it fell from the high ground into the Lough, and all that was left of it, floating in the water, was its heart. Fairy associations seem to begin with WBY’s account, though the Lough was always regarded as unusual, and a story of its recent and dramatic formation was told in the Annals of the Four Masters (compiled in the mid-seventeenth century), where it resulted from an earthquake of c .1490. In fact, Loch Achree is in terms of geography a corrie, formed by glacial erosion on the side of the mountain. One probable source for WBY is Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), where a chapter is entitled ‘The Stolen Bride’ (I, 49–51). This gives a story from Co. Clare and not Co. Sligo, but centres on a man who (like O’Driscoll) ‘would go out alone to shoot the wild fowl at night’. One Samhain eve, he disturbs a fairy party who are in the process of bearing away a young woman, lying as though dead, whom they have stolen from her father. The hero brings her back to his home, but there for the next year she neither eats nor speaks; on the following Samhain, he overhears the same fairy troop discussing the case, and learns how to break the spell, which having duly done, he restores the girl to her father, and is then given her as his bride. This happy ending is of course quite different from WBY’s Bridget and O’Driscoll; but Wilde’s remark, that ending happily ‘is considered a great merit by the Irish, as they dislike a tale to which they cannot append, as an epilogue, the hearty and outspoken “Thank God” ’, perhaps offers a hint as to the poet’s preference for an unhappier narrative trajectory. A more down-to-earth aspect of the bride-abduction motif, though, is sug­ gested by another remark of Wilde’s, that some fairy tales ‘turn out childishly harmless,

THE HOST OF THE AIR

221

and their evil actions seldom go beyond stealing the neighbours’ butter, or abducting a pretty girl’. It is worth noting that the following chapter in Wilde’s book is on ‘Fairy Music’, and this may well resonate with the piping in the poem, with its dual nature of ‘sad’ and ‘gay’, and with WBY’s own domestic experience of his mother’s increasing paralysis and withdrawal from communication after 1889 (I, 52): It is sometimes possible, by the spells of a powerful fairy-man, to bring back the living from Fairy-land. But they are never quite the same after. They have always a spirit-look, especially if they have listened to the fairy music. For the fairy music is soft, and low, and plaintive, with a fatal charm for mortal ears. WBY may be indirectly influenced by William Allingham’s best-known poem, ‘The Fareies’, and in particular by one stanza (Irish Songs and Poems (1890), 29–40): They stole little Bridget For seven years long; When she came down again Her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back, Between the night and morrow, They thought that she was fast asleep, But she was dead with sorrow. They have kept her ever since Deep within the lake, On a bed of flag-leaves, Watching till she wake. Here, too, the name Bridget is a point of contact, which may perhaps be an allusion. The narrative of WBY’s ballad has affinities with the verse-play he composed shortly afterwards (mainly in Jan. 1894), The Land of Heart’s Desire. Here, too, a young, newly married wife is stolen from her husband by the fairies and dies – though now the dramatic setting is a domestic one. This much more elaborate work gives evidence that WBY was thinking seri­ ously in 1893–1894 about the possibilities of the abduction narrative as a way of framing tensions between the mortal and the more than mortal worlds, with a view to exploring (and partially celebrating) the glamour of the fairy dimension in contrast to a life of mun­ dane domesticity. The fairy child who entices the bride (Mary Bruin) away speaks explicitly against what the priest calls ‘home and love’ (The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), 37): Stay, and come with me, newly-married bride, For, if you hear him, you grow like the rest: Bear children, cook, be mindful of the churn, And wrangle over butter, fowl, and eggs, And sit at last there, old and bitter of tongue, Watching the white stars war upon your hopes.

222

THE HOST OF THE AIR

Mary represents WBY’s more dramatic and complex attitude to the stolen bride, of whom O’Driscoll’s Bridget is an earlier example. If the lines are used for a comparison with Bridget’s case in the ballad, they may suggest areas which WBY’s narrative leaves undetermined: how old, for example, is O’Driscoll, and how desirable, in fact, might be any escape from the domestic life he offers? On the other hand, Bridget shows some concern for her husband, and goes to some lengths to ensure that he does not partake of fairy hospitality and so allow himself to be enchanted also. (This concern may be genu­ inely for his wellbeing, though there is also the chance that Bridget wishes to be quite sure she is no longer to be troubled by his company.) Interpretation and reception. One of the more remarkable instances of early reception in WBY’s (or any other poet’s) oeuvre has been claimed for this poem by A. Bourke, ‘Reading a Woman’s Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, Feminist Studies 21/3 (1995), 553–586. Here, the events following the murder of a Co. Tipperary woman, Bridget Cleary, in Mar. 1895, are read with an eye to (amongst other factors) this poem as part of the culture which was exploited to explain (and even perhaps cause) the murder itself. Cleary’s husband assaulted his wife over a prolonged period, believing her to have been stolen away by the fairies with a senseless substitute left in her place. Finally, he burned her to death, and resorted to the nearest fairy rath to reclaim the true Bridget. Instead, he was tried, and ultimately convicted of manslaughter. Bourke reads contemporary newspaper reports and social context in the light of efforts to prove the Irish people under-civilized, and in relation to what she calls ‘Celtic Twilight and the Colonized Feminine’ (566): The stately, sad figure of Erin, large-eyed and dark-haired, although drawn from earlier Irish tropes about land and sovereignty as female, was an inven­ tion of the colonial process. It was particularly beloved of Yeats, one of the chief proponents of romantic Celticism. In 1893, two years before Bridget Cleary’s death, he published a poem called ‘The Stolen Bride’ [.  .  .] which remarkably anticipates the story told in rural Tipperary about Bridget and Michael Cleary. The central figure of this poem is a pre-Raphaelite Bridget: a bride with ‘long dim hair,’ whom the fairies sweep away before her hus­ band’s eyes. It may well have influenced the treatment of the Cleary case by the newspapers, which described it as ‘kin to the fairy romances of ancient times in Erin.’ Though it is probably unfortunate (from the point of view of this argument) that WBY’s poem pre-dated the immolation of Bridget Cleary, it is also unfortunately the case that any ‘influence’ from the poem on subsequent coverage lacks any kind of evidence. Nev­ ertheless, the real-life crime here – one which only with considerable difficulty can be interpreted as ideologically-conditioned – does serve as a reminder that WBY’s poem draws on folk beliefs that could still, in 1895, come lethally to the surface of rural life. The poet makes reference to this crime in his long essay ‘Away’ (1902), giving the opinions of ‘a woman from Mayo’, who ‘was very angry with the Tipperary countryman who burned

THE HOST OF THE AIR

223

his wife, some time ago’, but was able to combine superstition with humanity in her atti­ tude to the case: ‘She had no doubt that they only burned some dead person, but she was quite certain that you should not burn even a dead person’ (CW 10, 75). More orthodox forms of critical reception made the poem a widely appreciated part of WBY’s work, though it was seldom, if ever, subject to detailed reading, despite its fre­ quent citation as an artistic success. WBY’s sometime publisher, A.H. Bullen, composed a tune for the ballad, which WBY printed alongside Florence Farr’s musical notations of other works in an appendix to his essay ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ in 1907. Detailed modern discussions of the poem begin with C. Bradford, who offers a close reading of the drafts in the MS notebook; perceiving little complexity in the composition process, he sees WBY as ‘retelling a story in simple metrical form’, and speculates that ‘This theme attracted Yeats because it seemed to him to express his relations with Maud Gonne’ – though it is hard to see how the poem could reasonably ‘express’ those relations, at least as they are known – finally regretting that ‘In spite of these evidences that Yeats took normal care in writing ‘The Host of the Air,’ in spite of the fact that the poem grew out of Yeats’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne, it still seems all too facile’ (Bradford, 29–35). The poem is not the most fertile of WBY’s works for biographical criticism, it is true, but this should not be counted an aesthetic limitation. A.R. Grossman’s account, in which ‘the poet is eclipsed in his suit by the superior potency of the sidhe’ similarly neglects the poem’s narrative function, and ends up elevating events to a plane they cannot quite occupy, with the conclusion that this is ‘a dream poet making clear that the bride is only recovered in sleep and that she is the possession of the Eternal, and His alone’ (Grossman, 22, 164–165). Revisions in the text are interpreted more aesthetically by C. Meir, who writes how the poet’s scrapping of the original penultimate stanza ‘shows him changing the nature of his source: he clearly wanted to stress the equivocal ‘lyric emotion’ evoked by the symbolism of the pipe music, not the stark, factual detail of the folk original’ – though of course nothing is known of WBY’s ‘folk original’ or its details, ‘stark’ or otherwise (The Ballads and Songs of W.B. Yeats (1974), 40). Despite its date of composition being early in the series of poems that eventually made up WATR, S. Putzel identifies ‘The Host of the Air’ as partly programmatic within the volume: ‘As we listen to the narrative, we begin to hear and to visualize patterns of images that recall the symbolic images of The Secret Rose [1897] and that will recur throughout the lyric and narrative poems that follow’ (Putzel, 173). For N. Grene, the poem is ‘naturalizing the experience of a dream vision in all its ambiguity,’ and ‘The dream vision [. . .] allows for an open interpretation of its expressiveness: the haunted doubleness of the lived world, the vulnerability of love, the fears that are its repressed other’ (Grene, 58, 60). The poem’s aesthetic success relies upon its narrative merits, and not on its place in the evolution of Yeatsian motifs, preoccupations, or the other poems of WATR (even though it will play a significant role in the arrangement of that volume). Starting his work in the notebook which he had just recently begun to use (only the drafts for ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, another fairy poem, come before it), WBY attempted a story of romantic happi­ ness thwarted by supernatural intervention. The discipline of narrative – one tightened further by the decision to write in ballad form – inevitably (and deliberately) distances

224

THE HOST OF THE AIR

the material from WBY’s personal romantic struggles and unhappiness; but the note­ book itself in which he was writing had an embroidered cover given to the poet by MG, and the narrative he set out to tackle was one that carried personal resonance for him in the autumn of 1893: the tale of a man whose love is snatched away from him by powers beyond his comprehension and his control. It appears that WBY had not been in close contact with MG for some time (having last seen her in Nov. 1891); and, though he was in fact to hear from her and see her in the autumn of 1893, the relationship between the two at this time was not at one of its points of romantic intensity. MG is, then, an unlikely candidate for a ‘bride’ figure when the poem is written (she had refused, indeed, to marry the poet in the past); even so, it is conceivable that WBY regarded her as in some ways ‘stolen’ from him – by her work in and for France, ostensibly, though surely also he considered the likelihood of a French lover for MG, even though he knew noth­ ing about Lucien Millevoye in particular. The element of sexual anxiety that enters the poem in 33–36 cannot be entirely without its resonance in relation to WBY’s thoughts of MG while so distantly separated from her. As a narrative, the poem belongs with other stories of supernatural contact writ­ ten (and collected) by WBY: its focus is on O’Driscoll, the ordinary man whose life is touched by something beyond him, and which he cannot fully understand. In revision, WBY puts O’Driscoll more emphatically at the centre of events, so that this is less the story of Bridget’s abduction (and death) than of her husband’s strange involvement with the very forces that rob him of a normal life. While Heart (or Hart) Lake may be ‘drear’, there is nothing dreary about the fairy existence which O’Driscoll temporarily shares; rather, it makes itself known in a way that can only be conveyed through the paradox of ‘sad’ and ‘gay’. Nor, in fact, does this existence entirely vanish, even when the ‘Old men and young men and young girls’ have vanished, for WBY ends the poem by repeating its initial apprehension of the fairy music: the reality of the fairies is thus partially present in the very world from which it draws its victims. In WATR, this effect has some significance, since the volume as a whole is con­ cerned with the interactions between natural and supernatural worlds. In assembling the book, WBY placed this poem relatively early (it is the fifth item), as the first of four quatrain narratives (‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ is the eleventh in the overall sequence, ‘The Cap and Bells’ the twenty-second, and ‘The Blessed’ the twenty-ninth) which provide both a formal contrast to the other, shorter first-person lyrics and a generic contrast, in being stories. O’Driscoll would not make for a convincing voice in the lyric medium adopted by Michael Robartes, or Aedh, in WATR; but he is nevertheless evidence in the kinds of cases they present, of the potential for irresistible contact with the powers that are apart from mortal man. O’Driscoll’s permanent experience is of the fairy piper’s music, which continues and abides with him as a kind of fairy ‘stroke’. This establishes a type of the dislocation from the world of common experience which the first-person voices of the lyrics suffer or enjoy, in the lasting disruption of everyday reality by the force of an altogether distinct order of things. That O’Driscoll is rendered brideless is not irrelevant: the life of mortal love, even for wildfowlers in the Ox Moun­ tains, does not survive the touch of loves that are more than just mortal. As for the fate

THE HOST OF THE AIR

225

of Bridget, its sadness in terms of life is perhaps balanced by its gaiety in a realm than is other than merely life. Publication history. The poem first appeared in The Bookman, Nov. 1893 (B), and next in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (SBRC), before its inclusion in WATR. It was included in all collected editions by WBY thereafter. In the United States, the SBRC text was included in the selection of WBY in Edmund Clarence Stedman, A Victorian Anthology (1895), and this went into many impressions in the following years. MS versions and Note for WATR are included after the text of the poem below. Copy-text: P49.

O

’Driscoll drove with a song The wild duck and the drake

From the tall and the tufted reeds

Of the drear Hart Lake.

Title] No title MSa, MSb, The Stolen Bride B, The Folk of the Air SBRC. 3. the tall and the tufted reeds] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake I xiii 7–8: ‘Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face  | Could on the dark-blue mirror trace’; three lines before this, Scott mentions ‘the wild duck’s brood’. Perhaps also cp. William Allingham, Flower Pieces (1888), ‘The Maids of Elfin Mere’ (1855): ‘Years ago and years ago | And the tall reeds sigh as the wind doth blow’ (refrain). 4. drear] [dim del.] drear MSb. WBY’s choice of ‘drear’ establishes a distinct kind of poetic diction, perhaps connected especially with Keats: the effect is comparable to ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, st. xxxv, where Madeline can­ not tell whether Porphyro is man or image, alive or dead: ‘How changed thou art! How pallid, chill and drear!’ (311). ‘Drear’ is also used twice in the poem by Keats which comes closest to being a narrative of supernatural shape-changing and substitution, ‘Lamia’ (I, 150: ‘anguish drear’, I, 238: ‘indifference drear’). But the real sign of Keats’s presence at this stage of the poem may lie in the rhythm

of the line itself, which corresponds closely with that of the fourth line of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’; Keats’s opening stanza, more­ over, feels close to ‘the drear Hart Lake’: Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering; The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. The pattern of three crowded stresses is repeat­ edly marked in Keats’s literary ballad: ‘And made sweet moan’ (24), ‘I love thee true’ (28), ‘On the cold hill side’ (36 and 44), with ‘And no birds sing’ repeated as the final line (48) (version of the poem in in H.B. Forman (ed.), Poetical Works (1883)). Hart] Heart MSb, B, SBRC. It is not clear why WBY made this change of spelling, which removes altogether the element of translation from the Irish name, Lough Achree (the Lake of the Heart), and puts in its place a word sug­ gesting both deer and heraldry. It is possible that the change is intended to align the poem with other works in which the word ‘Hart’ fea­ tures as a name: in particular, the verse-play The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894, and included in P95), where a priest is named Father Hart,

226 5

THE HOST OF THE AIR

And he saw how the reeds grew dark

At the coming of night-tide,

And dreamed of the long dim hair

Of Bridget his bride.

and the poem ‘The Ballad of Father O’Hart’ (1888). Another factor may come into play, in an association with his source for the story, the ‘old woman of Ballisodare’ who is, in the 1889 ‘Kidnappers’ ‘a little old woman in a white cap, who sings to herself in Gaelic, and moves from one foot to the other as though she remem­ bered the dancing of her youth’ (see Sources): this was the person WBY calls Biddy Hart, and refers to often in his folklore-related writing: in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1889), he says that ‘Near the village of Balliso­ dare there is a little woman who lived amongst them [the fairies] for seven years,’ adding the detail that ‘When she came home she had no toes  – she had danced them off ’ (CW 6, 11). Biddy Hart is the prominent figure in WBY’s Introduction to his edition of Irish Fairy Tales (1892), though here she does not inhabit Bal­ lysodare (which is about four miles south of Sligo, and at the foot of the Ox Mountains), but has ‘a cottage on the slope of Ben Bulben’, and is near the village of Grange (to the north of Sligo). 5. how the reeds] where reeds MSb. 7. long dim hair] Besides its importance in this poem, the image would go on to be a significant one in the poems of WATR. ‘Dim hair’ is original (though perhaps vulnerable to literal readings: the hair cannot be dim in itself, but must appear dim either to some­ one whose view is obscured, or on account of overall visibility); but it is possible that WBY had come across its occurrence in a poem by Edward Bulwer Lytton (whose Rosicrucian novel, Zanoni was being read in GD circles): cp. Bulwer Lytton, Clytemnestra and Other Poems (1855), ‘Song’, 19–20: ‘You – the dew on your dim hair, | And the smile in your soft eyes!’ Noting ‘The Host of the Air’ as

the starting-point for WBY’s many images of long dim hair, J. Harwood draws attention to the importance of Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s play Axel (a performance of which WBY attended in Paris in the company of MG in Feb. 1894) as a literary site of ‘those sexual fears which he was later to dramatise’ (Har­ wood, 68). WBY quoted the character Sara in his article ‘A Symbolical Drama in Paris’ in Apr. 1894: ‘to veil you with my hair, where you will breathe the spirit of dead roses’ (CW 9, 236). Doubtless the poet felt emboldened by this French material to develop his own ‘long dim hair’ images in subsequent poems. This proliferation of hair imagery did not go unremarked: in 1908, a reviewer for Country Life listed some of the occurrences ‘all culled from a few consecutive pages’ in the poems as something of which ‘we grow tired’ (5 Dec. 1908). At the other end of the literary spec­ trum, Paul Elmer More, regretting how ‘no one can read [WBY’s] more recent produc­ tions without observing what may be called a defalcation of the mind’, seized on the recur­ rent hair imagery as evidence (Shelburne Essays: First Series (1909), 182): Out of curiosity I  counted the number of allusions to hair in the few poems that make up Mr. Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds, and found they mounted up to twenty-three. [. . .] There is a fragile beauty in these expressions, no doubt, but withal something troubling and unwholesome; one thinks of the less chaste descriptions of Arthur Symons or the morbid women of Aubrey Beardsley’s pencil rather than of the strong ruddy heroines of old Irish story. The trait is significant of much. 8. Bridget his bride] Bridget his ^new-wed^ bride MSb.

THE HOST OF THE AIR

10

227

He heard while he sang and dreamed A piper piping away,

Bridget] This is a perfectly ordinary Irish name, and as such entirely fitting for WBY’s narrative purposes here. In selecting it, how­ ever, the poet would have been aware of at least some of its connotations in Irish myth, and it is possible that he chooses the name in order to give the fictional bride the shadow of a mythic dimension. John Rhys, citing the ninthcentury Glossary of Cormac, wrote of a ‘Celtic goddess [. . .] called Brigit, poetess and seeress, worshipped by the poets of ancient Erinn [. . .] she was daughter of the Irish god known as Dagda the Great [. . .] and had two sisters who were also called Brigit, the one the patroness of the healing art, and the other of smith-work’ (Celtic Heathendom (1888), 74–5). WBY’s familiarity with this is clear from the materials relating to his programme of ‘Celtic Myster­ ies’ of the later 1890s. A document from Dec. 1898 specifies Bridget as the guardian of one of the four talismans of this Order, the Sword; another document of the time, a ‘Genealogy of the Irish Gods’ in WBY’s hand, lists Bridget as the daughter of the Dagda. A  possible (if subliminal) link might be present with Biddy [i.e. Bridget] Hart, and it is likely that William Allingham’s celebrated poem ‘The Faeries’ is an influence at work on both WBY’s choice of name and the poem more generally (see Sources). 9–12.] Cp. Lady Wilde’s description of ‘Fairy Music’ (Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), I, 53): It is remarkable that the Irish national airs – plaintive, beautiful, and unutterably pathetic – should so perfectly express the spirit of the Céol Sidhe (the fairy music)

as it haunts the fancy of the people and mingles with all their traditions of the spirit world. Wild and capricious as the fairy nature, these delicate harmonies, with their mystic, mournful rhythm, seem to touch the deepest chords of feel­ ing, or to fill the sunshine with laughter, according to the mood of the players; but, above all things, Irish music is the utter­ ance of a Divine sorrow; not stormy or passionate, but like that of an exiled spirit, yearning and wistful, vague and unrest­ ing; ever seeking the unattainable, ever shadowed, as it were, with memories of some lost good, or some dim foreboding of a coming fate – emotions that seem to find their truest expression in the sweet, sad, lingering wail of a pathetic minor in a genuine Irish air. The piper as imagined by WBY here may have some kinship with the Piper of the Introduc­ tion to W. Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789), ‘Piping down the valleys wild, | Piping songs of pleasant glee’ (1–2), ‘Piper pipe that song again, | So I piped, he wept to hear’ (7–8). Men­ tioning this, A.R. Grossman proposes that ‘The juxtaposition of ‘sad’ and ‘gay’ informs us that we are in the presence of that mystic moral­ ity which transcends the normal conditions of human emotion’ (Grossman, 164); but it would be unwise to assume that either sadness or gaiety is transcended by WBY’s lines, which are not in fact a ‘juxtaposition’, but an inclu­ sion of supposed opposites in which both (in a Blakean fashion) remain present and valid. 9. where he sang and dreamed] in his song and dream MSb.

228

THE HOST OF THE AIR

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

15

20

And he saw young men and young girls Who danced on a level place, And Bridget his bride among them, With a sad and a gay face. The dancers crowded about him And many a sweet thing said, And a young man brought him red wine And a young girl white bread. But Bridget drew him by the sleeve Away from the merry bands, To old men playing at cards With a twinkling of ancient hands.

25

The bread and the wine had a doom, For these were the host of the air; He sat and played in a dream Of her long dim hair.

11–12.] George Russell’s [AE’s] poem ‘Inheri­ tance’ was published in his Homeward: Songs By the Way (1894), but it is likely that WBY had read it before this; the concluding lines may have furnished a hint for the ‘sad’/’gay’ contrast: ‘So, wise, and filled with sad and gay | You pass unto the further day’ (23–24). After the first publication of WBY’s poem, but before its appearance in WATR, KT drained his lines almost entirely of their strength: The Wind in the Trees (1898), ‘Autumn Day’, 5–6: ‘Singing so sad and gay | Of summers over and done’. 17.] And ^the dancers [came crowding del.]^ then they crowded about him MSb. 19. red wine] The element of luxurious enter­ tainment here is possibly to be associated with the riches of the fairies: it is hard to imagine that O’Driscoll is accustomed to this on either his wildfowling trips or at home. Nevertheless, WBY does present the wealthy rural household of the Bruin family in The

Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) as offering red wine to visitors. 20. a young girl] a merry young girl MSb. 23.] Two versions of this line in MSb: ‘To where old men were at cards’ with deletions rev. to ‘Unto old men who played at the cards’. 25–28.] For the bread and the wine brought doom

For these were the folk of the air;

And he played at the cards in a dream

In a dream of her long dim hair. MSb.

26. host] folk B, SBRC. WBY’s decision to adopt ‘host’ aligns this poem with ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, but it also allows for a moment of frisson in such close conjunction to the already eucharist-like white bread and red wine of the fairy food. The ‘host’ are the fairies and not – as it takes a moment to reg­ ister – anything to do with consecrated bread. 27. sat] sat down B.

THE HOST OF THE AIR

30

35

40

229

He played with the merry old men And thought not of evil chance, Until one bore Bridget his bride Away from the merry dance. He bore her away in his arms, The handsomest young man there, And his neck and his breast and his arms Were drowned in her long dim hair. O’Driscoll scattered the cards And out of his dream awoke: Old men and young men and young girls Were gone like a drifting smoke; But he heard high up in the air A piper piping away, And never was piping so sad, And never was piping so gay.

36^37.] Two verses here in B and SBRC give a dif­ ferent version of 37–40, and an additional stanza, which makes it clear that Bridget is dead: O’Driscoll got up from the grass,

And scattered the cards with a cry,

But the old men and dancers were gone,

As a cloud faded into the sky.

He knew now the folk of the air,

And his heart was blackened by dread,

And he ran to the door of his house;

Old women were keening the dead;

The lines appear in MSb., with many signs of difficulty in their composition: O’Driscoll got up in a rage And scattered ^the^ cards with a cry, But the [old del.][young del.] [young del.] old men and [girls del.] dancers were gone As a ^cloud^ faded into the sky. [He knew [who the dancers were] [now the old men and da[?ncers] del.] [And his [?heart] del.] He knew now the folk of the air And his heart was blackened by dread And he ran to [his cabin door del.] the door of his house

[And he found del.] [And del.] Old women were keening the dead; The first of these stanzas is separately redrafted two pages on in the notebook: O’Driscoll scattered the cards And out of his ^the^ dream awoke Old men, ^and^ young men, and young girls Were gone like a fading smoke. WBY’s removal of the stanza making clear the fact of Bridget’s death did not meet with the approval of Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote from Tokyo to the poet on 22 Jun. 1901 to object to what had been done to the poem: ‘You have mangled it, maimed it, deformed it, extenuated it – destroyed it totally. You have really sinned a great sin! Do try to be sorry for it! Reprint the original version – tell critics to go to perdition, if they don’t like it  – and, above all things, n’y touchez plus!’ WBY’s reply deplored ‘blackened by dread’ as ‘threadbare’ and ‘rhetorical’, and claimed to ‘doubt if the stanza is wanted at all,’ adding that he liked ‘to close so short a poem with a single unbroken mood’: ‘Surely the stanza merely tells, without rhythmical charm, what is implied by the other stanzas’ (CL 3, 101–102).

230

THE HOST OF THE AIR

MS versions. WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College) contains exten­ sive drafts for the poem, consisting of two versions, written in sequence (MSa and MSb). Readings for the more advanced of the drafts, MSb, are recorded in the notes to the poem; but since MSa has more numerous differences from the printed texts, it is repro­ duced here for convenience in its entirety. Reproductions of the notebook pages with diplomatic transcriptions are provided in Cornell WATR, 28–47. A transcription with commentary first appeared in C. Bradford, Yeats at Work, 28–35. MSa: MacMara drove with a song

The wild duck and the drake

From the tall and tufted reeds

Of the dim Heart Lake.

And he saw the [tall del.] reeds darken

At the coming of night tide

And dreamed of the long brown hair

Of Bridget his bride.

He heard in his song and dream

A piper piping away

[And never was there piping so mournful del.]

And never was piping [as del.] so sad

And never was piping [as del.] so gay.

And he saw [that del.] young men and ^young^ girls [Danced del.] Who danced on a level place And Bridget his bride [danced with them del.] among them With a sad and a merry face. And then they crowded about him

And many a sweet thing said

And a young man brought him red wine

And a merry young girl white bread.

[But Bridget took hold of his sleeve

And led him away from the throng

To where old men were at cards del.]

And he went with his dr[?ive] and his song.

But Bridget ^his bride^ drew him by the sleeve

Away from the dancing bands

[To where old men were at [play del.] cards

Twinkling their del.]

To old men sitting at cards

And a ^the^ twinkling of ancient hands.

THE HOST OF THE AIR

231

She had fear of bread and the wine

Of [?those] people of the air

But he sat and played in a dream

A dream of her long brown hair.

He played with the merry old men

[Nor had he thought of home

Till his Bridget del.]

And he thought not of evil chance

Until one bore Bridget his bride

Away in his arms from the dance.

And then he stood up in a rage

And scattered the cards on the ground

[But the pipers, the dancers and old del.]

But the old men, the young men and girls

Faded away like a cloud.

[And he knew who the dancers were

And his heart was black [^then^ del.] with dread del.]

He bore her away in his arms

The handsomest young man there

And his breast and his face and his arms

Were drowned [by del.] in her long dim hair.

He knew who the dancers were

And his heart was black [?with] dread

And he ran to his cabin door

[And del.] Old women there keened for the dead.

But he heard high up in the air

A piper piping away

And never was piping [as del.] so sad

And never was piping so gay.

Note for WATR: WBY provides a long, discursive note in 1899 which, although it par­ tially repeats the source note from B, launches out on a much larger disquisition: Some writers distinguish between the Sluagh Gaoith, the host of the air, and Sluagh Sidhe, the host of the Sidhe, and describe the host of the air as of a peculiar malignancy. Dr. Joyce says, ‘of all the different kinds of goblins . . . air demons were most dreaded by the people. They lived among clouds, and mists, and rocks, and hated the human race with the utmost malignity.’ A very

232

THE HOST OF THE AIR

old Arann charm, which contains the words ‘ Send God, by his strength, between us and the host of the Sidhe, between us and the host of the air,’ seems also to distinguish among them. I am inclined, however, to think that the distinction came in with Christianity and its belief about the prince of the air, for the host of the Sidhe, as I have already explained, are closely associated with the wind. They are said to steal brides just after their marriage, and sometimes in a blast of wind. A man in Galway says, ‘At Aughanish there were two couples came to the shore to be married, and one of the newly married women was in the boat with the priest, and they going back to the island; and a sudden blast of wind came, and the priest said some blessed words that were able to save himself, but the girl was swept.’ This woman was drowned; but more often the persons who are taken ‘get the touch,’ as it is called, and fall into a half dream, and grow indifferent to all things, for their true life has gone out of the world, and is among the hills and the forts of the Sidhe. A faery doctor has told me that his wife ‘got the touch ‘at her marriage because there was one of them wanted her; and the way he knew for certain was, that when he took a pitchfork out of the rafters, and told her it was a broom, she said, ‘ It is a broom.’ She was, the truth is, in the magical sleep, to which people have given a new name lately, that makes the imagination so passive that it can be moulded by any voice in any world into any shape. A mere likeness of some old woman, or even old animal, some one or some thing the Sidhe have no longer a use for, is believed to be left instead of the person who is ‘away;’ this some one or some thing can, it is thought, be driven away by threats, or by violence (though I  have heard country women say that violence is wrong), which perhaps awakes the soul out of the magical sleep. The story in the poem is founded on an old Gaelic ballad that was sung and translated for me by a woman at Ballisodare in County Sligo; but in the ballad the husband found the keeners keening his wife when he got to his house. She was ‘swept’ at once; but the Sidhe are said to value those the most whom they but cast into a half dream, which may last for years, for they need the help of a living person in most of the things they do. There are many stories of people who seem to die and be buried – though the country people will tell you it is but some one or some thing put in their place that dies and is buried – and yet are brought back afterwards. These tales are perhaps memories of true awakenings out of the magical sleep, moulded by the imagination, under the influence of a mystical doctrine which it understands too literally, into the shape of some well-known traditional tale. One does not hear them as one hears the others, from the persons who are ‘away,’ or from their wives or husbands; and one old man, who had often seen the Sidhe, began one of them with ‘ Maybe it is all vanity.’ Here is a tale that a friend of mine heard in the Burren hills, and it is a type of all: –

THE HOST OF THE AIR

‘There was a girl to be married, and she didn’t like the man, and she cried when the day was coming, and said she wouldn’t go along with him. And the mother said, ‘Get into the bed, then, and I’ll say that you’re sick.’ And so she did. And when the man came the mother said to him, ‘You can’t get her, she’s sick in the bed.’ And he looked in and said, ‘That’s not my wife that’s in the bed, it’s some old hag.’ And the mother began to cry and to roar. And he went out and got two hampers of turf, and made a fire that they thought he was going to burn the house down. And when the fire was kindled, ‘Come out now,’ says he, ‘and we’ll see who you are, when I’ll put you on the fire.’ And when she heard that, she gave one leap, and was out of the house, and they saw, then, it was an old hag she was. Well, the man asked the advice of an old woman, and she bid him go to a faery-bush that was near, and he might get some word of her. So he went there at night, and saw all sorts of grand people, and they in carriages or riding on horses, and among them he could see the girl he came to look for. So he went again to the old woman, and she said, ‘If you can get the three bits of blackthorn out of her hair, you’ll get her again.’ So that night he went again, and that time he only got hold of a bit of her hair. But the old woman told him that was no use, and that he was put back now, and it might be twelve nights before he’d get her. But on the fourth night he got the third bit of blackthorn, and he took her, and she came away with him. He never told the mother he had got her; but one day she saw her at a fair, and, says she, ‘That’s my daughter; I know her by the smile and by the laugh of her,’ and she with a shawl about her head. So the husband said, You’re right there, and hard I worked to get her.’ She spoke often of the grand things she saw underground, and how she used to have wine to drink, and to drive out in a carriage with four horses every night. And she used to be able to see her husband when he came to look for her, and she was greatly afraid he’d get a drop of the wine, for then he would have come underground and never left it again. And she was glad herself to come to earth again, and not to be left there.’ The old Gaelic literature is full of the appeals of the Tribes of the goddess Danu to mortals whom they would bring into their country; but the song of Midher to the beautiful Etain, the wife of the king who was called Echaid the ploughman, is the type of all. O beautiful woman, come with me to the marvellous land where one listens to a sweet music, where one has spring flowers in one’s hair, where the body is like snow from head to foot, where no one is sad or silent, where teeth are white and eyebrows are black.. cheeks red like foxglove in flower . . . Ireland is beautiful, but not so beautiful as the Great Plain I call you to. The beer of Ireland is heady, but the beer of the Great Plain is much more heady. How marvellous is the country I am speaking of ! Youth does not grow old there. Streams with warm flood flow there; sometimes mead,

233

234

THE HOST OF THE AIR

sometimes wine. Men are charming and without a blot there, and love is not forbidden there. O woman, when you come into my powerful country you will wear a crown of gold upon your head. I will give you the flesh of swine, and you will have beer and milk to drink, O beautiful woman. O beautiful woman, come with me!

141

[‘VEERING, FLEETING,

FICKLE, THE WINDS

OF KNOCKNAREA’]

Date of composition. The poem is likely to have taken shape in early 1894, and would have been part of the text of WBY’s story ‘Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan’ sent to W.E. Henley for The National Observer, probably by Jul. 1894. It is not clear that that the short story and the poem were composed together, and it is at least possible that the poem was writ­ ten (or begun) first, and the short story incorporating it was written a little later. The MS material that survives suggests that WBY started composition in the first months of 1894, and certainly before Mar. of that year. Sources. In providing a song for his protagonist, the poet O’Sullivan the Red (see Fictional context), WBY draws ultimately on an eighteenth-century Irish poem by Liam Dall Ó hIfearnáin (William Heffernan the Blind). WBY had been aware of O’Heffernan for some time, and referred to him in his ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ article for The Leisure Hour (1889) as ‘Heffernan, the blind, who in his old age loved to stand lis­ tening while the ploughboys in the hedge school droned out some Greek poet’ (CW 9, 96). That poem, which is a work of Jacobite propaganda, invokes the figure of Kathleen ni Houlihan in its refrain. WBY knew translations of this by J.C. Mangan and Edward Walsh. Mangan in fact produced two poems which are versions of this material. His first translation (originally in the Irish Penny Journal, 1841) is as follows: Long they pine in weary woe, the nobles of our land,

Long they wander to and fro, proscribed, alas! and banned;

Feastless, houseless, altarless, they bear the exile’s brand;

But their hope is in the coming-to of Kathaleen Ny-Houlihan!

Think her not a ghastly hag too hideous to be seen,

Call her not unseemly names, our matchless Kathaleen!

Young she is, and fair she is, and would be crowned a queen,

Were the king’s son at home here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlihan!

Sweet and mild would look her face, O none so sweet and mild,

Could she crush the foes by whom her beauty is reviled;

Woollen plaids would grace herself, and robes of silk her child,

If the king’s son were living here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlihan!

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-143

236

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

Sore distress it is to see the arbitress of thrones

Vassal to a Saxaneen of cold and sapless bones!

Bitter anguish wings our souls; with heavy sighs and groans

We wait the young deliverer of Kathaleen Ny-Houlihan!

Let us pray to Him who holds life’s issues in his hands,

Him who formed the mighty globe, with all its thousand lands;

Girdling them with seas and mountains, rivers deep, and strands,

To cast a look of pity upon Kathaleen Ny-Houlihan!

He who over sands and waves led Israel along,

He who fed with heavenly bread that chosen tribe and throng,

He who stood by Moses when his foes were fierce and strong, –

May He show forth His might in saving Kathaleen Ny-Houlihan!

Another poem by Mangan which is derived from O’Heffernan, and was also known to WBY, appeared (amongst other places) in John O’Daly (ed.), Poets and Poetry of Munster (3rd. edn., 1884): In vain, in vain we turn to Spain – she heeds us not.

Yet may we still, by strength of will, amend our lot.

O, yes! our foe shall yet lie low – our swords are drawn!

For her, our Queen our Caitilin Ni Uallachain!

Yield not to fear! The time is near – with sword in hand

We soon will chase the Saxon race far from our land.

What glory then to stand as men on field and bawn,

And see all sheen our Caitilin Ni Uallachain!

How tossed, how lost, with all hopes crossed, we long have been!

Our gold is gone; gear have we none, as all have seen.

But ships shall brave the Ocean’s wave, and morn shall dawn

On Eire green, on Caitilin Ni Uallachain!

Let none believe this lovely Eve outworn or old –

Fair is her form; her blood is warm, her heart is bold.

Though strangers long have wrought her wrong, she will not fawn –

Will not prove mean, our Caitilin Ni Uallachain!

Her stately air, her flowing hair – her eyes that far

Pierced through the gloom of Banba’s doom, each like a star;

Her songful voice that makes rejoice hearts Grief hath gnawn,

Prove her our Queen, our Caitilin Ni Uallachain!

We will not bear the chains we wear, not bear them long.

We seem bereaven, but mighty Heaven will make us strong.

The God who led through Ocean Red all Israel on

Will air our Queen, our Caitilin Ni Uallachain!

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

237

A further translation, by Edward Walsh in Irish Popular Songs (2nd edn., 1883), may also influence WBY’s poem: How sad our fate, driven desolate o’er moor and wild,

And lord and chief, in gloom and grief, from home exiled,

Of songs divine, and feasts and wine, and science lorn,

We pine unseen for Caitilin ni Uallachán.

Suppose not now that wrinkled brow, or unkempt hair,

Or long years’ rigour did e’er disfigure the queenly Fair –

Her numerous Race would find their place on Erin’s lawn,

If the prince had been with his Caitilin ni Uallachán.

Fair were her cheek could we live to wreak the foeman’s rout,

And flags would gleam to the breeze’s stream o’er victory’s shout;

And richest plaid on the happy maid would trail the lawn,

If the prince had been with his Caitilin ni Uallachán.

We raise our eyes with suppliant cry to the Lamb of Grace

Who formed the tide – did the lands divide – gave hills their place –

Who spread around the seas profound, and bay, and lawn –

To change the scene for Caitilin ni Uallachán.

Who Israel led where the Red Sea sped its waves of fear,

His table spread with Heaven’s blest bread for forty year,

In favouring hour gave Moses power and freedom’s dawn,

Shall come to screen his Caitilin ni Uallachán!

The main influence of these sources is of a general nature: structurally, WBY adopts a quatrain pattern, in which Kathleen dominates a fourth-line refrain; thematically, the O’Heffernan versions offer him suggestions of ways in which to embed the mother Ireland figure in both a quasi-religious context of veneration, and in larger evoca­ tions of Ireland itself. What is perhaps most notable, however, is the extent to which WBY strips O’Heffernan of his specifically Jacobite political content, in the process promoting hugely the importance of Irish places and landscape. Ole Munch-Pedersen, in ‘Some Aspects of the Rewriting of W.B. Yeats’s ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’’, Orbis Litterarum 36 (1981), 155–172 sees the triple-adjective runs in the poem (in the first and third lines of each stanza) as being influenced by Mangan’s ‘Feastless, houseless, altarless’ formation, and remarks that more generally there is ‘nothing in the original which could have suggested Mangan’s pattern of three co-ordinate adjec­ tives’ (161). Textual and publication history. Several pages of drafts are contained in the white notebook begun in 1893, now in the Burns Collection, Boston College. It is clear that the initial pages are a very rough draft indeed (and surely the first one): these occupy three pages of the notebook, and the beginning of a fourth; WBY resumes composition (with something much closer to the form and content of the eventual poem) on this fourth

238

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

page, turning his notebook horizontally to accommodate the now longer lines, with drafts of the three stanzas over two pages. To reflect the clear difference between these two stages of composition, the notes here record the first phase as MSa and the second as MSb. Given the largely illegible state of MSa, it is tempting to find an explanation in WBY’s letter to John O’Leary of 15 Apr. 1894, informing him that ‘I have been unable to write for the last three weeks as I have been in the hands of the oculist and without glasses. . . . The left eye is now practically useless . . . I suppose I shall have to very much drop reviewing and take to stories entirely which will be better artistically at any rate’ (CL 1, 385). If the drafts were being made in Jan. or Feb., there is clear evidence that by then WBY already stood in need of an oculist’s attention. The poem was first published as part of the story ‘Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan’ in The National Observer, 4 Aug. 1894. It next appeared (again as part of that story) in The Celtic Twilight (1897): this heavily revised version is edited separately in the present edition. Ultimately, after further radi­ cal revision, a version of the poem entered the oeuvre of WBY’s poetry as ‘Red Hanhra­ han’s Song About Ireland’ in In the Seven Woods and subsequent collected editions: this too has been separately edited for the present edition. MS drafts. MSa, in ink, represents an early (and extremely rough) phase of com­ position. The verses as drafted have the look of quatrains (and WBY begins simply with a pattern of four horizontal pen-lines), but from what can be made out in this largely indecipherable version it seems that the material here has largely the charac­ ter of a prose (or rather, perhaps, an unversified) preparation for the poem proper. WBY starts with the line, ‘You are eternal O Mother Eri’, and goes on to contrast this eternal figure with the lives ‘we’ lead: ‘You are pure as a foam on the rocks | But we are low as the clay’. ‘Mother Eri’ is addressed at the beginning of three further fourline blocks, and is again called ‘pure’; ‘we’ are compared to ‘the waves on the strand of Cum[men]’ while also being ‘weak as the worm’. Rhyme seems to emerge as WBY goes on drafting the lines: ‘Our hearts are as full of clay | As the Garavogue when [the floods del.] water flows from the bay’. A further four-line block (which men­ tions ‘feet’) is cancelled through, and this is followed by a further four lines, almost completely indecipherable. A final four lines, just before WBY begins composition of MSb, again begins with address to ‘Mother Eri’, and has the exhortation ‘let us’, ending with a line that begins ‘Who die[s/d] for’, and ends indecipherably, perhaps again with the word ‘land’. MSb starts on the same page, and contains more that can be read than the preceding pages: In their long robes of vapour the winds are at play In their robes of vapour the loud winds [In their long del.] robed ^in light and vapour^ [nightwinds del.] the winds [?of blighting] stray, Veering, ^fleeting^ floating, rushing round cairn-heap[ed] Knocknarea, And veering, fleeting, fickle, our bitter hearts this day, But we kiss the quiet foot-print ^feet [of Eri del.] Of Eri our Mother.

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

239

Veering, fleeting, fickle, upon cairn-heaped Knocknarea

In their robes of light and vapour the winds [?of blighting] stray,

[? For Eri] our love and anger a double blighting meet, But we [bow down del.] slowly down to kiss the quiet feet [Of Eri our Mother del.] Of Kathleen Ni Houlihan. Worn and weak and weary are the waves of Cummen Strand, For the winds come blowing to there across [indeciph.] hilly land, Worn and weak and weary our souls ^hearts^ have [?dared and died] But [rest of line indeciph.] [?as our] Kathleen Ni Houlihan. Dull and dark and earthy the Garavogue goes by, When the keen rains are [?slanting] [out of del.] across the winter sky, Dull and dark and earthy our souls and bodies be, But pure as any white in the home of the Trinity Is our Kathleen Ni Houlihan. Clearly, there is still some distance to be covered between these drafts and the poem as eventually printed. One interesting aspect of the early stages of composition is that WBY began with invocation of ‘Eri, our Mother’ rather than Kathleen Ni Houlihan: it may be that he is returning initially to his poem ‘The Watch-Fire’ (1892) which contains both this phrase and a close variation upon it (see notes on the poem). The importance of a Sligo setting is apparent: although the Garavogue river disappears from the printed ver­ sion, both Knocknarea and Cummen Strand are already present at this early stage. All of the drafts are, even by the standards of WBY, extremely difficult to read (see Textual and publication history), and transcription involves a great deal of guesswork. For a fuller alternative transcription, with reproductions of the MS  pages, see David Holdeman’s Cornell ‘In the Seven Woods’ and ‘The Green Helmet and Other Poems’: Manuscript Mate­ rials (2002), 56–68. Fictional context and interpretation. WBY’s story ‘Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan’ features the poet Owen O’Sullivan the Red, who is relieved in his wanderings by a woman rejected by polite society, Margaret Rooney, by being taken in to dwell with her and another woman (also of doubtful repute), called Mary Gillis. O’Sullivan’s fame as a poet draws attention and some prosperity to the house, but the story makes its focus a moment of melancholy, when O’Sullivan performs one of the ‘poems disguising a passionate patriotism under the form of a love-song addressed to Rosseen Dubh or Kathleen-NyHoolihan or some other of the personifications of Ireland’: Suddenly he ceased to sing and his eyes became dim, as though he gazed upon distant things. Mary Gillis, who was pouring some potheen into a naggen upon a three-legged stool at his feet, ceased to pour, and said, ‘Are you thinking of leaving us?’

240

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

Margaret Rooney heard the words without seeing their cause, and taking them too seriously, got up from her place by the hearth and came over to him, her heart full of the fear of renewed poverty, of weary tramps with a basket of herrings on her head, and of the loss of so wonderful a companion and of the importance that he gave her house. ‘You would not do that, my honey?’ she said, catching him by the hand. ‘No,’ he said, laying his hand upon her head. ‘I am thinking of Ireland and her sorrows.’ Then he began to sing these words to a wild, fitful air of his own, which rose and fell like the cry of the wind among the reeds: [The poem follows here.] While he sang he became greatly moved, and a tear rolled down his cheek, and Margaret Rooney put her face upon her hands and wept too. The situation WBY imagines here is in some ways a suggestive one as regards his ideas of poetry, the poet, and the love of women in the early 1890s. It is also note­ worthy that the poem is cued with an allusion to the title which WBY already had in mind for the next book of his own original verse – though this would not, in fact, see the light of day for another five years. The degree to which this is a poem belonging to WBY, and the extent to which it is a piece of fictional expression, are not easy to determine, and not easy even for the poet himself. In Sept. 1894, when the poet Alice Milligan wrote requesting a copy, WBY had to apologize for not having one to hand, and went on (CL 1, 399): I fear it would disappoint you for it is rather a dramatic utterance than a per­ sonal expression. I  have often noticed that Irish men who have no personal dignity or nobility will yet have a true and devoted love for their country and I have made a story to describe this and put the song into it. This explains a certain amount about the poem, though it also brings up the question of how far WBY is here addressing himself to Irish nationalism from a detached perspec­ tive – detachment, in this case, being a matter both of class and religious background. O’Sullivan’s status as essentially a vagabond means he has ‘no personal dignity’, and must thus be approached by WBY (for whom this was not a conspicuous lack) in a dramatic fashion; but the character’s Catholicism presents a trickier problem for WBY’s dramatic imagination. The dramatized poet’s devotion to Kathleen Ni Hoolihan is designed to fall into step with what WBY (and many of his readers) would associate with Irish peasant devotion to the Virgin Mary, but this raises difficulties, not least the implicit equivalence between nationalism and Marian devotion.

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

241

Copy-text: The National Observer 4 Aug. 1894.

V 5

10

eering, fleeting, fickle, the winds of Knocknarea, When in ragged vapour they mutter night and day, Veering, fleeting, fickle, our loves and angers meet: But we bend together and kiss the quiet feet Of Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan. Weak and worn and weary the waves of Cummen Strand, When the wind comes blowing across the hilly land; Weak and worn and weary our courage droops and dies But our hearts are lighted from the flame in the eyes Of Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan. Dark and dull and earthy the stream of Drumahair When the rain is pelting out of the wintry air;

1. Knocknarea] WBY had already at this point composed ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ (as ‘The Host’), in which the name of this Sligo moun­ tain also occupies the prominent position of the end of the opening line (see note to poem). It may be that he intends his fictional poet here to anticipate, as it were, from the Irish eighteenth century the nineteenth-cen­ tury (and non-fictional) poet WBY. Knock­ narea overlooks Sligo town, and can be seen from much of the surrounding parts of Co. Sligo. Its mythological associations (also see note to ‘The Host’, 1) are of little relevance to this poem, which employs Knocknarea instead as a landmark, immediately establish­ ing the location of the vagabond poet who is its fictional author. 5. Kathleen Ni Hoolihan] Kathleen, the daugh­ ter of Hoolihan. This figure, of a woman of innate nobility, reduced to a low degree in the world by prevailing political injustice and a conqueror’s oppression, whose restora­ tion to full dignity of position relies on the courage and initiative of her followers, has its origins in eighteenth-century Irish Jacobit­ ism. Kathleen appears in the poem translated by Mangan and Walsh (see Sources), where she is made serviceable for the nationalist discourse of the nineteenth century. WBY (whose Countess Kathleen was a different

figure) here makes his first approach to Kath­ leen Ni Hoolihan in the context of fictional and dramatic distance. His most extensive exploration of the figure was to come in the play (co-written with AG) Cathleen Ni Hou­ lihan (1902). 6. Cummen Strand] The beach (and townland) west of Sligo, and on the south of Sligo har­ bour towards Strandhill. The Irish name, Cuimín, means the small common. 7. the hilly land] With this (and with 4 earlier), cp. Aubrey De Vere, May Carols (1866), XV, 17–18: ‘To follow, earlier yet, the feet | Of her the hilly land who trod’. 8. droops and dies] A commonplace, and effec­ tively a cliché, but perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘To Julia’, 11–12: ‘Thus gay indifference blooms in thine, | While mine, deserted, droops and dies!’. 11. Drumahair] More usually Dromahair (but Drumahair also in the early printings of WBY’s ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’, changed to ‘Dromahair’ in P95 and after): a village in Co. Leitrim, whose Irish name, Droim Dha Thiar, means ‘the ridge of the two demons’ (see note to ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’, 1). Again, the fictional poet is made to give a location which had already been mapped, so to speak, in the work of the real WBY.

242

15

[‘VEERING, FLEETING, FICKLE’]

Dark and dull and earthy our souls and bodies be: But pure as a tall candle before the Trinity Our Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan.

14. pure as a tall candle] The attempt here to portray Kathleen as the equal of Mary, in a context of Roman Catholic devotion, does not entirely surmount the awkwardness of MSa above (‘But pure as any white in the home of the Trinity’), though WBY now moves the

imagery closer to that of actual Marian devo­ tion (as e.g. the description of the Virgin as a ‘tower of ivory’). An element of unproduc­ tive complication enters with ‘the Trinity’, where theology’s abstraction rubs up uneasily against the physicality of the candle image.

142

THE SONG OF THE

OLD MOTHER

Date of composition. This poem was composed by the end of Jan. or the beginning of Feb. 1894. Its presence in the MS fair copy of The Land of Heart’s Desire submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, most likely at the end of Jan. 1894, and in the TS of the part of the Child prepared for the production by 8 Feb. 1894, suggests that composition was in Jan., or possibly a little before the main burst of work on the play which took place in that month. It seems likely that the material contained in the Boston College notebook (see Text and publication history) is either a first draft, or from a time very close to the beginning of composition: the poem worked on eight pages before, ‘The Host of the Air’, was begun in Oct. 1893, so the lines could have been composed at any time after this and before the end of Jan. 1894. Context, reception, and interpretation. The poem was originally included as a song in WBY’s play The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894). It was present in the fair copy submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office ahead of that play’s first performance on 29 Mar. 1894, and removed by a pencil cancellation from a TS prepared for Dorothy Paget, who played the Child (see Text and publication history). WBY first had the Child receive the honey and milk she requested from the Bruin family with a performance of the song by way of thanks: ‘I like you; I will sing a song for you – | The song of the old mother and her care’. By the time of performance and publication, this was replaced by lines for the Child which incorporated some of the song’s content (The Land of Heart’s Desire [1894], 27): Old mother, my old mother, the green dawn

Brightens above while you blow up the fire;

And evening finds you spreading the white cloth.

The young may lie in bed and dream and hope,

But you work on because your heart is old.

The ‘old mother’ is the character Bridget Bruin, who is depicted early in the play as being impatient with the young and their affairs, but is won over by the fairy who comes into the Bruin household in the form of the Child. It is possible that WBY, who composed this play in something of a rush from Dec. 1893 to Jan. 1894, incorporated as the Child’s song a poem he already had to hand. Once removed from the play, at any rate, the piece carries no marks of its dramatic provenance, and WBY does not refer to this in any future con­ text. The ‘Song’ in the title of this poem is nevertheless not quite so figurative a term as it is usually in WBY’s poetry. In a 1908 addition to his essay of 1902, ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, a musical score for this poem was reproduced as ‘taken down by Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-144

244

THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER

from myself ’, and is attributed to ‘W.B.Y.’ It was in 1902 that the poet wrote to the drama critic William Archer of his recent experiments in poetry performance (CL 3, 204): I have been round at Dolmetsch’s this evening and have found to my very great surprise that I have made the poems of mine which have most ‘folk’ feeling, to actual little tunes, much like those AE writes to. What is most astonishing of all my little tune, ‘The Song of the Old Mother’ is in the Irish gapped scale. As R. Schuchard observes, ‘[WBY] would never forget what was for him an ecstatic revelation: it was as though he had received final confirmation of what he had believed all along, that his own ear and rhythmical imagination were tuned to an ancient scale’ (Schuchard, 74). WBY was to remember the ‘gapped scale’ as late as 1934 (see below): how well he understood this in musical terms must be open to question, but it is the pen­ tatonic scale, which has two intervals greater than a whole tone (thus seeming, by com­ parison with the usual seven-tone scale, to contain ‘gaps’). A florid account in WBY’s ‘Anglo-Irish Ballads’ (1935) speaks of ‘what is called the gapped scale [. . .] the wide space left unmeasured by the mathematical ear where the voice can rise wavering, quivering, through its quarter-tones’ (CW 6, 179). The poem’s simplicity, then, was in his own mind associated with its status as a ‘Song’. In The Trembling of the Veil (1922), WBY remem­ bered how (in the early 1890s) ‘I thought for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it The Rose, because of the Rose’s double meaning; of a fisherman who had ‘never a crack’ in his heart; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the young, or of some cheer­ ful fiddler, all those things that ‘popular poets’ write of, but that I must some day – on that day when the gates began to open – become difficult or obscure’ (CW 3, 205). The recollection suggests that this poem was written in a deliberately simple style (though the poet may be adding a sheen of higher cultural and artistic purpose retrospectively, when he might as easily have said that the poem – like ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ or ‘The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’ – was composed with an eye to the market for popu­ lar periodical publication). Later still, in a radio broadcast of 17 Mar. 1934, WBY read the poem with commentary (CW 10, 249): A generation came that wanted to be simple, I think I wanted that more than anybody else. [. . .] In my poetry I tried to keep to very simple emotions, to write the natural words, to put them in the natural order. Here is a little poem in which an old peasant woman complains of the young. There is music for it written to what is called the Irish gapped scale. Other music, too, was written for these lines, by the German composer (and friend of Eva Gore-Booth) Max Meyer-Olbersleben (1850–1927) (as reported in reviews of performances in the Manchester Guardian for 21 Jan. 1908, and the Musical Standard for 26 Jun. 1909). The poem was from the beginning well-received, though perhaps as much for its unYeatsian qualities as anything else. One review of WATR noted how the ‘present volume has a few pieces not specially referable, perhaps, to stories of the fairies and the legend­ ary heroes [. . .] Such is the pathetic crooning ‘Song of the Old Mother,’ which any old

THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER

245

peasant woman might sing’ (The Scotsman 21 Apr. 1899). The lyric was quoted in full in The Athenaeum (15 Jul. 1899): ‘‘The Song of the Old Mother,’ just inasmuch as it leaves the personal for the dramatic, is stronger for the leaving. [. . .] This has the high merit of sympa­ thetic sincerity. One feels gratefully the absence of effort – of tinkering. But a higher sincerity, a perfect simplicity, are possible: not the simplicity merely of the first clear, pure thought, but the simplicity of the finished work of art, on which a whole passion of labour and effort has been spent, which yet shows no trace of effort, whose fervour is only shown by the perfection of the result. [. . .] Whether Mr. Yeats ever attains to this higher simplicity one cannot say. Modern criticism seldom troubles itself with the poem, though it is properly attended to by R. Schuchard in his The Last Minstrels, where the whole context of chanting to the Psaltery is fully explored. More esoteric appetites are not so readily catered for by the poem, and A.R. Grossman reports that this is one of those pieces that ‘despite the transforming power of Yeats’s capacity for style, depend on the popular and sentimental tradition of magazine poetry and, beyond some slight occult and spiritualist suggestions, hardly rise above their origins’ (Grossman, 14). H. Adams does not linger with the poem for more than a sentence, claiming that here WBY ‘treats of his sexual opposite, an old mother, who accepts her working lot while the symbolic fire, which is sexuality, desire, youth, and comfort, dies away’ (67). In fact, ‘the fire’ may indeed carry symbolic meaning in the context of WATR (or more accurately, may go on to acquire such a meaning from that book): Aedh, Hanrahan, and Robartes are all explained in terms of symbolic fire by WBY in his notes, and the fire being tended by the old mother here is a restatement of this symbolic term in (as it were) a different stylistic key. A gender-based analysis of the poem is entirely feasible, but is inevitably quick to reach its destination, and thus for V. Mahaffey this is ‘yet another instance of Yeats’s imaginative self-projection into the labour of working-class motherhood,’ while its symbolism is relatively straightforward: ‘The old mother awakens ‘the seed of the fire’ at dawn and works all day, haunted by the contrast between her own incessant scrubbing and the indolence of the young, as her fire grows increasingly ‘feeble and cold’’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 195). Text and publication history. The poem is drafted in the Burns Collection, Boston College notebook (MS). It occupies two pages, and a complete draft faces what looks like a later (and only partially legible) version of 3–7. The next stage of the poem’s textual life is in materials for The Land of Heart’s Desire: WBY’s fair copy submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LC), is held in the British Library (Add. MS 53544 M), and is repro­ duced with transcription in the Cornell edn., Jared Curtis (ed.), The Land of Heart’s Desire: Manuscript Materials (2002). A typescript copy of the part of the child was prepared in advance of rehearsals for the play (the professional typing is dated 8 Feb. 1894), for the use of the ten year-old Dorothy Paget (TS): this is in the Robert H. Taylor collection, Princeton University Library, and is reproduced in Curtis’s Cornell edn. The poem was first published in The Bookman in Apr. 1894 (B), and next in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club in Jun. 1894 (SBRC). The poem appeared in WATR, and was retained by

246

THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER

WBY in all collected editions thereafter. In 1899, after the publication of WATR, two American journals ran the poem: first, The Living Age on 19 Aug., and next the London Academy for Oct. These two texts are identical, and they appear to follow WATR; but one textual difference may be of significance (see note on 6). Although it can carry no textual authority, the reading given by WBY in a broadcast of 17 Mar. 1934 contains several changes to the poem’s text (see notes). Copy-text: P49.

I

5

10

rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;

And then I must scrub and bake and sweep

Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;

And the young lie long and dream in their bed

Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,

And their day goes over in idleness,

And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:

While I must work because I am old,

And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

1. I rise in the dawn] I get up at dawn MS, LC, TS. in the] at the B. 2. seed] seeds TS. 2, 10. the seed of the fire] For this phrase, WBY supplied a note in B: ‘The “seed of the fire” is the Irish phrase for the little fragment of burning turf and hot ashes which remains in the hearth from the day before.’ 3–4.] And then I  must scrub and bake and mend | Till the shadows spread out and the daylight end MS, LC, TS. On the facing page of MS, WBY drafts the lines: ‘And I  must mend and sew and bake | Till [?valleys] thicken and shadows wake’ (Cornell WATR transcription). 3. scrub] mend B. 5–6.] In MS  notebook, facing the full draft, WBY writes: ‘While the young lie long and dream through the morn | Of love that calls [them del.] like a [?devil’s/ dark] horn’ (Cor­ nell WATR transcription). 5. And] While MS, LC, TS, B; But SBRC. In his reading of the poem, recorded on 17 Mar. 1934, WBY reverts to the early version, and reads out ‘But the young’.

6.] Of the matching of ribbon in blue and in red MS. Of the matching of ribbons the blue and the red LC, TS, B, SBRC. ribbons] The post-WATR printings of the poem in the American journals The Living Age and London Academy in 1899 (see Text and publication history) both read ‘ribbon’ here. (This is also the reading of the MS ver­ sion earlier, though WBY’s handwriting does not allow for absolute certainty; and he was in any case capable of leaving off an intended letter in such cases.) 7. And their] In his 1934 reading, WBY gives (with a prolonged stress) the single word ‘Their’. 8. lift a] lift up a MS, LC, TS, B, SBRC. Again in his 1934 recording, WBY departed from the text, and returned to this earlier version, reading here ‘lift up a tress’; he drops the first word of the verse also, so that the whole line becomes ‘They sigh if the wind but lift up a tress’. 9–10.] But the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold, | And I  must work because I  am old. MS, LC, TS, B.

143

[‘WHITE DAUGHTER OF

THE IRON TIME . . .’]

Date of revision. This poem is a revision of ‘To a Sister of the Cross and the Rose’, a poem entered in two MS books by WBY in the summer and autumn of 1891. This revision of the 1891 poem took place in early 1894, and probably before Mar. Textual history. The lines are in WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston Col­ lege), just after the first draft of ‘The Heart of the Woman’, and immediately before ‘I will not in grey hours revoke’ (dated by WBY 10 Mar.). Since this revision did not result in a printed poem, the notebook (MS) is the only source for the text. A transcription is included in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 485. Copy-text: 1893 notebook (Boston College).

W

hite daughter of the Iron Time,

A mystic morning cries to you;

The Kabbalistic stars, the dew,

1. White daughter] WBY associated MG with white and whiteness (often e.g. by using apple-blossom in connection with her). In the abandoned novel The Speckled Bird, the hero’s beloved appears often as a figure in white; in one version (1900), when ‘Margaret came down presently in a white Italian silk that shimmered in the candle light’, ‘Michael had thought that it was only in old times that people wore anything so beautiful and this dress was more beautiful than any of the dresses he had imagined for Olwen or Guine­ vere or Branwen’ (SB, 133). Also cp. Shelley, ‘Arethusa’, 44–45: ‘The Earth’s white daughter | Fled like a sunny beam’. the Iron Time] The allusion is partly to the ancient concept (first in Hesiod) of an age of iron, in succession to ages of gold and silver; partly, too, WBY intends to convey a sense of modern, industrial society. In the verse here,

WBY may be remembering W. Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, in the Prologue to which ‘the last of all the bards’ lives when ‘Old times were changed, old manners gone’ (19), and ‘The bigots of the iron time | Had called his harmless art a crime’ (21–22). 3. The Kabbalistic stars] This is an altogether unusual moment of explicit mysticism in WBY’s verse (though it is also one which he never put into print). The stars were vitally important to various symbolic schemes in the teachings and practice of the GD, and as such were heavily dependent upon the various medieval and post-medieval interpretations of the Hebrew Kabbala. WBY is explicit on this point because he has an audience of one (MG), who as a member of the GD (albeit now an unenthusiastic one, and soon to leave the organization altogether) is equipped to understand this otherwise esoteric reference. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-145

248 4a 4b 5

[‘WHITE DAUGHTER OF THE IRON TIME . . .’]

[This heart that weaves sad webs of rhyme:] [The heart that weaves a mournful rhyme:] The phantom trembling to be born, The phantom in the brimming lake, Murmur ‘Awake, awake, awake, For God has wound his lonely horn.’

4.] The MS has two versions of this line, each with corrections (given as 4a. and 4b. in the present edition). WBY marks the lines with a brace in the left margin. 4a.] This [sad weaving del.] ^ heart that weaves sad ^ webs of rhyme MS. 4b.] This heart ^ that weaves^ weaving a mournful rhyme MS. 6. brimming] The MS reading here is uncertain. Cornell Early Poetry 2 reads ‘burning’, and this is plausible. ‘Brimming’ however is also a possible

reading of the word, and is in some ways a more appealing reading, better in key with the poem as a whole. ‘The burning lake’ calls up the lake of fire, and Hell, in ways that can contribute very little to any overall coherence here. 7. awake, awake, awake] Cp. W. Blake, Jeru­ salem, ‘To the Christians’: ‘England! Awake! awake! awake!’ 8. lonely horn] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems (1866), ‘The Northman’s Foray’, 72: ‘the watch at midnight winds a lonely horn’.

144

[‘I WILL NOT IN GREY

HOURS REVOKE’]

Date of composition. Probably 10 Mar. 1894. At the foot of the poem in his notebook, WBY has entered the date ‘March 10th 94’. Since the MS shows evidence of at least one set of revisions, it is likely that this was the date the poem was first composed, though not necessarily when it was finished. Context and interpretation. The poem was written in the wake of WBY’s visit to Paris of Feb. 1984, during which he had seen a good deal of MG. In this respect, though, the visit was not for him altogether a satisfactory one, and the 1915 account in WBY’s draft Autobiography links events (in retrospect, at least) with his work on the play The Land of Heart’s Desire, in which a young heroine allows herself to be taken away from husband and domesticity by the fairies. He also frames this with his meeting OS in London for the first time – OS is an unhappily married woman who fits the role of the play’s hero­ ine much better than MG does, though the poet himself is apparently not aware of this resonance. Instead, he reflects that ‘I could not tell why Maud Gonne had turned from me unless she had done so from some vague desire for some impossible life, for some unvarying excitement like that of the heroine of my play’. WBY continues (Mem., 73): Maud Gonne was of course my chief interest; she had not left France for a long time now and was, I was told, ill again. I saw her, and our relations, which were friendly enough, had not our old intimacy. I remember going with her to call on some friend and noting that she mounted the stairs slowly and with difficulty. She had not gone on with her work in the Order, and was soon to withdraw altogether, disliking, she said, our absorption in biblical symbolism, but Mac­ Gregor Mathers was her firm admirer. A number of facts, not all of them actually known to WBY in 1894, help to flesh out these details of romantic disappointment: MG was again pregnant by Lucien Millevoye at this point, and her long separation from WBY’s society in France had been taken up partly in mourning for her infant son Georges, who had died in 1891; her enthusiasm for the GD (however great MacGregor Mathers’s enthusiasm for her) had dwindled, because she suspected it of lacking political potential, or of being an ersatz offshoot of Freemasonry, as well as being preoccupied with Jewish (WBY’s ‘biblical’) learning and symbolism: none of these things was in the slightest to MG’s liking, and her ‘withdrawal’ from the social club of ritual magic was also – and relatedly – a withdrawal from her ‘old inti­ macy’ with WBY. Back in London in Mar., it seemed to the poet that the most intense romantic relationship of his life had now come, however gently, to an end. This poem DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-146

250

[‘I WILL NOT IN GREY HOURS REVOKE’]

clearly belongs to the weeks of despondency at this time, and is certainly addressed to MG. Although it demands a biographical reading, not all of its details are readily asso­ ciated with particular events in the poet’s relationship with MG; and in particular, the ‘breath of slander’ has no precise reference and is, in any case, ambiguous in effect – the ‘slander’ might be attached either to the speaker or to ‘you’. The poem (which was never published by WBY) has featured in some biographical studies: R. Foster quotes it in full as marking a moment when ‘Once more [WBY] renewed his commitment to [MG],’ adding that it ‘directly reflects their recent estrangement, and her inspiration of his work’ (Foster 1, 138). A biographer of MG speculates on the ‘breath of slander’, assuming that ‘while in Paris others tried to appraise Yeats of Maud Gonne’s real situation – that she was the acknowledged mistress of Lucien Millevoye,’ and builds on this a reading of the poem which assumes WBY ‘knew the stories about Gonne must be true,’ while ‘The fact that his beloved will not by him be loved in a physical way is not necessarily a problem,’ because ‘She can still be a very good muse’ (A. Frazier, The Adulterous Muse [2016], 130–131). This is largely fanciful, and the poem provides no corroboration. However, it is worth taking this poem more on its own terms, as both the confirmation of a past gift and the pledge of a future one, with the gift in question being ‘a poor foolish book of rhyme’. Since WBY begins by declaring that he will not ‘revoke’ a past gift, it is tempt­ ing to see a reference here to the 1891 Flame of the Spirit notebook of poems, which he had indeed given as a gift to MG; and if this is so, then the poem works towards a conclusion in which another, new book is to be offered. The poem’s role, in this situa­ tion, is to be dedicatory (‘a poor foolish book of rhyme’ is also ‘this poor foolish book of rhyme’: WBY did not decide between the two possibilities (see below, 12)). It may be that WBY was thinking at this point of being able to put together another presentation MS book for MG, and was assuming that the poems yet to come in his notebook (the embroidered cover of which had been a gift from MG herself) would contain these. The third stanza establishes a connection with an earlier poem to MG, ‘When You Are Old’ (though certainly without adding anything to it), but the poem as a whole is not quite in the register of wistful resignation. No past gift is to be taken back; but at the same time, the poem acknowledges the damage which ‘the breath of slander’ has wrought. WBY’s image for this is the breaking of a ‘little thread’, one ‘drawn tight’ by ‘my folly’, whose purpose was ‘To bind two lonely hearts in one’. Here, it is not possible to be certain about WBY’s precise meaning, partly because the poet seems himself to be uncertain about the metaphor: is this a thread of connection spun by love (possibly with Robert Browning as a precedent – see note to 4–5), or is it, as line 8 suggests, the thread of life as spun for men by the Fates? The third stanza, which abandons this thread image, is the weakest and most conventional of the three; the poem’s less resolved first two stanzas are also its most effective. If the poem was intended to be dedicatory, the poems it projected for the future did not come to pass, and those that fill the rest of the notebook are in fact much more complicated than the ‘poor foolish’ stuff which the final stanza here (rather unconvincingly) imagines. The relationship, too, of course, was to be subject to unfore­ seen challenges, not least WBY’s affair (which lay just around the corner) with OS. As a result, future lyrics that engage with the trope of dedicating work to the loved one are much more complicated – complicated, that is, both by their internal procedures and

[‘I WILL NOT IN GREY HOURS REVOKE’]

251

their external circumstances; and it is useful to compare this poem with such later suc­ cessors as ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’ and ‘A Poet to his Beloved’ in order to gauge the degree to which the dedicatory trope gained in subtlety and power in WBY’s work between 1894 and 1895. Text and publication history. The poem exists in a single MS copy in the 1893 note­ book (Burns Collection, Boston College). WBY never printed it, and its first publication was in Foster 1, 138. An edited text appears in UM, 100, and there is a full transcription of the MS  in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 493. The present text supplies punctuation, and adopts single readings of words and phrases which WBY left with alternatives undeleted. For details of these, see notes. Copy-text: Boston College MS notebook, with editorially added punctuation.

I

will not in grey hours revoke

The gift I gave in hours of light,

Before the breath of slander broke

The thread my folly had drawn tight,

5

The little thread weak hope had made

To bind two lonely hearts in one;

1. grey hours] Perhaps cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘The Pause of Evening’, 2: ‘The grey hours floated smoothly’. revoke] In pencil, over an undeleted ‘retake’. WBY’s second thought, ‘revoke’, is more complex than his first. While retaking a gift has a natural meaning, revoking one is not so simple: WBY intends here either OED ‘revoke’ 2.a: ‘To recant, withdraw (something one has written or said); to retract, take back (a statement, opinion, vow, etc.); to renounce (a belief)’ or 3.a: ‘To annul, repeal, rescind (a decree, will, privilege, etc.); to cancel (an order, appointment, office, etc.): in either case, however, he is applying the verb to something concrete rather than abstract, with a consequential awkwardness. 2. in hours of light] This may appear a slightly stilted piece of poetic diction, but it has an important role in the poem, being picked up by line 7’s ‘loves of light’. It is possible that WBY is remembering a poem by the Irish poet J.J. Callanan, Poems (1861), ‘Stanzas’, and in particular its first verse:

Hours like those I spent with you,

So bright, so passing, and so few,

May never bless me more, – farewell!

My heart can feel but dare not tell,

The rapture of those hours of light,

Thus snatched from sorrow’s cheerless

night. In 1895, WBY was to write of Callanan bring­ ing ‘into the elaborate literature of the modern world the cold vehemence, the arid definite­ ness, the tumultuous movement, the immea­ surable dreaming of the Gaelic literature’ (‘Irish National Literature, I’, The Bookman (Jul. 1895), CW 9, 265). 3.] Before a slanderous touch could break del. 4–5. the thread  .  .  .  the little thread] Perhaps cp. R. Browning, Dramatic Lyrics (1842), ‘Two in the Campagna’, where a dominant image in a poem about (possibly disap­ pointed, or soon to part) lovers is the ‘turns of thread the spiders throw | Mocking across our path’ (8–9); by the end of the poem, the ‘thread’ – which is a connection, but also a

252

[‘I WILL NOT IN GREY HOURS REVOKE’]

But loves of light must fade and fade Till all the dooms of men are spun. 10

The gift I gave once more I give, For you may come to winter time, But your white flower of beauty live In a poor foolish book of rhyme.

subtle binding together  – has been lost by the speaker: ‘Where is that thread now? Off again!’ (56–57). This delicacy of implication may be in tune with WBY’s rueful account of an attempt to ‘draw tight’ together ‘two lonely hearts’ with something that is too frail, ulti­ mately, to take that strain. 7. fade and fade] Not an unprecedented dou­ bling, and all of the instances in nineteenthcentury poetry may derive from Keats, Endymion (1818), III, 179: ‘She came, and thou didst fade and fade away’. 8.] WBY is alluding here to the classical fig­ ures of the Fates (the Greek Moirai and the Roman Parcae) who are regularly depicted as

spinning the thread of a life from their loom. This allusion does not seem entirely in har­ mony with 4–5, where the intention is alto­ gether more personal and romantic. 10. may] written above ‘will’: the two words are enclosed in a brace. 11. your white] written above the undeleted ‘still your’. flower of beauty] The phrase is wholly conventional; but WBY’s addition of ‘white’ links it more closely with MG, who is often associated in his 1890s writings with white images. 12. a] written above ‘this’: the two words are enclosed in a brace.

145

THE HEART OF THE

WOMAN

Date: A likely date of composition is Mar. to Jul. 1894. The first MS draft is two pages after a poem in the same notebook which is dated Mar. 10 1894; the present poem appeared in print on 21 Jul., and (since the next dated material in the notebook, after many pages of Shadowy Waters drafts, is from Nov.) it seems that the poem was composed at some time between Mar. and Jul. 1894. Context, text, and publication history. The first appearance of this poem in print was as part of WBY’s short story ‘Those Who Live in the Storm’, in The Speaker, 21 Jul. 1894. In the story, which is set (according to WBY) in ‘the great storm of October, 1765’, a young woman, Oona Herne, aids the spirit of her dead lover, Michael Creed, in its vengeful visit to her family cottage. The lover had been murdered by her brother one year before, and comes to the cottage in the storm, where the girl, her brother, father, and mother are all gathered. The girl sings the words of this poem to an air of the wandering poet O’Sullivan the Red (later in WBY’s fiction to become Red Hanrahan): ‘The fire has gone out,’ ’ said the old man. The eyes of the girl brightened, and she half rose from her chair, and sang in a loud and joyous voice: – “O, what to me the firelit room

Where I have laughed and spun and played?

He bade me out into the gloom,

And my white breast on his he laid.

“O, what to me my mother’s care,

The milking-place, the sheltered farm?

The shadowy blossom of my hair

Will hide us from the bitter storm.

“O, hiding hair and dewy eyes,

I am no more with life and death!

My heart upon his warm heart lies;

My breath is mixed into his breath.”

While she had been singing, an intense drowsiness had crept into the room, as though the gates of Death had moved upon their hinges. The old woman had leaned forward upon the table, for she had suddenly understood that her hour had come. The young DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-147

254

THE HEART OF THE WOMAN

man had fixed his eyes fiercely on the face of the girl, and the light died out of them. The old man had known nothing, except that he was very cold and sleepy, until the cold came to his heart and his head fell backwards, convulsed. At the end of the song the storm began again with redoubled tumult, and the roof shook violently. The lips of the girl were half-parted in expectation, and out of her eyes looked all the submis­ sion which had been in the heart of the woman from the first day. WBY collected this story as ‘The Rose of Shadow’ in The Secret Rose (1897), making changes to the text of the poem (SR), but he dropped it from subsequent collections of his short fic­ tion. The poem next appeared, under its present title, in WATR and all subsequent collected editions. Two MS drafts are extant in the 1893 notebook in the Burns Collection, Boston College (MS1 and MS2). The short story has much in common with the plot for WBY’s play The Land of Heart’s Desire, which was in rehearsal and production in Mar. and Apr. 1894, and was published on Apr. 20. WBY identifies the poem as a stand-alone item in a list of pieces included in his notebook just before the MS1 draft: it has been added in ink to this pencil list (as ‘the Heart of the Woman’), suggesting that WBY did not intend to allow it to remain solely in the context of his short story. Although the decision to collect it will have already been taken, WBY was probably confirmed in this by Robert Bridges’ assurance in a letter of 30 Mar. 1897 that ‘I liked some of the lyrics in The Secret Rose, espe­ cially ‘O what to me the little room’’ (LTWBY 1, 31). Enthusiasm was also expressed to WBY in a letter from George Russell of 3 Apr. 1897 (Letters from AE ed. A. Denson (1961), 19): The little song in The Rose in Shadow [sic] is simply perfect. Long ago you would have said some beautiful thing, say about the sea or stars in this, which we would have forgiven for its beauty, but which would have destroyed the passionate intensity of the poem as a whole. Your art gets more perfect in these things. Copy-text: P49.

O

what to me the little room

That was brimmed up with prayer and rest;

Title] The Heart of a Woman MS2. This is the only occasion on which WBY writes the indefi­ nite, rather than the definite article here; it is more likely to be a slip than a revision. How­ ever, it may register one well-known Irish poetic use of the phrase by Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), ‘Tone’s Grave’, 9–10: ‘For in him the heart of a woman combined | With a heroic life, and a governing mind’. 1. O] O, SR. little] firelit MS1, MS2.

1, 5. O what to me] With this construction, cp. a quatrain by George Croly, Scenes from Scrip­ ture (1851), ‘Wrath on Jerusalem’ 37–40: ‘What to me is prayer or praise, | When the heart no more is given? | What to me the Altar’s blaze | But the mockery of Heaven?’ On Croly, see note to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ I, 4. 2.] Where I  have spun and laughed and prayed (WBY writes ‘laughed and spun’, then circles the two verbs, writing over them ‘trans[pose]’) MS1. rest;] rest? SR.

THE HEART OF THE WOMAN

255

He bade me out into the gloom, And my breast lies upon his breast. 5

10

O what to me my mother’s care, The house where I was safe and warm; The shadowy blossom of my hair Will hide us from the bitter storm. O hiding hair and dewy eyes, I am no more with life and death, My heart upon his warm heart lies, My breath is mixed into his breath.

3. bade] bids del. bade MS1. 4.] [That del.] And my white breast on his be laid MS1 (WBY changes ‘That’ to ‘And’, but omits to change ‘be’ to correspond). And my white breast on his he laid MS2. O] O, SR. 6.] My father’s [ploughing from the morn del.] [thought of byre and farm del.] del. The milking place, the sheltered farm MS1 The milking place, the sheltered farm MS2. On the notebook’s facing page, WBY tries three versions of line 6, the last of them marked ‘or’: The house where I  was safe and warm The roof rush-strewn to keep me warm My father’s long-considering mind MS2. warm;] warm? SR. 8. Will] Has del. will MS1.

On the page facing this line in MS2, WBY gives two versions of an alternative line (to rhyme with the possible ‘mind’ in line 6): Will hide us out of the cold wind Will hide us from the bitter wind MS2. 9.] O what [to me who lives and dies del.] and whither are Life and Death MS1 [O what to me who lives and dies del.] MS2. On the facing page of the notebook, WBY drafts a new version of 9–10: O [heavy breast del.] and dewy eyes | [That are del.] I am no more with life and death MS2. O] O, SR. 10.] Fading hopes and [?ruinous] skies MS1. death,] death! SR. 11.] My [breast del.] heart upon his warm heart lies MS1 My heart upon his warm [breast del.] heart lies MS2. lies,] lies; SR.

146

[‘ THE POET, OWEN

HANRAHAN . . .’]

Date of composition. These lines were probably written in Aug. or Sept. 1894. WBY’s pre­ vious story for The National Observer was published there on 4 Aug., and work on this story for late Sept. publication is likely to have gone on into Sept. Fictional context. These lines are a poem for the main character of ‘The Curse of O’Sullivan the Red upon Old Age’ (later ‘The Curse of Hanrahan the Red’, and later still ‘Red Hanrahan’s Curse’). The itinerant poet, at this time a hedge schoolmaster, sees on the road a girl sobbing, who on being asked what the matter is, extracts a promise of help from the poet: she has been betrothed by her family to an old man, and wants the poet to compose a curse on the elderly fiancé to extract her from this situation. The poet is piqued by the young girl’s assumption that he is of an age with that old man – he claims to be a good twenty years younger – but his depression lifts sufficiently to allow him the ability to compose. In the first version of this very heavily revised story, the poem is introduced as follows (National Observer, 29 Sept. 1894): To the left of the road was a branch covered with May blossoms, and a little gust of wind blew the white petals over his coat. ‘May blossoms,’ he said, brushing a number of them into the hollow of one hand, ‘you never know age because you die away in beauty; and you will I put into my rhyme, and give you a blessing.’ He sat down under the bush, and began making his rhyme, crooning it to himself, the May blossoms falling over him the while. At last he had finished, and this is the rhyme that he made: [poem follows] After this, O’Sullivan (Hanrahan) makes sure that his rhymes are carried by children to Sligo, and rests satisfied with his job. But shortly afterwards, his victims seek him out at the head of an angry mob of old men, and he abandons his cottage, which they burn to the ground. Sources. W. Gould and D. Toomey in M adduce a possible source for these lines in an actual poem by Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain (the eighteenth-century model for WBY’s O’Sullivan/ Hanrahan), with the title ‘An tArrachtach Sean’ (The Old Wraith-like One), in which old age received the poet’s curse. There was no English translation of this, and Gould and Toomey speculate that WBY might have been told of it by Douglas Hyde, who was certainly familiar with such material at this time. Form. WBY chooses to cast these lines as rhymed fourteener couplets. The intention is probably to convey an element of oral composition, and this model reaches back to DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-148

[‘THE POET, OWEN HANRAHAN . . .’]

257

English verse of the renaissance, in particular perhaps for WBY the rhymed fourteeners of George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad. Publication history. No MS  survives, but the first publication of these verses came with that of ‘The Curse of O’Sullivan the Red upon Old Age’ in The National Observer, 29 Sept. 1894 (NO). The short story and its poem were next published in WBY’s The Secret Rose (1897) (SR), and reprinted in CWVP08 and EPS, and finally Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose (1927). They were included in the 1931 projected book, Mythologies (which was to be published posthumously). WBY never published these lines as a self-standing poem. Copy-text: Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose (1927).

T

5

he poet, Owen Hanrahan, under a bush of may Calls down a curse on his own head because it withers grey; Then on the speckled eagle cock of Ballygawley Hill, Because it is the oldest thing that knows of cark and ill; And on the yew that has been green from the times out of mind By the Steep Place of the Strangers and the Gap of the Wind;

1. Owen Hanrahan] Red O’Sullivan NO. a bush of may] May is a name for the com­ mon hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, a small tree or large shrub that flowers in May or early Jun. In finding this phrase, it is possible that WBY remembered a notoriously ‘Cockney’ couplet of Keats, ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 29–30: ‘A bush of May flowers with the bees about them; | Ah, sure no tasteful nook would be without them’. may] May NO, SR. 2. a curse on his own head] This figure had been used in a short and uncompromisingly stern hymn by Isaac Watts, Works (1810), ‘Life and immortal joys are given’, 9–12: ‘The law con­ demns the rebel dead, | Under the wrath of God he lies, | He seals the curse on his own head, | And with a double vengeance dies’. 3. of Ballygawley Hill] that is on Awley’s Hill, SR. About five miles from Sligo town, Bal­ lygawley (from the Irish, Baile Dhalaigh or Baile Uí Dhálaigh) is a townland adjacent to Collooney. 4. cark] care NO. The reading of NO may reflect an editorial misreading of (or change

to) WBY’s word, ‘cark’: this is OED n. 3. (identified as archaic), ‘That which burdens the spirit, trouble;  hence, troubled state of mind, distress, anxiety; anxious solicitude, labour, or toil,’ ‘in later use generally coupled with care’. WBY might have come across the word in E. Spenser, The Faerie Queene I i 44: ‘Downe did lay | His heavie head, devoide of carefull carke’, but ‘cark and care’ is found in R. Browning and other nineteenth-century poetry. 5–6.] And on the leaning, wrinkling ash, that many an age hath stood | Hollow and gnarled and broken to North of Markree Wood; NO. 6. the Steep Place of the Strangers] This is Lug­ nagall, understood with this meaning by WBY, whose poem ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ (1887) and short story ‘The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows’ (1893) had featured it as the site of a fatal plunge by a troop of mounted Cromwellians. the Gap of the Wind] Bearna na Gaoithe, gap of the winds, is in the townland of Car­ rickhenry on the southern outskirts of Sligo town.

258

10

15

20

[‘THE POET, OWEN HANRAHAN . . .’]

And on the great grey pike that broods in Castle Dargan Lake Having in his long body many a hook and ache. Then curses he old Paddy Bruen of the Well of Bride Because no hair is on his head and drowsiness inside; Then Paddy’s neighbour, Peter Hart, and Michael Gill, his friend, Because their wandering histories are never at an end. And then old Shemus Cullinan, shepherd of the Green Lands, Because he holds two crutches between his crooked hands; Then calls a curse from the dark North upon old Paddy Doe, Who plans to lay his withering head upon a breast of snow, Who plans to wreck a singing voice and break a merry heart; He bids a curse hang over him till breath and body part; But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may, Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away.

7. broods] dwells NO. Castle Dargan Lake] Dargan Lough is in the Castle Dargan estate, close to Ballygawley. 8. hook] pain NO, SR. The copy-text here reads ‘a many a hook’, which seems very likely to be a misprint, and is here corrected in line with all the other versions. 9.] Then curses he old Paudeen Strange, herds­ man of Tubber Bride, NO. the Well of Bride] This translates the ear­ lier ‘Tubber Bride’ (Tobar Bride, the Well of Brigid): there are several such in Co. Sligo, including one near Collooney. 11. Paddy’s] Paudeen’s NO. 12. wandering] rambling NO. 13. shepherd of the Green Lands] cooper of Scanavin NO. the Green Lands] A  large stretch of com­ mon land (usually, the Greenlands), which runs above the long beach between Dead­ man’s Point and Rosses Point: WBY knew this area well, and walked there often. 14.] Because he holds two crutches in his fin­ gers long and thin NO.

15.] Then calls a curse of Druid power upon old Paudeen Doe, NO Then calls a curse of threefold power upon old Paddy Doe SR. Both Paudeen and Paddy Doe are the names of the old fiancé of the sobbing young girl in WBY’s short story (see Fic­ tional context). 16. a breast of snow] Something of a cliché, but one which WBY would have met with in W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake (1810), I  xviii 8–9: ‘in hastier swell to show | Short glimpses of a breast of snow’. 18–19.] A  threefold curse of Druid power, clinging till breath depart; | But O, he calls a blessing on the blossom of the May NO. 18.] He calls a curse that shall be his until his breath depart SR. 19. But] And SR. the blossom of the may] Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Despair of Cuhullin’, 120–121: ‘Sweet blossom of the May, | Sing me a song to cheer me’. may] May SR.

147

THE LOVER TO HIS HEART

Date of composition. The lines were composed in mid-Nov. 1894. The most advanced version in MS carries WBY’s date of 19 Nov. Context. This piece, which features as a song in the version of The Countess Cathleen included in P95, began as an independent poem, drafted in the 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), and given its title there. The notebook contains six versions of the poem and, since no other material interrupts the sequence, it is likely that the process of composition begins not long before the date which WBY appends to the most advanced draft, ‘Nov. 19th, [18]94’. The lines were incorporated as a song by the charac­ ter Aleel in The Countess Cathleen, but it may well be that WBY did not initially think of the lines with the play in mind. WBY subsequently rewrote the poem completely, to produce ‘To his Heart, Bidding it have no Fear’ (1896). Publication history. The lines were extracted from The Countess Kathleen by WBY and published separately under the present title in a Dublin journal, The Social Review, for 7 Dec. 1894. They appear in the context of The Countess Kathleen in P95, and in all subsequent collected editions which include this play. Copy-text: Collected Plays (1934).

I

mpetuous heart, be still, be still,

Your sorrowful love can never be told;

1. Impetuous heart] Cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), Empedocles on Etna (1852) Act II, 89–94: He fables, yet speaks truth!

The brave, impetuous heart yields every­ where To the subtle, contriving head; Great qualities are trodden down,

And littleness united

Is become invincible.

(These lines also probably influence some later poetry by WBY, including ‘The Fisherman’, 23–24.) 2. can] The Countess Cathleen (1912) and all subsequent editions; may P95-CWVP08. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-149

260

5

THE LOVER TO HIS HEART

Cover it up with a lonely tune.

He who could bend all things to His will

Has covered the door of the infinite fold

With the pale stars and the wandering moon.

5. the infinite fold] WBY works here from the metaphor of OED fold 1.a: ‘A pen or enclo­ sure for domestic animals, esp. sheep’ to 1.b: ‘figurative, esp. in a spiritual sense’. It is awk­ ward for even a spiritually understood fold to possess a door rather than a gate, but WBY’s image derives ultimately from Shelley, ‘Lines Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon’, 5: ‘The last of the flock of the starry fold’. This in turn had influenced e.g. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Regent of change, thou waning Moon’, 15–16: ‘those threads that catch | In wisdom’s net the starry fold’, and was to influence AE, Collected Poems (1926), ‘The City’, 19: ‘Pen me within the starry fold’, and ‘Michael’, 313–314: ‘the Gates of Gold | That open to the Starry Fold’. 6. the wandering moon] Perhaps cp. Milton, Il Penseroso, 65–67: ‘And, missing thee, I  walk unseen | On the dry, smooth-shaven green, | To behold the wandering Moon’. WBY’s ‘pale stars’ may show the subliminal influence here of Shelley’s fragment, ‘To the Moon’, 1–2: ‘Art thou pale for weariness, | Wandering companionless’. MS verions. The lines seem to have given WBY a good deal of initial trouble, and transcrip­ tions of the early drafts are set out here. All of these are found in the 1893 notebook. In four main stages, the poem remains an eight-line

piece (evolving into two four-line stanzas), and it is with the fifth draft that WBY compresses it into its six-line form. The first five drafts are as follows: (a) Impetuous heart give heed to my rune The tale of tales may never be told Cover it up with a lonely Tune

Cover it up with a fitful dream

Give help to my heart great journeyman Who hid away the infinite fold With the pale stars and the wan moon And the things that are with the things that seem. (b) O heart tell not in tale or rune The hidden things that may not be told Wrap them [over del.] about with a lonely Tune Wrap them about with a fitful dream. O help my heart [^indeciph. ^ del.] great journeyman Who cover away the infinite fold With the pale stars and the wandering moon And the things that are with the things that seem.

THE LOVER TO HIS HEART

(c) Give heed impetuous heart to my rune Your sorrowful thoughts may never ^not^ be told Cover your love with a lonely tune Cover your hope with a fitful dream [O help del.] Give help to my heart great journeyman Who hid away ^could but hide^ the infinite fold With the pale stars and the wander­ ing moon And the things that are with the things that seem. (d) Impetuous heart be still be still Your sorrowful things may not be told Cover your love with a lonely tune Cover your hope with a fitful dream. Impetuous heart be still, still, For He has hid the infinite fold With pale stars and the wandering moon

261

The things that are in the things that seem. (e) Impetuous heart be still, be still, Your sorrowful thoughts may not be told, Cover your love with a lonely tune, For he who could bend all to His will Has covered the door of the Infinite fold With the pale stars and the wandering moon. A final (and dated) version follows in the notebook, which is textually almost identical to the lines as they will appear in The Social Review and P95. The MS  versions were first printed (in a slightly simplified transcrip­ tion) by R. Ellmann, who also discussed the evidence for WBY’s stylistic habits which they present, culminating with ‘To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear’, and concluding that ‘Only by infinite patience did the poet achieve such skill in his art’ (Man and the Masks, 141–144).

148

[‘OUT OF SIGHT IS OUT

OF MIND’]

Date of composition and publication history. The lines were probably composed as part of WBY’s short story ‘Wisdom’; this was intended for W.E. Henley, who had left his role at the National Observer for one at the New Review, where the story was published eventu­ ally in Sept. 1895. Letters of WBY from Jan. 1895 (CL 1, 421, 423, 428) show that it was in this month that he addressed himself to producing the story; it is not known, however, when work concluded (and this could have been at any time up to the late summer). The story’s next publication was in The Secret Rose (1897), and then in subsequent editions of collected short fiction. WBY included the story in the ‘Mythologies’ grouping for his projected Edition de Luxe on the 1930s, and it was part of the posthumous Mythologies (1959). Fictional context. Early in the short story, a grey woman, ‘the crone of the grey hawk’ in whose hair are the feathers of that bird, enters ‘a hut of mud-plastered wicker’ where the motherless son of a king is being taken care of by a nurse who rocks him in the cra­ dle. She is followed by another, then another, then a third, and finally the whole dwelling fills up with these grey women. Addressing each other as ‘sisters’, they identify the child as royal. Before they deliver the lines of this poem, WBY writes: ‘And after that they sang together, those who were nearest rocking the cradle with long wrinkled fingers; and their voices were now tender and caressing, now like the wind blowing in the great wood, and this was their song’ (M, 110). They sing the lines, and then (M, 111): When the song had died out, the crone who had first spoken, said: ‘We have nothing more to do but to mix a drop of our blood into his blood.’ And she scratched her arm with the sharp point of a spindle, which she had made the nurse bring to her, and let a drop of blood, grey as the mist, fall upon the lips of the child; and passed out into the darkness. Once the child grows up, he grows grey feathers in his hair, and ultimately leaves his kingdom, never to return. WBY’s ‘crones’ bear an obvious resemblance to the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, so it is entirely fitting that they should be given lines that fall in with the Sisters’ magical chants in Shakespeare’s play, of trochaic tetrameters in couplet rhyme. Criticism. The lines have been discussed by S. Putzel, as ‘a kind of otherworldly mani­ festo’ in WBY’s story; he claims that they are ‘well worth a close reading’, which he pro­ vides, attending to their patterns of ‘balance and opposition’ (Putzel, 37). DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-150

[‘OUT OF SIGHT IS OUT OF MIND’]

263

Copy-text: M. (There are no significant variations from earlier

printings; no MS material survives.)

O

5

ut of sight is out of mind:

Long have man and woman-kind,

Heavy of will and light of mood,

Taken away our wheaten food,

Taken away our Altar-stone;

Hail and rain and thunder alone,

1.] The proverb here is extremely well-known, and very old: it is recorded from the sixteenth century, but is probably older than this. For WBY’s purposes, its falling naturally into a trochaic tetrameter outweighs any disadvan­ tage of cliché. 2. man and woman-kind] The use of this phrase was in terminal decline by WBY’s time, though it had been relatively common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 4. wheaten food] Food made from grain; but an unusual phrase, found in poetry only in Thomas Yalden’s versions of the Fables of Aesop (included by Samuel Johnson in his edition of the English poets), where in one fable a weasel enters a ‘store-house’ by its narrow opening: ‘And made long time his quarters good, | On slaughtered mice and wheaten food’ (Aesop at Court (1702), Fable VII, 11–12). The weasel eats so well that he becomes too fat to get out again. The prop­ erties of wheaten food were commonly con­ trasted with those of mere potatoes at the time of the Irish famine, and also before it: see e.g. The Gentleman’s Magazine Vol. 159 (1836), 390: ‘We would not, if we are wise, trust to the potato; and further, this potato system superseding wheaten food, is in itself most objectionable. Instead of increasing it, we hope soon to see the potato form only

a pleasing variety in the dinner of an Irish peasant.’ In a discussion at the Royal Society on 27 Nov. 1857, the Chairman (the Scot­ tish scientist and politician Lyon Playfair) observed that, ‘Give an Irishman potatoes in this country, and an Englishman wheaten food, the very character of the diet would make the former worth only half the wages of the latter.’ ‘In point of fact,’ Playfair went on, ‘the famine in Ireland was one of the greatest blessings that could have befallen that country’ (Journal of the Royal Society of Arts Vol.6 (1858), 27). It is possible that ‘wheaten food’ keeps something of its midcentury association with discussion of the Irish famine, if only at the back of WBY’s mind, especially since the ‘crones’ here com­ plain that it has been ‘taken away’, along with their ‘Altar-stone’, thus perhaps align­ ing themselves with both starvation and religious persecution. 6.] Perhaps cp. R. Browning, Pacchiorotto and How He Worked in Distemper (1876), ‘St. Martin’s Summer’, 62: ‘Tempts rain and hail and thunder’, James Montgomery, Poems (1850), ‘A Voyage Round the World’, 27: ‘Thunder, lightning, hail and rain’, and Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘La Révéla­ tion par le désert’, 48 (of a cloud): ‘with rain and thunder in its womb’.

264

[‘OUT OF SIGHT IS OUT OF MIND’]

And red hearts we turn to grey,

Are true till Time gutter away.

7. red hearts we turn to grey] This colour con­ trast will prove important in WBY’s short story, since the child will grow increasingly grey, when he grows up and is covered in hawk’s feathers; the ‘crones’, too, are grey, and possess blood that is ‘grey as the mist’. There is an accidental echo here of a poem WBY had read: cp. KT, Ballads and Lyrics (1891), ‘Our Lady’s Exile’, 31: ‘the red hearts of the roses’. Perhaps cp. also some lines of W. Mor­ ris, in the same metre as WBY’s verses, in an interlude song in The Earthly Paradise (1870): Drink about, for night doth go, By daylight grey hairs will show; Now from silver lamps doth fall Golden light on gilded wall; Seize this hour while you may;

Let it pass – there cometh day When all things will turn to grey. 8.] till Time gutter away] WBY’s metaphor repeats that of a poem he had written in 1893, and which he had used as an epigraph to The Celtic Twilight in that year, ‘The Moods’, 1–2: ‘Time drops in decay, | Like a candle burnt out’ (see note to poem). The verb here is also that associated with candles, OED 5., ‘To melt away rapidly by its becoming channelled on one side and the tallow or wax pouring down’. However, ‘gutter’ in this sense is more often used with ‘down’ or ‘out’, rather than ‘away’. With the line, perhaps cp. an early poem by Tennyson, published first in his Poems (1842), ‘Love thou thy land’, 79: ‘And this be true, till Time shall close’.

149

THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE

Date of revision and context. The revision of this poem from WO probably took place in early 1895, but no evidence offers a definite date. WBY sent copy for P95 to Unwin on 27 Mar. 1895; he had reached a firm agreement with the publisher for the book by 5 Nov. 1894, and after this was regularly engaged in revision and preparation of materials. It is of course possible that this poem had been revised by WBY at an earlier date, and no MS evidence survives to offer clues. The poet here was returning to and substantially rewriting a lyric of 1886, published as ‘Indian Song’ in WO. In P95, the new version, complete with its new title, was in the book’s final section, ‘Crossways’, along with a selec­ tion of other pieces from WO. Despite the fact that most of the poem had been recently rewritten, WBY affixed to it the date ‘1886’. Reception and interpretation. WBY’s radical revision of a poem published just six years earlier did not escape attention. Ernest Rhys, reviewing P95 in the Academy, 22 Feb. 1896, raised an eyebrow: ‘Indian Song’, which now reappears as ‘The Indian to his Love’ and which, in shed­ ding something of its extravagance, loses something of its lyric fervour, the ear of many of his readers will not sanction the practical suppression of such a verse as this: Oh wanderer in the southern weather, Our isle awaits us; on each lea The pea-hens dance, in crimson feather A parrot swaying on a tree Rages at his own image in the enamelled sea. Mainly, what one finds in these changes is that if Mr. Yeats is growing rather more literary, he is, too, more severe as an artist than he used to be. However, WBY’s changes were more to the taste of later generations, and Louis MacNeice, although he found many of the poet’s revisions of early work unsatisfactory (‘by removing inversion Yeats does not bring the poem any nearer life because the sort of life he was here treating is a life where grammatical inversions float in the air’), he made this poem an instance of how ‘When in revising Yeats merely omits, his omissions are usually justifiable’, citing the dropped original second stanza as an example – ‘an inept verse of Keatsian allegory’ (MacNeice, 69: see ‘An Indian Song’ (1886), 6–10). A detailed account DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-151

266

THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE

of the revision was given by T. Parkinson, examining individual changes in detail; he summed up the major changes made for P95 as follows (42): The poem as it now stands is an imaginative unit that makes use of the land­ scape to suggest the mood, the quality and direction of experience, more fully than did the 1889 version. Because of the unclear imagery and contorted syn­ tax, the 1889 version had not been a poem with lucidity of texture, and the sec­ ond stanza (rejected in 1895) had disturbed the dramatic structure and broken the unity of the verse by intruding the evaluative personifications that unfortu­ nately suggest Swinburne and a host of forgotten nineteenth-century poets. In 1895 the structure is clear and the texture grants us both an imagery of cleaner outline and a syntax less contorted. The poem now moves with a certain grace from the tranquillity of day and love in the island, when the great trees are filled with parrots and burnished doves and the garden lawn populated with peahens, to the night and death, when the lovers will roam beyond the sleep of the birds on the very sea itself. In order to attain the bones of coherence, Yeats carries two chief symbols through the poem, the great boughs and the birds as leitmotivs, and throughout the poem he specifies qualities more fully. Modern criticism of WBY seldom attends to revisions as an issue in evaluative discus­ sion, and perhaps as a result of this the poem is not often a major focus of attention. Its thematic content is of interest, though; and the fact that it is essentially a return by the poet of 1895 to the work of the poet of 1886 offers a valuable perspective on the development of WBY’s poetic ideas and preoccupations during that time. The poem is about love and lovers, but it originates from a time when the poet’s experience of both was scant; it is rewritten when he has deeper, more definite, and more wounding experiences to inform the youthful idyll. For G. Bornstein, the poem is ‘a paradigm of Yeats’s early handling of Shelleyan love,’ since ‘Yeats follows Shelley in using geographi­ cal separation to suggest the profounder separation of the world of loving union from the normal world of mutability’. Quoting Shelley’s Prometheus on a place ‘Where we will sit and talk of time and change, | As the world ebbs and flows, ourself unchanged’ (Pro­ metheus Unbound, III iii 23–24), Bornstein concludes that ‘in envisioning the island as a paradise of love’ the Indian and his love ‘are counterparts, not antinomies’ (Bornstein, 153). This Shelleyan vista is an important one, for in 1895 WBY was beginning to find it inadequate, at least insofar as it could be applied to his own situation as an unhappy lover. Another change between 1886 and 1895 is that WBY in the meantime had written (and was now revising) ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, whose narrative explored both idyllic love and its abandonment, pitched in the key of mythic narrative. H. Adams sees how the rewritten lyric compresses the problems, as well as the glamour, of the early miniepic. The parrot, who rages at his own image in 1886, rages still in 1895, but with more, perhaps, to be enraged about (Adams, 41): What causes the parrot’s rage? It is said that these lovers will wander ‘with woven hands’ like Niamh and Oisin and that they will ‘murmur . . . how far

THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE

267

away are the unquiet lands’. But why should they dwell on this at all, having escaped it, and will not their isolation in the paradise eventually become a bore? In it there seems to be no hope of change, except that death is said to occur. But in death they will rove the same paths as ghosts. Text and publication history. WBY’s revised text first appeared in P95, then P99. Further minor revision took place for P01, and the poem was included in all collected editions thereafter. More small revisions were made, and some were made and then reversed (see note to 20). Copy-text: P49.

T

he island dreams under the dawn And great boughs drop tranquillity;

The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,

A parrot sways upon a tree,

3. the peahens dance] The peacock’s courtship routine (most notable for its display of vividly coloured tail feathers) is often referred to as a dance; however, the dancing is carried out by the males, and not by the females (the pea­ hens). WBY’s mistake almost certainly has its origin in ignorance, but the poet was set against any revision in the light of subsequent information. In a generally hostile notice of WO in the Freeman’s Journal for 1 Feb. 1889, the reviewer (probably WBY’s political oppo­ nent J.F. Taylor) highlighted this failing in ornithological accuracy as symptomatic of a lack of ‘strenuous thought and sound judge­ ment’, and was ‘tempted to wish that [WBY] would study the ways of poultry.’ Writing within a couple of days to his mentor John O’Leary, WBY voiced a somewhat haughty indignation: The Freeman reviewer is wrong about pea­ hens they dance throughout the whole of Indian poetry. If I had Kalidasa by me I could find many such dancings. As to the poultry yards, with them I  have no concern  – The wild peahen dances or all Indian poets lie. (CL 1, 138) WBY was correct to assert that peafowl may be seen dancing in the works of the

great fifth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, but incorrect to think them peahens rather than peacocks: e.g., ‘Pleased on each terrace, dancing with delight, | The friendly Peacock hails thy graceful flight’ (The Megha Dúta Or Cloud Messenger, trans. H.H. Wilson, 2nd edn. (1843), 33). Zoological correctness in verse was certainly possible at this time, though it did not necessarily improve the quality of the poetry: Edwin Arnold’s ‘With Sa’di in the Garden: Or, The Book of Love’ (1888) has one excited dancer exhort another to ‘make the pacing pea-hens envious!’ (1278). (Perhaps J.F. Taylor knew, and was impressed by, this nicety with regard to ‘pacing’ of Arnold’s when he addressed the wildfowl of WO.) It is possible that WBY was simply unaware of the differ­ ences between peahens and peacocks; at any rate, even though this line was to be revised, the reference to peahens rather than peacocks remained: it is evident from the 1889 letter that any later concession to Taylor would have been unthinkable. However, this whole question, which had been for so long forgotten, returns (again in the context of a largely negative esti­ mate of WBY as a poet) in Christopher Ricks’s essay ‘Literature and the Matter of Fact’, where Ricks, with the letter to O’Leary in his sights,

268 5

10

THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE

Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea. Here we will moor our lonely ship

And wander ever with woven hands,

Murmuring softly lip to lip,

Along the grass, along the sands,

Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:

How we alone of mortals are

Hid under quiet boughs apart,

While our love grows an Indian star,

A meteor of the burning heart,

says that ‘no amount of high and mighty scorn will undo the fact that a high price is paid by a poetry which invokes poultry and at the same time declares that it has no concern with the poultry yards’ (Essays in Appreciation (1996), 304). For subsequent critical flurries, pac­ ing and dancing around this point, see Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry (2002), 47–8, and Peter Robinson, Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (2002), 86–88. 5. the enamelled sea] the dim enamelled sea P95, P99. WBY’s removal of ‘dim’ in P01 (return­ ing the text here to its unrevised 1886 state) was commented on by T. Parkinson: ‘The deletion of “dim” does two things to the line: it reduces the line to six rather irregular beats instead of the seven it had in 1899; it clears up a contradictory image, for if the sea is dim – misty, overhung with fog? – it would not grant the parrot a very good mirror, and if it is enamelled – smooth, shining of surface – can it be dim?’ (Parkinson, 43). The changes to the final lines of each stanza in P01, by turn­ ing the very long seven-foot lines of P95 and P99 to alexandrines, in fact revise the poem’s metre back to what it had been in WO, where the last lines of each stanza have six feet. In the course of a reading of the poem that treats it as in some ways ominous, H. Adams sees ‘the enamelled sea’ as a sign of ‘being part of some artifice’, giving rise to the suspicion that ‘artifice itself is a vehicle of evasion’ (Adams, 41; see also Reception and interpretation).

7. And wander ever] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Search after Prosperpine’, 6: ‘I wander ever, sad and lone’. 8. Cp. Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), 133–136: Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur’d – ‘While you live Drink! – for once dead you never shall return.’ 10. Murmuring how far away] Murmuring gently how far off P95, P99. 14.] WBY is putting into an amatory context here images that are conventionally mar­ tial ones: meteors often figure thus in James Macpherson’s Ossian e.g. XII, (1805 edn., p. 404): ‘Thou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the hill; terrible as a meteor of fire’, and in nineteenth-century Irish poetry, e.g. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘The Old Sword of Ireland’, st.3, 5–6: ‘Yet still to the foes of thy country the same, | Thy lus­ tre has blazed like a meteor of war’, or R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), 1140: ‘He went forth like a meteor of morning, and the rocks felt the hoofs of his steed’. For martially stirred hearts, cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyo­ nesse, and Other Poems (1882),‘Athens: An Ode’, 121: ‘Still the burning heart of boy and man alike rejoices’.

THE INDIAN TO HIS LOVE

15

One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart.

20

The heavy boughs, the burnished dove

That moans and sighs a hundred days:

How when we die our shades will rove,

When eve has hushed the feathered ways,

With vapoury footsole by the water’s drowsy blaze.

15.] One with the glimmering tide, the wings that glimmer and gleam and dart; P95, P99. 16.] The great boughs, and the burnished dove P95; And great boughs, and the burnished dove P99.

269

20. With vapoury footsole by] CP33 and after. And drop a vapoury footsole in P95, P99; And drop a vapoury footsole among the P01, P04, P08, P12-P29; Dropping a vapoury footsole on the tide’s drowsy blaze PW06, CWVP08.

150

THE WANDERINGS

OF OISIN

Date of publication. ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’, a very substantial revision of the title poem of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), was the opening piece in WBY’s Poems, published by T. Fisher Unwin in autumn 1895 (P95). This volume was many times reprinted, and WBY made further revisions to the text in these subsequent editions, as well as in CWVP08 and CP33. Date and context of revision. Late in 1894, WBY undertook a large-scale revision of this poem, first published in 1889 in WO; the work of revision continued into 1895. During Dec. 1894, WBY was hard at work on rewriting in Sligo: ‘I am correcting “Oisin” and find it a job’, he reported to SMY on 16 Dec., and ten days later he wrote to her that ‘I am half through the revision of “The Wanderings of Oisin”, now “The Wanderings of Ussheen”’ (CL 1, 418–419). The copy for P95 was not sent to the publishers until late Mar. 1895. WBY, who had been very busy with orchestrating a controversy about Irish national literature in the pages of the Dublin Daily Express (where he attacked old family friend and his one-time mentor, Edward Dowden), was clearly at work up to the last minute on his revisions for Unwin. Influenza at the end of Feb. caused some delay, but writing to SMY, again from Sligo on 3 Mar., WBY reported that ‘I am always through [this may be a mistake for ‘almost through’, but need not be so] with the corrections of my things for Unwins republication of them’, and he asked her to ‘Tell papa that the Countess Kath­ leen is radically different at the end and the Wanderings of Usheen at the beginning and middle’ (CL 1, 447). The revision of a poem which, only six years previously, had been the centrepiece of WO, a well-reviewed (if not commercially successful) volume was, as these remarks indicate, part of a larger-scale effort on WBY’s part to re-present work of the recent past as a continuing creative engagement with the present. (His verse-play The Countess Kathleen, similarly, had been in the title position of this second volume, CK, as recently as 1892; and it, too, had attracted a good deal of appreciative attention.) The present moment of 1895 was one in which a number of things had changed for WBY since 1889, not least in terms of Irish cultural and literary nationalism. In Mar., the poet’s anthology A Book of Irish Verse was published, and this was connected to a concerted campaign to define and promote the best of Irish literature, in which the press spat with Dowden played an important part (breaking as it did the bounds of a long-standing fam­ ily friendship, since Dowden was an old friend of JBY’s who had gone out of his way to be helpful to the young poet in the none-too-distant past). WBY was careful, through­ out the programme of his Irish nationalist cultural agitation, not to be seen to promote himself as a poet; at the same time, a new version of himself as a poet, soon becoming DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-152

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

271

available, was highly desirable as a complement to that programme: others, at that point, would have the opportunity to deliver the praise on which the cultural critic and poet himself discreetly forbore to presume. With A Book of Irish Verse fresh in his hands on 12 Mar., WBY found himself writing to apologise to KT for inadvertently leaving out altogether some verses of one of her poems, and told her that ‘I included no verses of my own in the book, because I have left out or criticised unfavourably in the introduction so many well known Irish poets, and did not want to appear to prefer my own work’; he also let KT know that he ‘was afraid of the charge of ‘log-rolling’’ when he omitted her name from a list of recommended authors in the Daily Express (CL 1, 450). (Such charges, even so, were not slow in coming; and a virulent attack on KT in the Irish Figaro of 16 Mar. 1895 mocked WBY’s ‘Best Thirty Irish Books’ list in the Daily Express, with a ‘Poetry’ listing of: ‘26. Miss  Tynan about Dr. Hyde. By K. Tynan. 27. Standish O’Grady about Miss Tynan. By Standish O’Grady. 28. Miss Tynan about Yeats. By K. Tynan. 29. Yeats about Miss Tynan. By Yeats. 30. My Wife’s Aunt about them All. By my Wife’s Aunt’.) But WBY’s concern was not primarily with Dublin literary gossip and ill will; instead, it was important to him in early 1895 to establish both his own work as a contribution to an Irish national literature and a culture of what he called in the Daily Express ‘the steadily increasing sale of Irish books, and the steadily increasing intelligence of Irish criticism’ (CL 1, 445). As such, a thorough revision of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (now with the English-friendly spelling of ‘Usheen’ – a tactic that was to prove temporary) was an important staking-out of literary territory. The very fact that this was a revision was intended to compel attention. WBY ended his 12 Mar. letter to KT by telling her that ‘I have been busy correcting my own things getting ready a collected edition containing all I like in the ‘Oisin’ and ‘Kathleen’ volumes [. . .] I have rewritten almost every thing from the ‘Oisin’ book. [. . .] It has been a frightful business but is now practically finished’. This declaration of literary self-improvement cannot be detached from the observations with which the letter’s postscript ends: ‘I felt my criticism would carry no weight unless I separated myself from the old gush and folly,’ since ‘I want people to accept my praise of Irish books as something better than mere national vanity’ (CL 1, 451). WBY’s work of revision was a matter of improving the earlier poem stylistically and in terms of overall poetic form. It was not an attempt to incorporate fresh material relat­ ing to the Irish mythic history and poetry by which that first poem had been informed. The suggestion of Austin Clarke, made in a conversation with Richard Ellmann in 1946, that ‘Yeats revised Oisin on the basis of retelling of a tale by Flannery which had come out since the first version’, is groundless, and founded either on confusion or a longprotracted grudge (quoted in W. Gould, “Gasping on the Strand’: Richard Ellmann’s W.B. Yeats Notebooks’, YA 16, 317). Clarke referred to Thomas Flannery’s edition and transla­ tion, The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth (1895); but this work, besides being published after WBY’s revision, contained nothing that could have added meaningfully to WBY’s revision – and certainly not in its own verse-rendering of Michael Comyn’s poem, upon which the work was based (see Sources in notes to the 1889 poem, vol. 1). WBY would not, in any case, have been overly willing to pay attention to Flannery, given that the Introduction to the translation mentions how ‘recently Mr. W.B. Yeats has published a

272

The Wanderings of oisin

poem called “The Wanderings of ossian,” [sic] but how far this is a translation [. . .] i can­ not say, as i have not seen it’ (xi). P95 did not mark the end of WBY’s revisions of this poem, but it is the most signifi­ cant moment in their history. Changes to the text were imposed on P99, and a number of later editions, not least in the matter of the spelling of irish names. a list of the variant spellings, and when they were used and/or discarded, is provided in VE, 1. Minor textual changes were being made by the poet as late as the proofs for the never-published ‘edi­ tion de Luxe’ Poems in 1932. nevertheless, the major alteration of ‘The Wanderings of oisin’ as a poem is the one that takes place for P95, and it is this text which is afterwards refined by WBY in details. one aspect of change which is not that of textual revision is worth remembering; that is, the position of ‘The Wanderings of oisin’ within various collected editions from P95 onwards. The poem had wanderings of its own, which were never satisfactorily con­ cluded. in P95, it is the opening poem (with the exception of the prefatory ‘To some i  have Talked With by the fire’), but for the next edition (P99), WBY moved it to the position of closing poem in the volume. This position was retained in subsequent edi­ tions of Poems until the book’s final incarnation in 1929; the poem was the last piece in Vol. 1 of CWVP08, and the first item in EPS (1925). in CP33, it became the first piece in a ‘narrative and dramatic’ section, placed after the lyric poetry; but there is good evidence to suggest that WBY in the 1930s had not come to any settled opinion on the position to be occupied by the poem in the order of his works in verse. The projected ‘edition de Luxe’ and the ‘Coole edition’, on plans (and proofs) for which WBY worked in the early-mid 1930s, were to move the poem to the beginning again. This has caused modern editors, keen to honour as ‘final’ those intentions of WBY that were merely his latest, a number of procedural problems: the poem takes opening position in e.g. Jeffares (ed.) Yeats’s Poems (1989), but is filed away in its P33 position in r. finneran’s CW 1. The question of the poem’s position in WBY’s oeuvre is not without critical significance, but it should be acknowledged that his thoughts on the matter changed over time, and in response to different kinds of contingent circumstance. in preparation for CWVP08, the poet wrote to his publisher a.h. Bullen that ‘for years every review said it was such a pity Mr Yeats had fallen off so after writing the Wanderings of oisin. so next edition [of Poems (P99)], i  put the Wanderings of oisin at the end of the book instead of the beginning, and nobody has ever mentioned it since’ (letter of 30 sept. 1907, inteLex 667). WBY remembered this in 1931, when he wrote to J.M. hone about how ‘My “Poems” when first published by Unwin were always reviewed out of “The Wandering of Usheen” until i  got in a rage and put the poem last’ (letter of 29 nov. 1931, inteLex, 5542). The problem mentioned here – that of a position of undue prominence being no less of a problem once it is one of undue obscurity – was to dog WBY for many more years. for a detailed overview of WBY’s involvement with various orderings within collected edi­ tions, see W. gould, in Jeffares (ed.) Yeats’s Poems, appendix 6: ‘The definitive edition: a history of the final arrangements of Yeats’s Work’. one crucial point of the discussion here relating to ‘The Wanderings of oisin’ concerns the meaning and scope of a letter sent by WBY to harold Macmillan on 2 apr. 1932, when the poet professed himself ‘delighted with your suggestions to put long poems in a section at the end’: this, as gould

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

273

convincingly demonstrates, cannot be taken as anything other than an endorsement of proposals that related strictly to a projected volume of lyric verse, quite distinct from the collected editions of WBY’s writings which were also in preparation in the early 1930s, and for which the long poem’s chronological position was to be respected. In fact, the uncertainty about where the poem was to figure was one that continued for almost the length of WBY’s publishing career: if it ended, that was only with the poet’s death. Like ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ itself, the constant re-imagining and re-positioning was as much a lifetime’s work as a single textual event. It does seem that WBY continued to think of the poem as at least partly a point of artistic beginning, and a correspondingly early position is implied in his letter to OS of 30 Jun. 1932, when he is ‘correcting proofs’ (InteLex, 5692): My first denunciation of old age I made in ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’ (end of part 1) before I was twenty and the same denunciation comes in the last pages of the book. The swordsman throughout repudiates the saint, but not without vacillation. Is that perhaps the sole theme – Usheen and Patrick [. . .] Sources. Modern criticism has some treatments of the sources for WBY’s poem (see e.g. F. Kinahan), and the earliest study is that of R.K. Alspach, ‘Some Sources of Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin’, PMLA 58/3 (Sept. 1943), 849–866 (Alspach in the notes). In WO, WBY cites no sources for his poem. However, the question of source material was soon raised, in a review in the Spectator for 27 Jul. 1889: ‘We wish that Mr. Yeats had told us the source from which he got the material of this somewhat strange poem’. The reviewer quoted I, 176–188 and III, 173–180, saying that ‘There is something weird, for instance, about the following lines,’ and adding that ‘we are curious to know whether they are wholly the writer’s own’. WBY sent a reply, published in the following week’s edition (CL1, 176–177): In a kindly notice of my volume of poems, your reviewer asks where I got the materials for ‘The Wanderings of Oisin.’ The first few pages are developed from a most beautiful old poem written by one of the numerous half-forgotten Gaelic poets who lived in Ireland in the last century. In the quarrels between the saint and the blind warrior, I have used suggestions from various ballad Dialogues of Oisin and Patrick, published by the Ossianic Society. The pages dealing with the three islands, including your reviewer’s second quotation, are wholly my own, having no further root in tradition than the Irish peasant’s notion that Tir-u­ au-oge [sic] (the Country of the Young) is made up of three phantom islands. As the poet claims here, the largest proportion of source-reliant material is to be found in the poem’s first part, while the confrontations between Oisin and Patrick are devel­ oped from Irish dialogue poems. WBY’s major literary source was a translation which appeared in Transactions of the Ossianic Society Vol. 4 (1859) (Trans. Oss. Soc.). This was a learned publication, and the volume was dedicated to a series of ‘Fenian Poems’ edited by John O’Daly. The Irish quatrain-poem Laoi Oisin ar Thir na nÓg was included,

274

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

along with an English translation (in parallel), in unrhymed verse. The Laoi Oisin situ­ ates itself in a tradition of Oisin and Patrick dialogue poems, recorded from the Mid­ dle Ages onward, and it may well draw upon older materials that no longer survive. The Trans. Oss. Soc. translation was by Brian Ó Lunaigh (Brian O’Looney); O’Looney (1828–1901) was from Co. Clare, but his career was a scholarly and literary one, and he held a number of prominent positions in the Irish-language and antiquarian circles of Dublin from the 1870s onwards. Amongst what WBY calls the ‘various ballad dialogues of Oisin and Patrick’ is the Caoidh Oisin a n-Diagh na Feinne (‘The Lamentation of Oisin after the Fenians’), a poem in over 200 quatrains, translated by Standish H. O’Grady in Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3 (1857), which consists largely of the complaints of Oisin as he nears the death for which Patrick offers him spiritual counsel (Lamentation). The ‘Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youths’ as the Laoi Oisin ar Thir na nÓg was translated (Lay in all notes below), although presented as a ‘Fenian’ poem, was claimed by O’Looney to be of mideighteenth-century origin. According to O’Looney, it was the work of the Irish writer Micheál Coimín (Michael Comyn), who lived from c. 1680–1760, and it was probably written around 1750. Comyn, from a landowning Irish family in Co. Clare, wrote prose fiction as well as verse, but all his works remained (until 1859) in manuscript circulation only. O’Looney assigns the Lay this authorship in his preface to the translation: From the fourteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, we have another class of poems and romantic tales, which exhibit a later stage of the language, but which are well worthy of attention. My own conviction is that the Ossianic poem on the ‘Land of Youth’ is of this last class and date, and from the testimony of many corroborating facts supported by the result of an inquiry which I instituted at your suggestion, I believe it to have been written by the learned Michael Comyn . . . about the year AD 1749. This ascription to Comyn is largely circumstantial, however: the personal papers of this author were destroyed after his death, and the Lay was only identified as his in some oral re-tellings. Later scholars have cast doubt on the attribution, and have found just as plau­ sible a dating of the poem to the middle decades of the nineteenth century. For WBY though, whose knowledge was probably limited to the prefatory material by O’Looney, this was a poem of the eighteenth century, based on materials that stretched back much further in time. Its relatively recent authorship, nevertheless, might have inclined him not to make particular mention of it as a source in the first publication of his own poem. Although WBY knew the Lay, it is possible that this was not his first encounter with its story. In a much less scholarly and antiquarian mode, for example, Patrick Kennedy’s Legendary Fic­ tions of the Irish Celts (1866) included the Oisin story as ‘The Old Age of Oisin’ (241–242): After the final battle of Gavra the only surviving warrior, Oisin, son of Fion, was borne away on the Atlantic waves by the Lady Niav of resplendent beauty, and for a hundred and fifty years he enjoyed her sweet society in the Land of Youth below the waters. Getting at last tired of this monotony of happiness, he expressed a wish to revisit the land where his youth and manhood had been

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

275

spent, and the loving Niav was obliged to consent. She wept bitterly on seeing him mount the white steed, and warned him that if his feet touched earth, he would never see her nor Tir-na-n-Oge again, and that his strength would be no more than that of a newly-born child. Alas! Fion and his heroes were scarcely remembered on the plains and by the streams of Erinn. The fortress of Almain was a mound and moat overgrown with docks and thistles, and moss had covered the huge casting-stones of the Fianna. Where strong mounds and ditches once secured armed warriors from their foes, he found unchecked entrance, and prayers and hymns recited and sung in stone buildings surmounted by cross and spire. He saw fewer spears and many more sickles than in the days of Fion, and near the Pass of Wattles (Dublin) he found Patrick the missionary raising a lowly house of worship. As he sorrowfully rode up the Glen of Thrushes (Glann-a-Smoll), a crowd of men striving to raise a huge stone on a low wagon, craved his aid. Stooping, he heaved the mass on to the car, but in doing so the girth snapped, the saddle turned round, away flew the white steed, and the last of the heroes lay on the hill-side, a grizzly-haired, feeble man. He was conveyed to Bal a’ Cliath, and St. Patrick gave him a kind reception, and kept him in his house. Many an attempt did he make to convert him to Christianity, but with little success; and the conferences generally ended with Oisin’s laments for the lost heroes. The saint, pitying the desolation of the brave old man, would then introduce some remark on past events, which would be sure to draw from the bard a rhymed narrative of a Fenian battle, or hunting, or invasion by the king of the world – at least of Greece – or an enchantment worked on Fion or Fergus by some Danaan Druid, such as the ones just told. The winding up would be a fresh lament over his own desolate state, and the faded glories of the once renowned Fianna. WBY was making use of Kennedy in the summer of 1888 (see letter to Douglas Hyde, 11 Jul. 1888, CL 1, 81), but almost certainly knew this book before then: Kennedy’s account, which is in a register far from the heroic, may inform WBY’s poem, especially in its treatment of the contrast between the saint and the old man (it is worth remarking, too, that Kennedy (like Samuel Ferguson) uses ‘Danaan’ adjectivally, a habit for which WBY would be notable.) Oisin-related material made its way into contemporary poetry, and WBY knew one version of it in Aubrey De Vere’s book Legends of St. Patrick (1872). Here, De Vere weighs in of the Christian side of the argument between the pagan hero and Ireland’s patron saint. Oisin’s conversion – not itself wholly at odds with some of the monasti­ cally inflected source material – offered WBY an excellent instance of the de-paganizing against which his own version could react (The Legends of St. Patrick (1872), ‘St. Patrick and Oisin’, V: Oisin’s Vision’, 25–68): Patrick, of me they noised a tale,

That down beneath a lake

276

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

A hundred years I lived, unchanged, For a Faery Lady’s sake: They said that, home when I returned, The men I loved were dead; And that the whiteness fell that hour Like snow upon my head. A song of mine, a dream in youth, That tale misdeemed for true: Far other dream was mine in age: A dream that no man knew. For though I sang of things loved well, I hid the things loved best: Patrick, to thee that later dream At last shall be confessed. On Gahbra’s field my Oscar fell: Last died my father, Fionn: The wind went o’er their grassy mounds; I heard it, and lived on. I loved no more the lark by Lee, Nor yet the battle-cry; And therefore in a dell, one day, I laid me down to die. The cold went on into my heart: Methought that I was dead: Yet well I knew that angels waved Their wings above my head. They said, “This man, for Erin’s sake Shall tarry here an age, Till Christ to Erin comes – shall sleep In this still hermitage: That so, ere yet that great old time Is wholly gone and past, Her manlier with her saintly day May blend in bridal fast. And since of deadly deeds he sang Above him will we sing The Death that saved: and we from him Will keep the gadfly’s wing. For him an age, for us an hour, Here, like a cradled child,

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

277

Shall sleep the man whose hand was red,

Whose heart was undefiled.”

The approach, with its willed binding-together of Ireland’s ‘manlier’ and ‘saintly’ identities, is perhaps a kind of religious whimsy; but it is for that reason an element that stiffens the anti-Christian (and utterly unwhimsical) resolve of WBY’s portrait of Oisin. WBY certainly knew De Vere’s book, which he mentions in his first Boston Pilot piece (3 Aug. 1889) (CW 7, 10). Some years later, in his Introduction to A Book Of Irish Verse (1895), WBY puts emphasis on De Vere as a Roman Catholic writer; in the process, he finds himself using an Oisin-derived metaphor of ‘enchanted islands’, with a hint of his own ‘Island of Forgetfulness’ in Book III, while not letting go of the (possibly sectarian) impulse to face down the saintly in the name of the heroically sword-wielding (CW 6, 106): The poetry of Mr. Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in grey seas of stately impersonal revery and description, which drift by and leave no definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary. Closer to the spirit of the story, Standish J. O’Grady’s account of Oisin’s adventures and his encounter with St. Patrick was also known to WBY. O’Grady offers Oisin’s rebukes to the saint as a defiant defence of the heroic, pre-Christian world which Oisin repre­ sents, and of which he is the sole survivor (History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878), Ch. XII, 36–38): ‘O son of Calpurn of the crosses, hateful to me is the sound of thy bells and the howling of thy lean clerics. There is no joy in your strait cells; there are no women among you, no cheerful maids. ‘You have practised magic against the Fianna. At the sound of your bells they grow pale. At the howling of your clerics they became like ghosts; they melted into the air. When we marched against our enemies every step that we took could be heard through the firmament. Now all are silent; they have melted into the air. I, too, linger for a while, a shadow; I shall soon depart. ‘I took no farewell of Fionn nor of any of the Fenians; they perished far away from me. Out of the west, out of the sea, riding on a fairy steed, shod with gold, came a lady seeking a champion. Brighter than gold was her hair, like lime her fair body, and her voice was sweeter than the angled harp. ‘I set her before me on the steed. The sea divided before us, and arched above us. We descended into the depths. A fawn flew past me, whom two hounds pur­ sued; a fair girl ran by with an apple of gold; a youth with drawn sword pressed behind. I knew not their import. ‘Three hundred years I lived in the Tirnanōg, in the land of the ever young, the isles of the blest; but, far away I heard the hateful clanging of thy bells (the

278

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

thought of my comrades come over me like a flood), and I  returned to fade away beneath thy spells, O son of Calpurn. ‘How stood the planets when power was given you, that we should grow pale before your advent. Withered trees are ye, blasted by the red wind. Your hair, the glory of manhood, is shaven away; your eyes are leaden with much study; your flesh wasted with fasting and self-torture; your countenances sad. I hear no gleeful laughter; I see no eyes bright and glad; and ever the dismal bells keep ringing, and sorrowful psalmody sounds. ‘Life is a burden to you, not a pleasure. It is the journey of one travelling through desolate places hastening homeward. ‘Not such, not such, was our life, O cleric; not such the pleasures of Fionn and the Fianna. The music that Fionn loved was that which filled the heart with joy and gave light to the countenance, the song of the blackbird of Letter Lee, and the melody of the Dord Fian, the sound of the wind in Droum-derg, the thunders of Assaroe, the cry of the hounds let loose through Glen Rah, with their faces outward from the Suir, the Tonn Rury lashing the shore, the wash of water against the sides of ships, the cry of Braan at Knock-an-awr, the murmur of streams at Slieve Mish, and oh, the blackbird of Derry Carn. I never heard, by my soul, sound sweeter than that. Were I only beneath his nest! ‘We did not weep and make mournful music. When we let our hounds loose at Locha Lein, and the chase resounded through Slieve Crot, there was no dole­ ful sound, nor when we mustered for battle, and the pure, cold wind whistled in the flying banners of the Fianna of Erin; nor yet, in our gentle intercourse with women, alas, O Diarmait; nor in the banqueting hall with lights, feasting and drinking, while we hearkened to the chanting of noble tales and the sound of the harp and the voice. ‘How, then, hast thou conquered, O son of Calpurn.’ Oisin’s journey to the third island is WBY’s original addition to the Ossianic material of his sources. The story of heroic sleepers awaiting their re-awakening is traditional, and probably best known in its Arthurian inflection, where the King and his Knights lie asleep under the hills until the day of the kingdom’s greatest peril. Alspach (863) adduces Alfred Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (1888), where reference is made to Arthur and his Knights sleeping in the Eildon Hills in general relation to Irish mythic motifs (123). Although WBY knew and did some copying work for Nutt and was familiar with his folklore research, the composition of this part of the poem (mostly in the autumn of 1887 in Sligo, though the conception of the third island might easily be from before this) predates Nutt’s book. The location given by Nutt, however, puts the story in greater proximity to Walter Scott. Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which was published in a second edition in 1885, relates the Eildon Hills (near Melrose in the Scottish lowlands, a place especially associated with the author) to stories of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ – Thomas of Erceldoune, a figure also, like Oisin, taken away into the fairy world by an otherworldly royal lover. Scott’s version of the story may well influ­ ence WBY’s narrative: in particular, the motif of the sounded horn: (Scott, 115–116):

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

279

Thomas of Erceldoune, during his retirement, has been supposed, from time to time, to be levying forces to take the field in some crisis of his country’s fate. The story has often been told of a daring horse-jockey having sold a black horse to a man of venerable and antique appearance, who appointed the remarkable hillock upon Eildon hills, called the Lucken-hare, as the place where, at twelve o’clock at night, he should receive the price. He came, his money was paid in ancient coin, and he was invited by his customer to view his residence. The trader in horses followed his guide in the deepest astonishment through several long ranges of stalls, in each of which a horse stood motion­ less, while an armed warrior lay equally still at the charger’s feet. ‘All these men,’ said the wizard in a whisper, ‘will awaken at the battle of Sheriffmoor.’ At the extremity of this extraordinary depôt hung a sword and a horn, which the prophet pointed out to the horse-dealer as containing the means of dis­ solving the spel The man in confusion took the horn, and attempted to wind it. The horses instantly started in their stalls, stamped, and shook their bridles, the men arose and clashed their armour, and the mortal, terrified at the tumult he had excited, dropped the horn from his hand. A voice like that of a giant, louder even than the tumult around, pronounced these words: – ‘Woe to the coward that ever he was born, That did not draw the sword before he blew the horn!’ A whirlwind expelled the horse-dealer from the cavern, the entrance to which he could never again find. Whether or not WBY was familiar with this version of the story, he certainly knew other tellings of encounters with sleeping kings and their entourages. KT’s poem ‘Waiting’, in Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885) is an account of Fionn, who waits with the Fenians to come to the world again: A giant I, of a primeval race, These, great-limbed, bearing helm and shield and sword, My good knights are, and each still awful face Will one day wake to knowledge at a word – O’erhead the groaning years turn round apace. Here with the peaceful dead we keep our state;

Some day a cry shall ring adown the lands;

“The hour is come, the hour grown large with fate.”

He knows who hath the centuries in His hands

When that shall be – till then we watch and wait.

KT’s note to the poem underscores its political implications, while adding religious sen­ timent (Louise de la Vallière, 71): This poem treats of a legend well known among the peasantry of the north of

Ireland, which recounts how a band of Irish warriors of the primeval time lie in

280

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

armour, and frozen in a deathly sleep, in one of the hill-caverns of the Donegal highlands, there to await the hour of Ireland’s redemption, when they will come forth to do battle for her under the leadership of the giant Finn. The legend further prophesies that in the hour of victory the phantom knights and their leader will be claimed by Death, from whom they have been so long withheld, that they will receive at last burial in holy earth, and that the hill-cavern will know them no more. In his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), WBY included a story by T. Crofton Croker, ‘The Story of the Little Bird’ (1827), in which a monk is tempted away from his monastery by the singing of a bird, and follows it until (he believes) nightfall. On returning, he finds that he has been away for 200 years; he receives absolution from one of the brothers, and dies. This minor parallel to Oisin’s situation might have under­ scored for WBY the Irish mythic tradition of the miraculous lapse of time, which will be realised fully in the fate of the hero in Part III. Tir na nOg. WBY’s poem is largely set in a place beyond the world of mortals, located somewhere over the sea. In his treatment of this otherworldly realm, WBY draws upon and adapts a wide range of Irish sources, in which there is a land of youth, or of the young, most often referred to as Tir na nOg. In the prefatory material to his translation of Lay, Brian O’Looney offered WBY a detailed account of many of the elements of this mythic otherworld in Irish tradition (Trans. Oss. Soc. IV, 230–231): In this poem we have an account of Tir na n-Doine maithe (Land of the good people), the Elysium of the Pagan Irish as related to St. Patrick by Oisin, when he returned to Erin after a lapse of more than three hundred years, which he spent in the enjoyment of all bliss, with his charming spouse, the gold headed (haired) Niamh. While Oisin sojourned in the paradise of perpetual youth, it was (it seems falsely) said of him that he was dead, but as those who enter the ‘Land of the Just’ can never die, so Oisin lived until he returned to relate the history of his adventures, and of this happy Elysium. The inhabitants of the eastern countries believed that in the west there was a happy final abode for the just which was called Tir na n-Doine maithe (Land of the good people.) This Elysium is supposed to be divided into different states and provinces, each governed by its own king or ruler, such as Tir na n-Og (Land of youth) Tir na m-Beo (Land of the living) and Tir na m-Buadha (Land of virtues) and several others. According to traditional geography and history the ‘Land of Youth’ is the most charming country to be found or imagined, abounding in all that fancy could suggest or man could desire, and bestowing the peculiar virtue of perpetual youth, and hence the name. In the ‘Land of Virtues,’ or as some call it the ‘Land of Victories,’ (but the latter name I suppose to be a mis-translation, as I have never heard of a battle or strife in this country); it is all peace, tranquil­ ity and happiness. As there is no conflict there can be no victory – and there is no virtue to be desired which is not to be had on entering this country! The ‘Land of Life’ is supposed to give perpetual life to the departed spirits of the

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

281

just. These are supposed to be located somewhere about the sun’s setting point, and have means of approach, chiefly through the seas, lakes and rivers of this world, also through raths, duns and forts. Although O’Looney claims more divisions than three, his tripartite map of the Irish otherworld here was probably a suggestive one for WBY, who adopts e.g. the Land of Victories, adding to it the battles and strife that O’Looney cannot find there. O’Looney goes on to provide details of various supposed locations for entrances to Tir na nOg, including one in the sea between Liscannor and Lahinch in Co. Clare, near the cliffs of Moher (231): The white breaking waves, which are always seen in this part of the Bay, are said to be caused by the shallowness of the water over this enchanted little city, which is believed to be seen once in seven years, and of which, it is observed, that those who have seen it shall depart this world before the lapse of seven years to come; but it is not supposed that those persons die, but change their abode, and transmigrate from this world of toil, into the Elysium of the just, i.e. Tir na n-Og (‘Land of Youth,’) where they shall, at once, become sportive, young and happy, and continue so for ever. Transmigration was a concept applied to the myth a few years earlier by Nicholas O’Kearney, also writing about (although he did not specify it) Comyn’s Lay, as ‘this very curious poem, which pretty fully elucidates the Irish pagan doctrine of the metempsy­ chosis as believed by the druids’. O’Kearney, who claims that ‘The traditions relative to the enchanted islands on the Irish coasts are so firmly believed by the people that they actually imagine to have seen them’, goes on to speculate on the links between these oth­ erworldly realms and a global system of mythic belief (The Battle of Gabhra, Trans. Oss. Soc., Vol. 1 (1854), 26–7): We need not be surprised that the orientals believed that there were places of abode for creatures of a rational nature under the waters of the ocean, but much less when we learn the belief of the Firbolg race that the places of the just after death were in our creeks and lakes, to which the water supplied a fitting atmo­ sphere. [.  .  .] There is a curious coincidence, in many respects, between the substance of the above extracts and the traditions still found among the Irish, relative to the pagan doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the least remark­ able of which may have been the notion that the passage to Tir na nOg was through a narrow cave in one of our lake islets. Less speculative, and brisker, was the summary of the otherworld given by P.W. Joyce, in a note to his Old Celtic Romances: Translated from the Gaelic (1879), 410: The ancient Irish had a sort of dim, vague belief that there was a land where people were always youthful, and free from care and trouble, suffered no

282

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

disease, and lived for ever. This country they called by various names: – Tir-na­ mbeo, the land of the [ever-]living; Tir-na-nog, the land of the [ever-]youthful; Moy-Mell, the plain of pleasure, etc. It had its own inhabitants – fairies; but mortals were sometimes brought there; and while they lived in it, were gifted with the everlasting youth and beauty of the fairy people themselves, and par­ took of their pleasures. As to the exact place where Tirnanoge was situated, the references are shadowy and variable; but they often place it far out in the Atlantic Ocean, as far as the eye can reach from the high cliffs of the western coast. Here also, although he is claiming no specific division into three, Joyce supplies the hint of a tripartite arrangement. The earliest published account of Tir na nOg from WBY himself comes in John O’Leary’s short-lived periodical The Gael, where he places Oisin’s long enchantment not in Tir na nOg at all, but on the mythic mid-Atlantic island of Hy Brasil (‘Finn MacCool’, The Gael 23 April 1887 (CW 9, p. 49)). Since he was already engaged with his poem on Oisin at this time, it is interesting that he avoids mentioning Tir na nOg specifically, even in the context of giving a brief summary of (essentially) the content of his own narrative poem. By 1888, in his edition of FFTIP, WBY was ready to go into much more detail, including the tripartite division central to his own (now forthcoming) poem (CW6, 20–21): T’Yeer-Na-N-Oge* There is a country called Tír-na-n-Og, which means the Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it; neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it. The shadiest boskage covers it perpetually. One man has gone there and returned. The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse, moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh, lived there three hun­ dred years, and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he was bowed dou­ ble, and his beard swept the ground. He described his sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died. Since then many have seen it in many places; some in the depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells; more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the western cliffs. Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw it. It never appears unless to announce some national trouble. There are many kindred beliefs. A Dutch pilot, settled in Dublin, told M. De La Boullage Le Cong, who travelled in Ireland in 1614, that round the poles were many islands; some hard to be approached because of the witches who inhabit them and destroy by storms those who seek to land. He had once, off the coast of Greenland, in sixty-one degrees of latitude, seen and approached such an island only to see it vanish. Sailing in an opposite direction, they met with the same island, and sailing near, were almost destroyed by a furious tempest.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

283

According to many stories, Tír-na-n-Og is the favourite dwelling of the fair­ ies. Some say it is triple – the island of the living, the island of victories, and an underwater land. *‘Tír-na-n-óg’, Mr Douglas Hyde writes, ‘ ‘The Country of the Young’, is the place where the Irish peasant will tell you geabhaedh tu an sonas aer pighin, ‘you will get happiness for a penny’, so cheap and common it will be. It is sometimes, but not often, called Tir-na-hóige, the ‘Land of Youth’. Crofton Croker writes it, Thierna-na-noge, which is an unfortunate mistake of his, Thierna meaning a lord, not a country. This unlucky blunder is, like many others of the same sort where Irish words are concerned, in danger of becoming stereotyped, as the name of Iona has been, from mere clerical carelessness. WBY’s unlikely excursus into Irish in his footnote suggests at least that his composition of an Oisin poem had taken him (if only perhaps with Douglas Hyde’s assistance) into some measure of proximity with the Gaelic sources for this otherworld. As regards the tripartite division (where ‘Some say . . .’ must be taken as including the poet WBY amongst that select few), it is worth noting that while the first two of WBY’s islands are present here, the third is aligned not with sleeping (as in his poem) but with an ‘underwater’ condition: since Part III had been completed by the end of 1887, this must be counted as a deliberate departure from his own narrative. It may be that WBY was keen to establish the third island as imaginatively his own, and not a part of the inherited narrative tradition. Tir na nOg also had more mod­ ern Fenian credentials, being the subject of a poem by the celebrated John Keegan Casey (1846–1870), who after imprisonment for his part in the 1867 rebellion was a noted pub­ lic speaker and propagandist for non-constitutional nationalism. Casey’s ‘Song of GoldenHaired Niamh’, subtitled ‘An Ossianic Lay’, appeared in his A Wreath of Shamrocks (1867): Oh! come with me to Tirnan-og;

There fruit and blossoms bend each tree,

Red sparkling wine and honey flow,

And beauty smiles from sea to sea.

Your flowing locks will ne’er turn gray,

No wrinkles on your forehead come,

Nor burning pain nor grim decay,

Across the threshold of your home.

So haste away to Tirnan-og,

My white steed waits in golden sheen;

A diadem shall crown thy brow,

And I will be thy bridal queen.

The poem continues in similar vein, with Niamh offering Oisin the delights of luxury and fine company, martial valour and feminine beauty, leading to a final invitation: O Oisin of the powerful hand!

First in the chase, first in the war,

284

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Over our sweet and glorious land Thy gallant deeds were borne afar. Loch Leine is deep, but deeper still In Niamh’s soul thy image dwells; Then turn thee westward from this hill To where the sun-hued billow swells. Oisin. Oisin, whose Irish name means ‘the little deer’, is the son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the principal figure amongst the Fenians. He is both a Fenian warrior and a poet in Irish tradition and a significant contributor to the store of poetic material associated with Fenian mythology. In Standish J. O’Grady’s History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878), Oisin is the subject of an elegiac paragraph which effectively sets the scene for WBY’s treatment of this figure (35): But what shall we say of Oiseen, better known by his North British appella­ tion, the poet and historian of the Fianna, the reviler of Patrick, the sorrowful mourner, the last of all the giant brood, withering away a white-haired shadow in scholastic cells, in mind and body the mere ghost of the once mighty Ossian, ever wondering whither had departed his comrades, and how any power was able to smite them with decay. O’Grady’s allusion to the ‘North British appellation’ serves to indicate a very important context for Oisin in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, for Oisin is also the Ossian of the Scottish James Macpherson (1736–1796), whose versions of Fenian stories, based on originals which he claimed to have read and heard in Scots Gaelic, first appeared in 1761 and reached completion with his international best-seller The Works of Ossian (1765). Ossian became an enormously famous and influential work all over Europe, and remained so until well into the nineteenth century. Purporting to offer the epic works of a Scottish, rather than Irish, ancient culture, Ossian was from almost the beginning highly controversial in Irish circles, and numerous antiquarians, scholars, and men of letters questioned or openly denied its claims to authenticity. (Macpherson himself never produced the supposed Gaelic originals upon which his narratives were based.) Irish writers were not slow to reclaim the Fenian hero, and a significant blow against Ossian was struck by Charles O’Conor in his Dissertation on the Origins and Antiquities of the Ancient Scots (1775). Irish antiquarians continued to produce the evidence for the priority of the Irish rather than Macpherson’s claimed Scottish texts, along with much research on the early culture of Ireland that fed into the Fenian narratives, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the Irish bid for possession of the stories of Finn and Oisin was generally understood to be the stron­ ger. One of the results of the scholarly backlash against Macpherson was eventually the founding of the Ossianic Society, whose publications in the 1850s consolidated and extended the work in this area of previous generations of Irish scholars. A sense of the orthodoxy which it seemed reasonable to claim on this question is to be had from Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 5 (1860), 178:

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

285

Every candid and impartial literary person, who has taken the trouble of inves­ tigating the subject of the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, as published by Macpherson, has been convinced that they were fabricated by him for the most part, and were founded on the fragments of the compositions of the Irish Bard, Oisin, which were conveyed to the highlands of Scotland from time to time by the Irish Shanachies [story-tellers]. They were there committed to memory by the story-tellers, and recited as they had been in Ireland. By the 1880s, the Ossian controversy was very old news, but it was not forgotten; and the name of WBY’s hero was, though certainly Irish, not entirely unfamiliar in literary circles. The ghost of the century-old controversy still lingered, and an early review of WO from Scotland reveals a continuing (if now rather more good-natured than before) instance of Scottish/Irish rivalry (Glasgow Herald, 12 Mar. 1889, 4): That the name of Ossian is still a spell to rouse the poetic spirit in the Celtic imagination, in the glens of the Scottish Highlands and in the wilds of Ireland, is ever receiving some new proof. The latest is the publication of ‘The Wander­ ings of Oisin’, a poem, by W.B. Yeats, in whose veins, if we are not mistaken, flows the blood and burns the fire of the true Irish Celt, to whom poetry is life. The Oisin of the poem is, of course, our own familiar Ossian, whom the Irish people claim as their own along with Finn or Fingal, whose associates and fol­ lowers were called the Feinne or Finians in Ireland and Fingalians in Scotland. Perhaps it would not be inaccurate to say that Oisin was as much Scotch as Irish, and that Ossian was as much Irish as Scotch. The whole race being Celtic, they were practically a single people [. . .] With perhaps some degree of Unionist mischief, The Irish Times in its review of WO grumbled: ‘ “Oisin” for “Ossian” (though the former is, perhaps, right) is a piece of ped­ antry unworthy of Mr. Yeats’ (4 Mar. 1889). As far as his literary existence is concerned, the Irish Oisin is found first in the collec­ tion of tales and poems entitled the Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Ancients) composed (or possibly compiled) in the early thirteenth century. By WBY’s time, Oisin was a centrally important figure in the Fenian stories, then well on the way to another phase of recycling and recirculation. Oisin’s status as the legendary author of the poems in the Fenian cycle is significant, insofar as it aligns him with an imaginative endeavour inherited (ultimately) by WBY himself. Oisin and St Patrick. Standish H. O’Grady’s introduction to Fenian material in Trans. Oss. Soc. gives a detailed picture of the hero as belated poet and chronicler, with St Pat­ rick as his interlocutor and antagonist (Vol. 3, 16–17): The Fenian compositions, then, consist of prose tales and of poems. It is lawful to call them collectively ‘Fenian,’ since the deeds and adventures of the Fenian warriors are equally the theme of the tales and of the poems; but to these lat­ ter alone belongs the name ‘Ossianic,’ for Oisin is principally regarded as their

286

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

author, whereas the prose tales are not attributed to him. The poems are known among the peasantry of the Irish districts as ‘Sgeulta Fiannuigheachta,’ Stories of the Fenians; and moreover as ‘Agallamh Oisin agus Phadruig,’ the dialogue of Oisin and Patrick; for Oisin is said to have recited them to the Saint in the latter days, when, the glory of the Fenians having departed for ever, he alone of them survived; infirm, blind, and dependent upon the bounty of the first Chris­ tian missionaries to Ireland. We do not learn whether these pious men eventu­ ally succeeded in thoroughly converting the old warrior-poet; but it is plain that at the time when he yielded to the Saint’s frequent requests that he would tell him of the deeds of his lost comrades, and accordingly embodied his recollec­ tions in the poems which have descended to us, the discipline of Christianity sat most uneasily upon him, causing him many times to sigh and wearily to lament for the harp and the feast, the battle and the chace, which had been the delight and the pride of the vanished years of his strength. These indications of a still untamed spirit of paganism St. Patrick did not allow to pass uncorrected, and we find his reproofs, exhortations, and threats interspersed throughout the poems, as also his questions touching the exploits of the Fenians (vid. the Battle of Gabhra); and whatever period or author be assigned to the Ossianic poems, certainly nothing can be better or more naturally expressed than the objections and repinings which the aged desolate heathen opposes to the arguments of the holy man. The significance of the Oisin/St  Patrick confrontation was widely seen as the mythic representation of a contrast between pre-Christian and Christian Ireland, one made pos­ sible by the exceptionally long lifespan of a prominent Fenian hero and poet. Explain­ ing this lifespan was, it was generally agreed, partly the reason for the stories of Oisin’s centuries-long dalliance in Tir na nOg. There is evidence for the story of an Oisin who lives beyond his era in Irish texts, as there is for his Fenian companion Caolite, who features in dialogue with Patrick in the Acallam na Senórach. For both these figures, an unnaturally long lifespan was required precisely to enable contact between the pagan and Christian eras and as a means of passing on the older history to the newer age. The implausibility of this was taken advantage of by those who wished to press the claims of Macpherson’s Ossian against Irish materials, as when Hugh Blair mocked the Irish Gaelic sources – late corruptions, as he saw it, of the Scots Gaelic originals (A Critical Disserta­ tion on the Poems of Ossian [1763], xxv-xxvi): From the whole tenor of the Irish poems, concerning the Fiona, it appears, that Finn Mac Comnal flourished in the reign of Cormac, which is placed, by the universal consent of the senachies, in the third century. They even fix the death of Fingal in the year 286, yet his son Ossian is made contemporary with St. Patrick, who preached the gospel in Ireland about the middle of the fifth age. Ossian, tho’ at that time, he must have been two hundred and fifty years of age, had a daughter young enough to become wife to the saint. On account of this family connection, Patrick of the Psalms, for so the apostle of

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

287

Ireland is emphatically called in the poems, took great delight in the company of Ossian, and in hearing the great actions of his family. The saint sometimes threw off the austerity of his profession, drunk freely, and had his soul properly warmed with wine, in order to hear, with becoming enthusiasm, the poems of his father-in-law. The underpinnings of such arguments were soon undone by scholarship, but the sar­ casm continued to rankle for Irish antiquarians in the mid-nineteenth century. Explain­ ing the need for a long-lived representative of the pagan culture to have converse with the Saint, J.H. Simpson offered the narrative situation of the Irish sources as a species of common sense (Poems of Oisin, Bard of Erin [1857], 3–4): Besides, as has been already suggested, by means of an imaginary dialogue, a poet living several centuries after Oisin might seek to connect, and put into a form more likely to insure their preservation, poems which in his days were known to be songs of Oisin. It seems to me that nothing is more likely than that the early Christian clergy should endeavour, when they saw how their flocks delighted in songs about their pagan ancestors, to convey the first principles of Christianity by means of a dialogue between their old blind bard Oisin and St. Patrick. A dialogue of this description would both interest and instruct the people, and would be all the more likely to rivet their attention if it formed, as it were, a thread upon which their beads of song were strung. More philosophically speculative explanations were also on offer, and one possibility which probably chimed with WBY’s own interest in theosophy and eastern tradition saw the survivals of pagan figures into a subsequent age as examples of a kind of trans­ migration of souls through the ages. This was already familiar enough to be mentioned by Thomas Moore (The History of Ireland [1835] I, 52): [. . .] the greater infusion of orientalism into the theology of the Irish, arose doubtless from the longer continuance of their intercourse with the East. How large a portion of the religious customs of Persia were adopted by the Magi or Druids of Ireland, has already been amply shown. [. . .] The favourite tenet as well of Druidism as of Magism, the transmigration of the soul,* which the Druids of Gaul are thought to have derived from the Massilian Greeks, might have reached them, through Ireland, from some part of the east, at a much earlier period; this favourite doctrine of all Oriental theologies, from the Brach­ mans of India to the priests of Egypt, being found inculcated also through the medium of some of the traditions of the ancient Irish. Moore’s note to this is: * The prevalence, among them, of a belief in the transmigration of the soul, may be inferred from the fable respecting Ruan, one of the colony that landed

288

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

in Ireland, under Partholan, some two or three centuries after the Flood. Of this ancient personage, it was believed that he continued to live, through a long series of transmigration, till so late as the time of St. Patrick, when, having resumed the human shape, he communicated to the saint all he knew of the early history of the island, and was then baptized and died. WBY would have been introduced to modern discussion of Oisin and Patrick’s meeting across the ages in the first volume of Trans. Oss. Soc. (1854), where Nicholas O’Kearney introduced his translation and commentary for the bardic verses on the Battle of Gab­ hra. Here, O’Keaney made use of the Lay (though he did not name it, or suggest anything of its relatively modern status as a text) in terms that echoed Moore (21): This account of Tir na n-Og, and Tir na m-Beo, the Elysium of the pagan Irish, i.e. the Islands of the Happy of eastern writers, and of Oisin having returned to life after a lapse of three hundred years or upwards, so as to meet St. Patrick, and narrate the history of Fenian achievements, is, probably, the remnant of history that best explains the docrine of the transmigration of souls. Since one calling himself Oisin returned from Tir na n-Og, and related a portion of Irish history, no doubt it was believed by the pagans of his day that he was the real Oisin who had again assumed the human shape. O’Kearney calls Lay ‘this very curious poem’, claiming that it ‘pretty fully elucidates the Irish pagan doctrine of metempsychosis as believed by the druids’ (25). In case of any doubt, O’Kearney assures his readers that ‘It is doubtful if St. Patrick ever saw the real Oisin, but only some druid or old seanchaidhe [storyteller], who believed himself to be Oisin revived, in virtue of the druidical doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of the spirit into other bodies’ (28). That a confrontation between paganism and the Church carried contemporary overtones in the 1880s is certain. This is clear even from the distance of 1913, when JBY wrote that ‘I remember hearing John O’Leary say, that he as a Fenian hated priests, as a class’ (letter to Ruth Hart, 22 Nov. 1913). The Fenians, old and new. The term ‘Fenian’ is taken by WBY to denote a member of the warrior band of Finn, the fianna. The word is partly formed from fianna, but partly also from the name Féni, referring to the legendary Goidels, who were thought to have come to Ireland from continental Europe and to have established themselves there as landowners: the Féni were thus taken as an anciently established order of true Irish, who had never had any kind of connection with Britain. The formation of the word ‘Fenian’, therefore, is actually a bringing together of two distinct etymological roots. In WBY’s time, its widespread use was relatively modern, and seems to have begun with the anti­ quarian Charles O’Conor (1710–1791), who in an attack on the authenticity of Macpher­ son’s Ossian in his Reflections on the History of Ireland during the Times of Heathenism (1786) referred to ‘Fin Mac Cumhal and his Fenian heroes’ (240). The fellow antiquarian to whom O’Conor’s book was addressed, General Charles Vallancey (1725–1812), also made use of ‘Fenian’ (in the same volume in which O’Conor’s Reflections were collected), connecting it in his wayward scholarship to the ancient Phoenecians, whom he identified

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

289

with the legendary Féni: for Vallancey, ‘The most ancient Irish dialect is called Bearla na Feine or Beacna na Fene, which means the dialect of the Fenians, the tongue of the Feni­ ans’ (Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, vol. 2 [1868], 62). This pretended etymology did not at first find any foothold; but the use of ‘Fenian’ in relation to Finn (and the Ossianic tradition) was available for Walter Scott, who in The Antiquary (1816) referred to ‘the tales of the bare-arm’d Fenians’. The word was relatively little used, however, until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was resurrected in the United States by the Irish Republi­ can Brotherhood, who identified themselves as the Fenian Brotherhood. One prominent American Fenian (an exiled Young Irelander, from Dublin), John Savage (1828–1888), gave a tub-thumping account of the term in his Fenian Heroes and Martyrs (1868), 100: Since the Fenian Brotherhood have become famous, a power on the earth, and a terror to English ministers and excited Parliamentarians, there have been many speculations as to the origin, meaning and appropriateness of the desig­ nation – Fenian. [. . .] The era of the Fiann (Feean) that is the Fenian period, was one of the most romantic and glorious in the records of ancient Ireland, and an account of the Fenian Brotherhood, who then made it so [. . .] will doubtless be interesting in itself, as well as furnishing the origin of the designation now so widely recognized as synonymous with Irish liberty. Savage repeats the conflation of Féni and fianna, along with the association with Finn, and asserts that although in origin ‘the Fenians seem to have done nothing but hunt and fight’, they became ‘the standing military force, the national militia’ of ancient Ireland (101). In his article, ‘Finn MacCool’, published in O’Leary’s The Gael for 23 April 1887, WBY wrote (CW 9, 48): These Fenians, of whom before long Finn became the chief, having around him Ossian, Oscar, Dermot, Caoilte, and many more, were the Militia of Ireland; their duties, the defence of the country against Alban and African pirates, the protection of the Ardrigh, at this time the famous Cormac Mac Art, in whose reign Tara was at its greatest splendour; but far from this luxury in the vast forests, the Fenians lived rudely and simply as Cuchulain of old; while those around them sought to be architects of kingdoms, of armies, of splendour, they longed only to be the architects of themselves, to be braver than any, and gener­ ous beyond dreams. Homeless, in winter they were quartered on the people; in summer they slept on the earth they loved – that earth they were ever wont to kneel down and kiss before they entered the battle. They sought to be that which Cuchulain and his followers were without seeking – men of nature. They were chivalrous; the primeval men were heroic. History knows of nothing more important than this brotherhood, for the wave of their influence swept on through Wales with her Arthurian Knights, on over Britain, over Europe, till joining with the worship of the Virgin, surging in from the east, it became mediaeval chivalry, that dim seeking for a light departed in the morning of the world.

290

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Reception and interpretation. ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ had been extensively covered in reviews of WO (see notes to the 1889 version of the poem in vol. 1 of the present edition). In 1902, William Archer’s essay on WBY in his anthology Poets of the Younger Generation compared the most recent version of ‘Oisin’ (1901) with the 1889 publication (535–538): The Wanderings of Oisin, as it now stands, is very different from the poem origi­ nally published under that title. It would be a curious and very profitable criti­ cal exercise to make an exhaustive comparison of the two texts [. . .] I content myself with quoting the opening passage of each version, to show how radical has been the remodelling to which Mr. Yeats has subjected his early work, and how remarkably his individuality has accentuated itself in the interim. [quotes 1889 I, 1–53] This is pretty, indeed, and fancifully decorative, with unmistak­ able foretastes of the poet’s mature quality; but it is nerveless, diffuse, and now and then commonplace. Everything of value is retained in the later version; some exquisite touches are added; and the whole passage is compressed into little more than two-thirds of its original length [quotes revised text I, 1–31] Here everything, to my thinking, is bettered with an unerring touch. The bur­ densome and irrelevant description of the horse, with its ‘pearly white wellgroomed hair,’ has altogether disappeared; so has the laboured image of the doves; so has the superficially pretty but essentially grotesque comparison of the lady’s eyes to dewdrops hanging upon bending grass-blades. On the other hand, the noble audacity of the ‘stormy sunset on doomed ships’ is retained intact, while two of the rejected colour-motives reappear in the beautiful lines And found on the dove-grey edge of the sea

A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode

On a horse with a bridle of findrinny.

– ‘a kind of red bronze,’ as the glossary explains. Note, too, how every change tends to heighten the racial colour of the passage (if I may call it so) and make it more characteristically Celtic. The first form might have been the work of an Englishman cleverly applying the method of Christabel to an Irish subject; the second form is Irish to its inmost fibre. Archer was not the first to notice the scale of the changes. A detailed, but not entirely sympathetic account from 1899 noted how poems had been ‘revised and re-revised, with­ out reaching the author’s idea of the perfect or final state’ (The Scotsman, 8 May 1899): For, as he [WBY] tells us, ‘other revisions are necessary, and he hopes to make them when he is further from the mood in which the poems were written, and has more leisure’ – the former surely an ambiguous condition for making improving touches. Yet further revisions are promised when he has learned the old pronunciation of Irish names, and a consistent method of spelling, heads

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

291

upon which he can do no more at present than affirm ‘that he has not treated his Irish names as badly as the mediaeval writers of the stories of King Arthur treated their Welsh names.’ Mr. Yeats, perhaps, treats his names, and even him­ self, with a somewhat too portentous seriousness. More charitably, The Bookman reported that ‘there is evidence of considerable revision, for he [WBY] is a fastidious artist restlessly striving after perfection’ (Jun. 1899). A sub­ stantial early account came in F. Reid’s book about WBY in 1915; this was highly admir­ ing, and made a point of the superiority of the revised version to that of 1889 (36–7): [In WO version] The poem is extraordinary as the work of so young a man. [. . .] If it reveals nothing else, it reveals a temperament that, whatever its limi­ tations, is poetic through and through. The workmanship, particularly in the first two parts, is uneven, but the verse is always remarkable for its melodious­ ness. In the first two parts Mr. Yeats has not yet shaken off external influences. These parts recall in places both Keats and Shelley. But in the third part he is himself. [. . .] In its final form it is quite perfect. The first two parts [. . .] have been entirely rewritten, and the entire thing now has that unity of effect which is worth a thousand wandering, unrelated beauties. It is as if it had sprung straight and whole from the brain that conceived it, without any of the toil of writing, the flagging moments, the taking up and breaking of a thread. A  wealth of lyri­ cal beauty has been showered upon it with the utmost prodigality. This beauty is sustained as it has rarely been sustained in so long a poem. Hardly for a moment does it drop below its own highest level, which is very high indeed; and the rich, at times almost sluggish, melody of the verse gives it an atmo­ sphere as dreamy and strange as that of Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters. Can we say that it is a great poem? I think so. It quite frankly has nothing to give but its beauty, and that beauty is a pagan and sensuous beauty: its ethical, its moral significance is absolutely nil. It will seem great to us, therefore, in proportion as we care for art for its own sake – that is, for the sake of beauty – as the painter, the musician – Whistler, Mozart – care for it. Certainly Usheen was infinitely the greatest poem Ireland had produced up to the year 1899, and would have been the greatest poem now had not Mr. Yeats himself surpassed it. In later years, such enthusiasm was in shorter supply. Louis MacNeice found little to admire in the poem, calling it ‘very derivative [. . .] and no more Irish than Tennyson’s Voyage of Maeldune’ (64): The epithets are often clichés and the rhythms are sometimes the more vulgar rhythms of the Romantics, sometimes feeble  – especially when he [WBY] is using the rhyming couplets of Morris. Morris’s influence can be seen every­ where. [. . .] Keats and Shelley often, even Tennyson occasionally, show a lack of savoir-faire which approximates to bad taste. Yeats, who received the Romantic

292

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

inspiration largely through the more enervated verse of Morris, ran the risk of being emasculated and crude simultaneously. In 1943, J. Hone noted that ‘the poem was vastly improved in later revision to which many of its greatest delights are due,’ while remarking that ‘Even then some felt that their pleasure in the colour and imaginative energy of the narrative was interrupted by the theosophical hints and suggestions, and asked whether it was in this manner that Irish saga, objective as the Greek, endowed things with dream shape and magical significance’ (Hone, 62). R. Ellmann read the poem partly as an autobiographical allegory (Man and the Masks, 31–32): The Wanderings of Oisin is divided into three parts, each of them a separate voyage. Yeats’s life also fell into three main phases, at Sligo, at London, and at Howth, near Dublin. During the first Yeats chased after the two dogs and talked to the fishermen; during the second he fought with the English school­ boys; and during the third he secluded himself in the thicket and dreamed. Oisin, in the first book of the poem [. . .] finds a world inhabited only by the young, and spends a hundred years in hunting and fishing. This century may be described as the Sligo period. Then he makes a second voyage to a differ­ ent kind of island, where ‘rose a world of towers | And blackness in the dark.’ Surely this is a symbolical England as seen through Irish eyes. Here is the castle of Manannan, the old god of the sea, his place taken now by a ‘brown demon’. The demon has enchained a beautiful lady who, like the enchained young man in ‘The Two Titans,’ symbolizes Ireland. Oisin battles the demon for a hundred years but the demon’s form is protean and ultimately unconquerable. After this second century Oisin and Niam go to the final island, that of forgetful­ ness, where, lulled by a bell-branch, Oisin dreams as Yeats had dreamed in the Howth thicket [. . .] Ellmann maintained this biographical focus later in Identity, though he acknowledged that the poem, ‘within the framework of the Irish legend, reaches towards a more com­ plex meaning’, since ‘Yeats felt at liberty to transplant and graft one legend upon another, or within reasonable bounds to invent his own variations’; and while the poet ‘had not developed the full panoply of his resources for working with myth [. . .] neither could the wanderings of Oisin be considered random wanderings: they were rather a prearranged tour of a rich and fairly well-governed symbolical land’ (19–20). T.R. Henn identified the poem as ‘traditional’ and saw in it ‘the pre-Raphaelite formula, working on a myth that lacked the strength and ferocity of the Norse which had brought out the best in Morris; its tapestry effects were changed by that luminous softness of a rain-filled countryside and the nostalgia that it brings’; he also complained of the poem’s ‘sentimentality, occa­ sional clumsiness of technique, and a private symbolism’ (Henn, 111–112). For H. Orel, the poem’s importance lay ‘in its marking a definite stage in Yeats’s apprenticeship,’ and he noted in this regard how the poet ‘was now turning to the scholars for his texts [. . .] Yeats had begun to survey a cultural tradition, and to examine literary materials that had

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

293

only lately been modernized by Gaelic scholars’. Orel interpreted the Irish hero in terms of traditional patterns of epic character and resilience (16–17): So long as Oisin delights in his strength these conflicts [on the second island] continue; but ultimately his pride of manhood diminishes as his recognition of their pointlessness grows. [. . .] Oisin’s odyssey is ultimately leading to a knowl­ edge of ‘how men pass,’ of death; and his final gesture – the flinging of a sack full of sand some five yards while ‘leaning down from the gem-studded saddle’ of his horse – is the bravura of a man who has lived intensely, fully, and heroically, and who even at the end denies the fact of his mortality. A more complex reading of the poem, partly in relation to its literary analogies in Romantic poetry, began with T.R. Whitaker, who wrote that whereas the WO version of 1889 saw the poet ‘groping for his language, his desire for order hampered by the very richness of his imagination’, ‘the revision for the collected Poems of 1895 further clarifies this symbolism’ (26–27): The cycle of life had been obscured by his naming the first island that of the ‘Liv­ ing’ and his suggesting that an ‘Isle of Youth’ could not be found; now the first island became that of ‘Dancing’ and the hidden refuge from the cycle became the ‘island of Content’. [. . .] Although obscurities remained, some needed not excision but the clarification that only years of thought would bring. Life on the three islands is not adequately correlated with the conflict between Oisin and Patrick; but that incoherence troubled Yeats’s account of the cycle and the alternating eras in Blake, and was solved only by complicated geometry in A Vision. Oisin’s islands, too, are ambiguously a refuge from life and a mirror if it, and he is spurred on by strangely mingled longings – for Niamh, for the past, and for death. But that motive is itself the paradoxical Will, which impels the soul through the cycles of a life that mirrors eternity, in order to lead it back to its vaguely remembered source. G. Bornstein’s reading of the poem in terms of its relation to the work of Shelley brought discussion to a more complex (and illuminating) critical level. While allowing for alle­ gorical ambitions, Bornstein saw how such things were also conditioned by poetic influ­ ence: ‘Both the general conception of the subject and its specific symbolic technique owed something to Shelley as well as to specific Irish sources’ (Bornstein, 24–25): Yeats aspired to write an Irish Prometheus Unbound which would set its Shel­ leyan beautiful idealisms of moral excellence firmly on Irish soil and legend. Already, Shelley’s Englishness and, even more, his generalized settings both­ ered Yeats, but he still felt that he could unite the essential spirit of Shelley’s words with his own nationalist strategies. [. . .] Yet the finished product relates not just to Prometheus Unbound, whose rhythms hover behind those of Oisin, but also to the bulk of Shelley’s work, particularly Alastor and The Triumph

294

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

of Life. Yeats’s poem presents his favourite Shelleyan theme of a mortal lover­ poet’s love for an immortal enchantress, and the impossibility of satisfying it within the normal human world. [. . .] The emphasis on wandering in the title of the poem suggests the troubled search of the youth in Alastor, and the images of tower, cave, and water accompanying the lovers’ search for an isolated paradise recall the difficulties both of Laon and Cythna and of Prometheus and Asia. Also in 1970, H. Bloom published a major critical account of the poem, with a chapter on ‘Anglo-Irish Poetry and The Wanderings of Oisin’ (Bloom, 83–103), where he called the poem ‘Yeats’s principal, overt attempt at Anglo-Irish poetry,’ contending that ‘It is prob­ ably Yeats’s most underrated major poem, in proportion to its high merits’ (87). Drawing attention to the importance of both J.C. Mangan and Samuel Ferguson, Bloom never­ theless insisted that ‘the reader must begin by remembering how far the poet actually is from his supposed sources’, claiming that ‘He is so far from mythology, and indeed in every sense so far from Ireland, that we need not be surprised to discover that his poem, despite its Celtic colourings, is in the centre of English Romantic tradition’ (87). Plac­ ing the poem in this tradition as what he called ‘the internalization of quest-romance,’ Bloom defined this as follows (89–90): The main tradition of the Romantic quest is not one in which the imagination is ravaged by the strength of despair. The great questers, and their creators, suffer from their own proper strength; they are destroyed by the power of hope, by the imagination itself. [. . .] The goal of the quest from the Solitary [in Wordsworth’s The Excursion] through Oisin is sublimity, but it is a sublimity impossible to distinguish from an absolute solipsism. It is the sublimity not of conceptions, but only of a hoped-for potential, one that turns upon infinitude. In his interpretation of the poem itself, Bloom saw in Book I a central contrast between Oisin and the ‘Immortals’, since ‘Primary decay awaits Oisin, but the destruction of the immortals can come only when the forms of nature dissolve,’ so that ‘to choose nature is to be survived by nature, for the human cannot outlast the natural, but to choose the inhuman is to transcend nature, and yet to live as long as nature lives’ (98). In the events of Book II, Bloom claimed that ‘What Oisin fights, slays, and yet must face per­ petually again is his own double, the natural man or soul in him that will not finally die, but that also finally cannot overcome him’ (98). In Book III, ‘the quest leads to the Island of Sleepers, as it must, for the flight from nature and toward a perpetual gratifi­ cation of desire dooms the searcher to identify sleep and poetry [. . .] the quest is now haunted by nostalgia for the human world, and an end to illusion (and to love, and poetry) approaches’ (99). Bloom’s concluding summary of the poem’s meaning as questromance was a sombre one: ‘What Oisin has failed to learn is the lesson that Keats and Shelley, the latter in particular, had taught the young Yeats: a quest to thwart nature’s limitations must seek out an object that itself shatters nature’s value as well as context; the young Oisin had sought in a super-nature what only the imagination can give, and even then only with equivocation’ (99).

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

295

After Bloom, whose work had given a cue for further attention to the poem, WBY’s modern critics seldom afforded the poem the centrality which he (and, in a sense, WBY himself) felt that it deserved. Nevertheless, the poem is often engaged with in useful ways. H. Adams remarks that ‘the Fenian/ faery opposition does not turn out to be a true contrary, because the land of faery is escapist, passive, and artificial in its expressions of desire, therefore negating the real’; reading forwards from the poem, he observes that ‘The true object of desire, Niamh, exceeds her false world and threatens already (though we don’t know this quite yet) to break into real life as the beloved of later poems, finally named Maud Gonne’ (Adams, 35). Such a reading arguably takes its cue from later WBY, and a poem such as ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, but it is also possible to interpret ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ in terms of the poet’s earlier influences. E.B. Loizeaux offers a new perspective by returning to William Morris (whose importance for the poem MacNeice had taken for granted, but who had not in fact been much mentioned in criticism of ‘Oisin’ thereafter); it is Morris the visual artist, and in particular the producer of figu­ rative tapestries, in whom Loiseaux is interested, and she gives a detailed and illuminat­ ing reading of the poem in terms of its affinities with Morris’s aesthetic in that medium. Loiseaux makes an important point about the poem’s visual elements (64–65): The decorativeness of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ – its flatness, its colour, its pat­ tern – like that of Morris’s tapestries, pushes the poem toward the symbolic. We cannot take any of the landscapes, even the woods through which the Fenians ride at the beginning of the poem, as representative of a real place: they are too patterned, too coloured, too decorative. They must represent something else. Like Morris, Oisin seeks to discover a paradisal world. The landscapes of the three islands reflect the perfection of the kind of life lived on them, of joy, of victory, and of repose. But, unlike Morris’s, the landscapes of ‘Oisin’ also sug­ gest the inadequacy of such perfection for mortal man. A substantial critical reading of the poem is offered by E. Larrissy, who brings together the ‘fairy’ dimension of the story with that of WBY’s evolving Irish national­ ism, seeing there tensions and complexities. ‘Yeats’s patriotic design,’ Larrissy writes, ‘involves Niamh in the question of his relationship to Irish mythology,’ since ‘in so far as Faery may stand for the whole tradition of Irish mythology and folklore, and for its lure, so may Niamh [. . .] she represents the possibility of possessing [. . .] the matter of Ireland’ (42–43): But in so far as she is subtly uncanny, she simultaneously represents the possi­ bility of not possessing it, of an alienating quest away from reality and identity. A conceivable rebuttal of this point of view would indicate that it is the Ireland of Finn and the Fenians that represents the desired state. Yet it is only neces­ sary to remark that the whole of the Fenian cycle is marked by the irruption of Faery to suggest how problematic such a rebuttal would be. [. . .] The world of the Fenians is on the permeable boundaries of Faery, and this character of it is itself a contributor to Yeats’s idea of the ‘twilight’: a boundary between

296

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

the world of dreams and the mundane. [. . .] One way of regarding the malign aspect of a voyage to the Other World is to see it as constituting a movement away from a fluid and permeable boundary, which is at the centre of a triad where the infinite is on one side and the finite on the other, towards a fixed boundary at the end of the world (the land beyond the wave): a kind of mural of static tableaux [. . .] a series of discrete, intensely worked pictures of life, revolving around a void. This perspective on the poem aligns with the Morris-inspired visual elements identified by Loiseaux; but it also suggests how WBY’s ambitions for allegorical meaning were challenged from within the very texture (literary and cultural) of his source materials. An attempt to return to the question of the poem’s overall symbolic meaning is made by M.J. Sidnell in his ‘The Allegory of The Wanderings of Oisin’. Here, previous allegorical readings (including Ellmann’s) are corrected and refined in some ways, and the signifi­ cance of John O’Leary as a type of Fenian hero is stressed, to conclude that ‘having tasted all the possibilities of the Otherworld, Oisin is driven back to the world of time and change’; here, he is ‘trapped in it with the knowledge, making him worse off than before, that there is no remedy for its ills, even in an Otherworld’ (Sidnell, 163). The contrasts between the world of the fairies and that of the Fenians, and between both these and Christian Ireland, are addressed by M. Howes, who argues that ‘Yeats structured the poem around two related contrasts, each of which allies Oisin, the Fenians and truly vital Irish nationality with a version of masculinity’ (Yeats’s Nations [1996], 28–29): One contrast sets the physical and imaginative vitality of Oisin’s pagan Ireland against the material and spiritual poverty of Patrick’s Christian Ireland. [. . .] Oisin has ‘the Fenians’ old strength’ while the Christian Irish are ‘men wax­ ing so weakly’. The poem’s second contrast opposes the masculine world of the Fenians and the national struggle to the feminine world of the Sidhe. The world of the faeries, presided over by Niamh, is a feminine realm of beauty, sexual­ ity and romance. [. . .] The Fenians (and even their dogs, Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair) usually come in comradely groups of three or more, such as ‘Cao­ ilte, Conan, and Finn’ and ‘Blanaid, MacNessa, tall Fergus’, rather than in the romantic pairs of the Sidhe. The historical dynamics in play here are worth further exploration; and it is worth remembering that one of the key changes in the political and religious circumstances between the first version’s publication in 1889 and that of the major revision in 1895 was the fall of C.S. Parnell, with its consequent heightening of tensions between nationalist commitment and national religious pieties. The most historically informed placing of the poem is given in R.F. Foster’s chapter, ‘Oisin Comes Home: Yeats as Inheritor’ (Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances (2011), 129–173). The present edited version. The version of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ presented here incorporates all the changes made by WBY from P95 onwards. A selection of textual changes made by WBY over this period is included in the notes: a comprehensive

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

297

account will be found in the version in VE. Additionally, the MS  which was used by WBY in preparing the P95 text is used here to provide post-1889 variants from before P95’s publication. The multiple changes at various stages to spellings of Irish names have not been recorded (for these, see VE, 1). In explanatory notes, much material relating to the 1889 version has been carried over in the present commentary in order to save the reader the trouble of looking back from the notes of this to those of the earlier version in vol.1. For the genesis of the poem, its context in the later 1880s, and its major source materials and Irish parallels, the reader is referred to the headnotes of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin (1889)’. WBY’s uses and adaptations of his principal source, the translation of the ‘Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youths’ in Transactions of the Ossianic Society Vol. 4 (1859), are recorded again in the notes to this later text, with the abbreviation Lay, as are his uses of the Caoidh Oisin a n-Diagh na Feinne (‘The Lamentation of Oisin after the Fenians’), translated by Standish H. O’Grady in Transactions of the Ossianic Society Vol.3 (1857), (Lamentation). Manuscript sources. NLI 3726 binds together an 1886 notebook (A) of drafts for the 1889 poem with another notebook (B). This carries drafts for the revised version, writ­ ten out in WBY’s hand for Books I and II and, for Book III, with the relevant pages of WO pasted in and altered by hand in WBY’s revision. Transcriptions of all pages (and reproductions of a few) are in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 124–169. Copy-text: P49.

The Wanderings of Oisin ‘Give me the world if Thou wilt, but grant me an asylum for my affections.’ – TULKA TO

EDWIN J. ELLIS

BOOK I

S

. Patrick. You who are bent, and bald, and blind,

With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,

Have known three centuries, poets sing,

Of dalliance with a demon thing.

BOOK I] The Island of Dancing del. MS.

Argument

there and how he [grew weary del.] longed for his old companions and left it. MS

2. a wandering mind] Perhaps cp. J.N. Paton, Spindrift (1867), ‘Perdita’, 215–216: ‘with a wandering mind, | A languid eye, and a fam­ Osheen tells St  Patrick of his journey to the

ished heart’. enchanted Island of dancing and of his life

Epigraph and dedication] See p. 359.

298 5

10

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Oisin. Sad to remember, sick with years, The swift innumerable spears, The horsemen with their floating hair, And bowls of barley, honey, and wine, Those merry couples dancing in tune, And the white body that lay by mine; But the tale, though words be lighter than air, Must live to be old like the wandering moon.

4. a demon thing] This phrase is prominent in an obscure poem by George Croly (1780–1860), Napoleon (1820), 75: ‘A sceptred, desperate, demon thing’. It may seem unlikely that WBY would have known the poem; but it shares a metre and rhyme-scheme with his own, and its casting, as a dramatic monologue for Bonaparte, who is shown expressing furious defiance in abject defeat (the first line begins, ‘I hate thee, England!’), is very similar to that of Oisin. Croly was a churchman and Tory jour­ nalist, associated with Blackwood’s magazine, and was once attacked by Byron; he was born in the North of Ireland, and educated at TCD. 8.] Perhaps cp. KT, Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘Gramachree’, 19: ‘A comb of gold honey, and wine of the best’. 9.] And feet of maidens dancing in tune MS. With ‘dancing in tune’, cp. Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama (1855), I  XXII iii, 4: ‘To the dancers dancing in tune’. 10.] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Para­ dise (1870), ‘November: The lovers of Gud­ run’: ‘upon the bed, her hair | O’er her white body scattered here and there’, and Oscar Wilde, Poems (1881), ‘La Bella Donna della mia Mente’, 33–34: ‘O delicate | White body made for love and pain’. 12. the wandering moon] The phrase is some­ thing of a commonplace in poetry, deriving from Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’, 67: ‘To behold the wandering moon’. But here perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘To the Moon’, 1–3: ‘Art thou pale for weariness | Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, | Wandering companionless’. 13. Caoilte] The Fenian warrior Cailte mac Ronain, who was steward to Finn and is

here presented as a comrade of Oisin. A con­ temporary literary appearance of this figure known to WBY was in KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, IV, 41 (as Cailte). On the character of Caoilte, Standish J. O’Grady’s summary is one which may influence WBY’s larger perspective on the Fenian heroes and their relation to the early Irish Christian culture of the monks (History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical [1881] Vol. 1, 353): Coelte Mac Ronan, Coelte son of Ronan, is the nephew of Finn, being his sister’s son. He is one of the greater Fian heroes, slender, and renowned for his swift­ ness. He and Ossian alone survived of all the Fiana Eireen, but while Ossian, a withered elder, is taken possession of by the monks, and encouraged to relate the historyof his people, Coelte, after the destruction of the Fians, entered the host of the Tuatha De Danan, and lived immortal and invisible in the island. He stormed the enchanted fortress of the gods of the Erne at Assaroe, and entered himself into its possession, where he dwelt for many centuries. He, too, how­ ever, is once or twice represented as visit­ ing St. Patrick, and relating histories. In the ideas attached to Coelte and Ossian, we see a great historical truth. With the ascendancy of the new order, with its love of scholarship and learning, the monks began to feel an interest in the history of their country and of the bardic literature. This tendency finds dramatic expression

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

15

299

Caoilte, and Conan, and Finn were there,

When we followed a deer with our baying hounds,

With Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair,

And passing the Firbolgs’ burial-mounds,

Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill

Where passionate Maeve is stony-still;

And found on the dove-grey edge of the sea

in the introduction of Ossian into the monasteries. On the other hand, the bardic and ethnic traditions continued amongst the hereditary bards, and thus Coelte, in his second avatar, is found not amongst the monks, but amongst the Tu­ atha De Danan, the chief object of loving interest after the heroes to the non-Chris­ tian portion of the community. WBY’s familiarity with this account is made more likely by the fact that he uses one of O’Grady’s stories about Caoilte in 1893, when writing ‘The Host’ (later ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’); this story occurs on the page that follows in O’Grady’s book. The tale of Caolte’s driving away former gods from Assaroe is compressed for use by WBY in ‘The Secret Rose’ (1896), 16. Conan] Probably Conán mac Morna (sometimes, Conán Máel [the bald]), a Fenian warrior later referred to by AG as ‘Conan of the Bitter Tongue’: another, lesser-known warrior in some of the Fenian cycle is Conán mac Lia, an former enemy who ultimately joins Finn). Finn] The father of Oisin (in Irish Fionn mac Cumhaill, Finn the son of Cumhall). He is the mythic figure at the centre of the Fenian cycle of early Irish stories. 15. Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair] The three hounds of Finn: Bran and Sgeolan had origi­ nally been human, but their mother Uirne (Finn’s aunt), was changed into a dog before their birth. In Lay, ‘There were there Sgeo­ lan and Bran, | Lomaire’, and WBY adopts this number and (very nearly) this spelling for the dogs: Patrick Kennedy’s Literary Fic­ tions of the Irish Celts (1866), ‘The Youth of

Ossian’, has a higher number: ‘Brann, Sceolu­ ing, Lomaire, Brod, and Lomulath’. In Lam­ entation, Oisin says that ‘It is a dark grief to me not to see Sgeolan | Following the cries of the Fenians’, and S.H. O’Grady’s note to these lines gives more detail (Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3, 262–263): Next to Bran, Sgeolan was the most fa­ vourite hound of Finn MacCumhail. The following is the first stanza of a division of a poem on the battle of Knockanaur, called ‘The names of the hounds and staghounds which the Fenians had on leaving Knockanaur,’ in which are given the names of two hundred and ninetyfour hounds: There were Sgeolan and Bran, Lomaire, Brad, and Lon-luith; Five hounds foremost in chace and exploits, That never used to separate from Finn. 16. Firbolgs’ burial-mounds] The Firbolgs (‘men of the bag’) were thought to have been defeated in the Battle of Moytura by the Tuatha De Danaan. In Co. Sligo, between Sligo town and Knocknarea, an area with numerous megalithic graves, Carrowmore, was associated with the burial places of this mythic people. See McGarry, 47. 17–18.] A  large prehistoric monument on Knocknarea was often thought to be the rest­ ing place of Queen Maeve of Connacht, who plays a significant role in the stories of the Cuchulain Ulster cycle. 19–30: WBY adapts here the description of Niamh and her horse given in Lay:

300 20

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

A pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode On a horse with a bridle of findrinny; And like a sunset were her lips,

‘absolutely crude and uninteresting’ (‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’, United Ireland Oct. 1892, CW 9, 186) and ‘jigging doggerel’ (in the Bookman, Aug. 1894, CW 9, 246)). ‘Pearl-pale’ appears in MacCarthy’s short poem ‘Dolores’, Underglimpses, And Other We all ceased from the chase,

Poems, (1857), 5–8: ‘The rose of my heart On seeing the form of the royal maid;

is gone, Dolores, | Bud or blossom, in vain ’Twas a surprise to Fionn and the Fianns,

I seek; | For I miss the breath of thy lip, Dolo­ They never beheld a woman equal in beauty.

res, | And the blush of thy pearl-pale cheek’. MacCarthy’s posthumous collected Poems A royal crown was on her head;

went into a second edition in 1884; ‘pearl­ And a brown mantle of precious silk,

pale’, in a lyric replete with roses of the heart Spangled with stars of red gold,

and moons of the soul, seems at the very least Covering her shoes down to the grass.

to offer a startling Yeatsian premonition. Redder were her cheeks than the rose, 21.] On a horse whose bridle and [hoofs del.] Fairer was her visage than the swan upon shoes were made | Of gleaming ruddy Find­ the wave, ruinny MS. WBY’s entry for this word in the And more sweet was the taste of her bal­ Glossary to P95 defines it simply as ‘A kind sam lips of red bronze’. The term should properly be Than honey mingled thro’ red wine. taken as referring to white bronze (from the Irish findruine, and Old Irish find-bruine, A garment wide, long, and smooth,

where fionn [fin-, find-] means white). WBY Covered the white steed;

makes a point, however, of the redness of his There was a comely saddle of red gold,

‘findrinny’: later in the poem, he has Oisin And her right hand held a bridle with a

ride ‘With hoofs of ruddy findrinny | Over golden bit. the purple glimmering sea’ (I, 383–384). Four shoes well shaped were under him, A  definition of Findruine as ‘bronze coated Of the yellow gold of the purest quality; with tin or some white alloy’ and ‘white metal A silver wreath was on the back of his (silver bronze)’ was given in Eugene O’Curry, head, On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient And there was not in the world a steed better. Irish (1873), Vol. 1, cccclxv, and Vol. 3, 100. Standish J. O’Grady, in History of Ireland: The 20, 28. pearl-pale] This epithet belongs, per­ Heroic Period (1878), 91 writes of ‘a bag of haps, in the verbal world of WATR: it is used twisted threads of findruiney’, and it is worth in ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’, 7, noticing that this spelling is very close to that whose initial MS appearance is probably from of WBY’s MS reading earlier. a time just months after the revision of Oisin. 21^22.] And she was mild and tender and fair ‘Pearl-pale’ may have come to WBY from an | As the doves that moaned in the laurel wall unlikely source  – that of the Young Ireland | That was about Emain’s hosting hall MS poet Denis Florence MacCarthy, whose work (revising WO, 36–39). WBY was in the habit of deriding (he called it ’Twas not long till we saw, westwards,

A fleet rider advancing towards us,

A young maiden of most beautiful

appearance, On a slender white steed of swiftest power.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

25

30

301

A stormy sunset on doomed ships;

A citron colour gloomed in her hair,

But down to her feet white vesture flowed, And with the glimmering crimson glowed Of many a figured embroidery; And it was bound with a pearl-pale shell That wavered like the summer streams, As her soft bosom rose and fell. S. Patrick. You are still wrecked among heathen dreams. Oisin. ‘Why do you wind no horn?’ she said,

‘And every hero droop his head?

The hornless deer is not more sad

22–23.] A short poem in William Sharp’s 1884 volume, Poems, has ‘Stormy Sunset’ for sub­ title (‘Across th’ ensanguined sea the sun | Sinks slowly through the blood-red west’), but WBY had already used the ‘lips’/ ‘ships’ rhyme in IoS II iii 289–290: ‘With all his ships | I saw him from sad Dido’s shores depart, | Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips’, and before that in his sonnet ‘Behold the Man’, 8–10: ‘As o’er the sea from love-sick Dido’s stair | Passed long ago the wanderer’s white-sailed ships, | Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips.’ ‘Doomed ships’ may owe something to the arresting phrase ‘doomed lips’, which occurs in Lady Wilde, Poems of Speranza (2nd edn., 1871), ‘The Prisoner: Christmas, 1869’, 47 (see also notes to III, 149 and 214 below). In his story, ‘The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’ WBY writes of the woman being wooed by his protago­ nist: ‘and still the girl’s blushes came and went like a stormy sunset’ (The National Observer 24 Dec. 1892; later included in The Secret Rose [1897]). For detailed engagement with this image, and the large circle of associations that arise from it, see W. Gould, ‘Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lachrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy’, YA 18, 15–57. 24. citron] OED n, 3: ‘The pale yellow or green­ ish yellow colour of the rind of a citron (or

lemon)’. In his copy of WO, JBY underlined ‘citron’, and wrote: ‘citron fruit ? or what? yel­ low? or brown? what colour is “citron”?’ gloomed] This is OED v. 5, intrans. to glow; but it is classed as obsolete, and there are no citations from after the sixteenth century. WBY’s resurrection of the word probably has an ear to internal rhyme with ‘doomed’ in 23. 28.] And it was bound with a pearl white shell MS. 30.] R.W. Buchanan’s Undertones (1864) includes ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’, where some lines prefigure WBY’s description of Niamh, bringing to the rising and falling bosom both ‘dewily’ and ‘lips’, as well as the light-effects of sun on these: ‘Her eyes were vacant of a seeing soul, | But dewily the bosom rose and fell, | The lips caught sunrise, parting’ (Part 3, 241–244). 34. the hornless deer] Cp. W.H. Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), ‘The Lay of the Chase of Slieve Guillen’, 5–10: From the reckless throng Finn stole unseen, When he spied a young doe on the heathclad green With agile spring draw near: On Sceolan and Bran, his nimble hounds, He whistles aloud, and away he bounds In chase of the hornless deer.

302

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

35

That many a peaceful moment had, More sleek than any granary mouse, In his own leafy forest house Among the waving fields of fern: The hunting of heroes should be glad.’

40

‘O pleasant woman,’ answered Finn, ‘We think on Oscar’s pencilled urn, And on the heroes lying slain On Gabhra’s raven-covered plain;

36.] The phrase ‘sleek as a mouse’ was com­ monplace: it features in an eighteenth-cen­ tury poem (sometimes attributed to John Gay), ‘A New Song of New Similies’ (in which all the many similes are intended to be rec­ ognized as clichés). ‘Sleek’ here is likely to recall Robert Burns’s celebrated ‘sleekit’ in ‘To a Mouse on Turning her up in her Nest with the Plough, Nov. 1785’, 1: ‘Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie’. 37. his] her MS (revised from WO his). 38. the waving fields of fern] Cp. Samuel Fer­ guson, ‘The Cromlech at Howth’ (‘Aideen’s Grave’), 3–4: ‘We leave her, ’mong the fields of fern, | Between the cliff and wave’, and R.D. Joyce, Deirdrè (1877), ‘The Return to Eman’, 529: ‘the green grass amid the waving fern’. 39.] Placed as l.32 in WO and P95; present position in P99 and after. 40–70.] WBY is following here the exchange between Niamh and Fionn in Lay: “Who art thou, thyself, O youthful princess!

Of fairest form, beauty, and countenance,

Relate to us the cause of thy story,

Thine own name and thy country.”

Or what is the affliction that is on thyself?” “’Tis not my husband that went from me, And as yet I have not been spoken of with any man, O! king of the Fianna of highest repute, But affection and love I  have given to thy son.” “Which of my children [is he] O bloom­ ing daughter, To whom thou hast given love, or yet af­ fection – Do not conceal from us now the cause,

And relate to us thy case, O woman.”

“I will tell thee that, O Fionn!

Thy noble son of the well-tempered arms,

High-spirited Oisin of the powerful hands

Is the champion that I  am now appeal­ ing of.” 41. Oscar’s pencilled urn] Cp. Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘Aideen’s Grave’, 76–80: A cup of bodkin-pencill’d clay Holds Oscar; mighty heart and limb One handful now of ashes grey: And she has died for him.

“Golden-headed Niamh is my name,

O, sage Fionn of the great hosts,

Beyond the women of the world I  have

43. On Gabhra’s] And Gavra’s MS. Gabhra, won esteem, close to Garristown in Co. Dublin, was tra­ I am the fair daughter of the King of Youth.” ditionally the scene of the Fenians’ last cata­ strophic battle, when (supposedly in AD 284) “Relate to us O amiable princess they suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of What caused thee to come afar across the the Irish king Cairbre, in the course of which sea – Ossian’s son Oscar was killed. In a note in Is it thy consort has forsaken thee,

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

45

303

But where are your noble kith and kin, And from what country do you ride?’ ‘My father and my mother are

P95, WBY glosses: ‘Gavra – The great battle in which the power of the Fenians was bro­ ken.’ Both Samuel Ferguson and Aubrey De Vere use the form Gavra. In Ferguson’s The Cromlech on Howth: A Poem (1864) (later ‘Aideen’s Grave’ in his Lays of the Western Gael), reference is made to Aideen, the wife of Oscar: ‘rapt in her battle car, | At Gavra, when, at Oscar’s side, | She rode the ridge of war’ (l62–64). WBY praised the poem in 1886: ‘Of all the lesser poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson there is none more beautiful than that on the burial of Aideen, who died of grief for the death of Oscar, and whose grave is the cromlech at Howth’ (CW 9, 25). Fergu­ son’s note on Gavra is as follows: Gabhra, pronounced Gavra, has been identified by the learned archaeologist, Dr. John O’Donovan, with an extensive, but now almost obliterated, earthen enclosure, lying immediately under, and to the west of, the Hill of Tara, the ancient residence of the Irish kings in Meath. The Battle of Gavra, fought between the monarch Cair­ bre and Moghcorb, king of Munster, aided by Ossian, has remained, as Henri Martin, the French historian, observes, ‘as famous in the histories of Ireland as the struggles of the Couravas and the Pandavas in the traditions of India.’ Here the heroes who followed in the train of Ossian were ex­ terminated, and the power of the Fenian military bands was broken. A century later, Christianity penetrated into Ireland, and the historian above quoted adds: ‘Nous in­ clinons à penser que Fingal, Ossian, Oscar, ont existé aussi bien que Roland; que Gavra est authentique comme Roncevaux. Le reste est l’oeuvre de l’imagination bardique. Un vaste cycle poétique s’est formé sur les Finiens à la fois en Irelande et en Ecosse, absolument dans les mêmes conditions que le cycle d’Arthure et Merlin s’est fait en

Galles et en Bretagne.’ In the Irish Ossianic history of the Battle of Gavra is an affecting picture of the death of Oscar and the grief of his father. Aubrey De Vere’s Inisfail: A Lyrical Chronicle of Ireland (1863) also had a note on Gavra: The publications of the Ossianic Society have made us familiar with Fionn MacCumhal (the Fingal of McPherson), chief of the far-famed Irish militia, instituted in the third century to protect the kingdom from foreign invasion. Its organisation rendered it an army of extraordinary efficiency; but, existing as a separate power, it became in time as formidable to the native sovereigns as to foreigners. The terrible battle of Gavra was its ruin. In it Oscar, the son of Oisin (or Ossian), and consequently the grandson of Fionn, fell in single combat with the Irish king Carbry, and nearly his whole army perished with him, A.D. 284. To this day Fionn and Oisin are household names in those parts of Western Ireland in which the traditional Gaelic poetry is recited. 45.] P12 and after. That you with no attendant ride | Where through white waters glim­ mer and roll del. MS And into what country P95-CWVP08. 46–54.] P12 and after. Earlier version: I am Neave, a child of the mighty Shee, And was born where the sun drops down in the tide, O worn deed-doer.’ ‘What may bring ‘To this dim shore those gentle feet? ‘Did your companion wander away?’ Then did you answer, pearl-pale one, With laughter low, and tender, and sweet: P95-CWVP08. pearl-pale] cloud pale MS.

304

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Aengus and Edain, my own name Niamh, and my country far Beyond the tumbling of this tide.’ 50

55

60

‘What dream came with you that you came Through bitter tide on foam-wet feet? Did your companion wander away From where the birds of Aengus wing?’ Thereon did she look haughty and sweet: ‘I have not yet, war-weary king, Been spoken of with any man; Yet now I choose, for these four feet Ran through the foam and ran to this That I might have your son to kiss.’ ‘Were there no better than my son That you through all that foam should run?’

47. Aengus and Edain] WBY gives Niamh these parents first in P12, after he has made use of Aengus (effectively an Irish god of love, much celebrated as such in late nineteenth-cen­ tury Celtic writings) and Edain, the mythic byword for feminine beauty who features in early Irish texts such as the Tochmarc Etaine (‘The Wooing of Etain’). The couple feature in WBY’s prefatory poem to The Shadowy Waters (lines initially featuring within the body of the play itself), ‘The Harp of Aengus’ (1900): 1–2: ‘Edain came out of Midhir’s hill, and lay | Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass’. WBY may be introducing Edain at his point in recognition of the numerous echoes which this passage had always carried from Ferguson’s ‘Aideen’s [Edain’s] Grave’. 48. Niamh] In Irish mythology, Niamh was sometimes indeed the daughter of the god Aengus, and his queen Edain. The name itself is from the Irish níam, meaning brightness: in ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1903), WBY writes of ‘Niamh, whose name means brightness or beauty’ (CW 4, 68). G. Bornstein sees evidence here of WBY’s association

of Niam with Shelley’s ‘star image for love’: ‘By making Oisin pursue an ideal woman named brightness, then, Yeats associated him with the list of Shelleyan lovers ranging from the youth of Alastor to Rousseau in The Tri­ umph of Life who also destroy themselves by such a quest’ (Bornstein, 25). 53. the birds of Aengus] In a detail much elabo­ rated by writers on Irish themes at this time, the god Aengus was said to be accompanied by birds, which were physical representations of his kisses. 60–61.] P12 and after. Earlier versions are: ‘O, wild ‘Young princess, when were you beguiled ‘By this young man, Usheen my son?’ P95. ‘And how and where were you beguiled, Princess, by this young man, my son?’ P99. ‘How comes it, Princes, that your mind Among undying people has run On this young man, Oisin, my son?’ P01-CWVP08.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

65

70

75

305

‘I loved no man, though kings besought, Until the Danaan poets brought Rhyme that rhymed upon Oisin’s name, And now I am dizzy with the thought Of all that wisdom and the fame Of battles broken by his hands, Of stories builded by his words That are like coloured Asian birds At evening in their rainless lands.’ O Patrick, by your bazen bell, There was no limb of mine but fell Into a desperate gulph of love! ‘You only will I wed,’ I cried, ‘And I will make a thousand songs, And set your name all names above, And captives bound in leathern thongs Shall kneel and praise you, one by one, At evening in my western dun.’

62–65.] CP33. Earlier versions are: I loved no man though kings besought me

And many a prince of lofty name,

Until the wandering poets [brought del.]

taught me Sweet thoughts of Usheen and his fame MS I loved no man, though canns besought, And many a prince [man P99] of lofty name, Until the Danaan poets came, Bringing me honeyed, wandering thought Of noble Usheen and his fame, P95­ CWVP08. I loved no man though kings besought Love, till the Danaan poets came, Rhyme, that rhymed to Usheen’s name, P12-SP29 69.] And glorious as Asian birds MS. This reading, carried over from WO, did not

survive into P95. In his copy of WO, JBY had underlined ‘Asian’ and ‘At evening’, and com­ mented: ‘why at evening? There are no Birds I fancy in any rainless parts of Asia. Certainly no very beautiful ones’. 72–73.] Cp. Lay: ‘There was not a limb of me but was in love | With the beautiful daughter of the glossy hair’. 72.] I had not any limb but fell MS. 77. leathern thongs] Cp. John Dryden, Aeneid, VII, 1010–1011: ‘Light demi-lances from afar they throw, | Fastened with leathern thongs’. 79. dun] OED n 3: ‘A type of small fort or forti­ fied dwelling used in the Scottish Highlands and Ireland from the latter part of the 1st mil­ lennium BC  to the early Middle Ages, typi­ cally consisting a stone wall around a large house and agricultural buildings; any similar defensive structure, such as a broch or rath; (sometimes also) a hill fort; a promontory fort.’

306 80

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

‘O Oisin, mount by me and ride

To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide,

Where men have heaped no burial-mounds,

And the days pass by like a wayward tune,

80–105.] WBY compresses the following pas­ sage from Lay:

From which no person ever escaped alive Who, once, saw the sharp weapon.

“Obligations unresisted by true heroes

O generous Oisin I put upon thee

To come with myself now upon my steed

Till we arrive at the ‘Land of Youth.’

“Thou wilt get a hundred coats of armour and shirts of satin, Thou wilt get a hundred cows and, also, an hundred calves, Thou wilt get a hundred sheep, with their golden fleeces, Thou wilt get a hundred jewels not in this world.

“It is the most delightful country to be found,

Of greatest repute under the sun

Trees dropping with fruit and blossom

And foliage growing on the tops of boughs.

“Abundant, there, are honey and wine

And everything that eye has beheld,

There will not come decline on thee with

lapse of time, Death or decay thou wilt not see. “Thou wilt get feasts, playing, and drink, Thou wilt get melodious music on the harp strings,

Thou wilt get silver and gold,

Thou wilt get also many jewels.

“Thou wilt get, without falsehood, a hun­ dred swords; Thou wilt get a hundred satin garments of precious silk, Thou wilt get a hundred horses the swift­ est in conflict, And thou wilt get a hundred with them of keen hounds. “Thou wilt get the royal diadem of the ‘King of Youth,’ Which he never yet gave to any person under the sun, ’Twill protect thee both night and day, In battle, in tumult, and in rough conflict. “Thou wilt get a fitting coat of protecting mail And a gold headed sword apt for strokes,

“Thou wilt get a hundred virgins gay and young Bright, refulgent, like the sun, Of best form, shape, and appearance, Whose voices are sweeter than the music of birds. “Thou wilt get a hundred heroes most powerful in conflict, And also most expert in feats of agility, In arms and armour waiting on thee In the ‘Land of Youth’ if thou wilt come with me. “Thou will get everything I promised thee And delights, also, which I may not mention, Thou wilt get beauty, strength, and power, And I myself will be thy wife.” 81. wash of the tremulous tide] Perhaps cp. Samuel Rogers, Poetical Works (1875), ‘Human Life’, 693 (describing Venice): ‘With light reflected on the tremulous tide’; also perhaps cp. William Sharp, The Human Inheritance (1882), ‘The Sea-Wrack’, 3: ‘the long wash of the tide’. 83.] Where change goes by like a fitful tune del. MS. With ‘wayward tune’ perhaps cp. J.N. Paton, Poems by a Painter (1861), ‘To the Summer Wind’, 19: ‘Singing a weird and way­ ward tune’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

85

90

95

100

105

110

307

Where broken faith has never been known, And the blushes of first love never have flown; And there I will give you a hundred hounds; No mightier creatures bay at the moon; And a hundred robes of murmuring silk, And a hundred calves and a hundred sheep Whose long wool whiter than sea-froth flows, And a hundred spears and a hundred bows, And oil and wine and honey and milk, And always never-anxious sleep; While a hundred youths, mighty of limb, But knowing nor tumult nor hate nor strife, And a hundred ladies, merry as birds, Who when they dance to a fitful measure Have a speed like the speed of the salmon herds, Shall follow your horn and obey your whim, And you shall know the Danaan leisure; And Niamh be with you for a wife.’ Then she sighed gently, ‘It grows late. Music and love and sleep await, Where I would be when the white moon climbs, The red sun falls and the world grows dim.’ And then I mounted and she bound me

With her triumphing arms around me,

And whispering to herself enwound me;

But when the horse had felt my weight,

He shook himself and neighed three times: Caoilte, Conan, and Finn came near, And wept, and raised their lamenting hands, And bid me stay, with many a tear; But we rode out from the human lands.

83^84.] In the poppy hung house of the twi­ light fluted del. MS. 87^88.] And a hundred steeds, tumultuous footed del. MS. 103.] P99 and after. And many a mile to the fairy state MS And many a mile is the faery state P95. 109–110.] WBY here adapts and elaborates two stanzas from Lay:

On the back of the steed we went together,

Before me sat the virgin;

She said: “Oisin let us remain quiet,

Till we reach the mouth of the great sea.”

Then arose the steed swiftly,

When we arrived on the borders of the strand

He shook himself then to pace forward,

And neighed three times aloud.

308 115

120

125

130

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

In what far kingdom do you go, Ah, Fenians, with the shield and bow? Or are you phantoms white as snow, Whose lips had life’s most prosperous glow? O you, with whom in sloping valleys, Or down the dewy forest alleys, I chased at morn the flying deer, With whom I hurled the hurrying spear, And heard the foemen’s bucklers rattle, And broke the heaving ranks of battle! And Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair, Where are you with your long rough hair? You go not where the red deer feeds, Nor tear the foemen from their steeds. S. Patrick. Boast not, nor mourn with drooping head Companions long accurst and dead, And hounds for centuries dust and air. Oisin. We galloped over the glossy sea: I knew not if days passed or hours, And Niamh sang continually

119. sloping valleys] Although the phrase is not especially notable, it occurs in a poem whose subject seems germane in this context, ‘The Celtic Paradise, Or Green Isle of the West­ ern Waves’, in the Poetical Remains (1811) of the Scottish Orientalist John Leyden (1775– 1811), 86: ‘Where sloping valleys spread to meet the seas’. There is, however, no record of WBY’s contact with this obscure work. 120. dewy forest alleys] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘The Death of O’Donnell’, 53–4: ‘Six champions of might from that green forest alley | Bear him on thro’ each wild glade and torrent-bound valley’. Cp. also Keats, Endymion (1818), IV, 133: ‘About the dewy forest’, and M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘The Strayed Reveller’, 263: ‘From the dewy forest-coverts’. 121. the flying deer] A  common phrase in poetry, but especially notable in James

Macpherson’s Ossian (e.g. Fingal Book V: ‘She and the maids of the bow pursue the flying deer’). In his Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), W. H. Drummond included the short poem, ‘The Lay of Patrick Exhorting Ossian to Attend to his Psalmody’, near the end of which Ossian declares (39–40): ‘Far more harmonious chimes I  hear | When hounds pursue the flying deer’. 129–131.] Boast not of your forgotten deeds,| Nor your companions, now shad­ ows dead, | Mourn del. MS. Mourn not, Usheen, with bowed head, | For heroes, shadows among the dead, | And hounds whose time del. MS. 131. dust and air] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Asphodel and Other Poems (1894), ‘Ballad of Dead Man’s Bay’, 99: ‘They turn to darkness and dust and air’. 134. And Niamh] For Neave P95.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

135

309

Danaan songs, and their dewy showers Of pensive laughter, unhuman sound, Lulled weariness, and softly round My human sorrow her white arms wound. We galloped; now a hornless deer

136. unhuman sound] ‘Unhuman’ is a rare word, but it is used by Edward Dowden in Poems (1876), ‘In the Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes | Your joy unhuman shall control’. WBY’s meaning here is some­ where between that of OED 2. ‘Not limited by human qualities or conditions; superhu­ man’ and 3. ‘Not pertaining to mankind’. Cp. Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘The Fairy Thorn’, 41–2: ‘Soft o’er their bosom’s beating  – the only human sound – | They hear the silky footsteps of the silent fairy crowd’. WBY uses the adjective again at II, 98 and III, 56. 137–138.] and [closely del.] softly round | My human sadness fay arms wound del. MS. 139–141.] Lay has the following stanza: We saw also, by our sides,

A hornless fawn leaping nimbly,

And a red-eared white dog,

Urging it boldly in the chase.

Deer make appearances throughout Celtic myth. Oisin’s mother, Sadhbh, was at one stage transformed into a deer by a Druid whom she had refused to marry. Fionn encountered her in this form on a hunt, when the hounds Bran and Sceolan detected that she was human; Fionn therefore did not kill her, but brought her to his home, where she regained human shape (albeit temporarily, since she was to be turned into a deer again, this time by Fear Doirich). In his note to the poem ‘The Desire of Man and Woman’ in The Dome (Jun. 1897), WBY explained the opening couplet (‘Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? | I  have been changed to a hound with one red ear’) with reference to Oisin: ‘In the old Irish story of Usheen’s journey to the Islands

of the Young, Usheen sees amid the waters a hound with one red ear, following a deer with no horns; and other persons in other old Celtic stories see the like images of the desire of the man, and of the desire of the woman “which is for the desire of the man,” and of all desires that are as these.’ WBY takes ‘red-eared’ in Lay in an unusual sense, as indicating that the hound possesses only one red ear; if there is an ambi­ guity in Lay, it is not present in P.W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (1879), where ‘a white hound with red ears’ is seen (389). When ‘The Desire of Man and Woman’ was reprinted as ‘Mongan Laments The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved’ in WATR, WBY wrote that ‘My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends, leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin’s jour­ ney to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related to the Hounds of Annwvyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red ears, and were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants following some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related to the hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize the souls of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon, and to the hound the son of Setanta killed, on what was certainly, in the first form of the tale, a visit to the Celtic Hades.’ How much of this might have been in WBY’s mind a decade earlier, when composing WO, is unclear; it is likely to have been closer to the front of his mind by 1894–1895. 139. We galloped] P12 and after; On! on! MS, P95-CWVP08.

310

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

140

Passed by us, chased by a phantom hound All pearly white, save one red ear; And now a lady rode like the wind With an apple of gold in her tossing hand;

142–147.] WBY compresses four stanzas of Lay: We beheld also, without fiction,

A young maid on a brown steed,

A golden apple in her right hand,

And she going on top of the waves.

We saw after her,

A young rider on a white steed,

Under a purple, crimson mantle of satin,

And a gold-headed sword in his right

hand. “Who are you two whom I see,

O gentle princess, tell me the meaning,

That woman of most beautiful countenance,

And the comely rider of the white steed.”

“Heed not what thou wilt see,

O! gentle Oisin, nor what thou hast yet

seen, There is in them but nothing, Till we reach the land of the ‘King of Youth.’ ” 142–145.] WBY’s 1899 WATR note continues: ‘I got my hound and deer out of a last cen­ tury Gaelic poem about Oisin’s journey to the country of the young. After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him to the sea­ shore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niam, he sees amid the waters  – I  have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it from memory – a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns. This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man “which is for the woman,” and “the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,” and of all desires that are as these. I have read them in this way in “The Wanderings of Usheen” or Oisin, and have made my lover sigh because he has seen

in their faces “the immortal desire of immor­ tals.” A solar mythologist would perhaps say that the girl with the golden apple was once the winter, or night, carrying the sun away, and the deer without horns, like the boar without bristles, darkness flying the night.’ The Old Irish stories known as the Echtrai (‘Adventures’) included the Adventure of Conle (or Connla): a son of the High King Conn Cétchathach (Conn of the Hundred Battles), Conle is tempted away from his companions by a beautiful woman, invisible to everyone else, who throws him a golden apple; this apple makes him pine after her, until finally she takes him away from the world in a ship of glass to her supernatural home in ‘The Plain of Delight’. WBY’s source in Lay probably alludes to this story, and WBY himself mentions it ten years later, in his Fortnightly Review piece of 1898, ‘The Broken Gates of Death’, where he adduces ‘Conla when he sailed with a divine woman in a ship of glass to “the ever-living, living ones” ’ (CW 9, 406). The figure of the beauti­ ful girl with a golden apple itself is likely to derive ultimately from Greek myth, and the story of Atalanta and Hippomanes: there, it is the young man Hippomanes who throws golden apples to the girl in order to distract her from the race against him which she is successfully running and which, should she be defeated in it, brings her hand as its prize. Another perspective on these lines is offered by H. Adams, who sees in them the traces of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 17–20: Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

145

311

And a beautiful young man followed behind With quenchless gaze and fluttering hair. ‘Were these two born in the Danaan land, Or have they breathed the mortal air?’

150

155

160

‘Vex them no longer,’ Niamh said, And sighing bowed her gentle head, And sighing laid the pearly tip Of one long finger on my lip. But now the moon like a white rose shone In the pale west, and the sun’s rim sank, And clouds arrayed their rank on rank About his fading crimson ball: The floor of Almhuin’s hosting hall Was not more level than the sea, As, full of loving fantasy, And with low murmurs, we rode on, Where many a trumpet-twisted shell That in immortal silence sleeps Dreaming of her own melting hues, Her golds, her ambers, and her blues, Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.

Adams comments (33–34): ‘There are many questions suppressed in the land of faery, which begins to look like a vehicle for the poet’s evasions rather than a true contrary to the Fenian life’, and adds that ‘The scene offers endless perpetuation of the condition of desire, but Oisin and Niamh are merely observers of a scene treated as desirable (but with reserva­ tions) in the drama of Keats’s poem’. 142. a lady] SP29 and after; a maiden MS, P95-P29. 143. an apple of gold] In changing Lay’s (and P.W. Joyce’s) ‘a golden apple’, WBY echoes a line of J. C. Mangan, whose version of Owen Roe O’Sullivan, ‘A Lullaby’, has ‘I’ll give thee that glorious apple of gold’ (9). 144–145.] P12 and after; And with quenchless eyes and fluttering hair | A  beautiful young man followed behind MS, P95-CWVP08.

150. pearly] cloud pale del. MS. 153. the pale west] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Sonnets on the Poetry and Problems of Life (1881), ‘The longest day and heavy heat are o’er’, 9–10: ‘the world whose low, pale west | Gleams like the close of life’. 156. Almhuin’s] CP33 Emen’s P95-P24 Allen’s EPS-SP29. 161. immortal silence] Cp. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742), IX, 548–549: ‘Immortal Silence! where shall I  begin? | Where end?’ 162. melting hues] Cp. John Keble, Miscella­ neous Poems (1869) ‘To the Memory of John Leyden’, 11–12: ‘And melting hues of moon­ light loveliness, | And fairy forms’. 164.] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Reticence’, 21: ‘Often shallow, pierced with light’ and W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), XIV, 501: ‘To push across the shallowing sea’.

312 165

170

175

180

185

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

But now a wandering land breeze came And a far sound of feathery quires; It seemed to blow from the dying flame, They seemed to sing in the smouldering fires. The horse towards the music raced, Neighing along the lifeless waste; Like sooty fingers, many a tree Rose ever out of the warm sea; And they were trembling ceaselessly, As though they were all beating time, Upon the centre of the sun, To that low laughing woodland rhyme. And, now our wandering hours were done, We cantered to the shore, and knew The reason of the trembling trees: Round every branch the song-birds flew, Or clung thereon like swarming bees; While round the shore a million stood Like drops of frozen rainbow light, And pondered in a soft vain mood Upon their shadows in the tide, And told the purple deeps their pride

166. quires] This was revised from the more usual spelling ‘choirs’ for P95, and the form was retained thereafter. 171.] Cp. WBY’s much later use of the same image in ‘The Tower’ II, 2–3: ‘where | Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth’. It is unlikely that WBY had read the ode by Thomas Warton, ‘The Crusade’ (1777), in which there is ‘many a demon, pale of hue, | Doom’d to drink the bitter dew | That drops from Macon’s sooty tree’ (79–81); yet it is pos­ sible that he did so, especially since the poem’s opening lines seem to resonate with 156–157 earlier (‘Almhuin’s dancing hall | Was not more level than the sea’: cp. Warton, 2–3: ‘Nimbly we brush’d the level brine,| All in azure steel array’d’). For all the clarity of the image here, Oisin’s familiarity with sooty fingers is not necessarily in key with his aristocratic life.

179. the trembling trees] A  poetic common­ place, and nowhere more so than Denis Florence MacCarthy’s Poems (1884), ‘The Tidings’, 50: ‘the gladsome breeze thro’ the trembling trees’. 181. thereon] as close as del. MS. 183. drops of frozen rainbow light] Perhaps cp. Shelley, Queen Mab I, 54: ‘lines of rain­ bow light’, and Thomas Moore, Loves of the Angels, ‘First Angel’s Story’, 333–334: ‘Those vivid drops of light, that fall | The last from Day’s exhausted urn’, and ‘Spirit of Joy’, 15: ‘Attempts to catch the drops of light’. WBY used the phrase in ‘Street Dancers’ (prob. composed in 1888), 33: ‘Dropping liquid rainbow light’. 186. the purple deeps] Perhaps cp. A. Pope trans. The Iliad (1715), XIV, 22: ‘The Waves just heaving on the purple Deeps’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

190

195

200

205

210

313

And murmured snatches of delight; And on the shores were many boats With bending sterns and bending bows, And carven figures on their prows Of bitterns, and fish-eating stoats, And swans with their exultant throats: And where the wood and waters meet We tied the horse in a leafy clump, And Niamh blew three merry notes Out of a little silver trump; And then an answering whisper flew Over the bare and woody land, A whisper of impetuous feet, And ever nearer, nearer grew; And from the woods rushed out a band Of men and ladies, hand in hand, And singing, singing all together; Their brows were white as fragrant milk, Their cloaks made out of yellow silk, And trimmed with many a crimson feather; And when they saw the cloak I wore Was dim with mire of a mortal shore, They fingered it and gazed on me And laughed like murmurs of the sea; But Niamh with a swift distress

202. men and ladies] SP29 and after. [youths del.] men and maidens MS men and maidens P95-P29. 204. fragrant milk] P99 and after; the fragrant milk MS, P95. 205.] P99 and after; Their robes were all of the yellow silk MS Their brattas made out of yel­ low silk P95. 206. And trimmed with] Trimmed round with MS. 207.] P99 and after. When they beheld my earthly dress MS; And when they saw that the bratta I wore P95. (In the Celtic Mysteries

materials, on which WBY and his associates worked in the later 1890s, the first of ‘The three Bridgets’, the ‘Smithworker’, has a tunic ‘of blue and purple’ and a purple ‘bratta’, an Irish cape-like garment.) 208. with mire] P99 and after. Whole line absent in MS; with the mire P95. 210. murmurs of the sea] Perhaps cp. Dora Greenwell, Stories That Might Be True (1850), ‘Time’, 47–9: ‘How may I  reach the sunset isles that lie | Far Westward, where the mur­ murs of the Sea | Rise ever gently’.

314

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

215

220

225

Bid them away and hold their peace; And when they heard her voice they ran And knelt there, every girl and man, And kissed, as they would never cease, Her pearl-pale hand and the hem of her dress. She bade them bring us to the hall Where Aengus dreams, from sun to sun, A Druid dream of the end of days When the stars are to wane and the world be done. They led us by long and shadowy ways Where drops of dew in myriads fall, And tangled creepers every hour Blossom in some new crimson flower, And once a sudden laughter sprang From all their lips, and once they sang Together, while the dark woods rang, And made in all their distant parts,

212. Bid] Bad MS. 214. knelt there] SP29 and after; knelt them P95-P29. girl] SP29 and after; maid P95-P29. 215–222.] Her fingers and her garments’ hem. [I strode through woods del.] They led me through the woods with them To find their prince’s hosting hall, On in the woods away with them, Where white dewdrops in myriads fall MS. 219. Druid dream] WBY’s adjective here (and at I, 289) recalls his own ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (1891), 32: ‘A Druid land, a Druid tune!’ ‘Druid’ as an adjective is attested in the eighteenth century and after (e.g. George Dyer, Poems (1801), ‘Ode XI: On Genius’, 32: ‘The Cambrian youth shall wake the Druid song’), and had been employed much more recently by John Todhunter, ‘The Fate of the Sons of Usna’, First Duan, 140–141: ‘Then Cathvah took the child | And

o’er its new-born head murmured his druid song’. WBY’s fondness for this adjective came to be pronounced, or at least pronounced upon: William Sharp (writing as Fiona Macleod) mentioned it in connection with ‘the overuse of certain words’ (‘The Later Work of Mr. W.B. Yeats’, North American Review 175/4 (1 Oct. 1902): Mannerism threatens disillusion when it becomes a common use, as when in close conjunction Mr. Yeats thrice uses a favourite, but at best dubious, epithet druid, uses it as an adjective for ‘mystic’ or kindred word. [. . .] It has a contagion, for a day or two ago I saw in a paper an al­ lusion to ‘the druid spell of Mr. Yeats’s po­ etry, its druid lights and shadows.’ I  can understand a druid spell, though ‘druidic’ is the fit word: but not druid lights and shadows. 224. crimson flower] Cp. Tennyson, Song from The Princess, ‘Now falls the crimson petal, now the white’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

230

235

240

315

With boom of bees in honey-marts, A rumour of delighted hearts. And once a lady by my side

Gave me a harp, and bid me sing,

And touch the laughing silver string;

But when I sang of human joy

A sorrow wrapped each merry face, And, Patrick! by your beard, they wept, Until one came, a tearful boy; ‘A sadder creature never stept Than this strange human bard,’ he cried; And caught the silver harp away, And, weeping over the white strings, hurled It down in a leaf-hid, hollow place That kept dim waters from the sky; And each one said, with a long, long sigh,

229. honey marts] WBY’s archaism (carried over from the WO text) is an awkward coin­ age, since ‘mart’ always implies a place of trade, and not just production. 230. a rumour] One of the MSS behind the text for WO may cast doubt on this reading, as being an error for ‘murmur’. But the word is ‘rumour’ in all printed editions, and there are no solid grounds for emendation. See note to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin (1889)’, I, 267. 233.] WBY may be alluding to the harp played by the god Aengus Og (Aengus the Young) in Irish myth, which is sometimes made of silver (as in e.g. AG’s later account in Gods and Fighting Men, where Aengus plays ‘a sil­ ver harp with strings of red gold’). Cp. WBY’s later ‘The Harp of Aengus’ (1900). A related harp is that belonging to the god Dagda (the father of Aengus) of the Tautha De Danaan, which could play three different strains: of gaiety, sorrow, and sleep. 235. a sorrow wrapped] Perhaps cp. Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (2nd edn. 1871), ‘The Prisoners: Christmas 1869’, 89: ‘With sorrow wrapped round like a garment’ (this poem may also be echoed in III, 149). 236. by your beard] A variant on the invented archaism ‘By my beard!’ as an oath: amongst

various nineteenth-century uses of this is W. Morris’s ‘It lacks something, by my beard!’ in the Prologue to The Earthly Paradise (1870), 1064. 241–246] A leafy hollow near at hand Hid dolorous waters from the sky: Therein the silver harp he hurled, And each one said with a long long sigh ‘The saddest harp in all the world’. MS 242. leaf-hid] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Pic­ tures and Songs (1880), ‘Cricket’s Song’, 23: ‘The leaf-hid robins sing’, and Jean Ingelow, Divided (1888), 82: ‘A little piping of leaf-hid birds’. 244. a long, long sigh] Cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘The Forsaken Merman’, 101–105: ‘And anon there breaks a sigh, | And anon there drops a tear, | From a sorrow-clouded eye, | And a heart sorrow-laden, | A  long, long sigh’. The phrase occurs twice in John Banim’s The Celt’s Paradise (1821), Fourth Duan 35–6: ‘My life on earth was a long, long sigh | Of hopes and fears, of hopes and fears’, and 101–102: ‘Beauty! – The bard’s eternal theme, | His long, long sigh, his ceaseless dream’.

316

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

245

250

255

260

265

‘O saddest harp in all the world, Sleep there till the moon and the stars die!’ And now, still sad, we came to where A beautiful young man dreamed within A house of wattles, clay, and skin; One hand upheld his beardless chin, And one a sceptre flashing out Wild flames of red and gold and blue, Like to a merry wandering rout Of dancers leaping in the air; And men and ladies knelt them there And showed their eyes with teardrops dim, And with low murmurs prayed to him And kissed the sceptre with red lips, And touched it with their finger-tips. He held that flashing sceptre up. ‘Joy drowns the twilight in the dew, And fills with stars night’s purple cup, And wakes the sluggard seeds of corn, And stirs the young kid’s budding horn, And makes the infant ferns unwrap, And for the peewit paints his cap,

248. dreamed] throned MS. 253. a merry] another MS.

255.] ladies SP29 and after; maidens P95-P26.

261–275.] E. Larrissy discusses this passage in

terms of WBY’s reception of ‘the alchemical doctrine of contraries’ (38): So far, so relatively simple. But the reader may well pause at that gloomy barrow [line 272], added in Poems (1895) (it had originally been ‘some urn funereal’). For a barrow in Ireland, sometimes called a ‘liss’, would frequently be the home of the sidhe, the same that inhabit Tir-na­ nOg, of whom the beautiful young man is one. There need be no problem with that mere fact. [. . .] But in Oisin the liss is unmistakably a barrow. And there lies ambivalence. After all, Oisin himself has

forsaken ‘change and birth’. Is he then dreaming under a sinister fairy hill, like True Thomas, of whom Yeats had thought after seeing a mysterious light moving with preternatural swiftness up the slopes of Knocknarea? Is Oisin being subjected to the notorious perversity of the sidhe? 263. sluggard] sluggish MS. 264. young kid’s budding horn] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Winning of Amarac’, 100: ‘And grasped the bright-backed offspring of the morn | By one pink ear and by one bud­ ding horn’. 266. for the peewit paints his cap] The peewit is the lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), resident in much of Ireland. The bird’s head has a crest of dark feathers.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

270

275

280

285

290

295

317

And rolls along the unwieldy sun,

And makes the little planets run:

And if joy were not on the earth,

There were an end of change and birth, And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die, And in some gloomy barrow lie Folded like a frozen fly; Then mock at Death and Time with glances And wavering arms and wandering dances. ‘Men’s hearts of old were drops of flame

That from the saffron morning came,

Or drops of silver joy that fell

Out of the moon’s pale twisted shell;

But now hearts cry that hearts are slaves, And toss and turn in narrow caves; But here there is nor law nor rule, Nor have hands held a weary tool; And here there is nor Change nor Death, But only kind and merry breath, For joy is God and God is joy.’ With one long glance for girl and boy And the pale blossom of the moon, He fell into a Druid swoon. And in a wild and sudden dance We mocked at Time and Fate and Chance And swept out of the wattled hall And came to where the dewdrops fall Among the foamdrops of the sea, And there we hushed the revelry;

268. the little planets run] ‘Run’ is a common poetic verb for planetary motion, as in e.g. W.M. Praed, Poems (1844), ‘The Bridal of Belmont: A  Legend of the Rhine’, 348–349: ‘How fast the twinkling planets run, | From age to age, about the sun’. 274.] Then mock pale time with starry glances MS. 277. the saffron morning] the [merry del.] danc­ ing starlight MS. ‘Saffron morning’ is used by George Chapman in his trans. of Iliad XXIII, 628 (‘And now the saffron morning rose’), but also by R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The

Sojourn in Alba’, 97: ‘Bright over all the saf­ fron morning glowed’. 287. for girl] SP29 and after; on maid P95-P26. 288. pale blossom] P99 and after; on the star­ light and MS thin crescent P95. 290–295.] But now the dance began once more And swept out through the wattled door And swept down to the glimmering sea Where murmuring birds [     ] up and down In a long and shadowy row MS.

318

300

305

310

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

And, gathering on our brows a frown, Bent all our swaying bodies down, And to the waves that glimmer by That sloping green De Danaan sod Sang, ‘God is joy and joy is God, And things that have grown sad are wicked, And things that fear the dawn of the morrow Or the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.’ We danced to where in the winding thicket The damask roses, bloom on bloom, Like crimson meteors hang in the gloom, And bending over them softly said, Bending over them in the dance, With a swift and friendly glance From dewy eyes: ‘Upon the dead Fall the leaves of other roses, On the dead dim earth encloses: But never, never on our graves, Heaped beside the glimmering waves,

297–303.]

grace | Of her tumultuous face | And all the urgent rapture of her wings | Whereto grey Whispered to the sea whose flow

sorrow clings’ (61–64). Another occurrence Eat away the sloping sod,

is in an Irish-devoted volume by the engraver, “God is joy and joy is God,

political activist and poet W.J. Linton (1812– Everything that’s sad is wicked,

1897), whose propagandist verses in Ireland Everything that fears tomorrow,

for the Irish (1867) included ‘Revenge’, with Or the wild grey osprey sorrow.’ MS

its gloating rhetorical demand: ‘Who mock’d [repeating WO, I, 305–310.] grey sorrow’s smart?’ (14). 304–319.] MS repeats WO, I, 342–358, without 303, 319, 342. [grey . . .] osprey sorrow] WBY’s significant revision. ‘grey’ attaches primarily (and naturally) 306.] WBY’s image of meteors is close to that to the osprey, but its close proximity to the in his ‘Ephemera’, 14 (’like faint meteors in the abstract noun ‘sorrow’ recalls the dismis­ gloom’) and may, like it, owe something to sive effect of attaching this adjective to sources in Shelley and Allingham (see notes). another abstract noun in ‘The Song of the Here, however, the meteors seem to be static; in Happy Shepherd’, 4: ‘Grey truth’. The phrase poetry (as in nature), meteors are more com­ ‘grey sorrow’ appears in only two Victorian monly seen moving, as e.g. the ‘red meteor’ poems, each of which WBY might have read: in W.H. Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy the heavily prolific English poet George Bar­ (1852), ‘The Lay of Moira Borb’, 13–14: ‘Like low (1847–1914) had a Swinburnian poem, the red meteor of the night | That shoots across ‘What Shall Be: A Song of Weariness’ in his the vale’. WBY’s effect can be compared with Song-Spray (1882), where ‘grey sorrow’ is Dryden’s translation of Aeneid II, 156: ‘Then joined by aspects of image (e.g. the Rose and flaming meteors, hung in air, were seen’. the femme fatale) and of diction which seem 314. glimmering waves] The phrase is not to foreshadow Yeatsian habits of the 1890s unknown, but perhaps cp. Edward Dowden, and later: e.g., ‘Ineffable desire and splendid

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

315

Shall fall the leaves of damask roses. For neither Death nor Change comes near us, And all listless hours fear us,

And we fear no dawning morrow,

Nor the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.’

320

The dance wound through the windless woods; The ever-summered solitudes; Until the tossing arms grew still Upon the woody central hill; And, gathered in a panting band, We flung on high each waving hand, And sang unto the starry broods. In our raised eyes there flashed a glow Of milky brightness to and fro As thus our song arose: ‘You stars,

325

Poems (1876), ‘Oasis’, 3: beside the glimmer­ ing wave of life’. 315. damask roses] OED damask 2d.: ‘Appar­ ently, originally the Rosa gallica var. dama­ scena, a tall shrub with semi-double pink or light-red (rarely white) flowers, culti­ vated in the East for attar of roses’. Damask roses are common in the rhetoric of love poetry, though a twist to their usual deco­ rative function which occurs in a poem by James Clarence Mangan may be relevant to WBY here; in his ‘Love’, 8: ‘the damask Rose ascends her throne on happy Beauty’s cheek’; but the short poem ends with ‘O! If Hades could but speak | What a world of ruined souls would curse the sheen of Beau­ ty’s cheek! (15–16). 317. listless hours] Cp. Wordsworth, The Excur­ sion (1814), I, 258–259: ‘These occupations oftentimes deceived | the listless hours’, and III, 136: ‘Beguiling harmlessly the listless hours’; also cp. Shelley, ‘To Harriet’, 68: ‘list­ less hours unprofitably roll’. 320. windless woods] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), IV, ‘February’, ‘Bel­ lerophon in Lycia’, 1604: ‘And in the windless woods the acorn fell’.

319

321. summered] WBY’s use is unusual, though OED does record this adjectival form, cit­ ing Anna Seward, Memoir of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804), 337: ‘the ever-summered gales’. One of the (rare) instances of this word in poetry comes in T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘The Grape and the Star’, 44: ‘Its summered summit’ [of a tree]. 323. woody] lofty del. MS. 325. each waving hand] Cp. Laetitia Land­ on’s description of dancing spirits, Literary Remains (1841), ‘Petrarch’s Dream’, 38–9: ‘As the summer came to greet | Each waving hand’. 329–342.] H. Bloom saw this passage as ‘a direct presentation of the Promethean defi­ ance’ (101): The conceptual imagery here is Blake’s: the God is Urizen or Shelley’s Jupiter; the appeal to revolt is qualified however by the antinomian but equivocal ‘unchain­ able as the dim tide,’ for the tide, whether of ocean or blood-dimmed, is itself in the iron bond of natural cycle, as are the ‘hearts that know nor law nor rule,’ but nevertheless obey the cyclic impulses of nature.

320 330

335

340

345

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Across your wandering ruby cars Shake the loose reins: you slaves of God, He rules you with an iron rod, He holds you with an iron bond, Each one woven to the other, Each one woven to his brother Like bubbles in a frozen pond; But we in a lonely land abide Unchainable as the dim tide, With hearts that know nor law nor rule, And hands that hold no wearisome tool, Folded in love that fears no morrow, Nor the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.’ O Patrick! for a hundred years

I chased upon that woody shore

The deer, the badger, and the boar. O Patrick! for a hundred years At evening on the glimmering sands, Beside the piled-up hunting spears, These now outworn and withered hands

330. ruby cars] These chariots are more opu­ lent even than the ‘brazen cars’ ruled by Fer­ gus in ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, 9. 331. slaves of God] Although the phrase may derive from the use of ‘slaves’ as a term of contempt in the context of religious orthodoxy, common in the earlier Shelley, its use in this phrase is found only in the work of R.W. Buchanan, where it occurs several times, e.g. Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Last Faith’, 16–17: ‘The blind priest raves, and all the slaves of God | Shriek their approval!’ 333. iron bond] WBY’s instant variation on the commonplace ‘rules you with an iron rod’ of 332 has a precedent in the work of Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘The Chain of Gold’, 29: ‘For falsehood is an iron bond’. WBY deprecated Lover’s poetry in ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ (The Leisure Hour, Nov. 1889, CW9, 108). 337–342]

But we have [held del.] known nor law nor rule Nor have we held a weary tool; [In our green island far del.] In human lands men wither away, From where the [hopes of men decay del.] And angers [wake del.] are born and loves decay And all things fade, we know not why, Who only know we cannot die Or fall down wearied any morrow, And fear the wild grey osprey sorrow.’ MS. 338.] Cp. J.C. Mangan, ‘O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire’, 14: ‘though he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchainable sea’. WBY included this poem in his A Book of Irish Verse (1895). 344. woody shore] Cp. William Blake, Poetical Sketches, ‘Edward the Third’ Sc. 6, 29: ‘some woody shore’. 345.^346.] And gazed on Neave’s fluttering hair | And laughed down Time and Change and Care del. MS.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

350

355

360

321

Wrestled among the island bands. O Patrick! for a hundred years We went a-fishing in long boats With bending sterns and bending bows, And carven figures on their prows Of bitterns and fish-eating stoats. O Patrick! for a hundred years The gentle Niamh was my wife; But now two things devour my life; The things that most of all I hate: Fasting and prayers. S. Patrick.

Tell on.

Oisin. Yes, yes, For these were ancient Oisin’s fate, Loosed long ago from Heaven’s gate, For his last days to lie in wait. 365

370

375

When one day by the tide I stood, I found in that forgetfulness Of dreamy foam a staff of wood From some dead warrior’s broken lance: I turned it in my hands; the stains Of war were on it, and I wept, Remembering how the Fenians stept Along the blood-bedabbled plains, Equal to good or grievous chance: Thereon young Niamh softly came And caught my hands, but spake no word Save only many times my name, In murmurs, like a frighted bird. We passed by woods, and lawns of clover,

360. Fasting and prayers] Cp. Luke 2.37: ‘And she [Anna] was a widow of about four­ score and four years, which departed not from the Temple, but served with fastings and prayers night and day’, and 1 Cor. 7.5: ‘Defraud you not one the other, except with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your inconstancy’. 364. tide] SP29 and after; shore P95-P29.

365–366.] SP29 and after; I  drew out of the numberless | White flowers of the foam a staff of wood P95-P29. 371. blood-bedabbled] The phrase is not entirely uncommon, but perhaps cp. J.C. Mangan, ‘Gasparo Bandollo: An Anecdote of the South of Italy’, 37: ‘the blood-bedabbled straw’. 377–399.] This passage was quoted in full by W. Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation (1902) [see Reception and interpretation], who commented (540):

322

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

380

385

390

395

And found the horse and bridled him, For we knew well the old was over. I heard one say, ‘His eyes grow dim With all the ancient sorrow of men’; And wrapped in dreams rode out again With hoofs of the pale findrinny Over the glimmering purple sea. Under the golden evening light, The Immortals moved among the fountains By rivers and the woods’ old night; Some danced like shadows on the mountains, Some wandered ever hand in hand; Or sat in dreams on the pale strand, Each forehead like an obscure star Bent down above each hookèd knee, And sang, and with a dreamy gaze Watched where the sun in a saffron blaze Was slumbering half in the sea-ways; And, as they sang, the painted birds Kept time with their bright wings and feet; Like drops of honey came their words, But fainter than a young lamb’s bleat.

As a mere piece of decoration, how un­ mistakably Celtic this is! Magical and mysterious though the subject be, the de­ sign is perfectly definite, and is picked out, so to speak, in washes of brilliant, translu­ cent, almost unharmonised colours. The picture is illuminated rather than painted, like the border of an ancient manuscript. It is characteristic of the Celtic imagina­ tion, though it may dwell by preference in the mist, to emerge at times into a scintil­ lant blaze of light and colour. 382–387.] I dreamed of other lands and skies And saw not who. [The red findrinny Of the four hoofs beat on the del.] Each ruddy hoof Beat on Manannan’s purple roof And in the golden evening light The immortals moved among fountains By rivers and in the woods’ old night. MS.

383. pale] P99 and after; ruddy P95. (For ‘find­ rinny’, see note on I, 21.) 387. old night] cp. Milton, Paradise Lost I, 543: ‘chaos and old night’. 392. hookèd] doubled MS [revising WO hookèd]. 396. the painted birds] JBY had underlined ‘painted’ in his copy of WO, and had writ­ ten there: ‘O, let us have done with “the painted birds” (pictaeque volucres) Nature does not “paint,” – nor “gild” either, – nor even “silver.” ’ The Latin words are from Aeneid IV, 525, rendered by Dryden as ‘parti-colour’d fowl’ (the general mean­ ing seems to be ‘colourful’, with ‘painted’ used as a metaphor for this  – evidently, to JBY’s displeasure). WBY would already have known the phrase from Shelley, ‘Alas­ tor’ (1816), 465: ‘Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon’. 398^399.] Over the dim and wandering tide MS.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

400

405

410

415

420

323

‘An old man stirs the fire to a blaze, In the house of a child, of a friend, of a brother. He has over-lingered his welcome; the days, Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other; He hears the storm in the chimney above, And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold While his heart still dreams of battle and love And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old. ‘But we are apart in the grassy places,

Where care cannot trouble the least of our days,

Or the softness of youth be gone from our faces, Or love’s first tenderness die in our gaze. The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness; A storm of birds in the Asian trees Like tulips in the air a-winging, And the gentle waves of the summer seas, That raise their heads and wander singing, Must murmur at last, “Unjust, unjust”; And “My speed is a weariness,” falters the mouse, And the kingfisher turns to a ball of dust, And the roof falls in of his tunnelled house. But the love-dew dims our eyes till the day

400–407.] Composed by WBY after the MS revision, which preserves WO I, 460–471, but discards WO I, 472–475. 408. grassy] island del. MS. 416. a storm of birds] Possibly cp. Thomas Aird, Poetical Works, 1878, ‘A Winter Day: Morning’, 28–9: ‘all heaven is filled | With a wild storm of birds!’ Asian trees] southern seas MS [revising WO Asian trees]. 419. wander singing] WBY’s slightly odd con­ ceit here may be a maritime twist on the

conventional diction of the sentimental Irish ballad, such as ‘The Hills of Connemara’ by John Keegan Casey in A Wreath of Shamrocks (1866), 25–6: ‘O’er Clifden’s slopes our moun­ tain girls | Now wander singing blithely’. WBY mentioned Casey amongst ‘many another name’ in ‘the blue ballad books’ ‘dear wherever the Irish are’ in his piece ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ in The Leisure Hour of Nov. 1889 (CW 9, 106–107). 420. Must murmur at last] Grow weary and cease with MS.

324

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

425

When God shall come from the sea with a sigh And bid the stars drop down from the sky, And the moon like a pale rose wither away.’ BOOK II

N

ow, man of croziers, shadows called our names And then away, away, like whirling flames; And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound, The youth and lady and the deer and hound; ‘Gaze no more on the phantoms,’ Niamh said,

And kissed my eyes, and, swaying her bright head

And her bright body, sang of faery and man

Before God was or my old line began;

Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; faeries of old

Who wedded men with rings of Druid gold; And how those lovers never turn their eyes Upon the life that fades and flickers and dies,

5

10

427.] Book I ends here P99 and after. But here in the gentle Danaan places No dawn can blow out the flame of our days Or the softness of youth be gone from our faces, Or love’s first tenderness die in our gaze. MS [revising WO I, 504–507] The singing melted in the night;

The isle was over now and gone;

The mist closed round us; pearly light

On horse and sea and saddle shone.

MS, P95 [preserving WO I, 508–511]

Book II] Argument Usheen tells how he came to the island of victo­ ries, of his life there, and how he [wearied del.] longed for his old companions, and left it. MS 1. man of croziers] In Lamentation, this is one of the forms of address from Oisin to Patrick,

e.g. ‘cleric of the croziers’ (269), ‘O Patrick of the white croziers’ (285). 2. whirling] P99 and after; spiral MS, P95. With ‘whirling flames’ perhaps cp. E. Spenser, Virgil’s Gnat, 173: ‘[Hyperion] Did shed his whirling flames on either side’. With ‘spiral flames’ cp. J.C. Mangan, ‘Love’, 6: ‘Hence the Soul of Love in spiral flames would mount for ever higher’. 6–7.] And [tossing del] swaying the [brown del.] wild blossom of her head | Sang of things done by faery and by man MS. 9–10.] faery kings Who wed the queens of human lands with rings Of druid pearl, and queens of faery lands Who took the human warriors by the hands MS [revising WO, II, 9–12]. 9. shadowy, vast] Cp. R. Browning, Paracelsus (1838), III, 923: ‘Two sorts of knowledge; one – vast, shadowy’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

15

20

25

30

325

Yet love and kiss on dim shores far away Rolled round with music of the sighing spray; Yet sang no more as when, like a brown bee That has drunk full, she crossed the misty sea With me in her white arms a hundred years Before this day; for now the fall of tears Troubled her song. I do not know if days Or hours passed by, yet hold the morning rays Shone many times among the glimmering flowers Woven into her hair, before dark towers Rose in the darkness, and the white surf gleamed About them; and the horse of Faery screamed And shivered, knowing the Isle of Many Fears, Nor ceased until white Niamh stroked his ears And named him by sweet names. A foaming tide Whitened afar with surge, fan-formed and wide, Burst from a great door marred by many a blow From mace and sword and pole-axe, long ago When gods and giants warred. We rode between

13. Yet] SP29 and after; But P95-P29. 14–19.] Or [else del.] wander [apart del.] in ^a^ sweet companion [ships del.] ship, Unlanguid as birds, with never withering lips, On murmuring [shores del.] sands un­ seen of oaring galleys Or wrestle with their peers in dewy valleys. [She sang, but no more merry as when like bees [That have del.] She was not merry as when like a brown bee That has drunk full of honey she [passed del.] crossed the sea [With me in del] With her white arms about me, a hundred years Before that hour; a tremulous sound of tears [Floated in all her singing del.] Hung in her song. MS [revising WO, II, 18–28]

18. the fall of tears] Cp. E.B. Browning, Son­ nets from the Portuguese IX, 2: ‘To let thee sit beneath the fall of tears’. 25. Isle of Many Fears] the isle of demons and fears MS. 26.] Till pearl pale Neave had caressed his ears MS. 28–31.] Poured with loud tumult out of a wide Gate [way del.] of basalt [broken del.] marred by many a blow From [battle axe del.] [maces and battle axes del.] mace and sword and [war del.] poleaxes long ago [When the gods warred on the giants and by nails Of demons when the sea del.] The gods and giants warred. MS.

326

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

The seaweed-covered pillars; and the green

And surging phosphorus alone gave light

On our dark pathway, till a countless flight

Of moonlit steps glimmered; and left and right Dark statues glimmered over the pale tide Upon dark thrones. Between the lids of one The imaged meteors had flashed and run And had disported in the stilly jet, And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set, Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother, The stream churned, churned, and churned – his lips apart, As though he told his never-slumbering heart Of every foamdrop on its misty way. Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stair

35

40

45

32–37.] The seaweed covered sides, [and soon del.] the trembling green Of surging phosphorus alone gave light [Till an innumerable del.] flight [Of steps shone in the moon del.] [In that dark way until at last del.] In that dark way until a countless flight Of moonlit steps [glimmered and either side del.] glimmered and left and right [Black del.][Basaltic del.] statues sat glim­ mering above the tide [Dripping with [fog del.] foam del.] Vast shapes of stone. Between the lids of one MS 38. meteors] Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam (1817) I, st. 26: The earliest dweller of the world, alone, Stood on the verge of chaos. Lo! Afar, O’er the wide wild abyss two meteors shone, Sprung from the depth of its tempestuous jar: A blood-red Comet and the Morning Star Mingling their beams in combat.

flashed and run] [dawned and set del.] shone and run MS. 39. stilly jet] OED stilly, 2: ‘Characterized by stillness’ is ‘chiefly poet.’, its chief poetical moment being Thomas Moore’s famous ‘Oft in the stilly night’. ‘Jet’ is the dark stone, or perhaps its blackness. 40. dawned and shone and set] dawned and set MS. 41–50.] MS follows WO, 54–68. 42. smother] OED smother n. 2.b., ‘A confused turmoil or welter of foam or water’. Cp. John Todhunter, The Banshee and Other Poems (1888), ‘The Coffin Ship’, 1–3: ‘Storm, and the moon like a waif, | Homeless, the baffled phan­ tom of hope, | In a smother of hurrying rack’. 44. never slumbering heart] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queen Maeve: Or, The Tain Bo Cualgné’, 127: ‘mightier far, with never slumbering hearts’, and R. Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810), VII 132–134: ‘rouse his slumbering heart, | And make him yet put forth his arm to raise | The thunder’. 47. unvesselled] WBY’s coinage. stair] CP33; stairs P95-SP29 (and repr. of SP29 in 1936, 1938).

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

50

55

60

65

327

And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were Hung from the morning star; when these mild words Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds: ‘My brothers spring out of their beds at morn, A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn They chase the noontide deer; And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare An ashen hunting-spear. O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me; Flutter along the froth lips of the sea, And shores the froth lips wet: And stay a little while, and bid them weep: Ah, touch their blue-veined eyelids if they sleep, And shake their coverlet. When you have told how I weep endlessly, Flutter along the froth lips of the sea And home to me again,

51–68.] For this passage (heavily revised from WO), F. Reid had particular praise in 1915 (38–9): This is an excellent example of what Mr. Yeats has done in the way of revision. The original version undoubtedly has charm, but it has nothing like the finished beauty of the later version. It is struggling to­ wards freedom, but has not yet found it. The individuality of the poet is only inter­ mittently present [. . .] In the later version all that was good in the earlier version has been kept, and made better; all that was indifferent has been removed; and the twenty-four lines are reduced to eighteen. The colour, meanwhile, has completely al­ tered. The form has been perfected, and that hint of prettiness – it was here but a hint  – which characterizes so much An­ glo-Irish verse, has disappeared. Compare When the earliest dew-washed star from eve has leant, with And when the dew-drowned stars hung in the air;

compare And tell me how my kindred’s tears are welling, And one whom you will go to without telling, Say how he weeps in Eri, with And in the shadow of my hair lie hid, And tell me how you came to one unbid, The saddest of all men. The difference is, I  think, just the difference between pleasant verse and poetry. 54. dew-drowned stars] dew washed stars MS. 56. An ashen hunting spear] EPS and after; [The del.] A larch wood hunting spear MS; A larch-wood hunting spear P95-CWVP08; An ash-wood hunting spear P12-P24. 57. fluttering sigh] Perhaps cp. Byron, Don Juan V, st. 155, 6: ‘a fluttering sigh Gulbeyaz heaved’. 61. blue-veined eyelids] Perhaps cp. Mortimer Collins, The Inn of Strange Meetings (1871), XLI, 32–3: ‘I gaze on her | Whose eyes are hidden blue-veined eyelids under’. (See also note to ‘eyelids blue’ WO II, 85.)

328

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

And in the shadow of my hair lie hid, And tell me that you found a man unbid, The saddest of all men.’ 70

75

A lady with soft eyes like funeral tapers, And face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapours, And a sad mouth, that fear made tremulous As any ruddy moth, looked down on us; And she with a wave-rusted chain was tied To two old eagles, full of ancient pride, That with dim eyeballs stood on either side. Few feathers were on their dishevelled wings, For their dim minds were on the ancient things. ‘I bring deliverance,’ pearl-pale Niamh said.

80

‘Neither the living, nor the unlabouring dead, Nor the high gods who never lived, may fight My enemy and hope; demons for fright Jabber and scream about him in the night;

67. that you found a man] EPS and after; how you came to one P95-P24. 69. eyes like funeral tapers] Cp. (along with the rhyme on ‘vapours’) Thomas Hood, Whims and Oddities (1826), ‘A Valentine’, 3–6: ‘Those cruel eyes, like two funereal tapers, | Have only lighted me the way to death. | Perchance, thou wilt extinguish them in vapours, | When I am gone’. 70. moonlit vapours] Perhaps cp. Alfred Hayes, The Last Crusade and Other Poems (1887), ‘The Burial of Saint Louis’, 120–121: ‘the wreaths | Of moonlit vapour’. Hayes (1857–1936) achieved some success with his poetry, and was to be reviewed favourably by Oscar Wilde, amongst others; he became an associate of Richard Le Gallienne in the 1890s. Neither this nor a pos­ sible echo in WO I, 94 is at all conclusive, but it is possible that WBY saw a copy of the newly published The Last Crusade in 1887 before composing these lines for WO. 71. sad] kind del. MS. 74. old] great del. MS.

75.] That stood with their dim eyeballs on each side del. MS. 76.] Their hundred years del. MS. 76–77.] [They had few feathers del.] Few feathers were in the dishevelled wings, And their dim minds dwelt with the an­ cient things, [But looked out no more on the night or day del.] [We have come riding from the gates of day del.] MS. 79–82.] No god nor any of the unlabouring dead Nor any who breathe sweet mortal air may fight My enemy and hope. He comes at night Dropping out of his eyes a languid light [And aged del.] A horde of dem[ons] jab­ ber and scream for fright [About del.] Round him and age [? holds] his subtle soul. MS.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

85

329

For he is strong and crafty as the seas That spring under the Seven Hazel Trees, And I must needs endure and hate and weep, Until the gods and demons drop asleep, Hearing Aedh touch the mournful strings of gold.’ ‘Is he so dreadful?’

90

95

‘Be not over-bold, But fly while still you may.’ And thereon I: ‘This demon shall be battered till he die, And his loose bulk be thrown in the loud tide.’ ‘Flee from him,’ pearl-pale weeping Niamh cried, ‘For all men flee the demons’; but moved not My angry king-remembering soul one jot. There was no mightier soul of Heber’s line; Now it is old and mouse-like. For a sign I burst the chain: still earless, nerveless, blind,

83–84.] These trees are probably those that stand over the Pool of Conla, where their nuts fed the salmon of wisdom which was caught and cooked by Finn. WBY touches on Conla’s Pool in various contexts through the 1890s, including in The Shadowy Waters. 87. Aedh] In his glossary entry in P95, WBY calls Aedh ‘A God of death,’ adding that ‘All who hear his harp-playing die,’ and that ‘He was one of the two gods who appeared to Cuhoollin before his death, according to the bardic tale’. The same name (though not with this identity) would figure elsewhere in WBY’s 1890s work, both in The Shadowy Waters and as a speaker for a number of poems in WATR. 89.] SP29 and after; But flee while you still may. Then I: P95; But flee while you may flee from him. Then I: P99-P24; But, fly while you may fly from him. Then I: P27, P29. 90. shall be battered till he die] EPS and after; shall be pierced and drop and die MS, P95-P24. 93. For all men flee the demons] It is no shame to fly a spirit MS. 93–95.] but moved me not | Nor shook my spacious and firm soul one jot, | It was the glory of an ancient line MS.

95. Heber’s] Heber was one of the legendary patriarchs of the Irish people, mentioned in the Lebor Gabala (Book of Invasions). There are in fact four figures with this name, but WBY probably intends here Ebor Finn, a Milesian chieftain who became the father of all the southern Gaels. 97. burst the chain] In many ways a com­ monplace functional phrase; but WBY may be alert here to echoes of moments of melodramatic emancipation in the con­ text of national struggle. Aubrey De Vere’s Poetical Works (1884) collected a sonnet ‘To Charles Eliot Norton: On Reading his ‘Vita Nuova’ of Dante, March  28th 1860’, in which the USA ‘early burst the chain weak nations bear | Weeping’ (12–13). In Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Voice and Pen’ 5–7: ‘What burst the chain far over the main, | And brightened the captive’s den? | ’Twas the fearless pen and the voice of power’. Less metaphori­ cally charged is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, where in ‘The Holy Grail’ (1869), 804: ‘I burst the chain, I  sprang into the boat’.

330

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

100

Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind, In some dim memory or ancient mood, Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles stood.

105

110

115

120

And then we climbed the stair to a high door; A hundred horsemen on the basalt floor Beneath had paced content: we held our way And stood within: clothed in a misty ray I saw a foam-white seagull drift and float Under the roof, and with a straining throat Shouted, and hailed him: he hung there a star, For no man’s cry shall ever mount so far; Not even your God could have thrown down that hall; Stabling His unloosed lightnings in their stall, He had sat down and sighed with cumbered heart, As though His hour were come. We sought the part That was most distant from the door; green slime Made the way slippery, and time on time Showed prints of sea-born scales, while down through it The captive’s journeys to and fro were writ Like a small river, and where feet touched came A momentary gleam of phosphorus flame. Under the deepest shadows of the hall That woman found a ring hung on the wall, And in the ring a torch, and with its flare Making a world about her in the air,

100. earless] WBY may have taken this word from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (1803), 4: ‘Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den’. A. Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise (1871) has similar liber­ ationist impetus in ‘A Marching Song’, 76–7: ‘These eyeless times and earless, | Shall they not see and hear?’ In W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October: The Man Who Never Laughed Again’, a ‘Song’ has the lines: ‘think of these | That stand around as wellwrought images, | Earless and eyeless as these trembling trees’. 103. content] at play del. MS. 104. clothed] the hall del. MS.

110. unloosed lightnings] By what may be a coincidence, WBY’s image and phras­ ing repeat that used in a poem by T.D. Sul­ livan (1827–1914), the Parnellite (but later anti-Parnell) MP who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1885–1886, and who had written the words to ‘God Save Ireland’ in 1867. His Poems (1882) includes ‘Dunboy’, 7–9: ‘They shall soon know our worth | When our men sally forth | Like lightnings unloosed to the fray’. 116. captive’s] P12 and after; maiden’s del. cap­ tive MS; captives’ P95-CWVP08. 118–141.] A  MS  version of these lines is missing.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

125

331

Passed under the dim doorway, out of sight, And came again, holding a second light Burning between her fingers, and in mine Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine No centuries could dim, and a word ran Thereon in Ogham letters, ‘Manannan’;

128. Manannan] The Irish sea-god Manan­ nán Mac Lir, sometimes associated with the Tuatha Dé Danaan, but also having more ancient associations, features in all four of the major Irish cycles of ancient myth. The figure’s identity is linked closely to the Irish Sea (his name means ‘Son of the waves, of the Isle of Man/Irish Sea’), and he rides across water in his chariot as though it were dry land. The sword of Manannán is Fre­ craid [the Answerer]: it can strike through any armour, and always deals a mortal blow. Lugh Lámfhota [Lugh of the Long Arm], the leader of the Tuatha Dé Danaan and in some traditions Manannán’s foster-son, brings this sword with him from Tír na mBéo [the Island of the Living]. Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland vol.2 (1880) mentions ‘Fraygarta, the sword of Mananan’, which shines ‘like glitter­ ing diamond . . . and on its starry sides there were graved verses in Ogham’ (279). Manan­ nán’s principal dwelling is Emain Ablach [Emain of the Apples], an island imagined off the coast of Scotland. The Irish god has some attributes which resonate both with the demon WBY’s Oisin is shortly to encounter and with the cyclical nature of the encounter itself: he is a shape-shifter, able also to change colours, and the livestock he keeps can be eaten on one day only to return, alive and well, on another. Manannán features in some nineteenth-century Irish poetry. With the spelling adopted by WBY, he is in R.D. Joyce’s Deirdre (1877), ‘The Feast in the House of Feilimid’, 217–218: ‘Since Mananan, the Seagod, first upthrew | The wild isle’s stony ribs unto the blue’, and in ‘The Capture of the

Fomorian Galleys’ 220–233, where a descrip­ tion of his sword, as taken up by Naisi, might have influenced WBY: And as with curious eyes the hero gazed On the gold hilt that bright with dia­ monds blazed, A spirit voice through his whole being ran, That seemed to say, “The gift of Mananan! Take it, and fear not!” Then with eager hand He grasped the hilt, and plucked the daz­ zling brand From the soft earth, and from the tent withdrew Into the light, and looked with wonder new On the great blade whereon was picturèd All shapes that live and move in Ocean’s bed. Long time he gazed upon its mimic sea, Then whirled the weapon round full joyously O’er his proud head in circles of bright flame That made the night breeze whistle as it came. Joyce’s Blanid (1879) mentions Manannán in connection with ‘Mana’ (probably the Isle of Man, though it is almost certain that the god took his name from the island, and not vice versa), where a castle ‘by magic might uphurled’ is ‘Built . . . by Mananan of old’ (‘The Taking of Mana’, 177–178). Another version of Manannán with which WBY is likely to have been familiar is that given in Samuel Ferguson’s Congal (1872). In Book III, 150–175, the poet Ardan informs Congal on the subject of the sea-god:

332

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

130

135

That sea-god’s name, who in a deep content Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent Out of the sevenfold seas, built the dark hall Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all The mightier masters of a mighty race; And at his cry there came no milk-pale face Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood, But only exultant faces. Niamh stood With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone, But she whose hours of tenderness were gone Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide

King, thou describest by his bulk and by his clapping cloak A mighty demon of the old time, who with much dread and fear Once filled the race of Partholan; Manan­ nan Mor Mac Lir, Son of the Sea. In former times there lived not on the face Of Erin a sprite of bigger bulk or potenter to raise The powers of air by land or sea in light­ ning, tempest, hail, Or magical thick mist, than he; albeit in woody Fail Dwelt many demons at that time: but being so huge of limb, Manannan had the overward of the coast allotted him, To stride it round, from cape to cape, daily; and if a fleet Hove into sight, to shake them down a sea-fog from his feet; Or with a wafture of his cloak flap forth a tempest straight Would drive them off a hundred leagues; and so he kept his state In churlish sort about our bays and forelands, till at last Great Spanish Miledh’s mighty sons, for all he was so vast And fell a churl, in spite of him, by dint of blows, made good

Their landing, and brought in their Dru­ ids: from which time forth, the brood Of Goblin people shun the light; some in the hollow sides Of hills lie hid; some hide beneath the brackish ocean-tides; Some underneath the sweet-well springs. Manannan, Poets say, Fled to the isle which bears his name, that eastward lies halfway Sailing to Britain; whence at times he wades the narrow seas, Revisiting his old domain, when evil destinies Impend o’er Erin: but his force and magic might are gone: And at such times ’tis said that he who, ’twixt twilight and dawn, Meets him and speaks him, safely learns a year’s events to be. Ferguson here makes use of the tradition that Manannán was driven out with the Tuatha Dé Danaan by the Milesians, and associates him with the Isle of Man. It is possible that Fergu­ son’s conception of the sea-god as the divinity in attendance whenever ‘evil destinies | Impend o’er Erin’ influences WBY in his giving to Oisin Manannán’s sword for an allegorical (and per­ haps politically allegorical) combat here. 134–135] Oisin here, for Patrick’s benefit, makes contemptuous reference to the iconography of the Christians he finds himself among.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

140

145

150

155

333

Under the shadows till the tumults died Of the loud-crashing and earth-shaking fight, Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight; And thrust the torch between the slimy flags. A dome made out of endless carven jags, Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face, Looked down on me; and in the self-same place I waited hour by hour, and the high dome, Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze Was loaded with the memory of days Buried and mighty. When through the great door The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall And found a door deep sunken in the wall, The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain A little runnel made a bubbling strain, And on the runnel’s stony and bare edge A dusky demon dry as a withered sedge

147. the high dome] the dome MS. 148. windowless] Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddolo’, 101: ‘A windowless, deformed and dreary pile’. 150–151. Days| Buried] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1820), II, 7: ‘honey-dew from buried days’. The lines immediately following (8–10) may have a bearing on WBY’s scene: ‘The woes of Troy, towers smothering o’er their blaze, | Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, | Struggling, and blood, and shrieks’. 151–152.] When [dawn pierced the del.] door | [And made a slender glimmering on the floor del.] MS. 155–163.] M.J. Sidnell comments that ‘This dried-up, self-contradictory little demon, pretending, or suffering the delusion, that he is still tending a living garden, talking to himself in a private language, is inescapably a critic or scholar  – as seen of course by a poet’. This may be so; but Sidnell’s conten­ tion that ‘Dowden was probably the origi­ nal on which the allegorical caricature was based’, and that ‘The demon is a cold one and

Dowden’s emotional nature was deficient too’ (Sidnell, 169–170), is hard to reconcile with the fact that the lines were written as long ago as 1887, at a time when WBY had not yet engaged in his pre-planned public argu­ ments with the TCD professor. By 1895, it is true, relations between WBY and Dowden had deteriorated, and this was largely of the poet’s doing: an informed contemporary reader might indeed have seen something of Dowden in this ‘caricature’; but it would be mistaken to think of this effect as one that had been specifically engineered a good eight years earlier by WBY. 156. a little runnel] Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Guilt and Sorrow’, 540: ‘Across the pebbly road a little runnel strayed’. 158. dusky] MS, P95-P01, PW06, CWVP08, EPS and after; husky P04, P08, P12-P24. The misprint that begins with P04 is remarkably long-lived; and there had in fact probably been a misprint in this word on its first appearance in WO (see note to WO II, 190).

334 160

165

170

175

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue: In a sad revelry he sang and swung Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro His hand along the runnel’s side, as though The flowers still grew there. Far on the sea’s waste Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased, While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light, Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright, Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned: A demon’s leisure: eyes, first white, now burned Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose Barking. We trampled up and down with blows Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way; And when he knew the sword of Manannan Amid the shades of night, he changed and ran Through many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;

161. Bacchant] As an adjective, this is defined by OED as ‘Bacchus-worshipping, wineloving’, citing Byron, Don Juan III, lxiii, 24: ‘Over his shoulder, with a Bacchant air’. It is relatively unusual, however. WBY may have noticed the word’s remarkable prominence in the works of T.C. Irwin, where it is used on no fewer than nine separate occasions, e.g. Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘Winter and Wine’, 23: ‘Sweet dreams of love float o’er the heart, rich bacchant hours roll after’. 162. the runnel’s side] Cp. W. Scott, Marmion (1808), VI, xxx, 13–17: ‘She stooped her by the runnel’s side, | But in abhorrence back­ ward drew; | For, oozing from the mountain’s side | Where raged the war, a dark-red tide | Was curdling the streamlet blue’. 167. passionate dawn] This renders less verbally odd WO’s ‘Dawn passioned’. For WBY’s pos­ sible sources for this, see note to WO, II, 197. 167–170. WBY’s description of the demon’s shapeshifting owes much to Homer’s Odyssey Book IV, 455–458, where Menelaus and his

companions attempt to lay hands on Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. In George Chapman’s translation (which WBY read): And in rusht we, with an abhorred crie: Cast all our hands about him manfully, And then th’ old Forger, all his formes began: First was a Lion, with a mightie mane; Then next a Dragon; a pide Panther then; A vast Boare next; and sodainly did straine All into water. Last, he was a tree, Curld all at top, and shot vp to the skie. (The Whole Works of Homer (1616), The Fourthe Booke of Homers Odysses, 627–634.) 171–172.] A general reminiscence here of Mil­ ton, Paradise Lost I, 742–743: ‘from morn | To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve’. 173–175.] EPS and after; But when at wither­ ing of the sun he knew | The Druid sword of Mananan, he grew | To many shapes; MS, P95-P24.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

180

185

190

195

200

335

And thereupon I drew the livid chop

Of a drowned dripping body to my breast;

Horror from horror grew; but when the west Had surged up in a plumy fire, I drave Through heart and spine; and cast him in the wave Lest Niamh shudder. Full of hope and dread Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread, And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine; Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea-shine, We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine, Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day; And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept. And when the sun once more in saffron stept, Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep, We sang the loves and angers without sleep, And all the exultant labours of the strong. But now the lying clerics murder song With barren words and flatteries of the weak. In what land do the powerless turn the beak Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath? For all your croziers, they have left the path And wander in the storms and clinging snows,

178–180.] EPS and after. I held a dripping corpse, with livid chop And sunken shape, against my face and breast, When I had torn it down; MS, P95-P24. 181–182. I drave | Through heart and spine] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Sons of Usnach’ VI, 206–207: ‘[Conal Car­ nach] drave through Ilian’s side, | Knowing him not, the sword’. 187. sea-shine] Cp. A. Swinburne, Studies in Song (1880), ‘By the North Sea’, 175: ‘Streak on streak of glimmering seashine’, and Songs of the Springtides (1880), ‘Thalassius’, 475–476: ‘when brighter sea-wind blew | And louder sea-shine lightened’. (WBY prints ‘seashine’ here in WO.)

188–189. drank wine, | Brewed of the seagods] If F. Kinahan 89 is correct in seeing the influence of Kennedy’s ‘The Fellow in the Goat-Skin’ (see note on 214 below), WBY’s ‘Brewed’, along with ‘cups’ and the ‘lay’/’day’ rhyme, may show the sublimi­ nal influence of that story’s account of its hero’s recovery, with WBY’s upgrading of the original menu still carrying a trace of the earlier, more workaday, fare: ‘the prin­ cess and all her maids of honour to wait on him, and pity him, and give him gruel, and toast, and tay of all colours under the sun.’ (Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (1870), 113.) 195^196.] A break here, P95-SP29 (incl. SP29 1938 repr.)

336

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Hopeless for ever: ancient Oisin knows, For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies On the anvil of the world. 205

210

215

220

S.Patrick. Be still: the skies Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind, For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind; Go cast your body on the stones and pray, For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day. Oisin. Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder; Laughter and cries. The armies clash and shock, And now the daylight-darkening ravens flock. Cease, cease, O mournful, laughing Fenian horn! We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn I found, dropping sea-foam on the wide stair, And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair, That demon dull and unsubduable; And once more to a day-long battle fell, And at the sundown threw him in the surge, To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge His new-healed shape; and for a hundred years

211. shock] OED n.3, 1. a.; ‘Mil. The encounter of an armed force with the enemy in a charge or onset’. Cp. Shakespeare, Richard III V.v.46: ‘this doubtful shock of arms’. WBY uses the noun, but may perhaps remember the word used as a verb in Dryden’s Aeneid XII, 673: ‘And now both armies shock in open field’. 212–213.] EPS and after; All is done now – I see the ravens flock – | Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn! P95-P24. 214. We feasted for three days] Kinahan 89 suggests a parallel for the interval between fighting and feasting in Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (1870), and its story ‘The Fellow in the Goat-Skin’: ‘Herein the hero fights a giant, rests for three days, fights another giant, rests for three days, fights a third giant and then rests once more. The intervals of rest between Oisin’s clashes with the demon cover the same length of time . . .

and the rewards visited on the two are like­ wise similar’. on the fourth morn] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Bla­ nid (1879), ‘The Slaying of Curoi and the Revenge of his Minstrel’, 296–297: ‘Three days the feast went on; on the fourth morn | The glad hawks shook their wings’. 217. unsubduable] Cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘Gareth and Lynette’, 837: ‘The last a monster unsubduable’. Perhaps cp. also a highly-charged allegorical moment in Shel­ ley’s Queen Mab, V, 19–22: ‘Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, | And judgement cease to wage unnatural war | With passion’s unsubduable array. | Twin-sister of religion, selfishness!’ 221. new-healed] This revision of WO’s ‘healèd’ echoes W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘June: The Love of Alcestis’, 1228: ‘those awakened, new-healed eyes’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

225

230

337

So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,

Nor languor nor fatigue: an endless feast,

An endless war.

The hundred years had ceased; I stood upon the stair; the surges bore A beech-bough to me, and my heart grew sore, Remembering how I had stood by white-haired Finn Under a beech at Almhuin and heard the thin Outcry of bats. And then young Niamh came Holding that horse, and sadly called my name; I mounted, and we passed over the lone And drifting greyness, while this monotone, Surly and distant, mixed inseparably Into the clangour of the mist and sea.

235

‘I hear my soul drop down into decay, And Manannan’s dark tower, stone after stone, Gather sea-slime and fall the seaward way, And the moon goad the waters night and day, That all be overthrown.

240

‘But till the moon has taken all, I wage War on the mightiest men under the skies, And they have fallen or fled, age after age. Light is man’s love, and lighter is man’s rage; His purpose drifts and dies.’

245

And then lost Niamh murmured, ‘Love, we go To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo! The Islands of Dancing and of Victories Are empty of all power.’ ‘And which of these

223. endless feast] Though there is unlikely to be any question of allusion here, WBY’s phrase echoes Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), XLVII, 9: ‘And we shall sit at endless feast’. 228–229.] P12 and after; While the wood­ pecker made a merry din, | The hare leaped in the grass P95-CWVP08. 237. the seaward way] Something of a com­ monplace, but perhaps cp. R. Southey,

Poetical Works (1838), ‘The Ebb Tide’, 15: ‘Fast flow thy waters on their seaward way’ and W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘November: The Story of Rhodope’, 224: ‘Slowly along the seaward way he passed’. 244. drifts and dies] P99 and after; drifts away P95 (following WO).

338

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Is the Island of Content?’ 250

‘None know,’ she said; And on my bosom laid her weeping head. BOOK III

F

led foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke, High as the saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide; And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke; The immortal desire of Immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.

Book III] On most of the MS  material for this Book, WBY makes alterations on and around the printed text of WO, which has been pasted into the notebook page by page. This expedi­ ent (which WBY did not adopt in approaching Books I and II) may indicate that he intended lighter revision for this Book, or merely that he was feeling pressed for time, and thought it best to adopt this labour-saving practical approach to the revision process. [Argument] Usheen tells how he came to the Island of Forgetfulness, and how he dreamed many things, but longed for his old companions and returned to Eri, and became old and feeble. MS 1. Fled foam] The foam fled del. MS. WBY’s opening inversion may owe something to A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), where all of 391–393 is relevant to the poem: ‘Peleus the Larissaean, couched with whom | Sleeps the white sea-bred wife and silvershod, | Fair as fled foam, a goddess’. round us] around us P12-P24. 4. The immortal desire of immortals] The phrase ‘immortal desire’ is a rarity, and it is not likely that WBY would have remembered (if he ever encountered) its occurrence in a sub-Tennysonian patriotic British war poem by James Drummond Burns (1823–1864), whose Memoir, and Remains (1869) included

‘The Charge of the Seven Hundred’, 21–2: ‘they felt their blood tingle | With immortal desire’. However, the idea of never-ending desire as a troubling aspect of the gods’ immortality is explored in a poem by W.S. Landor, which WBY knew in later life and could well have encountered first in his youth. Landor’s Hellenics (1859) includes the short dramatic poem ‘Peleus and Thetis’, in which the immortal Thetis tells her mortal lover: ‘Immortal is thy love, immutable’ (52), and he replies ‘Ages shall fly | Over my tomb while thou art flourishing | In youth eternal, the desire of gods’ (63–65), before Thetis responds with: ‘I bless thy words | And in my heart will hold them; Gods who see | Within it may desire me, but they know | I have loved Peleus’ (68–71). The possible relation here to the situation of Oisin and Niamh is sugges­ tive. In his late poem ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ (1938), in which ‘Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed | By Oisin in the grass’ (5–6), a reference to Peleus and Thetis (‘Slim adoles­ cence that a nymph has stripped, | Peleus on Thetis stares’ (25–26) is primarily indebted to a painting by Poussin (then known as ‘Peleus and Thetis’ in the National Gallery of Ire­ land); but it may well be that the first connec­ tion between the Greek myth and Oisin and Niamh came here, albeit a connection likely to have been forgotten by the poet by 1938. Also relevant is Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860), another poem about the erotic union of a mortal with an immortal, in which the

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

5

10

15

339

I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair, And never a song sang Niamh, and over my finger-tips Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair, And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips. Were we days long or hours long in riding, when, rolled in a grisly peace, An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak? And we stood on a sea’s edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed fleece Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke. And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge; the sea’s edge barren and grey, Grey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees, Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away, Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

immortal (though, unlike Oisin at this point, ageing) speaker is left ‘maimed, | To dwell in presence of immortal youth, | Immortal age beside immortal youth, | And all I  was, in ashes’ (20–23). we saw in their faces, and sighed] Cp. Byron, Mazeppa (1819), VI, 1: ‘We met – we gazed – I saw, and sighed’ and 13: ‘I saw, and sighed – in silence wept’. 6. never a song] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (1881), ‘Alas! So Long’, 11: ‘though days and years have never a song’. Rossetti’s poem is another which hinges on the illusion of eter­ nally protracted youth (‘Ah! dear one, we were young so long, | It seemed that youth would never go’ [1–2]), contrasted with the conse­ quences of age (‘Ah! dear one, I’ve been old so long, | It seems that age is loth to part’ [9–10]). 8. the warmth of sighs] Possibly cp. Hart­ ley Coleridge, Poems (1851), ‘Prometheus: A  Fragment’, 151–153: ‘a lump of ice which you might thaw | With the kind warmth of sighs, and hard I  strove | To put away my immortality’. after the quiver] [now del.] the quiver MS. 10. with dripping hazel and oak] of dripping hazel and oak MS. WBY had for a time thought of correcting this to ‘dripping with hazel and oak’ (see note to WO, III, 10), but evidently this thought was not present when he undertook the 1894 revision.

11. sea’s edge] This was changed in the WO Proofs Texas to ‘land’s edge’, with the change then cancelled and marked ‘stet’; however, ‘sea’s edge’ was carried through to the printed text, and remained there. WBY’s phrase may remember A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyon­ esse (1882), VIII, 464: ‘And stood between the sea’s edge and the sea’. 12. Fled foam underneath us] The foam fled under del. MS. 15. doubling landward] WBY’s primary sense of ‘doubling’ here is OED v. 8.a., ‘To bend . . . over, so as to bring the two parts into contact parallel; to fold; to bend . . . so as to bring distant parts into proximity’, but ‘landward’ raises the possibility of his using the verb with the nautical resonance of OED v. 9 a., ‘To sail or pass round or to the other side of (a cape or point), so that the ship’s course is, as it were, doubled or bent upon itself ’. 16. rest from the moan of the seas] Cp. the arrival of the Argonauts at Cyzicum in W. Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason (1867), V, 25–29: ‘So, as they touched the shore, a champion tall | Drew nigh, and bade them name themselves withal; | And when he heard, he cried: “O heroes, land, | For here shall all things be at your com­ mand; | And here shall you have good rest from the sea.”

340

20

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark; Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound; For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark: Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground. And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night, For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun, Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light, And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.

25

30

35

Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak, A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay, Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk, Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way. And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade; And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid, And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold. And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men; The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds, And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen, The breathing came from those bodies, long warless, grown whiter than curds.

21. hollow night] The phrase is not unknown in nineteenth-century verse and occurs in R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Tears of Blanid’, 148: ‘dumb as the hollow night in their despair’, and William Allingham, Flower Pieces (1888), ‘The Shooting Star’, 11: ‘Beneath the dim-lit, hollow night’. 22. gleams of the world] Cp W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘February’: ‘The Hill of Venus’, 615–617: ‘grew thin | That lovely dream, and glimmered now through it | Gleams of the world cleft from him by his sin’. 24. the stars were blotted] Cp. R. Southey, Madoc, Part Second, III, 427–428: ‘when the moon | Was gone, and all the stars were blotted out’.

26. grass] grasses MS. 31. couch] bed CWVP08. 33–45.] The page of MS  for these lines is missing. 35. mural glen] WBY seems to have in mind some kind of walled-in effect here: the sense is between OED mural adj. 2.a., ‘fixed, placed or executed on a wall’ and 2.b., ‘growing against and fastened to a wall’. However, this use of ‘mural’ is idiosyncratic. 36. long-warless] ‘Warless’ is not common, but is extremely prominent in Tennyson’s Lock­ sley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), where it occurs five times in the title poem.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

40

341

The wood was so spacious above them, that He who has stars for His flocks Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from His dew-cumbered skies; So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their locks, Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes. And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,

Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow-place wide;

And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft star-flame,

Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.

45

Golden the nails of his bird-claws, flung loosely along the dim ground; In one was a branch soft-shining with bells more many than sighs

40. fibrous dimness] ‘Fibrous’ is an important word for Blake, and occurs on ten occasions in his Prophetic books, including The Book of Thel, IV, 3–4: ‘She saw the couches of the dead,  & where the fibrous roots | Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists’. 42. star-fire] Cp. William Sharp, The Human Inheritance (1882), II, ‘Youth’s Inheritance’ 538–539: ‘he watched her eyes | Reflect the panting star-fire in the skies’. 46. a branch soft-shining with bells] The bellbranch of Celtic mythology: in a note in P95, WBY says this is ‘A legendary branch whose shaking cast all men into a gentle sleep’. The mythic motif has associations of access to otherworldly experience. The oldest form of this legend comes in the eighth-century Immram Brain, The Voyage of Bran, where the hero wakes to find a branch of silver with white blossoms at his side, and later is given a silver branch by a beautiful woman, who will lead him to her supernatural domain. A later appearance of the branch was known to WBY from Standish H. O’Grady’s translation of the tale, ‘How Cormac Mac Airt Got his Branch’ in Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3, which begins (213): Of a time that Cormac, the son of Art, the son of Conn of the hundred battles, that is, the arch-king of Erin, was in Li­ athdruim, he saw a youth upon the green before his Dun, having in his hand a glit­ tering fairy branch with nine apples of red

gold upon it. And this was the manner of that branch, that when any one shook it wounded men and women with child would be lulled to sleep by the sound of the very sweet fairy music which those apples uttered; and another property that branch had, that is to say, that no one on earth would bear in mind any want, woe, or weariness of soul when that branch was shaken for him, and whatever evil might have befallen any one he would not re­ member it at the shaking of the branch. WBY substitutes bells for apples; but the rela­ tion between the two things had already been established in Eugene O’Curry’s On the Man­ ners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), in the course of which the same story is translated from another source (in the Book of Fermoy): here, O’Curry mentions ‘apples (or balls) of red gold’, ‘And when he shook it, sweeter than the world’s music was the music which the apples produced’ (III, 317). O’Curry’s summary of the available sources leads to the following conclu­ sion (III, 319): I scarcely need say any more to prove that the Craebh Ciúil, or Musical Branch, was an instrument indicative or symbolic of repose and peace, and used by those who were qualified by station or profession to command it. The particular form or parts of the Musical Branch we now have no means of discovering; but, from the

342

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

In midst of an old man’s bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around

Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.

50

55

And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; no, not since the world began, In realms where the handsome were many, nor in glamours by demons flung, Have faces alive with such beauty been known to the salt eye of man, Yet weary with passions that faded when the sevenfold seas were young. And I gazed on the bell-branch, sleep’s forebear, far sung by the Sennachies. I saw how those slumberers, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep, Of wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the wandering seas, Laid hands on the bell-branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.

qualities ascribed to the branches of the poet Sencha and of king Cormac, we may assume that it resembled, in effect at least, if not in shape, the silver crescent of the Turks, with its gently tingling bells, or that which, copied from it, some years ago had a place in British military bands. WBY draws on this motif in ‘The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novel­ ists’ (1890), ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), and ‘The Harp of Aengus’ (1900). soft-shining] WBY’s compound has prec­ edent in William Sharp, The New Minnesinger (1875), ‘The Crescent Moon’, 16: ‘Of those softshining eyes’. 48. Sidled their bodies] WBY’s transitive use of ‘Sidled’ is a rarity: OED 1.a., which comes closest to his effect, is intransitive: ‘To move or go sideways or obliquely; to edge along, as in a furtive or unobtrusive manner, or while looking in another direction; to make advances in this manner’. 49. no, not since the world began] P12 and after; no, neither in house of a cann P95-P08; for nowhere in any clan PW06, CWVP08. WBY’s work to rid the poem of the Irish ‘cann’ (which he glossed for P95 as ‘a kind of chief­ tain’) takes him to ‘clan’ before arriving at a solution (‘began’) in P12. 50. glamours by demons flung] OED ‘glamour’ 1: Magic, enchantment, spell; as in the phrase to

cast the glamour over one’, citing Allan Ram­ say’s note to his Poems (1721): ‘When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator.’ 51.] P12 and after; Are faces alive with such beauty made known to the salt [soft MS, P95] eye of man P95-CWVP08. 53. Seannachies] In Irish, a seanchai is a teller of traditional tales (seanchas being ‘old lore’). By the nineteenth century, the term was as commonly Scottish as Irish in reference: in 1863, J.F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands noted that ‘A Shanachie means a teller of old tales and traditions’. 54. grasses deep] WBY’s inversion here creates an echo of Jean Ingelow’s long poem, ‘The Four Bridges’ (Poems: First Series [1877]), 646: ‘Wetting thy steps in dewy grasses deep’. This could be confidently treated as a coin­ cidence, were it not for the context of Inge­ low’s line, in stanzas describing the attempt to awaken a lady from deep sleep: ‘I saw the moon on her shut eyelids shine |  .  .  . The fringed lids dropped low, as sleep-oppressed’ (627, 637), ‘Then from her stainless bosom she did take | Two beauteous lily flowers that lay therein, | And with slow-moving lips a gesture make, |  As one that some forgotten words doth win’ (649–652). 56. unhuman] The third use of this rare word in the poem. See notes to I, 136 and II, 98 above.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

60

343

Snatching the horn of Niamh, I blew a long lingering note. Came sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like the stirring of flies. He, shaking the folds of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat, Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes. I cried, ‘Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!

And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,

That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;

Your questioner, Oisin, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands.’

65

70

75

Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their dreams; His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came; Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping a sound in faint streams Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame. Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth, The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the whole of my mirth, And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone. In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low; And the pearl-pale Niamh lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast; And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years ’gan flow; Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.

61. king] PW06-CWVP08 and after; cann P95-P08. 65. and held me] MS omits this phrase. 67. slow dropping] Cp. WBY’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 9: ‘peace comes dropping slow’. WBY probably recalls Tennyson’s ‘The LotosEaters’, 10–11: ‘A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, | Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go’. 69–80.] The page of MS  for these lines is missing. 69. more than of earth] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, ‘Son­ net: To his Lady Nina, of Sicily’, 5–6: ‘thy

courtesy | And worth, more than of earth, celestial’. 70. moil] OED 1: ‘Turmoil, confusion, tangle; confusion of sound, hubbub. Also: trouble, vexation.’ 73. sorrels] Wild sorrel is a traditional source of natural sustenance in Irish poetry, and is included in Samuel Ferguson’s Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘The Fair Hills of Ire­ land: Old Irish Song’, 21: ‘The cresses on the water and the sorrels are at hand’. 74. the pearl-pale] P99 and after; pearl-pale P95.

344

80

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when the fallen on fallen lie rolled; How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron’s plot, And the name of the demon whose hammer made Conchubar’s swordblade of old. And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot That the spear-shaft is made out of ashwood, the shield out of osier and hide; How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spearhead’s burning spot; How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.

85

But in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust with their throngs, Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales; Came by me the kings of the Red Branch, with roaring of laughter and songs, Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing the tempest with sails.

79. falconer follows the falcon] Cp. WBY’s later ‘The Second Coming, 2: ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’. Falcons and hawks occur in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1386), ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, 1196–1197: ‘Thise fauconers upon a fair river, | That with hir haukes han the heron slayn.’ 80.] CP33 and after; And the names of the demons whose hammers made made armour for Conhor [Midhir PW06, CWVP08] of old P95-SP29. Conchubar was King of Ulster; in the Red Branch cycle of stories, his sword is forged by the smith Culann, who is associ­ ated also with an early episode in the career of Cuchullain: there the hero, still named Setanta, comes across a feast organized for Conchubar by Culann, and in gaining access he kills the hound who guards Culann’s for­ tress at Cuailgne, becoming known from then on himself as Cuchullain [‘the hound of Culann’]. WBY’s plural, ‘demons’, is not therefore in accord with the story: it was retained in the texts of the poem until SP29 (a volume that was much reprinted). 84. oxen of Finn] Possession of cattle is a com­ mon attribute of kings and heroes in early

Irish myth, and the stealing of cattle is a major theme in various tales: Finn’s oxen here are to be seen in that context. 86. winter tales] OED gives ‘winter tale’ as ‘n. Obs. an idle tale’: WBY probably has the phrase from the title of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (where the meaning is closely similar). 87. kings PW06, CWVP08 and after; canns P95-P04, P08. kings of the Red Branch] The Ulster cycle of stories was often referred to in the nine­ teenth century as the Red Branch cycle. This cycle (parts of which were first recorded in the eighth century) concerns the kingdom of Ulster: the Irish Craebruad refers to a red branch, or timber beam, and is the name of one of King Conchubar’s palaces in the cycle. WBY’s use of ‘kings’ is unusual in this con­ text: for Samuel Ferguson, Aubrey De Vere, and R.D. Joyce, the customary phrase is ‘Red Branch knights’. The ‘kings’ WBY has in mind here are Conchubar himself, and other heroes of the Ulaid, including Cuchulain: one name for this race was the Clanna Rudraige. in which the word ruad (red) was commonly identified.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

90

345

Came Blanid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk,

Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry,

Dark Balor, as old as a forest, car-borne, his mighty head sunk

Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.

89. Blanid] In the WO Proofs Texas, this line opens with ‘Blanid the unwished’; this is then altered in correction to ‘Blanid, MacNessa’. In his note in P95, WBY identifies Blanid as ‘The heroine of a beautiful and sad story told by Keating’. Blanid anglicizes the Irish Blaithine, the wife of Cu Roi, a king of Munster in the Ulster cycle; she is a lover of Cuchulain and, in the version contained in Geoffrey Keating’s (Seathrun Ceitinn (c. 1569–c. 1644)) History of Ireland (Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, c. 1634), helps Cuchulain to kill her husband, subsequently being killed in revenge by Cu Roi’s poet Feircheirtne, who flings her (along with himself) off a cliff. The story is also contained in R.D. Joyce’s poem Blanid (1879). Mac Nessa] The Red Branch King Conchu­ bar Mac Nessa (son of Ness, the daughter of Eochaid Salbuide (‘the yellow heel’)). tall] and P95. Fergus who feastward of old time slunk] Fer­ gus mac Roich, one of the kings of the Ulster cycle, and an important character in the Tain Bo Cualigne. In a note in P95, WBY writes of Fergus that ‘he was the poet of the Red Branch cycle, as Usheen was of the Fenian’: in connection with Barach (90), he writes that he ‘enticed Fergus away to a feast, that the sons of Usna might be killed in his absence. Fergus had made an oath never to refuse a feast from him, and so was compelled to go, though all unwillingly.’ In his Notes to WATR (1899), WBY writes about Fergus as ‘the son of Roigh, the legendary poet of ‘the quest of the bull of Cualge,’ as he is in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in modern poems by Fergu­ son. He married Nessa, and Ferguson makes him tell how she took him ‘captive in a single look’. [. . .] Presently, because of his great love,

he gave up his throne to Conchobar, her son by another, and lived out his days feasting, and fighting, and hunting. His promise never to refuse a feast from a certain comrade, and the mischief that came by his promise, and the vengeance he took afterwards, are a prin­ cipal theme of the poets’. 90. Barach] Barach was one of the Red Branch knights who, in the story of Deirdre, per­ suaded Fergus to leave Deirdre and the chil­ dren of Usna, whom he was guarding, in order to attend a feast at Emain Macha; once Fergus left them, his wards were murdered on the orders of Conchubar. warward] This heroic archaism seems to be WBY’s coinage. 91. Balor] A king of the Fomorians, who had an eye with the power of evil, opened only on the field of battle: this could defeat an entire army, and the services of four men were required in order for it to be opened. R.K. Alspach, ‘Some Sources of Yeats’s The Wan­ derings of Oisin’, PMLA 58/3 (Sept. 1943), 865 identifies WBY’s debt here to Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: Critical and Phil­ osophical Vol. 1, (1881), 120: ‘Balor, sleepy with age, was with difficulty brought into the battle. Nine giants with hooks lifted like a portcullis the vast lid of his petrifying eye. At the first glance whole ranks of the Tuatha De Danān were converted into stones’; also Vol. 2 93: ‘Balor . . . with his Gorgon eye converted armies into stones. Ten giants it required to raise the lid, for in age, the monster became inert and comatose.’ In his note in P95, WBY calls Balor ‘The Irish Chimaera, the leader of the hosts of darkness at the great battle of good and evil, life and death, light and dark­ ness, which was fought out on the strands of Moytura, near Sligo’.

346

95

100

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams, And Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone. So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of dreams, In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone. At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold; When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness they love going by; When a glow-worm was green on a grass-leaf, lured from his lair in the mould; Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh. So watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell, Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air,

93. soft red raiment] ‘Soft raiment’ occurs four times in W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, and occurs also in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, ‘A Ballad of Death’, 6: ‘Make thee soft raiment out of woven sighs’. 94. Grania] The betrothed of Finn, who ran away with Diarmid and was pursued by the angry king: this is the subject of the narra­ tive Toraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghrainne [The pursuit of Diarmid and Grania]: WBY was familiar with its translation by Standish Hayes O’Grady. WBY’s note in P95 goes into some detail: ‘A beautiful woman, who fled with Dermot to escape from the love of aged Finn. She fled from place to place over Ire­ land, but at last Dermot was killed at Sligo upon the seaward point of Benbulben, and Finn won her love and brought her, leaning upon his neck, into the assembly of the Feni­ ans, who burst into inextinguishable laugh­ ter.’ The centrepiece of KT’s Shamrocks (1887) was ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’. 96. iron sleep] OED iron adj. 7: ‘Chiefly poet. Designating an extremely deep sleep, as that of death.’

a fish  .  .  .  dumb as a stone] That a fish should be ‘dumb’ is not remarkable, since it would not be expected to speak in the nor­ mal course of things; WBY returns, however, to this concept in his much later poem, ‘All things can tempt me’, 10: ‘dumber and deafer than a fish’. Fish almost speak (but manage only to ‘mean’) in Isaac Watts’s paraphrase of Psalm 148 (Works (1810)), 31–2: ‘While the dumb fish that cut the stream | Leap up, and mean his praises too’. 100. lifted our eyelids] Cp. 92 above: the pur­ pose (and efficacy) of this echo are not certain. gazed on the grass] Possibly cp. Thomas Hood, Works (1863), ‘The Plea of the Mid­ summer Faeries’, 228–229: ‘Pity it was to see them, all so pale, | Gaze on the grass for a dying bed’. 101. heel of a century] WBY uses a rare sense of ‘heel’, OED n. 7: ‘The latter or concluding part of a period of time’. Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Window: Or, The Songs of the Wrens’ (1871), Winter’, 5–6: ‘The frost is here | And has bit­ ten the heel of the going year’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

347

A starling like them that foregathered ’neath a moon waking white as a shell When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sceolan, Lomair. 105

I awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran, Thrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man, And that I would leave the Immortals, their dimness, their dews drop­ ping sleep.

110

O had you seen beautiful Niamh grow white as the waters are white, Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept: But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight Of twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept. I cried, ‘O Niamh! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day I must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young In the Fenians’ dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play, Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan’s slanderous tongue!

115

120

‘Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle, Remembering its long-oared companions, sails turning to threadbare rags; No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile, But to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags.’ Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought, Watched her those seamless faces from the valley’s glimmering girth;

103. foregathered] WBY’s intransitive verb has most of its precedents in Scots writing. 104. Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair] See note on I, 15. 108. Immortals] The capital is present only in CP33 and after. dews dropping sleep] This, together with ‘slow dropping’ in 67 and the ‘dwellings of wattle’ in 115, echoes WBY’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 5–7, where ‘peace comes dropping slow, | Drop­ ping from the veils of the evening’. 109–112.] P99 and after. O, had you seen beautiful Naeve wail to herself and blanch, Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:

But, the bird in my fingers, I  mounted, mindful only to launch Forth, piercing the distance – beneath me the hoofs impatiently stept. P95 [fol­ lowing WO]. 116. bald Conan’s slanderous tongue] Conán mac Morna (sometimes, Conán Máel [the bald]): see note to I, 13. 120. flags] OED flag 1.a: ‘One of various endogenous plants, with a bladed or ensi­ form leaf, mostly growing in moist places. Now regarded as properly denoting a mem­ ber of the genus Iris (pseudacorus) but sometimes (as in early use) applied to any reed or rush.’

348

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

As she murmured, ‘O wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-branch is naught, For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth. 125

130

‘Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do, And softly come to your Niamh over the tops of the tide; But weep for your Niamh, O Oisin, weep; for if only your shoe Brush lightly as haymouse earth’s pebbles, you will come no more to my side. ‘O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?’ I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan: ‘I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto breast We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone ‘In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.

126–128.] Niam’s warning to Oisin compresses her triple injunction in Lay: “Remember O Oisin! what I am saying,

If thou layest foot on level ground,

Thou shalt not come again for ever

To this fine land in which I am myself.

“I say to thee again without guile,

If thou alightest once off the white steed,

Thou wilt never more come to the ‘Land

of Youth,’ O golden Oisin of the warlike arms! “I say to thee for the third time,

If thou alightest off the steed thyself,

That thou wilt be an old man, withered,

and blind, Without activity, without pleasure, with­ out run, without lea 131. breast unto breast] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October’, ‘The Story of Acontius and Cydippe’, 943–945: ‘That they this side of fair hope’s death | Might yet have clung breast unto breast, | And snatched from life a little rest’. 133. farthest seas] Possibly cp. W. Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘The Sylph of Sum­ mer’, 82–5 [where a departing voyager loses sight of his homeland as it sinks beneath the

horizon]: ‘How many anxious morns shall rise, | How many moons shall light the far­ thest seas | O’er what new scenes and regions shall he stray, | A  weary man, still thinking of his home’. only the spirits come] Possibly cp. Philip Bourke Marston, Wind-Voices (1883), ‘Dream Moonlight’, 3: ‘Where spirits come in dreams to laugh or weep’. Of itself, this would be an exceedingly tenuous verbal connec­ tion, and very doubtful; but Marston’s whole sonnet comes into thematic contact with this part of the poem, and WBY had been read­ ing at least Marston’s fiction in Sligo in the summer of 1887 when composition was in progress (see his letter to KT, 13 Aug. 1887, CL 1, 33). Marston (1850–1887) was part of the London circle of William Sharp, D.G. Rossetti, and Swinburne; WBY was certainly aware of his work, and ‘Dream Moonlight’ is by no means alien to the atmosphere the poet was trying to create in Part III of his narra­ tive poem: Dream-moonlight, which for me some­ times makes bright And fair and wonderful the vales of sleep, Where spirits come in dreams to laugh or weep,

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

135

140

349

Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon who sleeps on her nest, Nor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea’s vague drum? O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?’ The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark, Where ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound; For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark; In reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling ground. And I rode by the plains of the sea’s edge, where all is barren and grey, Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees, Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away, Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

145

And the winds made the sands on the sea’s edge turning and turning go, As my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak I rode away on the surges, where, high as the saddle-bow, Fled foam underneath me, and round me, a wandering and milky smoke.

Is, more than that which floods the actual night, A secret, subtle message to the sight. Sometimes it shines upon a pale dreamdeep, Or on untrodden fields no reapers reap, Or some unscaled and inaccessible height; – Sometimes it falls ’twixt branches of dream-trees, Where the soft light and shade divinely blend. O fair dream-moonlight, which dost give surcease To this sore heart from memories that rend, If death were but to languish in thy peace How could one stay and battle to the end? Twenty-three years later, WBY mentioned Marston slightingly in a letter to Mabel Dickinson, as ‘a bad poet who has certainly made many people sentimental’ (17 Aug. 1910: InteLex 1411); but this minor son­ net’s consonance with the imagery and other content of WBY’s poem seems more than coincidental.

135. star-fires] Cp. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), Poetical Works (1841), ‘The FireWorshippers’, 1787: ‘Sights that will turn your star-fires cold’, and Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘Seranade’, 21–2: ‘For when the pale dawn advances, | Tremulous starfires decay’. 136–140 and 141–144.] WBY largely repeats 17–20 and 13–16 above (see notes); Oisin’s way back takes him in correct reverse order through the poetic landscape of his outward journey. 140. reverie forgetful of all things] WBY’s ‘rev­ erie’ is OED 4.b: ‘The fact or state of being lost in thought or daydreaming’. The word is common in poetry, often with an adjec­ tive following it (‘reverie profound’, e.g., is a nineteenth-century commonplace); WBY’s phrase is close in effect to the almost exactly contemporary expression used by Albert Moll in his study Hypnotism (1890), IV, 193: ‘There is often reverie independent of the will’. 142. sand] CP33 and after; sands P95-SP29. 147. saddle bow] ‘The arched front part of a saddle’ (OED).

350 150

155

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast, Snatching the bird in secret; nor knew I, embosomed apart, When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast, For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart. Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown.

149. foam-flakes] Cp. Tennyson, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, 39: ‘Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand’. The phrase is not uncommon in poetry, but cp. Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (2nd edn. 1871), ‘The Prisoners: Christmas 1869’, 11–12: ‘fearless and free | As the foam-flakes that dash on the land’. 150. embosomed apart] OED 2.a: ‘to be enclosed, enveloped in, closely surrounded with (woods, foliage, mountains, etc.); poet., to be ‘wrapped’ in (slumber, happiness, beauty, etc.)’: none of these usages includes WBY’s highly unusual ‘apart’. 153. keened] The verb ‘keen’ (to bewail, from the Irish caoinim, ‘wail’) entered English in the nineteenth century, and was still rela­ tively rare even in Anglo-Irish poetry. It is most prominent in the title poem of John Todhunter’s The Banshee (1888), where it is repeated several times in the form ‘Keening, keening!’ 153. fattening] WBY’s figurative use here is closest to OED 3. trans. ‘To enrich (the soil) with nutritious or stimulating elements; to fertilize’. the winds of the morning] Cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Cid’s Departure into Exile’, 30: ‘And the winds of the morning swept off the tear’. Also cp. James Montgom­ ery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘The World Before the Flood’, Canto VII, 45: ‘Odours abroad the winds of morning breathe’. 156. grass-barnacle] The barnacle-goose [branta leucopsis] winters on the coast of the west of Ireland. In folklore, the fact that

the bird was not seen in summer gave rise to the legend that it bred mysteriously from the sea. An early witness to this belief is Giraldus Cambrensis (in his Topographia Hiberniae (c. 1188), XI, ‘Of barnacles, which grow from fir timber, and their nature’): There are likewise here many birds called barnacles, which nature produces in a wonderful manner, out of her ordinary course. They resemble the marsh-geese, but are smaller. Being at first gummy ex­ crescenses from pine-beams floating on the waters, and then enclosed in shells to secure their free growth, they hang by their beaks, like seaweeds attached to the timber. Being in process of time well covered with feathers, they either fall into the water or take their flight in the free air, their nourishment and growth being sup­ plied, while they are bred in this very un­ accountable and curious manner, from the juices of the wood in the sea-water. I have often seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute embryos of birds of this species on the seashore, hanging from one piece of timber, covered with shells, and already formed. No eggs are laid by these birds after copulation, as is the case with birds in general; the hen never sits on eggs in order to hatch them; in no corner of the world are they seen either to pair, or build nests. (Thomas Wright (ed.), The Histori­ cal Works of Giraldus Cambrensis (1863), The Topography of Ireland (trans. Thomas Forrester), 36.)

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

160

351

If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing the sand and the shells, Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips, Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells, I would leave no saint’s head on his body, from Rachlin to Bera of ships. Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path

Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and woodwork made,

Your bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the rath,

And a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade,

According to W.G. Wood-Martin, something of this medieval belief still persisted in the County Sligo of the nineteenth century (History of Sligo, County and Town (1882), vol. 2, 376): Some of the country people still firmly be­ lieve that the barnacle goose, which breeds in the high northern latitudes, i.e. Iceland, Lapland, &c., but is a winter visitant to our sea-coast, is really propagated from the cirriped marine testaceous animal so often found adhering to the wooden piles and hulls of vessels; but in this idea they were not singular, for in former times even learned writers gravely affected the same. Probably the delusion first arose from the designa­ tion ‘barnacle’ being common to both. It was long, however, before truth prevailed, and the absurd doctrine of the generation of these sea-fowl was finally refuted. WBY’s ‘grass-barnacle’ seems uncommon: it may derive from the fact that the goose’s cus­ tomary diet is grass. The bird makes a reap­ pearance in WBY’s late poetry: see ‘High Talk’ (1938), 11. 157. strong] bright del. MS. 160. Rachlin] Rathlin MS. This is the small island off the north coast of Ulster in Co. Antrim. WBY’s MS  spelling is the more familiar form of the island’s name; but in all the printed versions, he adopts a spelling closer to the Irish, Reachlainn. 161. kindling surges] WBY’s figurative use of ‘kindling’ is unusual: it is likely he intends to convey a red colour in the waves, with a sense closest to OED kindle 5.b. intr., ‘To become glowing or bright like fire’. Cp. R. Southey, The

Curse of Kehama (1810), VII, 60: ‘The ori­ ent  .  .  . Kindles as it receives the rising ray’. While ‘the kindling dawn’, like ‘the kindling air’ (used by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound III ii 79: ‘As thy chariot cleaves the kindling air’) and ‘the kindling sky’ (found in the Yeats circle in John Todhunter’s Forest Songs (1881), ‘A Phantasy’, 7: ‘I saw in the kindling sky’) is a commonplace, kindling waves are less often seen: an instance comes in R.W. Buchanan’s Balder the Beautiful: A Song of Divine Death (1877), IX ii, 9–10: ‘Brighter and fairer all around | The kindling waters shone’. 162. of wattles . . . made] The phrase is the one used by WBY in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 2: ‘of clay and wattles made’. 163. rath] The Irish rath (or raith) is a ring fort, an enclosure of roughly circular form, with earthen walls. In his A History of our Own Times (1880), the writer and anti-Parnellite MP Justin McCarthy (1830–1912) notes that ‘The ‘good people’ still linger around the raths’ (vol. 4, 231). The term is common in nine­ teenth-century Irish writing (much used in both Aubrey De Vere and William Allingham), but it is especially so in the poetry of Thomas Davis: in Poems (1846), ‘My Home: A Dream’ conjoins the term with ‘cairn’ in a way close to WBY here: ‘On its brink is a ruined castle, stern | The mountains are crowned with rath and cairn’ (11–12). Cp. also Aubrey De Vere, Poeti­ cal Works (1884), Inisfail III, ‘The Changed Music’, 3–4: ‘Pursues no more by field or shore | From rath to cairne, the ruined rout’. 164. mattock and spade] This phrase was in use since at least the sixteenth century (see e.g. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus IV iii 11:

352 165

170

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Or weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet; While in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious, their chief­ tains stood, Awaiting in patience the straw-death, croziered one, caught in your net: Went the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring of wind in a wood. And because I went by them so huge and so speedy with eyes so bright, Came after the hard gaze of youth, or an old man lifted his head: And I rode and I rode, and I cried out, ‘The Fenians hunt wolves in the night, So sleep thee by daytime.’ A voice cried, ‘The Fenians a long time are dead.’

‘dig with mattock and with spade’); in nine­ teenth-century poetry, it is to be found in R. Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868), X, 960–961: ‘the common life, | Mattock and spade, plough-tail and wagon-shaft’ and W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘Octo­ ber’: ‘The man who never Laughed Again’, 602: ‘Mattock and spade he too with him did bear’. The phrase occurs in Samuel Fergu­ son, Lays of the Western Gael (1888), ‘Owen Bawn’, 28: ‘hammer and trowel, and mattock and spade’. 166. bodies unglorious] Both the inversion, and the use of a very rare adjective in ‘unglorious’ (to mean inglorious), give Oisin’s speech here an archaic note. 167. straw-death] A natural death, in bed. Cp. Robert Burns, ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ (1787), 63: ‘a fair strae-death, | By loss o’ blood, or want o’ breath’. In his notes to Lam­ entation, Standish H. O’Grady writes that ‘It is probable that Oisin had seldom witnessed death except upon the battle-field, and was therefore ignorant of its symptoms when produced by mere decay. Many centuries after the Fenian epoch it was considered an extraordinary thing for a man, not being in the church, to meet any but a violent death, and the Annals of the middle and later ages generally notice such an event, saying that such an one met with “death upon the pillow,” and often adding it was a matter of surprise to all men’ (Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3, 284).

croziered one] Recalling Oisin’s open­ ing address to Partick at the beginning of Part II, ‘man of croziers’. For ‘croziered’, cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘King Ethelbert of Kent and Saint Augustine’, 408: ‘The strong brow mitred, and the crosiered hand’. (De Vere’s Legends of the Saxon Saints [1879], where the poem first appeared, is one of the modern books which, like his ear­ lier Legends of St. Patrick [1872], stands in the background of WBY’s saint-and-pagan dialogue). 168. laughter of scorn] WBY makes a noun of a common verbal phrase, ‘laugh to scorn’, first used in English Bible translations such as that of Coverdale (1540), which has its currency through the King James Bible, where it is com­ monly employed (e.g. Psalm 22, 7: All they that see me laugh me to scorn’). ‘Laugh to scorn’ also occurs twice in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 170. gaze of youth] For a probably coinciden­ tal occurrence of this rare phrase, cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Forest Sanctu­ ary’, Part 2, 434–435: ‘as when thy radiant sign | First drew my gaze of youth’. 172. by daytime] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets (1861), trans. of Cavalcanti, Sonnet 20, 1: ‘I come to thee by daytime constantly’; also cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘A Song in Season’, 103: ‘Joy by daytime’ and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), ‘A Dark Month’, 140: ‘Ghosts that walk by daytime’.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

175

180

353

A whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh of his face as dried grass, And in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad as a child without milk; And the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how men sorrow and pass, And their hound, and their horse, and their love, and their eyes that glimmer like silk. And wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, ‘In old age they ceased’; And my tears were larger than berries, and I murmured, ‘Where white clouds lie spread On Crevroe or broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast On the floors of the gods.’ He cried, ‘Nay, the gods a long time are dead.’ And lonely and longing for Niamh, I shivered and turned me about, The heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart;

173. whitebeard] An old man with a white beard: cp. Shakespeare, Richard II III. ii. 108: ‘Whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps’, and William Allingham, Irish Songs and Poems (1887), ‘A Stormy Night: A Story of the Donegal Coast’, XV, 3: ‘White­ beard Father, trembling Mother’. (WBY quoted this poem of Allingham’s in articles for United Ireland in 1891 and The Bookman in 1895: see CW 9, 150 and 266.) 176. horse] steeds P95. 179. On Crevroe or on broad Knockfefin] Crev­ roe is from the Irish, Craobh ruadh [older Irish spellings include Craebruad and Craeb Ruad] lit. ‘Red Branch’, the lodgings of the Red Branch knights at Emain Macha. This was one of three palaces of the king Con­ chubar MacNessa: its name derives from the large roofbeam supporting the hall. As first identified by McGarry, 61–2, Knockfefin is Sliabh-na-mBan Femhinn, mountain of the women of Femen, modern Slievenamon, Co. Tipperary (Femen was a plain in Tipperary, between Cashel and Clonmel). There are a number of mythological associations, includ­ ing with the enchantment of Finn MacCool, and the home of the Dagda’s son Bobh Derg, at Sid ar Femen. WBY’s conjunction of these

two place-names derives from J.C. Mangan’s translation of an Irish Jacobite aisling poem by John MacDonnell, ‘Claragh’s Dream’: ‘To the halls of Mac-Lir, to Creevroe’s height, | To Tara, the glory of Erin, | To the fairy pal­ ace that glances bright | On the peak of blue Cnocfeerin’. This poem was included in Celtic Irish Songs and Song-Writers: A Selection ed. Charles MacCarthy Collins (1885). 182. The heart in me] WBY’s conventional dic­ tion here is picked up, in a suggestive context, by John Todhunter’s poem ‘A Fenian’s Return’, published posthumously in his From The Land of Dreams (1918). The poem is ‘Inscribed to the Memory of John O’Leary’, and so may have been composed soon after O’Leary’s death in 1907; its setting, however, is that of 1885, when the exiled Fenian returned to Ireland. From the Land of Dreams gathers together poems from all points in Todhunter’s career, and an author’s preface claims that of the pre­ viously uncollected poems ‘most are new’, but it is conceivable that ‘A Fenian’s Return’ was written well before it could be inscribed to O’Leary’s memory, perhaps in the years when Todhunter was closest to the Yeats family in Bedford Park. Whatever its date, the poem’s congruence with WBY’s version of the return

354

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

And I turned and rode to the westward, and followed the sea’s old shout Till I saw where Maeve lies sleeping till starlight and midnight part. 185

And there at the foot of the mountain, two carried a sack full of sand, They bore it with staggering and sweating, but fell with their burden at length.

of Oisin to Ireland, in the political context of John O’Leary’s return from exile, is striking. ‘The heart of me’ comes in the poem’s sixth stanza: The wind wails o’er the bog, and in the pine-trees, With an Irish note of sorrow, soft and wild, And old memories of dead days come with its wailing, Till the heart of me is weeping like a child. WBY’s Oisin has a longing at this point for Niamh rather than Ireland; but Todhunter’s (probable) echo of WBY shows how the regis­ ter of nostalgia can carry a specifically Fenian inflection. ‘The Fenian’s Return’ is the sixth poem in a sequence, ‘Dreams in Exile’: its final poem, the seventh, is entitled ‘Tir N’An Og’. 185–192.] The version of Oisin’s touching the earth and putting on all his mortal years is given differently in Lay: rather than seeing men struggling with a sack full of sand, Oisin helps members of ‘a great assembly . . . Three hundred men and more’ to lift ‘a large flag of marble’. Lay narrates events thus: [Oisin] ’Tis a shameful deed, that it should now be said, And the number of men that is there,

That the strength of the host is unable

To lift a flag with great power.

If Oscur the son of Oisin lived,

He would take this flag in his right hand,

He would fling it in a throw over the host –

It is not my custom to speak falsehood.

I lay upon my right breast,

And I took the flag in my hand,

With the strength and activity of my limbs

I sent it seven perches from its place!

With the force of the very large flag,

The golden girth broke on the white steed;

I came down full suddenly,

On the soles of my two feet on the lea.

No sooner did I come down,

Than the white steed took fright,

He went then on his way,

And I, in sorrow, both weak and feeble.

I lost the sight of my eyes,

My form, my countenance, and my vigour,

I was an old man, poor and blind,

Without strength, understanding, or esteem.

WBY’s source for the sack full of sand comes in a coda to the prefatory matter in Lay, (Trans. Oss. Soc. 232–233). Here, John O’Daly men­ tions a version of the Oisin legend featuring ‘the cavern of the grey sheep’, ‘a large cave which is situated at Coolagarronroe, Kilkenny, near Mitchelstown, in the county of Cork’. He quotes a letter he has received on the subject from ‘a native of the district’, Mr. William Wil­ liams of Dungarvan: Oisin went into the cave, met a beautiful damsel, after crossing the stream, lived with her for (as he fancied) a few days, wished to revisit the Fenians, obtained consent at last, on condition of not alight­ ing from a white steed, with which she furnished him, stating that it was over 300  years since he came to the cave. He proceeded till he met a carrier, whose cart, containing a bag of sand, was upset; he asked Oisin to help him; unable to raise the bag with one hand, he alighted, on which the steed fled, leaving him a withered, decrepid, blind old man.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

355

Leaning down from the gem-studded saddle, I flung it five yards with my hand, With a sob for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenians’ old strength. 190

The rest you have heard of, O croziered man; how, when divided the girth, I fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly; And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose, and walked on the earth, A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle on his beard never dry.

(This story is also quoted in full in the brief account of ‘The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth’ given by Henry Charles Coote in The Folk-Lore Record Vol. 2 [1879], p 15–16.) A  sack (though a sack of oats, not sand) fea­ tures also in the version preserved in John Hawkins Simpson’s Poems of Oisin Bard of Erin (1857). In a section entitled ‘Oisin Returns from the Youthful City’, where ‘the enchantress’ gives Oisin a horse and an embroidered cloth, ‘telling him that, whenever he dismounted, he must be sure to put the cloth under the horse, and by that means the horse would be obliged to stand still’, Oisin meets ‘a man driving a horse laden with a sack of oats; by some acci­ dent the sack fell down, and the man called to Oisin to get off his horse and help him to lift the sack. The giant [Oisin] was vexed to see that the man was so weak: he jumped down and put up the sack for the man. Whilst he was doing this his enchanted steed vanished, – for he had forgotten all about the embroidered cloth – and directly he became old and blind’ (190–191). 188. the Fenians’ old strength] Oisin’s repeated ‘sob’ in this line establishes a firmly pagan style of heroic conduct, distinct from the sen­ timental modernity of a tear in the eye; but the ‘old strength’ may carry more contempo­ rary (and subversive) overtones. The phrase occurs strikingly in Tennyson’s Laureate poem, written at the command of the Prince of Wales, ‘Opening of the Indian and Colo­ nial Exhibition by the Queen’ (1886), whose second stanza runs:

May we find, as ages run,

The mother featured in the son;

And may yours for ever be

That old strength and constancy

Which has made your fathers great

In our ancient island State,

And wherever her flag fly,

Glorying between sea and sky,

Makes the might of Britain known;

Britons, hold your own!

189. man] one P95. 190. summer fly] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Palace Garden’, 336: [the trout] ‘sparkling upwards catch the summer fly’ and Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien (1859), 256: ‘called herself a gilded summer fly’. 191. my years three hundred fell on me] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Meave and Other Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age (1884), ‘The Children of Lir: An Ancient Irish Romance’, II, 405–407: ‘Soon as they left the wave, and trod the shore | The weight of bygone centuries on them fell: | To human forms they changed’. 192. full of sleep] Cp. A. Swinburne, A Song of Italy (1867), 519–520: ‘raised and gave thee life to run and leap | When thou wast full of sleep’ and Jean Ingelow, Poems (1888), ‘Sup­ per at the Mill’, 230: ‘his eyes are full of sleep’. WBY used the phrase in ‘When You Are Old’, 1: ‘old and grey and full of sleep’. the spittle on his beard] Perhaps cp. R. Burns, ‘Death and Doctor Hornbrook’ (1787), 59–60: ‘I wad na mind it, no that spit­ tle | Out-owre my beard’.

356

195

200

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

How the men of the sand-sack showed me a church with its belfry in air; Sorry place, where for the swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes the crozier gleams; What place have Caoilte and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair? Speak, you too are old with your memories, an old man surrounded with dreams. S. Patrick. Where the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones is their place; Where the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide Hell, Watching the blessèd ones move far off, and the smile on God’s face, Between them a gateway of brass, and the howl of the angels who fell. Oisin. Put the staff in my hands; for I go to the Fenians, O cleric, to chaunt The war-songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds with their breath,

195.] For this repeated list of Fenians and hounds, see note on I, 13 and 15 earlier. 197. footsole] This term for the sole of the foot is found in William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), IV 194–196: ‘nor, if secure | Of footsole-place where pain­ fully he wrought, | Would Manus grumble’ and W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) III, ‘September’: ‘The Death of Paris’, 270: ‘A dreary road the weary foot-sole wears’. on the burning stones] The references here and in the remainder of the poem to burn­ ing and flaming stones recall the language of John O’Daly’s translation of ‘The Dialogue of Oisin and Patrick’ (Agallamh Oisin agus Phadraic), included in the Trans. Oss. Soc. 1859, where Patrick tells Oisin (probably in relation to Fionn, though the context is unclear), ‘Well I  am aware | Where he is [stretched] on a flag-stone and a twist in his head’ (43), and ‘Fionn and the Fenians are now [lying] | Sorrowful on the flag-stone of pains’ (45). In P95, WBY adds a note which suggests that Partick’s and Oisin’s concep­ tions of Hell are at cross-purposes, with the Christian notion of ‘burning’ not in accord with the pagan idea of an eternal cold: ‘In the older Irish books Hell is always cold, and this is probably because the Fomoroh, or evil

powers ruled over the north and the winter. Christianity adopted as far as possible the Pagan symbolism in Ireland as elsewhere, and Irish poets, when they became Chris­ tian, did not cease to speak of ‘the cold flag­ stone of Hell’’. 198. stones of wide] roadways of del. MS. wide hell] It is just possible that WBY took up this phrase from a poem by Swinburne, ‘The Armada’, which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review for Sept. 1888 (the proofs for WO, where this phrase in the poem is first present, arrived at Bedford Park on 6 Sept. 1888): ‘The master whose mercy fulfils wide hell till its torturers tire’ (92) (the poem was reprinted in Poems and Ballads: Third Series in 1889, after the publication of WO.) 200.] a gateway of brass] Cp. Psalm 107: 16: ‘For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder.’ The allusion comes again in 209. 202. war-songs] In Lady Wilde’s Ancient Leg­ ends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1888), there is discussion of the ancient Irish ‘Ross-catha [Rosc-catha], or battle-hymn’ as ‘the great war-song to which the warriors marched to battle, and which inspired them with the heroic madness that braved death for victory’ (276).

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

357

Innumerable, singing, exultant; the clay underneath them shall pant, And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them in death. 205

210

215

And demons afraid in their darkness; deep horror of eyes and of wings, Afraid their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep; Hearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings, Hearing Hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep. We will tear out the flaming stones, and batter the gateway of brass And enter, and none sayeth ‘No’ when there enters the strongly armed guest; Make clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young grass; Then feast, making converse of wars, and of old wounds, and turn to our rest. S. Patrick. On the flaming stones, without refuge, the limbs of the Feni­ ans are tost; None war on the masters of Hell, who could break up the world in their rage; But kneel and wear out the flags and pray for your soul that is lost, Through the demon love of its youth and its godless and passionate age. Oisin. Ah me! to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain, Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear;

205. deep horror] Cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Genius of Harmony: An Irregular Ode’, 74: ‘Mid the deep horror of that silent bower’. 207. quiver of stretched bowstrings] WBY’s ‘quiver’, which is OED n.2 (‘An act of quiv­ ering; a quivering movement’), puns on the quivers containing the Fenians’ arrows. 208. loud with a murmur] ‘Murmur’ here is the archaic OED 1.a., ‘expression of discontent or anger’, though even in this sense ‘loud’ is an unusual adjective. Perhaps cp. Edwin Ather­ stone, The Fall of Nineveh (1868), III, 91–2: ‘He ended; and sounds dissonant – the voice | Applauding, the loud murmur censuring, – rose’ and XIII, 775–776: ‘Man unto man spake angrily; and turned | Upon the priest fierce faces; murmuring loud’.

209. We will tear out the flaming stones] P99 and after; tear up MS; We will tear the red flaming stones out P95. 212.] P12 and after; Then feast, making con­ verse of Eri, of wars, and of old wounds, and rest P95-CWVP08. 213. the flaming stones] P99 and after; the red flaming stones P95. 214.] [No live man goes thither and no man may del.] For no man may war on the mas­ ters of hell who could break up the world in rage MS. 216.] Through its demon love and its youth without peace and its godless and passionate age MS. 218.] Oisin’s list of his deprivations in the ‘Dia­ logue of Patrick and Oisin’ is more extensive (see also note to WO III, 217–218):

358 220

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain, As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir. It were sad to gaze on the blessèd and no man I loved of old there;

I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,

I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,

And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.

WBY’s notes. In P95, WBY provided a note to what was at that point ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’, and this formed the basis of the note provided in all future collected Without the cry of the hounds or of the editions: It is a good claim for me on thy God

To be among his clerics, as I am;

Without food, without clothing or music,

Without bestowing gold on bards.

horns, Without guarding harbours or coasts; For all that I have suffered for lack of food, I forgive heaven’s king in my will

Without bathing, without hunting, with­ out Fionn, Without courting generous women, with­ out sport, Without sitting in my place, as was due, Without learning feats of agility or fighting. 219. purple hours] WBY’s ‘purple’ is OED adj. 3 fig., ‘Characterized by richness or abundance; splendid, glorious’. Cp. Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on the Spring’, 1, 4: ‘The rosy-bosomed Hours | . . . | Wake the purple year’. beggar’s cloak] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Alexander the Great’ II i 91–2: ‘The Indian Seer | Who scorns both kingly throne and beggar’s cloak’. 220.] P12 and after; As a grass seed crushed by a pebble, as a wolf P95-CW08. 222. the chain of small stones] Oisin refers here to rosary beads (though anachronistically, since the rosary was a fourteenth-century introduction to Christian devotions). 224. at feast] A  common enough piece of pseudo-medieval diction in Victorian poetry, this phrase is a particular favourite of Aubrey De Vere’s, who uses it on seven occasions, e.g. Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queeen Maeve’, I, 463–464: ‘Again at feast | Ailill made question of the Red Branch Knights’.

This poem is founded upon the middle Irish dialogues of St. Patrick and Usheen and a certain Gaelic poem of the last century. The events it describes, like the events in most of the poems in this vol­ ume, are supposed to have taken place rather in the indefinite period, made up of many periods, described by the folk­ tales, than in any particular century; it therefore, like the later Fenian stories themselves, mixes much that is mediae­ val with other matters that are ancient. The Gaelic poems do not make Usheen go to more than one island, but tradition speaks of three islands. A  story in The Silva Gadelica describes ‘four paradises,’ an island to the north, an island to the west, an island to the south, and Adam’s paradise in the east. Another tradition, which puts one of the paradises under the sea, is perhaps a memory of the fabled kingdom of the shadowy Fomo­ roh, whose name proves that they came from the great waters. The final sentence of this note (which is rel­ evant to the version of The Shadowy Waters WBY was composing in 1895, but less so to later versions of that work) was dropped for P99 and all editions thereafter. In Standish H. O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica: A Collection of Tales in Irish (1892), the account of Teigue son of

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN

Cian has a character say: ‘I am well versed in the World’s history: for this precisely is the Earth’s fourth paradise; the others being inis Daleb in the world’s southern, and inis Escan­ dra in its boreal part (to the northward of ‘the black watery isle’), Adam’s paradise, and this island in which ye are now: the fourth land, I  say, in which Adam’s seed dwell  – such of them as are righteous’ (391–392). Epigraph (p. 295)] WBY’s source, and its ascription to ‘Tulka’, have eluded editors, some of whom assume these were both invented for the occasion by the poet himself. However, a firm identification can in fact be made, for which full evidence is given by Geert Lernout, ‘Yeats and Tukaram: ‘An Asylum for the Affections’, YA20, 287–292. Lernout establishes the author as the Hindu devotional poet Tukaram (1608–1650). The context for WBY’s quotation comes in the moral-like conclusion (the ‘Tukâ’) of one poem: You give, O God, each man his due and what is fit: Acknowledging it to be good, I  accept it readily. Tukâ says, – ‘If you like, give me this world, But give me an asylum for my affections.’ The lines as translated here occur in a book by Robert Henry Elliott, The Experiences of a Planter in the Jungle of Mysore (1871), 302. Elliott derives his material from Sir Alexan­ der Grant, ‘Tukárám, a Study of Hinduism’, The Fortnightly Review 7 (Jan. 1867), 27–40. Grant (and Elliott, quoting him) comments on these lines (Grant, 33; Elliott 302–303; sen­ tences in Grant not quoted by Elliott in square brackets): [‘If you like, give me this world (sansár),’ is an expression of the extremest resigna­ tion, amounting to quietism.] The great object of horror to the mind of a religious

359

Hindu, is the prospect of being born over and over again into this miserable world. [It is, according to Hindu ideas, the destiny of every unsaved, unemancipated man, to undergo eight million four hundred thousand transmigrations of the soul and births into the world.] Tukárám’s resigna­ tion to the will of God is so great, that he professes himself ready to bear this curse of prolonged individuality, provided only that, as long as he is in this world, he may have God as the object of his affections. How WBY came across Elliott’s book (or Grant’s article) is not known; Elliott’s work was of some interest to those studying techniques of agricultural planting (not one of WBY’s more pressing concerns), while the copy of The Fort­ nightly Review, had it come into WBY’s hands, might have drawn his attention on account of its carrying a poem by Swinburne (‘Child’s Song in Winter’), which immediately precedes the article by Grant. It is not clear, either, how WBY came up with ‘Tulka’ as the form of the Hindu poet’s name: it is possible (though hardly likely) that in recalling Tukárám he confused the name with a reference in Thomas Moore’s The History of Ireland (1837) to ‘the Battle of the Wood of Tulka’ of 1005 AD (translating the Irish Tulcha) (vol. 2, 105). Dedication (p.295)] This is to Edwin John Ellis (1848–1916), whom WBY came to know as a young man. Ellis had known JBY since they studied together at Heatherley’s Art School in London, and as young aspiring art­ ists they identified themselves (along with J.T. Nettleship) as ‘The Brotherhood’. WBY had presented Ellis with a copy of WO, and the title poem attracted his admiration: Ellis was him­ self a poet, and volumes by him appeared in 1892 and 1893. In 1889, he and WBY agreed to co-edit the works of William Blake, resulting in their ground-breaking three-volume edition of 1893.

151

THE MADNESS OF

KING GOLL

Date and contexts of revision. WBY submitted his finished MS  for P95 to Unwin on 27 Mar. 1895, but had been busy with revisions for the book at various times since the signing of a contract on 5 Nov. 1894: the poet had been staying with George Pollexfen in Sligo since Oct., and a sustained bout of revision began in early Dec. 1894. WBY was combining these revisions with another compositional push on The Shadowy Waters, and his letters record a strict regime of writing and revision from Dec. onwards (see e.g. letter to Charles Elkin Mathews, 30 Dec. 1894: ‘I worked at [The Shadowy Waters] till a little while ago all day long, but am now working in the afternoons at the revision of the other poems for Unwin’ (CL 1, 421)). WBY was revising ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and ‘The Countess Cathleen’ for P95 at the same time as this; but it is worth noting that The Shadowy Waters (though it would not be published until much later) was at this stage still a work dominated by the mythological characters of the Fomoroh, who are intro­ duced to the revision of this poem also (see note to 11); in The Shadowy Waters, too, the Standish O’Grady-derived goddess Orchil appears, as she does in the revisions WBY was making to ‘The Countess Cathleen’ (see note to 62). The Fomoroh are important as well in the short story which WBY was writing for W.E. Henley in the first week of Jan. 1895, and which appeared as ‘Wisdom’ in The New Review (Sept. 1895) (this was later ‘The Wisdom of the King’ in The Secret Rose, and was subject itself to heavy subsequent revision). The story has some quite striking points of contact with the poem: a young king is gifted with extraordinary powers (in this case, intellectual rather than martial ones); marked from infancy by the agency of hawk-women from the Fomoroh, he finally understands his own radical separateness from common humanity, troubled as he has always been by ‘thoughts and dreams that filled his mind like the marching and countermarching of armies,’ and WBY describes (in terms are close to Goll’s situation in the poem) how ‘his heart wandered, lost and futile, amid throngs of masterful thoughts and dreams, shuddering at its own consuming solitude’. Finally, the king leaves his kingdom alone: ‘But some believed that he found his eternal abode among the demons; some that he dwelt henceforth with the dark and dreadful goddesses, who sit all night about the pools in the forest, watching the constellations rise and set in those desolate mirrors’. The story may be in part inspired by the earlier versions of this poem, and may also inspire its revision, which was probably taking place at the same time. While it is possible that WBY had undertaken revision of the poem before Dec. 1894, it seems much more likely that it was part of the work towards P95 that took place in Sligo from that time and into the new year. Writing to Unwin on 21 Jan. 1895, WBY told his publisher that ‘I am very DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-153

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

361

anxious for my book to come out this spring and am pushing on with the revision as rapidly as I can’, adding that ‘I shall be through in a month’ (CL 1, 429). JBY was told by his son on 1 Feb. 1895 that ‘I am still busy with the correction of my poems for Unwin’, though by now the rewritings of both ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and ‘The Countess Cathleen’ were substantially complete (CL 1, 436). Just under a week later, WBY told Unwin that ‘I am copying out the corrected version of the poems as rapidly as I can and you will receive it next week’ (CL 1, 436). When the poet next contacted his publisher, on 16 Feb., he was still ‘getting on gradually with the revision – like most things it takes a little longer than I expected’, but he offered to send ahead ‘the first 70 or 80 pages at once’ (CL 1, 439): this may mean the long poem and the play (which come first in the con­ tents), and imply that it is the revision to the lyric poems which still remains unfinished. The poem’s revision, then, can be dated between Nov. 1894 and Mar. 1895. Sources. For WBY’s source material, and his conflation of King Goll with Goll Mac Morna, see notes to ‘King Goll (Third Century)’ and ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’. In this P95 revision, the poet attempts more in the way of mythic-historical clarity and reduces confusion between the two Golls by specifying an ancient Ulster kingdom for his poetking. Standish J. O’Grady’s work seems to be contributing fresh material to the revision (see note to 62). WBY’s own short story, ‘Wisdom’, may well also influence some of the revisions (see Dates and contexts of revision, and the note to 11). Criticism and interpretation. Although the poem was occasionally mentioned posi­ tively in early reviews, it has seldom been the subject of extended study in modern Yeats criticism. In general, it is absorbed within larger critical arguments concerning WBY’s poetic development, often with the assumption (whether explicit or implicit) that King Goll is a more or less veiled self-portrait. This approach receives encouragement from the JBY illustration in which WBY himself is the model for Goll, but in fact there is no evidence that the poet saw the poem as autobiographical (see Publication history for ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’). That the poem’s final state is one in which madness is the subject is more certain, and it is useful to think of WBY’s work here as a study in the con­ nection between worldly existence and otherworldly inspiration, a connection which, in the case of Goll, pushes the sufferer outside the bounds of society. Although WBY draws heavily, from the earliest version of the poem onwards, on both Irish source materi­ als and Irish literary models (essentially, the poem begins as an exercise in the manner of Samuel Ferguson), the presence of the romantic bard is very difficult to ignore. In particular, S.T. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ seems to be close at hand: the ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ whose gifts the poet there wishes to appropriate stands in direct relation to Goll with his harp/tympan, and the voiced ambition is one that WBY perhaps allows his protagonist to share (this might indeed have played a subliminal part in JBY’s con­ ception of his King Goll illustration): ‘And all who heard should see them there, | And all should cry, Beware! Beware! | His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ (‘Kubla Khan’, 48–50). The fact that this poem is comparatively early in WBY’s canonical oeuvre (though not in all likelihood so early as is commonly supposed: see note on ‘Date of composition’ for ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’) has led critics to read it as inherently programmatic, in terms of the young poet’s ambitions and sense of calling. This is misleading: WBY does not see his future career either as one of madness or as one in which the world will

362

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

believe him to be mad, and there is no developing aesthetic of creative derangement in play here. The poet’s attention is fixed on two major areas: a convincing and poetically resonant portrayal of Goll as a figure lost to active life, and an evocation of the powerful forces that exercise their irresistible pull upon the young man. If Goll is, in some sense, the type of the romantic poet, this is not the kind of poet that WBY sees himself either as being or as becoming in the future; rather, it is a poet driven beyond the world and selfoutcast, whose life story (which the poem tells) is one without any kind of satisfactory ending. Goll’s visionary ecstasy is nevertheless an ecstatic species of failure, and it should be remembered that even the ‘poetic’ career of the young king is one that has been cut short, and that ‘the kind wires are torn and still’. Despite JBY’s illustration, there is no confirmation in the poem that it is Goll who tears the ‘wires’ of his tympan (see note on 69), and one possibility is that it is Goll’s inability to carry the burden of his visions back into the world that finds its apt symbol in a broken and useless instrument. In the context of the ‘Crossways’ section of P95 and subsequent collected editions, the poem serves as a study of the proximity of ancient Irish mythic history to the supernatural: Goll steps across the boundary between these worlds, and is lost, just as, in the poem which WBY places next in sequence, ‘The Stolen Child’, the ‘human child’ vanishes from the mortal society of Ireland into the more-than-mortal world of ‘fairy’, which is lying in wait in the named landscape itself. The poem’s own journey to its final destination within WBY’s oeuvre is a complicated one, but this final version tries to make Goll historically specific rather than autobiographically resonant: he exemplifies something which WBY is keen to emphasise about Irish mythic history – that it is another gateway to the supernatural world – without suggesting that the ‘wandering’ of its protagonist maps out any course that can be taken in the living world. As such, it is (artistically speaking) a major early success; but a number of modern critics have been inclined to identify Goll’s various kinds of failure with those of the developing poet WBY himself. Interpreting it as a study in ‘the incompatibility of the contemplative and active life’, T. Parkinson wrote of the P95 ‘King Goll’ that it was ‘revised so thoroughly’ that it ‘is effectively a new poem’ (Parkinson, 24, 32). For H. Bloom, the poem is ‘a culmination of the Pre-Raphaelite lyric, almost an epitome of the essential thematic pattern of the Pre-Raphaelite poem,’ arguing that ‘Goll’s phantasmagoria fails because it must yield to nature, and his kingship failed because it yielded to vision’ (Bloom, 110). F. Kinahan sees WBY’s Goll as a character who ‘fails in both of the arenas in which a yet unfledged Yeats dreamt of success,’ and who ‘falls short of the mark as both man of action and poet’; he claims that ‘it was Yeats’s own lack of confidence that most fully answers for his early insistence on couching thoughts that were very much his own in the words of characters who, to all appearances, resembled him not at all’ (Kinahan, 200–201). Some interpreta­ tions strain unconvincingly after allegory, such as that of D. Holdeman, which sees in Goll’s broken tympan ‘the precipitous decline of the Irish language and of native Gaelic culture’ and suggests that ‘it hints at Yeats’s dissatisfaction with the English-language poetry written in Ireland in the wake of that decline’ (Kelly and Howes, 10–11). More successfully, E. Larrissy sees Goll as ‘subject to a form of inspired and estranging insan­ ity’, in which the poem presents ‘an early version of the unsettling Druid wisdom to be found in ‘Fergus and the Druid’, although Goll does not progress to the same disabling

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

363

conclusion as Fergus’ (Larrissy, 58). On the face of things, the poem offers little to reward a gender-based analysis, but E. Cullingford (17) sees in it nevertheless ‘the renunciation of political authority and prowess in war for the metaphorically feminine domain of nature, poetry, and madness’; she adds that (in the playing of the musical instrument) ‘poetry justifies [Goll’s] madness and alienation from masculine pursuits’, aligning this with ‘sexual and poetic impasses’ at this point in WBY’s development. Publication history. After its appearance in P95, the poem remained in all collected editions of WBY’s works. There were a number of further substantive revisions to the text for P99 (see note to 31–35), and a key verbal alteration for CP33 (see note to 58). Copy-text: P49.

I

sat on cushioned otter-skin:

My word was law from Ith to Emain,

1. cushioned otter-skin] WBY seems to be imagining a throne upholstered with otter skin. Archaeology offered the poet no hints when it came to royal fashions in upholstery, but otter skin as a material was relatively rare and, if used, would more likely be a clothing material. A  recent bog discovery led Rob­ ert MacAdam to report in 1861 a preserved cloak made from the sewn-together pelts of otters, and to set this in context: ‘That otterskins were considered of value in ancient times is evident from one of the Welsh laws of Howel Dha, (in the 10th century), in which the skin of an ox, a deer, a fox, a wolf, and an otter, are all valued at the same price, that is, eight times as dear as the skin of a sheep or goat. [.  .  .] There are early notices of the export of otter-skins, among other peltry, from Ireland’ (Ulster Journal of Archaeology, vol. 9 [1861], 299). 2. Ith] WBY uses as a place-name here what is originally the name of a legendary Milesian figure. In the twelfth-century compilation Lebor Gabála (The Book of Invasions), Ith is the first of the Milesians to come from Spain to Ireland, where he is killed by the Tuatha Dé Danaan. A  link between this figure and specific location in Co. Donegal is made by Standish J. O’Grady in his account of the events, which were to lead to a full-scale

Milesian invasion (The History of Ireland vol.1 The Heroic Period [1878], 60–61): From Tor Borgan, of Espan, the sons and kindred of Milesius set sail for the inva­ sion of Erin, and in each ship were fifty persons, not only warriors, but also their wives and little ones, their druids and poets, their craftsmen and slaves; for they had determined to occupy the island and make it their home. For not only were they straitened for room in their own country, by reason of the multiplying of the Clanna Gaedil, but vengeance, too, impelled them; for Ith, the son of Brogan, and uncle of Milesius, had been slain by the inhabitants of the isle. For, having been borne northwards through the Ic­ tian sea by violent winds, he had at last gained a quiet bay on the northern shore, whence with chosen comrades he had marched inland. But when after certain days he had not returned, the remain­ der of his people who were left with the ships, following in the same direction, if haply they might discover their comrades and their captain, had lighted upon him dead, in the midst of his dead warriors; but upon their bodies there were no signs of violence, and ever after men called this plain the plain of Ith.

364

5

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

And shook at Inver Amergin

The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,

And drove tumult and war away

From girl and boy and man and beast;

The fields grew fatter day by day,

The wild fowl of the air increased;

And every ancient Ollave said,

The precise location of this ‘plain of Ith’ is not agreed, though WBY might have been aware of John O’Donovan’s identification of it as being near Lough Swilly in Co. Donegal. Certainly, he understood the site of Magh Itha to have been somewhere in the northwest. Emain] Emain Macha, the capital of the Red Branch house in Ulster (modern Armagh). Goll’s kingdom thus runs from Donegal in the west to Co. Down in the east. This spelling is adopted by WBY in CP33; until then, he used the spelling ‘Emen’. 3. Inver Amergin] the Irish word Inbhear (spelled ‘Invar’ by WBY in all printings, then changed to ‘Inver’ in the 1932 proofs for the unpublished Edition de Luxe, subse­ quently adopted in CP50) means the mouth of a river, and Amergin (or Amairgin) is the name of another of the Milesians, a druid and poet, supposedly the author of the first Irish poem; he was also credited with the division of Ireland between the Tuatha Dé Danaan (who were to live beneath the ground) and the Milesians (who were to occupy the land’s surface). (Again, WBY’s spelling here is that of his alteration in the 1932 Edition de Luxe proofs: in print until CP33, the spelling is ‘Amargin’.) As a location, Inver Amergin may be the mouth of the River Avoca at Arklow, Co. Wicklow. There is another Amairgin, who features in the Ulster Cycle, the brotherin-law of Conchobar Mac Nessa, also a poet; but WBY probably has the Milesian in mind, especially since he has King Goll imply that he was involved in driving away Fomorian pirates (‘world-troubling seamen’) almost as far south as Dublin. It is also possible,

however, that WBY intends another Inver, since the legendary monster-pirates, the Fomoire, launched some of their attacks from Tory island, off the Donegal coast: in this case, Inver in Co. Donegal might offer a better (and Ulster-based) location for Goll’s battle. However, this Inver has no connection with Amairgin; it remains possible that WBY somehow conflates the two locations. 5. tumult and war] This near-tautologous com­ bination is used twice in the hymns of John Wesley: see Poetical Works (1868), ‘The Good Fight’, 15–16: ‘Plague, earthquake, and fam­ ine, and tumult, and war | The wonderful coming of Jesus declare’ and ‘How happy are we who trust in the Lord’, 17: ‘In tumult and war His tokens we hear’. 8. fowl of the air] Cp. Genesis 6.7: ‘And the Lord said, I  will destroy man, whom I  have created, from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air: for it repenteth me that I have made them’. 9. Ollave] The Irish ollamh was the highest among the seven distinct ranks of skilled and trained individuals, called fili, often with particularly advanced qualifications in poetry. The ollamh occupied high social rank also, and was able to practise various specific kinds of divination, in addition to his being proficient in a huge range of traditional tales and genealogical history. WBY’s spelling is used by Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Bard Ethell’, 206–207: ‘Ollave Fodhla in Tara’s hall | Fed bards and kings’. WBY also makes use of this spelling in the story ‘Wisdom’, where he refers several times to ‘ollaves and poets’.

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

10

15

365

While he bent down his fading head, ‘He drives away the Northern cold.’ They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old. I sat and mused and drank sweet wine; A herdsman came from inland valleys, Crying, the pirates drove his swine

11. the Northern cold] WBY annotated this phrase in P95 and all printings before EPS: ‘The Fomoroh [Fomor, P06-P24], the pow­ ers of death and darkness and cold and evil, came from the north.’ Also in P95, WBY glossed ‘Fomoroh’: Fomoroh means from under the sea, and is the name of the gods of night and death and cold. The Fomoroh were misshapen and had now the heads of goats and bulls, and now but one leg, and one arm that came out of the middle of their breasts. They were the ancestors of the evil faer­ ies and, according to one Gaelic writer, of all misshapen persons. The giants and leprecauns are expressly mentioned as of the Fomoroh. Goll’s role in defeating the Fomoroh is clearly his principal distinction, and a point of pride: in this sense, WBY places him amongst the heroes of the Lebor Gabála, who defeat the piratical sea powers which threaten the inhab­ itants of the country. O’Grady’s treatment of this material early in his History of Ireland is likely to be a shaping influence here, and WBY allows his King Goll to join the shadowy struggle in pre-history as projected by O’Grady from the raw materials of the Lebor Gabála. O’Grady’s projection seems in some ways to anticipate the phantasmagoric world inhabited by WBY’s Goll (The History of Ireland vol.1 The Heroic Period (1878), 28–29): But behind all this [. . .] lies a vast silent land, a land of the dead, a vast continent of the dead, lit with pale phosphoric radi­ ance. That weird light that surges round us now has passed away from that land.

The phantasmal energy has ceased there – the transmutation scenes that mock, the chaos, and the whirlwind. There, too, at one time the same phantasmagoria pre­ vailed, real seeming warriors thundered, kings glittered, kerds wrought, harpers harped, chariots rolled. 12.] On this refrain, see H. Bloom (110): This long line, in all the poem’s versions, has uncanny force, for the line’s meaning changes subtly as it is repeated. Remark­ able as Yeats’s later mastery of the refrain was, he rarely did more with it than here. At first, the refrain seems to indicate only Goll’s madness, the pathetic fallacy run wild, but as the lyric goes on we come to understand better that the fluttering of the leaves is itself a kind of natural super­ naturalism, a force that Goll vainly sought to master, first through kingship and then through poetry. 13.] The line echoes, as its situation perhaps parallels, Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1844), ‘The Sons of Usnach’, VI, 19–20, where Conor is ‘A mile from Eman near a wood-girt lake’: ‘He sat and mused: ‘The cup is at my lip – | What if some poison mingle with the wine?’’ 15, 21. pirates] The word is in a more mun­ dane register than that of the ‘northern cold’ of the Fomorians. This need not mean that these pirates are not from the Fomoroh, but it is nevertheless in keeping with the earlier published version of the poem, where there is a general implication of less elemental criminality, on a continuum with the Viking raids in recorded history. Samuel Ferguson,

366

20

25

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.

I called my battle-breaking men

And my loud brazen battle-cars

From rolling vale and rivery glen;

And under the blinking of the stars Fell on the pirates by the deep, And hurled them in the gulph of sleep: These hands won many a torque of gold. They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old. But slowly, as I shouting slew And trampled in the bubbling mire,

in Book IV of his Congal (1872), just before the battle in which King Sweeney runs mad (and which may very well have a part to play in the formation of WBY’s frenzy-stricken Goll), has King Domnhal address his Firbolg allies (IV, 162–163): ‘Firvolg and Gael in one accord; all Erin in a band | Against the rob­ bers of the sea and traitors of the land.’ 16. hollow galleys] While the primary sense here is that the ships have capacious holds, ready to be filled with plunder, WBY also echoes a common Homeric epithet for ships: see e.g. W. Cowper, The Iliad of Homer (1793), XII, 572: ‘The Grecians to their hol­ low galleys flew’. 18. brazen battle-cars] Chariots are given the name ‘battle-cars’ in Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queen Maeve’, e.g. III, 324: ‘Then leaped the champions on their battle-cars’ and V, 303: ‘Hewers of warways for her battle cars’. WBY’s ‘brazen’ here repeats his adjective from the lyric in his play ‘The Countess Kathleen’ later reprinted with the title ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, 9: ‘For Fer­ gus rules the brazen cars’. Insofar as bronze was used in Irish chariots, it was either made a decoration or put over the wheels. Eugene O’Curry remarks that ‘Chariot wheels were made of bronze or of iron; the former was the older material, and seems to have been only traditionally remembered when the principal tales took their present form, the material then in general being iron’ (On the Manners

and Customs of the Ancient Irish vol.1, 478– 479). The details offered a little later by P.W. Joyce make little mention of bronze, but Joyce notices one thing which may suggest that WBY’s ‘loud’ is more than a mere ‘filler’ here: ‘They [the Irish] evidently took pride in the noise: and the more distinguished the person riding in a chariot, the greater was supposed to be the creaking and rattle, as is often boastfully remarked by the old Irish writers, “a chariot under a king” being the noisiest of all’ (A Social History of Ancient Ire­ land (1903), vol.2, 406). 20.] WBY’s revision of this line from WO’s ‘And under the blink o’ the morning star’ shifts the scene decisively to the night rather than the morning. For F. Kinahan, ‘It was Yeats’s desire to cast Goll in the role of solar hero that impelled this shift to a night-time setting’ (‘A Source Note on ‘The Madness of King Goll’’, YA 4, 189–194, 192). 21. by the] of the P95, P99. 23. torque of gold] A  torque is ‘A collar, neck­ lace, bracelet, or similar ornament consisting of a twisted narrow band or strip, usually of precious metal, worn especially by the ancient Gauls and Britons’ (OED). The word is part of nineteenth-century archaeological vocabu­ lary, and not older; WBY here (as with ‘brazen battle-cars’) allows Goll to speak of himself in something of an antiquarian register. 26.] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, 40–41: ‘Trampling to a mire of blood | The adoring

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

30

35

40

367

In my most secret spirit grew

A whirling and a wandering fire:

I stood: keen stars above me shone,

Around me shone keen eyes of men: I laughed aloud and hurried on By rocky shore and rushy fen; I laughed because birds fluttered by, And starlight gleamed, and clouds flew high, And rushes waved and waters rolled. They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old. And now I wander in the woods

When summer gluts the golden bees,

Or in autumnal solitudes

Arise the leopard-coloured trees; Or when along the wintry strands The cormorants shiver on their rocks; I wander on, and wave my hands,

multitude’. WBY certainly knew these lines, and they return much later in his work, in ‘the dolphin’s mire and blood’ of ‘Byzantium’ (1930). ‘The bubbling mire’ of 1887 is likely to be bubbling with blood: cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake XI, 9–10: ‘The crosslet’s points of sparkling wood, | He quenched among the bubbling blood’. 28. a whirling  .  .  .  fire] Cp. William Sharp, Poems (1884), ‘Sospitra’, 208–209: ‘And all the vast vault of the sky | Seemed one great mass of whirling fire’. wandering fire] Perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), Lalla Rookh, ‘Second Angel’s Story’, 148–155: The same rapt wonder, only filled

With passion, more profound, intense, –

A vehement, but wandering fire,

Which, though nor love, nor yet desire, –

Though through all womankind it took

Its range, as lawless lightnings run.

29. keen stars] This phrase was favoured by T.C. Irwin, in e.g. Poems (1866), ‘Orpheus’, 11: ‘Keen stars that rise in light withdrawn’ and Songs and Romances (1878), ‘A Little Legend’,

416: ‘the keen stars and the breeze’; but it fea­ tures also in Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Prometheus Unbound’, 5–6: ‘and higher | The keen stars’. 31–35.] P99 and after. In P95: And with loud singing I rushed on

Over the heath and spungy fen,

And broke between my hands the staff

Of my long spear with song and laugh,

That down the echoing valleys rolled.

32, by rocky shore] Perhaps cp. (this phrase, and the movement of the whole line) Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1853), ‘Divine Walk’, 70: ‘By rocky shore, or mountain stream’. rushy fen] Perhaps cp. James Thomson, The Seasons (1730), ‘Autumn’, 403: ‘the rushy fen, the ragged furze’. 38. gluts] The meaning is OED 1.a, ‘To feed to repletion’, though the verb is, as OED notes, ‘Chiefly reflexive or passive’. WBY’s use here is relatively unusual, but also strongly reminiscent of Keats, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1820), 15: ‘Then glut thy sorrow on a morn­ ing rose’.

368 45

50

55

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

And sing, and shake my heavy locks. The grey wolf knows me; by one ear I lead along the woodland deer;

The hares run by me growing bold.

They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.

I came upon a little town That slumbered in the harvest moon, And passed a-tiptoe up and down, Murmuring, to a fitful tune, How I have followed, night and day, A tramping of tremendous feet, And saw where this old tympan lay Deserted on a doorway seat,

44. shake my heavy locks] The hairstyles of J. Macpherson’s Ossian feature many heavy locks: see e.g. (among many instances) The Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), Comala, p.  220: ‘O gentle breeze, lift thou the heavy locks of the maid’, Carric-Thura, p.  415: ‘he returned in the fair blushing of youth, with all his heavy locks’, Temora Bk. IV, p. 120: ‘She comes with bending eye, amid the wander­ ing of her heavy locks’. Behind the whole line, also, there is a general reminiscence of Shake­ speare, Macbeth IV.3. 50–51: ‘Never shake | Thy gory locks at me’. 49–50. a little town | That slumbered] Cp. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 35–9: What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be [. . .] 54.] Perhaps cp. Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 103–105: ‘ for all the night, around their echoing camp, | Was heard continuous from the hills, as sound as of the tramp | Of giant footsteps’, and IV, 405–406: ‘So wide, so deep, so terrible, so spreading, swift and fast, | With tempest-tramp from Congal’s camp the adverse columns passed’. 55. this old tympan] From the Irish, tiompan, this is a stringed instrument, played with a bow. It is discussed in Eugene O’Curry, On

the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), III, 359–366. Citing the Glossary of Cormac (which he dates to c. 900), O’Curry writes that ‘the statement of the instrument being of sally-wood, and bronze or brass (as it may be supposed, the frame of wood, and the strings of brass), is of some value, as coming from an authority so old as Cormac’ (359). Quoting from the Agallamh na Seanorach, O’Curry describes the metal strings which may correspond with the ‘wires’ of WBY’s account (69): ‘It [the Timpan] had its Lethrind (or treble-strings) of silver, and its pins (or keys) of gold, and its bass strings of Findruine (or white bronze); and wounded champions and warriors, however sore their sufferings, and women in labour would sleep under the influence of the plaintive fairy music which those princesses used to play for the maidens’ (361). O’Curry also quotes from Book of Lis­ more, on Cormac’s encounter with Aengus (362–363): He held a silver Timpan in his hand; Of red gold were the strings of that Timpan; Sweeter than all music under heaven Were the sounds of the strings of that Timpan. A wand with melody of music sweet an hundred fold; Over it [the Timpan] were two birds;

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

60

369

And bore it to the woods with me;

Of some inhuman misery

Our married voices wildly trolled.

They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.

I sang how, when day’s toil is done,

Orchil shakes out her long dark hair

58. inhuman] unhuman P95-P29. The change And the birds, no silly mode,

to ‘inhuman’ is made in CP33 (and is in the Used to be playing upon it.

1932 Edition de Luxe proofs), but ‘unhuman’ He sat beside me in pleasant fashion;

He played for me his delicious sweet had been WBY’s preferred word since the poem’s earliest printed version in 1887, and music; contributes to the line tonally in ways that, He prophesied most powerfully then, arguably, the more usual ‘inhuman’ does not. That which was intoxication to my mind. See notes to ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’ and ‘King Goll (Third Century)’. Now, although this account of King Cor­ 59. trolled] OED ‘troll’, 10.a., ‘To sing (some­ mac’s interview with the fairy chief of the thing) in the manner of a round or catch; to Tuatha De Danaan be the mere inven­ sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily tion of the imagination, still the poem af­ or jovially.’ OED’s citations include George fords another proof that the Timpan was Eliot, Romola (1861) I ch.9: ‘He could touch a stringed instrument; and, what is much the lute and troll a gay song’. more important to our purpose, it shows 62. Orchil] WBY annotates this in P95 as ‘A that it was an instrument played on with a Fomorian sorceress’. In P99 and P01, the note wand and hair, words that plainly enough is slightly longer, if hardly fuller: ‘A Fomoroh describe a fiddle-bow. and a sorceress, if I remember rightly. I for­ get whatever I may once have known about O’Curry also uses passages from the Brehon her.’ In fact, there is no trace of an Orchil in Laws to show that the harp was an instrument older Irish mythology; but she appears first in esteemed more highly than the tympan, though Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ireland vol.2, it was possible to be a player of both. In revi­ Cuculain and his Contemporaries (1880), sion, WBY’s poem has exchanged the harp for where Queen Maeve mentions the help she a tympan: perhaps, this is another reflection has received from ‘Oirchill, the earth-god­ of the poet’s desire to fit his composition out dess’ (150), and where Cuchulain also experi­ with suitably ancient Irish items; perhaps, too, ences her hostile power: ‘Loud then through he wishes to convey something of O’Curry’s the realms of gloom reverberated the voice of emphasis on the instrument as a precious one Orchil, the sorceress, summoning Fovart and (and ‘Findruine’ is a substance he takes from her sisterhood of the deep, a dim consistory, O’Curry in another revision for P95: see note and the earth-fiends arose against the son of on ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ I, 21). The com­ Sualtam’ (268). Later, in O’Grady’s The Com­ bination of harp and tympan occurs elsewhere ing of Cuchulain: A Romance of the Heroic Age in P95, in that book’s version of ‘The Countess (1894), Orchil is ‘the queen of the infernal Cathleen’, where in Act I, just before the lyric regions’ (62) and ‘a great sorceress who ruled ‘Impetuous heart, be still’, Aleel says ‘Tympan the world under the earth’ (102). M. Williams and harp, awake!’ (P95, 76), and where the notes that ‘O’Grady’s source for the name was Countess begins Act II with the instruction, ‘Be probably the Irish noun oirchill, ‘readiness’, silent, I am tired of tympan and harp’ (P95, 92).

370

65

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

That hides away the dying sun

And sheds faint odours through the air:

When my hand passed from wire to wire

It quenched, with sound like falling dew,

First, Orchil, her pale beautiful head alive, Her body shadowy as vapour drifting Under the dawn, for she who awoke desire Has but a heart of blood when others die; (P95, 148; CW 2, 60.)

I dreamed of Orchil, the dim goddess who is under the brown earth, in a vast cavern, where she weaves at two looms. With one hand she weaves the life upward through the grass; with the other she weaves death downward through the mould: and the sound of the weaving is Eternity, and the name of it in the green world is Time. And through all, Orchil weaves the weft of Eternal Beauty, that passeth not, though its soul is Change. This is my comfort, O Beauty that art of Time, who am faint and hopeless in the strong sound of that other Weav­ ing, where Orchil, the dim goddess, sits dreaming at her loom under the brown earth.

Orchil features in several 1890s drafts of The Shadowy Waters: in a version from c. 1896 she is ‘the sorceress Orchil’ (DC, 127) and (from a slightly later draft) ‘the passionate Orchil’ (DC, 133), and in the 1896 TS (which carries lines that had been present in several previous MS  versions), one of the ‘Demons and gods of earth and water and wind, | The passionate Orchil’ (DC, 213). Once the Formorians depart from the play’s MS versions (by 1899), Orchil is no longer present. In Beltaine (May, 1899), WBY wrote in the third person that ‘Orchil was a Celtic goddess, who is always imagined as a kind of Lilith in Mr. Yeats’s poetry’ (CW 8, 146). Orchil is present in the notebook MS of ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’ (1895), as ‘passionate Orchil’. At the same time as WBY’s incorporation of O’Grady’s goddess, William Sharp (as Fiona Macleod) made use of her, both in a short story, ‘The Snow-Sleep of Angus Ogue’, in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1896), later reprinted under Sharp’s name as well as that of his literary alter-ego, and in a prose-poem which may derive from WBY’s lines here (Fiona Macleod, From the Hills of Dream (1896), 143):

M. Williams speculates (384) that WBY dropped Orchil from further use because ‘He may have been irritated that Sharp’s borrowing had been passed off as an independent sam­ pling from the Celtic folk soul, despite the fact that he had himself originally borrowed Orchil from O’Grady’. 63.] The ‘dying sun’ is something of a cliché in Victorian verse, boosted in its popularity by Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), iii, 8: ‘murmurs from a dying sun’. WBY, however, puts a slight spin on the inevitable with his ‘hides away’, bringing a somewhat domestic context to what is usually a grandiose light effect of sublimity. 64. sheds faint odours] Odours are almost never ‘shed’ in nineteenth-century poetic diction, but perhaps cp. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Zexanna: An Eastern Tale (1839), 1096–1097: ‘where the breeze | Sheds odours o’er the moonlit seas’. 66. sound like falling dew] WBY’s projection of Goll’s mental disturbance depends partly on producing a sense of hyper-alertness to a phantasmagoric nature: here, the fact that

which can mean ‘providence’ or ‘store’, in the sense of the portion that ‘lies in store’ for a person’, and suggests that ‘This is probably another instance of O’Grady’s Hiberno-Hel­ lenism; he may have been trying to calque the Greek word moira, literally someone’s ‘allot­ ted portion’, but also (in the plural) the term for the goddesses of fate, the Moirai’ (Wil­ liams, 384). WBY made use of Orchil not only in the poem but also in his revisions to ‘The Countess Cathleen’, where in Act III the character Aleel sees her:

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

70

371

The whirling and the wandering fire;

But lift a mournful ulalu,

For the kind wires are torn and still,

And I must wander wood and hill

Through summer’s heat and winter’s cold.

They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.

WBY supplied a note for the first three editions containing this revision of his poem: In the legend King Goll hid himself in a valley near Cork, where it is said all the madmen in Ireland would gather were they free, so mighty a spell did he cast over that valley. P95, P99, P01. falling dew does not make a perceptible sound is important to this psychological projection. 68. ulalu] ‘Ululu’ is the more usual form of this word. The term describes ‘A wailing cry; a wail of lamentation’ (OED), and may derive from the Irish uileliúgh. Although he could have come across it in H.D. Thoreau’s Walden, where ‘screech-owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu’, WBY knew the word best from Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), ‘The Burial’, where it functions as a kind of refrain, e.g. 14–15: ‘Ululu! ululu! wail for the dead. | Green grow the grass of Fingall on his head’, 18–19: ‘Ululu! ululu! soft fall the dew | On the feet and the head of the martyred and true’, 38–39: ‘Ululu! ululu! wail for the dead! | Ululu! ululu! here is his bed’. 69.] These ‘wires’ are the metal strings which were believed to have been those of the tym­ pan (see note to 55). They are ‘kind’ in the sense that they have aided Goll in quenching the ‘fire’ of madness when he played them; but it is not clear from the text by whom or by what they have now been ‘torn’. Most read­ ers of the poem have assumed that they have been destroyed by Goll himself in the course of his frenzy; and this accords with JBY’s 1887 illustration (see notes to ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’) and with the painting of the same subject by JBY. Yet WBY in fact re-inserts the reference to torn musical strings for this P95 version, having revised it out of the WO incar­ nation (see notes to ‘King Goll [Third Cen­ tury]’). He does so, perhaps, with his father’s visual interpretation in mind; but this cannot be proven, and it is also possible that the text

keeps open the possibility here of musical mis­ fortune rather than misadventure. 70. I must wander] The importance of the verb ‘wander’ here should not be overlooked: it links Goll with the title of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (as does ‘wandering fire’ in 67), and may establish either a consonance or a contrast between the two mythic figures. ‘I wander in the woods’ (37) had been present as a line from the earliest published version of the poem, but the revision amplifies this in its concentration upon wandering. E. Lar­ rissy sees a connection also with ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, since Goll in his mad­ ness ‘intuits a connection between his own energy and the fire in the stars [.  .  .] He is then able to generalize his intuition [. . .] His spiritual fire, like that of Aengus, is ‘wander­ ing’, which guarantees the reality of the con­ nection which Goll has made’ (Larrissy, 58). 70–71.] These lines bring Goll very close to King Sweeney in the Buile Shuibhne, the twelfth-century Irish narrative where a king is driven mad and suffers a long series of panic-stricken wanderings, naked and sub­ sequently transformed into a bird, through Ireland in all its seasonal climatic extremes. There is no proof of WBY’s first-hand acquaintance with this work in the 1880s, but he might very well have known about it; given the slender degree to which his King Goll corresponds with a particular figure in Irish myth, it is possible that WBY effectively assigns the fate of Sweeney to that of his own nominal protagonist: see Sources and note on WBY’s P95 annotation.

372

THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL

If the P95 version of the poem attempts to undo to some degree WBY’s earlier confusion of two separate Golls, this accompanying note succeeds in introducing a new confusion, this time between two places associated with madmen. The ‘valley near Cork’ may be Glannagalt (Irish Gleann na nGealt, the glen of the lunatics), near Tralee in Co. Kerry: WBY is alluding to (though he does not now quote) the passage in Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on The Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861), with which he had furnished the 1887 ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’: Having entered the battle with extreme eagerness, his excitement soon increased to absolute frenzy, and after having performed astounding deeds of valour he fled in a state of derangement from the scene of slaughter, and never stopped until he plunged into the wild seclusion of a deep glen far up the country. This glen has ever since been called Glen-na-Gealt, or the Glen of the Lunatics, and it is even to this day believed in the south that all the lunatics of Erin would resort to this spot if they were allowed to be free. O’Curry is very likely WBY’s sole source here, but the link between this place and the legendary Goll (from the Cath Finntragha, or Battle of Ventry, and not Goll Mac Morna) was also made later by P.W. Joyce, who offers a full description of the Glen (The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1910), 172–173): In the parish of Kilgobban in Kerry, about eight miles west of Tralee, is situated the beautiful valley of Glannagalt; and it was believed not only in Kerry, but over the whole of Ireland, wherever the glen was known, that all lunatics, no matter in what part of the country, would ultimately, if left to themselves, find their way to this glen to be cured. [. . .] There are two wells in the glen, called Tobernagalt, the lunatics’ well, to which the madmen direct their way, crossing the little stream that flows through the valley, at a spot called Ahagaltaun, the madman’s ford, and passing by Cloghnagalt, the standing stone of the lunatics; and they drink of the healing waters, and eat some of the cresses that grow on the margin; – the water and the cress, and the secret virtue of the valley will restore the poor wanderers to sanity. [. . .] O’Curry seems to say that Gall was the first lunatic who went there, and that the custom originated with him. Despite his ‘near Cork’, this is probably the valley intended by WBY at the time of writing the note. However, there is another such glen, which is closely associated with the King Sweeney of the twelfth-century poem Buile Shuibne, who also went mad as a result of battle, and subsequently wandered through Ireland, sometimes in the form of a bird. In the poem, the mad Sweeney inhabits Glenn Bolcáin (the modern townland of Glenbuck, just outside Rasharkin, Co. Antrim). This environment is very prominent in the Irish poem, and WBY’s indebtedness in this poem to the Buile Shuibne in general (which may be mainly by way of Samuel Ferguson – see note on Sources, ‘King Goll: An Irish Leg­ end’) is suggested again by the nature of the P95 note.

152

TO SOME I   HAVE TALKED

WITH BY THE FIRE

Date of composition. Perhaps composed in spring 1895. The surviving MS  evidence allows only an approximate dating of what is clearly WBY’s first try at composition of this poem: it comes in the notebook some pages before a piece dated by WBY 22 Aug. 1895. However, the poem appeared in The Bookman for May 1895, so the draft probably belongs to Apr. of that year. Context. WBY’s verses are intended to preface P95, and are a ‘dedicatory’ piece (as WBY puts it in the subtitle for the poem’s appearance in The Bookman). It is a dedication to a group of people, who go unnamed: these should probably be taken to include all of the poet’s associates in both artistic and mystical speculation from his youth up to the present. The inclusion of a vision reported by one friend who was a member of the GD (see note on 13–14) suggests that the implied company, small enough to gather around a fireside for late-night talk, is one attuned to the esoteric and the supernatural. Text and publication history. WBY began work on this poem in his 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), with a draft transcribed in notes below. This is very rough, so subsequent MS states which must have existed are now lost. The poem was first published in The Bookman for May 1895 (B). WBY delivered the proofs of P95 to Unwin on 1 Jul. 1895, all of them (‘except a very few pages’) marked ‘for press’ (see CL 1, 466): for the new book, the poem was placed immediately after WBY’s Pref­ ace, and set in italics on a single page; it was followed by the contents list. The poem was moved to a position after the contents list for later editions of P, through to P29. The poem was not included in EPS in 1925. Its position in the sequence of WBY’s poems as something other than a prefatory dedication took time to settle: in PW06 and CWVP08 the poem had been placed at the head of the ‘Early Poems: Ballads and Lyrics’ section, now without its italics, and with the subtitle ‘A Dedication to a Volume of Early Poems’; finally, it was with CP33 that the poem took up its position amongst the poems in ‘The Rose’.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-154

374

TO SOME I HAVE TALKED WITH BY THE FIRE

Copy-text: P49.

W

hile I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes, My heart would brim with dreams about the times When we bent down above the fading coals And talked of the dark folk who live in souls Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;

And of the wayward twilight companies

Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content,

Because their blossoming dreams have never bent

Under the fruit of evil and of good:

And of the embattled flaming multitude Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,

5

10

Title] To Some I have Talked with by the Fire | (The Dedication of a New Book of Verse.) B. 1–4.] I dedicate these fitful Danaan rhymes To those with whom I have talked many times, While the night grew, above the fading coals, Of that dark folk who gather in the souls B. 1.] WBY’s two adjectives in this line first stim­ ulate and then direct attention. ‘Fitful’ is by no means an obvious word in this context: its meaning (OED adj. 2: ‘Characterized by irregular fits of activity or strength; coming and going by fits and starts; full of irregu­ lar changes; spasmodic, shifting, changing, capricious) seems ill-fitted to the texture and timbre of WBY’s poetry as collected in the volume. The word’s relevant application may be more private than public, in that WBY knew how his own verse had tended so far to be composed in bursts rather than at a regular rate over time. With ‘Danaan’ a label of kinds is affixed to the poetry: this word’s use as an adjective had been rare (WBY probably dis­ covered it in Samuel Ferguson), but by 1895 his own poetry had employed it often enough to render it almost a mainstream descriptive term, indicating Irish mythic subject matter. 6. wayward] wandering B.

7–9.] These lines describe the inhabitants of the fairy world who, in WBY’s interpretation, have the happiness of ‘blossoming dreams’ in their apparently carefree existence while also being subject to the ‘sorrow’ of knowing that they are not fully human: in not inheriting the woes of Adam and Eve, they are also deprived of entering into their particular inheritance. The Edenic theme is implicit in 13–14 (see note), but it is also worth registering that WBY simplifies the ‘fruit’ in Eden to one ‘of evil and of good’, whereas it is more accurately the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. 10. embattled flaming] proud embattled B. 11.] This line prepares the way, in P95 for a line that will give a new ending to an old poem, when lines from the 1892 play The Countess Kathleen are turned into ‘Dream of a Blessed Spirit’, ending with the new line: ‘Flame on flame and wing on wing’. 12. the Ineffable Name] This is the name of God, subject to severe reservation of expres­ sion in the Old Testament. ‘Ineffable’ is both OED 1.a, ‘That cannot be expressed or described in language; too great for words; transcending expression; unspeakable, unut­ terable, inexpressible’ and 2, ‘That must not be uttered’. The adjective has a place in hymnwriting, e.g. John and Charles Wesley, Poeti­ cal Works (1868), Hymn 131 (‘Come, let us ascend’, 43–44: ‘Our foreheads proclaim | His ineffable name’), but it is also present in more complicated poetry, and is prominent

TO SOME I HAVE TALKED WITH BY THE FIRE

15

375

And with the clashing of their sword-blades make A rapturous music, till the morning break And the white hush end all but the loud beat Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

near the beginning of R. Browning Dramatis Personae (1864), ‘Abt Vogler’ 4–7: ‘armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk | [. . .] | Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable name’. 13–14.] These lines develop from some recent visionary experience which WBY had partly instigated. In 1894, a fellow member of the GD, Dorothea Butler, allowed herself to be put into a trance in WBY’s presence, and had then a vision that took her to a place which was, she decided, the Garden of Eden. In The Trembling of the Veil (1922), WBY gave an account of this (CW 3, 210): A young girl, on being sent to the same garden [i.e. Eden], heard ‘the music of Heaven’ from a tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was made by the ‘continual clashing of swords’. Whence came that fine thought of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and thoughts? I  had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with the Anima Mundi described by Platonic phi­ losophers, and more especially in modern times by Henry More, which has a mem­ ory independent of embodied individual memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their thoughts. This is overlaid with a number of subsequent preoccupations, but the details of the vision as reported in 1894 remain fresh. Closer to the time, WBY used the vision in his short story ‘The Death of O’Sullivan the Red’ (later ‘The Death of Hanra­ han’), when the hero is in ‘a little wood of larch and hazel and ash’ (The New Review, Dec. 1896): Sometimes he would hear in the little wood a fitful music which was forgotten like a dream the moment it had ceased, and once in the deep silence of noon he heard there a sound like the continu­ ous clashing of many swords; while at

sundown and at moon-rise the lake grew like a gateway of ivory and silver, and from its silence arose faint lamentations, a vague, shivering laughter, and many pale and beckoning hands. The memory stayed with WBY for the rest of his life. In 1937, on being contacted by Dorothea Butler (now Dorothea Hunter), he recalled both her and her vision: ‘Yes, of course I  remember’, he wrote to her, ‘In a vision you described to me the music of heaven you heard as the Clashing of Swords’, adding ‘that had a great influence on my thought’ (letter of 13 Jun. 1937, InteLex 6964). 13. clashing] clanging B. 14. A rapturous] Continual B. In revision, WBY took the phrase from something unusual to a near-cliché. Amongst the users of the later phrase were Aubrey de Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Psyche’, 162–163: ‘The skylark loosed his silver chain | Of rapturous music, clear and loud’, and KT, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘At set of Sun’, 4: ‘Waking in life to rapturous music sweet’. But WBY’s first adjective was the one he remembered much later in giving an account of Dorothea Butler’s swords vision (‘continual clashing’), and it was close to the ‘continuous’ of 1894’s ‘Death of O’Sullivan the Red’ (see notes 13–14). 15.] And the white hush end all things, but the beat B, P95. This alteration made for P99 was the only one in the poem at that time; but WBY evidently took his time in considering it, and he wrote to Unwin on 23 Feb. 1899 to explain that the poem was one of the items which (along with the Preface and the notes) he was not yet able to hand over in a finished version (CL 2, 365). 16. the flash of their white feet] the flash of their swift feet B. Cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Caly­ don, 905: ‘and behold no flash of swift white feet’. (It is possible that WBY echoes a phrase from thirteen lines earlier in this piece in ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’, wr. late 1891.)

376

TO SOME I HAVE TALKED WITH BY THE FIRE

MS  draft. The Boston College notebook has the poem in draft form, written hori­ zontally on three pages. This is in pencil and extremely difficult to read. Reproductions and transcriptions of these pages are in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 346–353. A simplified transcription is offered here, differing in some details from Cornell, and incorporating editorial punctuation. I dedicate these fitful Danaan rhymes

To those with whom I have talked many times,

[Bend down above the fading and wine-red coals del.]

Bending above the fading wine-red coals;

Of the dark folk who cling about the souls

Of pass[ionate] men, like bats in the dim trees;

Of the wandering twilight companies

Who sigh in mingling sorrow and cont[ent]

Because in bloss[oming] dream have never bent

Under a weight of evil and of good;

Of the always flaming multitudes

Who rise wing above wing, flame over flame,

[And cry like the storm an ineff[able] name del.]

And like a storm cry a [illeg.]

And with the clanging of its [?sword] blades make

Cont[?inual] music, till the morning break,

And the white hush end all things but the beat

Of the long wings, the flash of [?swift] feet.

153

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED

CERTAIN RHYMES

Date of composition. The poem was probably begun in the spring of 1895, at some time before the end of Apr. The first stirrings of this lyric are found in WBY’s 1893 note­ book (Burns Collection, Boston College), where they follow seventeen pages of Shad­ owy Waters material, this itself following an item dated 19 Nov. 1894; the next item, which follows immediately in the notebook, was published in May 1895. Composition in spring 1895 seems likely, especially since WBY was at this time (having sent off his final proofs for P95) keen to gain income from short fiction. In the midst of the notebook drafts, WBY lists three stories ‘To be written’, and the first title here is ‘The Binding of the Hair’: this both suggests a direct link between the poem’s genesis and that of the short story, and shows that the poem was begun prior to the story’s composition. The short story itself was published at the very beginning of 1896. While the poem went through further (now lost) stages of writing after spring 1895, it must have been finished (in the form in which it appears in ‘The Binding of the Hair’) by mid-Dec. 1895. Context. The poem first appears as a song in a short story by WBY. In ‘The Binding of the Hair’, published in the first issue of The Savoy in Jan. 1896, the young queen, Dec­ tira, listens to a performance by the bard Aodh on the eve of a battle. After he performs a suitably rousing war poem, Aodh sees the queen and contemplates another kind of poetic address: The queen sat motionless for a while, and then leaned back in her chair so that its carved back made one dark tress fall over her cheek. Sighing a long, inex­ plicable sigh, she bound the tress about her head and fastened it with a golden pin. Aodh gazed at her, the fierce light fading in his eyes, and began to murmur something over to himself, and presently taking the five-stringed cruit from the ground, half knelt before her, and softly touched the strings. The shouters fell silent, for they saw that he would praise the queen, as his way was when the tales were at an end; and in the silence he struck three notes, as soft and sad as though they were the cooing of doves over the Gates of Death. At this point, urgent news breaks of an enemy attack, and Aodh prepares to join the armed company rushing to battle. Before he departs, the queen manages to extract a promise from him: At last he rose with a sigh, and was about to mix among the men-at-arms when the queen leaned forward, and taking him by the hand, said, in a low voice: DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-155

378

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED CERTAIN RHYMES

‘O Aodh, promise me to sing the song before the morning, whether we be victors or weary fugitives!’ He turned, with a pale face, and answered: ‘There are two little verses in my heart, two little drops in my flagon, and I swear by the Red Swineherd that I will pour them out before the morning for the Rose of my Desire, the Lily of my Peace, whether I have living lips or fade among the imponderable multitudes!’ After the battle is fought, survivors return to the queen, reporting a hard-won victory in which many, including Aodh, have been killed. The queen instantly sets out to the battlefield, where ‘here and there the starlight glimmered on helmet or sword, or in pools of blood, or in the eyes of the dead’. At this point, ‘Of a sudden, a sweet, tremulous song came from a bush near them’: They hurried towards the spot, and saw a head hanging from the bush by its dark hair; and the head was singing, and this was the song it sung – [The poem follows] And then a troop of crows, heavy like fragments of that sleep older than the world, swept out of the darkness, and, as they passed, smote those ecstatic lips with the points of their wings, and the head fell from the bush and rolled over at the feet of the queen. WBY’s choice of name for the queen, Dectira, links this story directly to his ongoing work The Shadowy Waters, where Dectira/Dectora is a character taken prisoner by the semi-divine protagonist, Forgael, who falls in love with her and murders her mortal lover (Aleel) before winning her through magical/musical enchantment. In ‘The Binding of the Hair’, Aodh is broadly comparable to Aleel, not least in his devotion to the queen even in death; Aleel’s lines as he goes to his death are similar in orientation to the poem, and share the devotional images of WBY’s love poetry at this time: ‘Having beheld the lily of the gods, | The rose of the world, I am content to die’ (The Shadowy Waters, 1896 version, 239–240). In between its appearance as part of the short story and the publi­ cation of WATR, the poem had the title ‘Aedh to Dectira’ (see Title), but Dectira was replaced by ‘Beloved’ in the book, while Aedh himself was to be replaced by ‘He’ in subsequent collected editions. Reception and interpretation. In a review in The Bookman (May 1899), Aodh was singled out as ‘the type of pure adoring passion’, and the opening lines of this poem were cited in explanation. Yet the ‘passion’ has posed a number of puzzles for WBY’s critics over the years, especially with regard to the degree to which it can be fixed in biographical terms. The view that the poem is addressed specifically to OS is stated boldly by R. Foster, who relies on ‘The Binding of the Hair’ to lend circumstantial weight: ‘It is sung to a young, wise, dark-haired queen, married to an old, somnolent foolish husband; the singer is a love-sick bard, whose passion transcends his death’

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED CERTAIN RHYMES

379

(Foster 1, 157–158). D. Donoghue, too, in his edition of Mem., speculates that this is one of two poems listed by WBY (but without naming them) as being written for OS in 1895 (Mem., 68). These correspondences may not be altogether secure: OS’s husband, whatever his shortcomings as they might have been perceived by the poet in the summer of 1895, did not much resemble the drunken, ‘old and foolish’ king of the story; nor would WBY have thought it proper to have so depicted the man whom – still potentially, at this stage – he was to cuckold. And WBY’s feelings towards OS at the time of composition were complex and conflicted, rather than clear in their focus; certainly, they were not those of a bard love-sick unto death. J. Harwood, who lists this poem amongst those written for OS, has to stretch for evidence: citing ‘White woman that passion has worn’ from ‘A Poet to his Beloved’, which may be echoed in the MS  line ‘White woman with the braided hair’ (see MS  version), he claims that it reflects ‘Yeats’s image of Olivia Shakespear as a passionate woman’, and adds that ‘There is an equality between the poet and the ‘white woman’, reinforced by the elabo­ rate formal balance of the poem, which suggests that both are artists, since both have ‘numberless dreams’’ (Harwood, 72). WBY probably understood several different things by ‘passion’, but it seems unlikely that he regarded OS as somehow ‘worn’ by sexual adventures (as Harwood suggests), and it is difficult to accept that the poem presents speaker and beloved as kindred artists. In fact, the association of the beloved with ‘white’ suggests much more strongly MG: in a MS poem from early 1894 (also in the Boston College notebook), it is Maud who is addressed as ‘White daughter of the Iron Time’. It was another kind of ‘passion’ – that of passionate politics – which WBY feared had ‘worn’ MG, and it is this which probably links her, and not OS, to at least the genesis of this poem (see notes to ‘A Poet to his Beloved’, 3–4, for other pos­ sibilities of ‘worn’ in this context). Dectira in ‘The Binding of the Hair’ may not actu­ ally fight, but she is the first to the field in the battle’s aftermath; and her inclination to action is emphasized throughout. The ‘sorrowful loveliness’ of the poet’s devoted endeavours recalls not WBY’s work – of which, as yet, there was little, if any – in writ­ ing love poems for OS, but the protracted labours of his unrequited love for MG since the beginning of the decade. The message of the poem’s second stanza, and especially of lines 7–9, that the beloved’s beauty is such that ‘all men’s hearts must burn and beat’, repeats a trope from much of WBY’s love-poetry to MG – her ability to incite passion in men, this being both romantic and political in its nature. One possible biographical reading of the poem (and of the story) would be that WBY, in the summer of 1895, is contemplating his own devotion to MG in terms of artistic service to a powerful queen, while at the same time taking stock of the cost of that service. The cost is not resented or refused, but perhaps the perspective gained on the romantic devotion is made possible only by WBY’s consideration of the offer of another romantic attach­ ment (to OS) in the light of this prior love. Plainly, however, the poem’s worth is not tied to its place in WBY’s biography. Critics have been drawn to the significance of the figure of the beloved. While for T.R. Henn this was a simple matter – he saw the beloved as typical of the women in the poems of WATR, ‘phantoms, brain-spun, languid and decorated’ (Henn, 52) – modern criticism has found

380

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED CERTAIN RHYMES

more here of interest. E. Cullingford refers to the ‘simple story and gentle poem’ where WBY ‘eschews [Walter Pater’s] fascination with corruption and obsession with the malignancy of women’: ‘the lover abases himself according to courtly formula, but his goddess resembles neither Gonne [. . .] nor Shakespear. [. . .] She has the pallor, the sor­ rowful face, the long heavy hair, and the totemic hands of a Rossetti icon’ (Cullingford, 51, 34–5). This link to pre-Raphaelite art is made also by G. Watson, who writes that ‘the women or Woman of the poems is obviously derived from the paintings of Rossetti [. . .] all the features of Rossetti paintings are to be found in Yeats’s poems, where hair is long and heavy and dim, and the lover will be hidden by it or drown in it [. . .] ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’ is characteristic, with its compound adjectives, hieratic ges­ tures, and hypnotic use of parataxis. [. . .] This woman is eternally alluring, but eternally unattainable’ (Howes and Kelly, 46). At a higher level of abstraction, S. Putzel sees in ‘The Binding of the Hair’ a situation in which ‘The poet and queen are mortal, the principles are immortal, and although Aodh dies, the principle will be incarnated throughout time and throughout The Secret Rose’ (Putzel, 34). In keeping with this, ‘the poem becomes the remade world that houses [WBY’s] Rose woman’, and ‘The ‘sorrowful loneliness’ that Aedh builds ‘Out of the battles of old times’ [. . .] already asserts the power of art as a recreator of worlds, as the means of giving substance to the Ideal’ (Putzel, 184). The poem does contemplate various kinds of transformation: of ‘battles’ to ‘sorrowful loveliness’ and of beauty to the burning and beating of ‘all men’s hearts’, as well as the transformation of nature itself to the mere elements in which the beloved’s beauty can be displayed. Behind this, originally, there is the transformation of the love-struck bard Aodh into a severed, but still singing, head. Yet it is important to remember that WBY lifted the poem out of its context in fiction, leaving behind the character Aodh in favour first of the voice of Aedh, identified as more of a principle than a character in the notes to WATR, and subsequently of ‘The Lover’ – who, by implication, may be any lover. As fiction falls away, so does allegory: and what remains is the lyric itself, detached from any autobiographical explicitness, in which the power of a woman’s beauty both fills and overcomes the capacities of a mortal poet, or art, and even finally of nature itself to contain and control. Text and publication history. Subsequent to the Boston College notebook, no MS drafts for the poem are extant. A page of TS (Berg Collection, NYPL) preserves the poem in something very close to its submitted state for WATR: apart from the title, and an indica­ tion that the indented lines in the stanzas should be left-justified, its text is identical to that published in the book of 1899. Reproductions and transcriptions of these materials are in Cornell WATR, 85–93. WBY did not change anything in the text of the poem in subsequent collected editions.

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED CERTAIN RHYMES

381

Copy-text: P49.

F

5

asten your hair with a golden pin,

And bind up every wandering tress;

I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:

It worked at them, day out, day in,

Building a sorrowful loveliness

Out of the battles of old times.

You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,

And bind up your long hair and sigh;

Title] [Aodh to Dectora del.] Aodh to Dec­ tora with certain rhymes TS Aedh Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes WATR. 1. a golden pin] Perhaps cp. W. Blake, Jerusa­ lem Pl. 67, 41–42: ‘The Twelve daughters in Rahab and Tirzah have circumscribed the Brain | Beneath and pierced it through the midst with a golden pin’. 3. I bade my heart] Perhaps cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘Isolation: To Marguerite’, 1–2: ‘We were apart; yet, day by day, | I bade my heart more constant be’. build . . . rhymes] Ultimately, the metaphor here derives from Milton, ‘Lycidas’, 10–11: ‘He knew | Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme’. these poor rhymes] Perhaps cp. Barry Corn­ wall, English Songs and other Small Poems (1851), ‘No love to be despised’, 9–12: And the poor rhymes, which thou dost scorn so much, Were dug out of my heart! – ay, forced, at times, Through burning, blinding tears! Dost thou despise A love like this? 7–9.] In 1902, George Russell praised these lines, saying that ‘I think in this poetry we find for the first time the revelation of the Spirit as the weaver of beauty’. ‘Hence it comes’, he added, ‘that little hitherto unno­ ticed motions are noticed,’ and after quoting the three lines, he wrote (‘A Poet of Shadows’,

Imaginations and Reveries [1915], 28): This woman is less the beloved than the priestess of beauty who reveals the divin­ ity, not as the inspired prophetesses filled with the Holy Breath did in the ancient mysteries, but in casual gestures and in a waving of her white arms, in the stillness of her eyes, in her hair which trembles like a faery flood of unloosed shadowy light over pale breasts, and in many glimmering motions so beautiful that it is at once seen whose footfall it is we hear, and that the place where she stands is holy ground. 7. pearl-pale] This compound had already been used by WBY in his revision of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ for P95. A source has been proposed in Dante, by way of D.G. Rossetti: ‘She hath that paleness of the pearl that’s fit | In a fair woman’ (The Early Italian Poets (1861), from Dante’s Vita Nuova xix, 11: ‘Color di perle’): see Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (1983), 140. This is pos­ sible, but ‘pearl-pale’ could have come to WBY from a less obvious source  – that of the Young Ireland poet Denis Florence MacCarthy, whose work WBY was in the habit of deriding (he called it ‘absolutely crude and uninteresting’ (‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’, United Ireland Oct. 1892, CW 9, 186) and ‘jigging doggerel’ (in the Bookman, Aug. 1894, CW 9, 246)). In MacCarthy’s short poem ‘Dolores’ (1852): ‘The rose of my heart is gone, Dolores, | Bud or blossom, in

382 10

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED CERTAIN RHYMES

And all men’s hearts must burn and beat; And candle-like foam on the dim sand, And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky, Live but to light your passing feet.

vain I seek; | For I miss the breath of thy lip, Dolores, | And the blush of thy pearl-pale cheek’ (Underglimpses, And Other Poems (1857), 160). MacCarthy’s posthumous col­ lected Poems went into a second edition in 1884; ‘pearl-pale’, in a lyric replete with roses of the heart and moons of the soul, seems at the very least to offer a startling Yeatsian premonition. 9. hearts must burn and beat] Cp. T.D. Sulli­ van, Poems (1882), ‘Dunboy’, 397–398: ‘And whatsoe’er the battle’s heat, | Howe’er his heart might burn and beat’. 10. candle-like foam] Cp. WBY’s The Shadowy Waters (1896 version), 24–5: ‘When night had poured out cloudy dark to quench | The candles of the foam’. 12. your passing feet] Cp. Forgael on Dectira in The Shadowy Waters (1896 version), 236– 239: ‘But touch her gently for the winds were made | Before the world was made, that they might sigh | About her heavy hair and linger­ ing feet’. MS version. The Boston College notebook holds several pages of drafts for this poem, beginning with fragmentary (and barely legible) lines, including ‘White woman with the braided hair | I bring to you my sorrowful rhymes | Made out of something that [illeg.]’. Three pages later, composition in stanzas begins: Fasten the hair with a golden pin And bind up every wandering tress My heart has [?drawn ?torn] in these poor rhymes I worked at them day out, day in Building a sorrowful [?loveliness] 5 Out of the battles of old times. You need but lift a pearl pale hand And bind up your long hair and sigh And all men’s hearts must burn and beat; And [?the] candle-like foam on the dim sand 10

And the moon climbing the dew-drop­ ping sky Live but to light your passing feet. Therefore though Tethra guard the way Or Balor come to battle anew: Or passionate Orchil ride the air 15 And shake the pillars of night and day I bring my sorrowful rhymes to you White woman with the braided hair. 2. bind] Without cancelling, WBY has written ‘braid’ above this word. 3. [?drawn ?torn] This is a very uncertain reading; Cornell WATR transcribes as [?dreams]. 7. You need but lift a] Uncancelled above this are the words, ‘While you but lift a’. 12. live] Are del. 13. Tethra] This major Fomorian king, sometimes seen as king of the under­ world, features prominently in The Shadowy Waters through the mid-1890s, e.g. 1896 version, 171: ‘Tethra and proud Balor’. See note to The Shadowy Waters (1896), 1. guard] Without cancelling, WBY has written ‘hold’ above this word. 14. Balor] An especially fearsome Fomo­ rian king, known to WBY from Standish J. O’Grady’s History of Ireland, and men­ tioned in his earlier poetry: see note to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), III, 91. 15. Orchil] This supposed Irish god­ dess derives ultimately from Standish J. O’Grady, and is mentioned by WBY in work towards The Shadowy Waters, and in his revised version of ‘The Madness of King Goll’, earlier in 1895: see note to ‘The Madness of King Goll’ (1895), 62. 16. And shake] Shaking del. the pillars of night and day] Cp. WBY, The Shadowy Waters (1896 version), 1–2: ‘Children of Tethra, that were old before | The pillars of the heavens were set up’.

154

[‘ THE LOUD YEARS COME,

THE LOUD YEARS GO’]

Text and date of composition: This quatrain is found in the 1893 notebook, Burns Col­ lection, Boston College (MS), where it is entered on the same page as ‘A Poet to His Beloved’. Like that poem, it gives the appearance of being a fair copy rather than a draft, so is likely to have been written at some point before the notebook text was entered. The date of entry is before 22 Aug. 1895, and after 19 Nov. 1894, but otherwise no date can be established with certainty; it seems plausible, however, to suppose that WBY wrote the lines into his notebook in the summer or the spring of 1895. Plainly, the poem is intended as some kind of compliment or dedication, of a purely occasional nature; but the occasion itself is unknown. Assuming that the poem was written close to the time at which it was entered in fair copy, there are a few possibilities for its intended occasion – though none of them is exactly compelling: the Preface for P95 was completed at the end of Mar., and this might perhaps have put into WBY’s mind the possibility of writing dedicatory verses to one particular future recipient; WBY stayed in Roscommon with Douglas Hyde for much of Apr. in 1895, and might have conceived of the quatrain as a parting gift to him; while back in London in May, the poet attempted to call on Oscar Wilde to offer his support to the legally imperilled writer just before the beginning of Wilde’s trial, and it is conceivable that he wished to put his support in verse. None of these explanations seems strongly based, yet it is also true that this quatrain is decidedly removed from the kind of verse WBY was writing in 1895 as lyric poetry, and that it turns up nowhere else in his unpublished or published work. However, WBY clearly kept the poem in mind when he wanted some dedicatory verses for the vellum-bound copy of WATR which he inscribed for AG on 14 Apr. 1899, using these lines. Publication history. A transcription of the quatrain appears in Cornell Early Poetry 2 493, and a reproduction of the text as found in the Boston College notebook is found in Cornell WATR, 82. An edited text is in UM, 101. The Emory text was published in R. Schuchard, ‘The Lady Gregory – Yeats Collection at Emory University’, YA 3, 159. The present text incorporates editorially supplied punctuation.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-156

384

[‘THE LOUD YEARS COME, THE LOUD YEARS GO’]

Copy-text: Autograph MS in AG’s copy of WATR, Emory University.

T

he loud years come, the loud years go,

A friend is the best thing here below;

Shall we a better marvel find

When the loud years have fallen behind?

1.] Though loud years come and loud years go MS.

155

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

Date of composition. The poem was entered by WBY in his 1893 notebook in fair copy in summer 1895, a little after the composition began there of ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’. In the notebook, the poem is four pages before an item which WBY dates ‘August 22nd 1895’. It is not possible to say how much earlier than this the poem had been first drafted; it seems reasonable to suppose that this happened in the summer, possibly after WBY had finished work on the proofs of P95 at the start of Jul. Context and interpretation. This poem belongs formally with others written in a sin­ gle eight-line stanza by WBY during the 1890s and it is, like them, a love poem which declares devotion to the beloved without any certainty of romantic success. The poem’s origins lie further back in the decade, and are intertwined with other addresses to the beloved, who is then identified strongly with MG. In early 1894, WBY had worked (also in this MS  notebook) on his revision of an 1891 poem, ‘To a Sister of the Cross and the Rose’, resulting in ‘White Daughter of the Iron Time’. That eight-line piece shares some elements with the present poem, which are expressed in common rhymes: ‘time’/ ‘rhyme’ and ‘born’/ ‘horn’. (If in line 6 of that poem the word sometimes read as ‘burn­ ing’ is in fact ‘brimming’ – the MS evidence is not certain – then there is a further verbal link between the two poems.) By the summer of 1895, the apocalyptic dawn of ‘White Daughter of the Iron Time’ had not yet come to pass, and MG was still not in any mari­ tal or physical sense the poet’s official ‘Beloved’; OS, on the other hand, had become a significant romantic attachment (though not, until the autumn, WBY’s lover). It is in the context of this burgeoning new relationship that WBY’s decision to return to his earlier, impassioned verses to MG must be seen, and it is possible to observe a certain turning away from the mystical excitement of the earlier 1890s towards an expression of devotion that is both more resigned to defeat and more sure of its own artistic authority. Whether this poem is an address to MG or to OS may not in the end be all that impor­ tant (see notes to 3–4); and in any case, when first published in 1896, it is addressed to the beloved of WBY’s semi-fictional poet character, O’Sullivan the Red. J. Harwood wishes to see OS as the poem’s subject (Harwood, 72–3), but that case is not clinched, and any such identification is kept well out of sight in the poem itself. Yet OS might have played a part in helping WBY to write a different kind of poem to MG, in that she gave him the confidence, from 1895 to 1896, to set his own artistic achievement in the balance with his record of devotion to a woman whose love he could not have. Thus, this poem presents the beloved with ‘The books of my numberless dreams’; and this is both the giv­ ing of a present and the making of a point; the poem ends not with the ‘White woman’, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-157

386

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

but with the ‘passionate rhyme’ that can now be brought to her. The summer of 1895 saw WBY finalizing P95 – a book that, being a compendium of past work, is also in a sense a collection of ‘books’ – and it is not necessary to take line 2 as a literal reference to this to see a general sense in which the weight of WBY’s past work is now becoming a real force in his imagination. The ‘numberless dreams’ of the poet’s ‘books’ are transferred by the close of the poem to the ‘White woman with numberless dreams’; the passion that has worn her (in one sense or another – see note to 3 below) is to be supplanted by ‘my passionate rhyme’. It is not necessary to develop this thought too far in interpretation, and too far is certainly where A.R. Grossman goes with it when he says that ‘For the coital relationship which as a lover the poet seeks, he substitutes his ‘dreams’; poetry is the sexual act of the impotent man’ (Grossman, 163). This is not to say that the poem as a whole does not stand as some kind of substitute for extra-poetic sexual union – but it is not to be considered (by the reader, or by WBY) in any sense a satisfactory one. A gift is perhaps the next best thing the poet has to offer, but the poem ensures that any such gift is extravagant and impressive. The beloved is offered (in the metaphorical sense – that is, she is presented with the metaphor) a cornucopia in the shape of ‘the horn | That is brimmed from the pale fire of time’ (5–6); this takes the place of the ‘lonely horn’ sounded by God at the end of ‘White daughter of the Iron Time’, and offers a suggestive contrast to the desolate devotion of that earlier poem – now, the anticipated sounding of a last trump has been replaced by the abundance won by ‘dreams’ in the labour of art, and one ‘horn’ has been supplanted by another. Although initially WBY chose to assign the poem to O’Sullivan the Red, it is notewor­ thy that for WATR he did not give it to Aedh or one of his other designated lyric speakers in that volume. ‘A Poet’ obviously hints at this poet, and readers have generally taken it as such. The poem has attracted little criticism in itself, though it is often listed amongst other poems from WATR as an example of WBY’s imagery and stance in his 1890s love poetry. One of the better things said of it was early on; when quoting the poem, William Sharp wrote: ‘Here we are aware of the stillness of things that are past or are not again to be’ (‘Fiona Macleod, ‘The Later Work of Mr. W.B. Yeats’, The North American Review 1 Oct. 1902). This catches a personal finality and sadness in the poem which WBY himself, perhaps, could not quite acknowledge. Form. W.K. Chapman includes this poem among those by WBY that manage ‘to bring into agreement the grammatic[al] unit of the sentence and the formal requirements of the stanza’ so that ‘grammatic[al] period and poem would come to the same thing’ (Chapman, 16). More than this, the poem describes a circle, or a kind of chiasmus, in its sequencing of ‘I bring you [. . .] White woman [. . .] White woman [. . .] I bring you’ from the beginning to the end of the eight lines. The rhyme scheme here is abcacdba, with the b rhyme identical (‘dreams’). This may perhaps be seen as a variation of the initially similar rhyme scheme of the poem which originally appeared with it (‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’), where the rhymes are arranged abcbadcd. Unlike that poem, however, the rhythm of the lines here is based on a triple foot, three beat pattern, stated most clearly in line 1, then stretched out to produce longer lines such as 6 or 4. Text and publication history. The first sign of this poem is in the 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), where it is written carefully in ink, with only one revision: it

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

387

seems certain, therefore, that this is a fair copy rather than a record of early composition (MS). The poem appeared first in print in The Senate, Mar. 1896, where it was the sec­ ond in a pair of poems under the general title ‘O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell’ (Sen). The following month, both poems were reprinted in United Ireland; first in the issue for 4 Apr., but again in the 11 Apr. issue, under a slightly different title, and in a text that corrected misprints in Sen which had been carried through to the 4 Apr. printing (UI). A single-page TS (Berg Collection, NYPL) preserves a version of the poem subsequent to its periodical publication (TS). The poem next appeared in WATR, and it was retained in all collected editions by WBY thereafter. Copy-text: P49.

I

bring you with reverent hands

The books of my numberless dreams,

White woman that passion has worn

Title] O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell II’ Sen, UI 4 Apr.; Two Poems by O’Sullivan the Red concerning Mary Lavell UI 11 Apr. 1. with reverent hands] A  common phrase in nineteenth-century poetry, often carrying religious overtones, e.g., R. Southey, Roder­ ick, The Last of the Goths (1814) I, 249–250: ‘And from her altar took with reverent hands | Our Lady’s image down’. 2. numberless] In poetry, this adjective tends to have a Miltonic provenance  – e.g. Para­ dise Lost III 718–719: ‘stars | Numberless’ or V 63: ‘Pavilions numberless’. It is from this source that it is adopted by e.g. Shelley, Alastor (1816), 92: ‘Numberless and immeasur­ able halls’; WBY probably absorbs it from his reading of Shelley. dreams,] dreams Sen, UI, WATR and all editions up to Later Poems (1931): the comma appears in CP33 and is retained thereafter. 3. White woman] It is scarcely in keeping with this poem’s methods and intent to look too determinedly for any particular identity here. Nevertheless, that has been done: J. Har­ wood quotes 3–4 to observe that they ‘are unlike anything to be found in the Maud Gonne poems of the period, whereas they reflect Yeats’s image of Olivia Shakespear as

a passionate woman’ (Harwood, 72). This is doubtful: MG was associated with white imagery in WBY’s poetry (‘The White Birds’ (1891) being a central instance), and the character of Margaret in WBY’s abandoned novel The Speckled Bird, who is based in many ways on MG, is glimpsed first (in the 1900 version) ‘in a white Italian silk that glimmered in the candle light’ (SB, 133) and (in the version abandoned in 1902) she is seen first as ‘a white figure’ who ‘came out of the doorway and held out her hand’ (SB, 37). Margaret with her ‘complexion that made him think now of pink apple blossoms, now of some kind of delicate china’ (SB, 37) is very close to the account of MG when first encountered by the poet, in his draft Autobi­ ography of 1915, when ‘I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty’ with ‘A complexion like the blossom of apples’: ‘All is but faint to me beside a moment when she passed before a window, dressed in white, and rearranged a spray of flowers in a vase’ (Mem., 40, 42). ‘White’ does not fit OS very well in terms of WBY’s symbolic memory: remembering their first meeting, his 1915 Autobiography notes how ‘her skin was a little darker than a Greek’s would have been’ (Mem., 72). At this point in the poem, WBY is returning to material drafted ten pages

388 5

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,

And with heart more old than the horn

That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:

earlier in the MS notebook, but then dropped from the poem ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’, and to the lines ‘I bring my sorrow­ ful rhymes to you | White woman with the braided hair’. The other verse to which the present poem returns  – addressed certainly to MG – is ‘White daughter of the Iron Time’ (see Context and interpretation), drafted earlier in the same notebook. So, insofar as there is a real ‘model’ for the ‘white woman’ addressed here, it is likely to be MG. Mov­ ing beyond the real altogether, the potential symbolic identities here are open to specu­ lation. A.R. Grossman confidently identifies ‘the Logos of the Simonian gnosis’ and (less esoterically) ‘the muse’ in the ‘White woman’, adding that ‘she is never the bride of the poet; for time and eternity do not mingle until the Last Judgement’ (Grossman, 163). E. Cullingford takes this seriously, seeing the figure as ‘the gnostic Sophia or Wisdom, who is either the bride of God or the bride of the dead, but never the bride of the poet’; she develops this in a reading of the poem which concludes that ‘As a love poet whose most indispensable inherited formal gesture was to kiss, meta­ phorically, the feet of his queen, Yeats filled a rhetorical and ideological structure that is potentially empty or even actually delusive with a content that was, in his case, revolu­ tionary’ (Cullingford, 36). 3–4. has worn  . . . wears] It is not in fact clear which sense of the verb WBY is using here – and it is possible that he is exploiting more than one. J. Harwood’s biographical reading, which identifies the ‘White woman’ with OS, obliges him to read ‘worn’ as ‘worn down’, and ‘passion’ as the past sexual intrigues in which WBY (wrongly) for a time believed OS to have engaged. But ‘worn’ may be func­ tioning here quite differently: WBY’s syntax, characteristically, uses ‘that’ to refer to the ‘White woman’, but it is not certain whether the relative pronoun should be taken as

‘whom’ or as ‘who’. If the woman has been worn down by passion, then it must mean ‘whom’; but if she has ‘worn’ passion as a woman might wear a hat, it means ‘who’. If this is an ambiguity at all, and if so how it might be resolved, might both be questions settled by line 4; but the sense in which the tide can be said to ‘wear’ the sands is simi­ larly ambiguous. The first likely meaning here is that of physical geography – the tides wear down rock to become sand; a second­ ary possibility, though, is that the tide wears the sands like a garment (which adds point to the compound adjective of ‘dove-grey’). To decide the matter, the slight uncertainty in WBY’s mind between ‘wears’ and ‘has’ may be decisive: arguably, it tilts the balance in favour of the ‘worn down’ interpretation as WBY’s original thought; but not perhaps quite unchallengeably so. E. Loiseaux reads these lines sensitively in terms of their dis­ tance from any real landscape (69): The seaside landscape called up [.  .  .] is the most vivid image in the poem, but it is not the scene of the poem’s action or projected action. [.  .  .] Nor can it be at­ tached to a place of action, [. . .] because there is no specified place of action. The landscape ‘actually’ exists somewhere in the world of the poem: the speaker as part of that world must have seen it in order to use it as a simile. But that landscape as we know it can be nothing other than a sym­ bolic representation of how passion wears down a woman. It exists solely for the sake of describing her, and if we imagine it as a place, it must be a symbolic place. There remains the question of what the poet intends here by ‘passion’, and although this may include romantic or sexual passion, it is also possible (and likely, if indeed MG looms large) that political passions are in play. 4. wears] wears del. has MS has Sen, UI.

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

389

White woman with numberless dreams, I bring you my passionate rhyme.

5–6.] This image of the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, has a classical derivation, and was very familiar to WBY both from this and from visual art. But his presentation of the motif is entirely unusual, as well as striking. Perhaps, in terms of manipulation of the ele­ ments, this is a moment at which the domi­ nant element of water, with which the ‘White woman’ is associated, is brought into contact with that of fire. R. Ellmann noticed how in WATR WBY ‘is particularly fond of manipu­ lating the opposition of fire and water,’ and listed this image amongst those where ‘The effect is to encompass strongly contrasted associations, even though their symbolic meaning is usually kept imprecise’ (Identity, 33). It may be significant in the scheme of the poem (whatever the biographical impli­ cations) that the fire which the poet’s imagi­ nation brings in the horn of plenty can quench the ‘tide’, the water with which the ‘Beloved’ is associated. In that sense, power relations between lover and beloved are not

quite as one-sided as they are in some other poems of this period. 5. with heart] with the heart Sen, UI 4 Apr. (almost certainly a misprint and not the authorial reading). 6. brimmed from] Perhaps cp. a Keatsian moment in Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Constantine at Constantinople’, 37–8: ‘O for a draught | Brimmed from the beaming beaker of my youth’. pale fire] Cp. Shelley, ‘A Vision of the Sea’, 21: ‘sulphur-flakes hurled from a mine of pale fire’.

time] Time Sen, UI.

8. passionate rhyme] It is unlikely that WBY ever came across Charles Mackay, Interludes and Undertones (1884), ‘Critiques or Critics: The Iconoclasts’; and this is perhaps just as well: ‘Revile him, decry him, he’s better than you! | Disparage and scorn him, he’s noble and true! | He has wrought the dull marble to beauty sublime, | He has poured his full soul into passionate rhyme’ (1–4).

156

THE EVERLASTING

VOICES

Date of composition. Composed probably in early to mid Aug. 1895. In the MS version, WBY appends the date ‘August [30 del.] 29th’ (the context proves this to be Aug. 1895). While this is likely to be the correct date for WBY entering the fair copy in the notebook (though it took him two attempts to get it right), it is much less likely to be the exact date of composition. The most plausible time for this, nevertheless, is Aug. 1895, when WBY was in London and was writing poetry and fiction. Although there is a possibility that this poem was an older one (as some other pieces which WBY entered in this notebook were), and there are verbal links with his short chapter ‘The Golden Age’, publ. in 1893 (see below), there is no MS trace or reference to it before 1895. Context and interpretation. In The Celtic Twilight (1893), WBY had included a short piece entitled ‘The Golden Age’ where he recalls a drowsy train journey to Sligo in the course of which he has a vision – an ‘excellent omen’, as he believes – of black and white dogs. As he longs ‘for a message of another kind’, ‘a man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions’ (The Celtic Twilight [1893], 173–175): I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a corner. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must weep until the Eternal gates swing open. The verbal echoes of this passage in the poem suggest a connection; and WBY’s domi­ nant idea in the verses is that of the problematic nature of the unearthly music which the voices sing, which causes deep unease amongst those mortals who are able to hear it, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-158

THE EVERLASTING VOICES

391

which will continue until the moment of apocalypse when ‘the eternal gates swing open’ – in the poem, ‘till Time be no more’ (4). A year after the poem’s first publication, also in The New Review, WBY published the story ‘The Death of O’Sullivan the Red’, and here too voices from a world beyond come to the hero as he meets his end: ‘he had moments when he heard faint, ecstatic, reedy voices crying from the roof tree or from the flame of the hearth. [. . .] After a little weakness brought a vanishing of pain and a slow blos­ soming of silence, in which, like faint light through a mist, the ecstatic reedy voices came continually’. At the moment of O’Sullivan’s death, ‘the ecstatic reedy voices began cry­ ing, while a faint dove-grey light crept over the room, coming from he knew not what secret world’ (The New Review, Dec. 1896, repr. as ‘The Death of Hanrahan the Red’ in The Secret Rose [1897]). Between them, the short story and ‘The Golden Age’ frame the poem as an encounter between the mortality of the poet and the relative immortality of the powers which – in a musical form – both inspire and torment him: relief can come if the voices themselves are silenced, though this must be either in the case of a general, time-ending mystical apocalypse, or with the exhausted defeat and death of the hearer. The only substantial reference to the poem by WBY himself is from late in life, in 1930 (‘Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty’, E, 305): I think that there are historical cycles [. . .] and that a cycle approaches where all shall be as particular and concrete as human intensity permits. Again and again I have tried to sing that approach – The Hosting of the Sidhe, ‘O sweet everlasting voices,’ and those lines about ‘The lonely majestical multitude,’ – and have almost understood my intention. Again and again with remorse, a sense of defeat, I have failed when I would write of God, written coldly and conventionally. By this point, the poem has been sucked into the gyre of WBY’s somewhat abstract self-assessment, and there is relatively little clue as to what it might have meant to him near the time of composition. That it had a significant place in his 1890s lyric work is suggested by its position in WATR, where it follows ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ as the vol­ ume’s second poem: since the opening poem ends with the ‘Away, come away’ of Niamh, it is tempting to read this poem as an address to the very voices a reader has just encoun­ tered. It is probably unwise to take this interpretation too far, but it is worth noticing that early readers were capable of reading the poem as part of a larger patterning of the volume itself. In a review for The Bookman by Annie Macdonnell, all of WATR was seen as ‘an answer to the “sweet everlasting voices,” the response of the passion of the heart to what is beyond itself, beauty, love, and what love is but the dim vision of ’ (May 1899). The poem attracted little specific commentary in the earlier years of its reception, but was often quoted as typical of WBY’s work and its musicality. In a manifestation of this, the poem was evidently one performed by the actor Frank Fay, in accord with various theories of verse-speaking propounded by Florence Farr and WBY. In 1903, Fay wrote to WBY, recording his lapse of attention during one of the poet’s American lectures (of Nov. or Dec. 1903): ‘In your lecture you said the whole effect of ‘O sweet Everlasting Voices’ would be missed unless . . . I missed what followed. Would you supply it for me as I wish to read this poem’ (quoted in Schuchard, 118). WBY’s reply does not survive; but

392

THE EVERLASTING VOICES

it is clear that this poem fitted in to the recitation-based theories which Farr and WBY had been developing for some time. In 1906, Edward Dowden announced to the world the arrival of a major new poetic talent in the shape of Rosalind Travers, whose The Two Arcadias he reviewed in Twentieth Century Quarterly. The terms of his recommendation are perhaps slightly eccentric (‘There are no stove-plants here, grown in a moist and overheated atmosphere’), but he did quote (with what degree of mischief it is impossible to know) some very derivative verses by Travers, which are plainly in thrall to WATRperiod WBY: ‘They shift and pass; the Unknown Powers remain; | The Everlasting Voices linger yet | By field and flood’. As a commentator on this for The Review of Reviews wrote (May 1906): ‘Good is it to know that the Everlasting Voices linger yet’. Further homage to WBY’s poem (or indirect acknowledgement of its power) came in Fiona Macleod’s (William Sharp’s) 1908 verse-play The Immortal Hour, where in an especially charged moment a character exclaims: ‘Voices be still! The woods are suddenly troubled. | I hear the footfall of predestined things’ (Poems and Dramas (1910), I, 118–119). Modern criticism has seldom paused over the piece, but it is assigned a major role in WATR when A.R. Grossman presents a comprehensively occult reading of it as ‘a banish­ ing ritual’ (to contrast with the poem immediately before in WATR, ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, which he interprets as ‘an invocation or summoning of power’). It is not clear how successful this ritual is, since Grossman writes of the poem’s ‘human speaker’ attempt­ ing in vain ‘to ward off or banish the apocalyptic guardians, God’s representatives, by commanding the Aima Elohim to curse them as he is cursed with the endless wander­ ing which in Yeats is the symbol of the hopeless search for the Beloved’ (Grossman, 81, 89): this may take WBY’s work to some places where he is more at home than the actual poem can ever be. A less arcane treatment is given by S. Putzel, who takes it as the sec­ ond of three ‘introductory’ poems in WATR (after ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ and before ‘The Moods’), where ‘a human voice answers Niamh’s call, and attempts to exorcise the inhuman, ‘everlasting Voices’’; he writes that ‘In the last four lines the voice lectures the Voices, asserts his mortality and connects himself with the reader,’ while ‘Perhaps because they know they will always have the last word, the elemental Voices do not answer the speaker’s question but continue to call in birds, wind, tide and fire throughout the volume’ (Putzel, 169–170). The sense of continuance is an important effect, whatever meanings may be attached to it. D.H. Purdy, examining the word ‘everlasting’, sees it as biblical in connotation, and notes that ‘The everlasting people of faery are normalized by the echo, and an intertextual irony invades, the poet bidding silence upon the very voice he is reechoing’ (Biblical Echo and Allusion in the Work of W.B. Yeats [1994], 51). The fact that the short poem does a lot of echoing and reechoing on its own account, and as part of its formal structure, is not irrelevant. H. Vendler has written of the poem as showing a ‘counterpoint of syntactical and stanzaic form’, since ‘because of the semicolon after line 4 [it] looks as though it were written in two irregularly rhyming quatrains – abac/ baca – that voice a series of injunctions’. ‘Nonetheless’, she continues, ‘the poem is equally well represented formally by a scheme which shows it to consist of a regularly rhyming inner sestet (bacbac) flanked fore and aft by a refrain (a) [. . .] The return of the initial refrain means that the haunting Voices will never cease, that the poem “begins over again” at its end and cannot reach its apocalyptic hope’ (Vendler, 105).

THE EVERLASTING VOICES

393

Text and publication history. This poem is entered in ink in the 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), with a blank page before and another blank page follow­ ing; although there are a few changes visible, the dated verses have the appearance of being a fair copy (MS). The notebook page is reproduced with transcription in Cornell WATR, 18–19. The poem’s first publication came in The New Review for Jan. 1896 (NR); its next appearance was in WATR. Although WATR was published in Apr. 1899, the poem appeared separately in the United States later in the year: in The Living Age on 6 May, and again (with an identical text) in the compendium Eclectic Magazine, and Monthly Edition of The Living Age for Jul. 1899 (LA/EM). The differences between this text and that of WATR are of an order that suggests editorial intervention rather than anything coming from WBY himself; and while the poet certainly did not revise his text for this occasion so soon after the publication of his book, it remains possible (though not at all certain) that the American magazine was working from material that preceded volume publication. The variant readings are given here, but should be treated with cau­ tion. After WATR, WBY retained the poem in all collected editions of his work. Copy-text: P49.

O

sweet everlasting Voices, be still;

Go to the guards of the heavenly fold

Title] No title MS; Everlasting Voices NR; O Everlasting Voices! LA/ER. The title may absorb a well-known Biblical verse: ‘Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God’ (Psalms 90:2). 1, 8. Voices] voices MS, NR. 1. sweet] The word may trigger a recollec­ tion of some of the earliest poetry to which WBY was exposed by his father’s reading it aloud in Howth. Writing about this period in 1914, WBY remembered how JBY ‘did not care even for a fine lyric passage unless he felt some actual man behind its elabora­ tion of beauty,’ and how ‘When the spirits sang their scorn of Manfred, and Manfred answered, ‘O sweet and melancholy voices’, I was told that they could not, even in anger, put off their spiritual sweetness’ (CW 3, 80). In fact, WBY misremembers here Byron’s

Manfred (1817), I  i 175–177: ‘I hear | Your voices, sweet and melancholy sounds | As music on the waters’. still;] still! LA/ER. 2. Go to] [Or call del.] Go MS. the heavenly fold] WBY’s phrase recalls (possibly on purpose) much religious writ­ ing. Cp. e.g. John and Charles Wesley, Poeti­ cal Works (1868), Hymn 34: ‘For the Heathen’, 19–24: As lightning launch’d from east to west, The coming of Thy kingdom be, To Thee by angel hosts confess’d, Bow every soul and every knee, Thy glory let all flesh behold, And then fill up Thy heavenly fold. For all such instances, the ultimate source is John 10:16: ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I  must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, one shepherd’.

394

5

THE EVERLASTING VOICES

And bid them wander obeying your will,

Flame under flame, till Time be no more;

Have you not heard that our hearts are old,

That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,

In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?

O sweet everlasting Voices, be still.

3. them wander] them ^[to del.]^ wander MS. 4. Flame under flame] This arresting image may develop from a line in WBY’s 1895 revision of lines from The Countess Cathleen in ‘A Dream of a Blessed Spirit’ (later, ‘The Countess Cath­ leen in Paradise’), 16: ‘Flame on flame, and wing on wing’. till Time be no more] The motif here is close to that of WBY’s ‘He tells of the Perfect Beauty’, 7: ‘until God burn time’. The phrase itself is not without poetic precedent, includ­ ing T.D. Sullivan, Green Leaves (1887), ‘Lord Derby and the Moon’, 38–9: ‘Till time be no more | It shall speed as of yore’. more;] more. NR. 5. old,] old? LA/ER. 6–7.] With these lines (and with the ‘sweet [. . .] voices’ of 1) cp. W. Blake, ‘Vala’, Night VII, 754–758 (text in Works eds. Yeats and Ellis (1893) III):

It is possible that the lines also echo some of the ritual in the GD’s ceremony for the 1 = 10 ‘Zelator’ grade; here, in the version preserved by Israel Regardie, the neophyte is told by the ‘Hireus’ how ‘Tetragrammaton [God]’ ‘placed Kerubim at the East of the Garden of Eden and a Flaming Sword which turned every way to keep the Path of the Tree of Life’ (perhaps cor­ responding with WBY’s ‘heavenly fold’ and its ‘guards’ in line 2):

And she went forth and saw the forms of life and of delight Walking on mountains or flying in the open expanse of heaven. She heard sweet voices in the winds and in the voices of birds That rose from waters, for the waters were as the voice of Luvah, Not seen to her like waters or like this dark world of death [. . .]

6. call in birds, in wind on] call in [the del.] birds, in [the del.] wind MS. Cp. Tennyson, Poems (1830), ‘All Things Will Die’, 24–26: ‘The voice of the bird | Will no more be heard | Nor the wind on the hill’. 7.] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, Poems (1870), ‘A Lit­ tle While’, 13–14: ‘Only across the shaken boughs | We hear the flood-tides seek the sea’. shore?] shore: LA/ER. 8. still.] still! LA/ER.

He has bound Man with the Stars as with a chain. He allures him with Scattered fragments of the Divine Body in bird and beast and flower, and He laments over him in the Wind and in the Sea and in the birds. When the times are ended, He will call the Kerubim from the East of the Garden, and all shall be consumed and become Infinite and Holy.

157

THE LOVER ASKS

FORGIVENESS BECAUSE

OF HIS MANY MOODS

Date of composition, text, and printing history. According to WBY’s own dating of the three drafts in his 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), this poem was composed on 22, 23, and 24 Aug. 1895. The first version in the notebook (MS1), dated ‘August 22nd 1895’, carries revisions but is nevertheless a good deal clearer than WBY’s usual first drafts, so it is possible that composition had been started elsewhere at an ear­ lier date. A second version immediately following is dated ‘August 23rd’by WBY (MS2). A  third version follows (MS3), this time with several revisions, dated ‘August  24th’. Another MS exists: this, a single leaf holograph in ink, with revisions, is held by the Clark Library UCLA, and was acquired in purchases in the 1920s from the circle and family of Oscar Wilde (MS4). It is possible that the MS was originally in Wilde’s possession; it is signed by WBY, but not dated. For reproductions and transcriptions of MS materials, see Cornell WATR, 118–127. The poem was published in The Saturday Review 2 Nov. 1895 (SR), but was further revised thereafter: a single typed sheet (Berg Collection, NYPL) preserves this stage of revision (TS), which is likely to date from shortly before the sub­ mission to the publisher of WATR; further changes (including to the title) are present in the text as published in that volume in 1899. WBY retained the poem in all collected editions, changing the title again but otherwise with only minor alterations. Context and interpretation. The word ‘forgiveness’, which was in this poem’s title almost from the beginning, inevitably begs a question in terms of any biographically informed reading: is WBY himself asking forgiveness, and, if so, for what and from whom? That WBY did not present his poem as autobiographical is something to remem­ ber in all such speculations; and Michael Robartes (its speaker in WATR) is here a type of the unsuccessfully devoted poetic lover, whose travails the poet does not intend to pass off as his own. Nevertheless, the poem’s probable date of composition in Aug. 1895 puts it at an important period in WBY’s developing love-affair with OS. By the summer, WBY was fully aware of OS’s feelings, and of her willingness to leave her family in order to live with him; but as the account in Mem. suggests, the poet was subject to bouts of nervous­ ness and uncertainty, so that the two not-yet-lovers enlisted a pair of what he calls ‘spon­ sors’ to facilitate the development of their relationship (Mem., 86). It is tempting to see in the events of the summer a series of ‘hopes that in mere hoping flicker and cease’ (3); and plausible, too, to imagine that OS had experienced a good deal of vacillation from WBY for which her nervous beloved might rightly ask her forgiveness. WBY was still DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-159

396

THE LOVER ASKS FORGIVENESS

resident at the family home in Blenheim Park (he did not move into Arthur Symons’s set in the Temple until early Oct.), and he brought OS there on 5 Sept., when his sister Lily reported on ‘Willy’s latest admiration, very pretty, young, and nice’. This is probably the first of WBY’s love poems to be directed solely towards OS; within a couple of years, he was able to attribute its voice to Michael Robartes, although the notes to WATR come close to quoting the poem when they describe Red Hanrahan as ‘fire blown by the wind’ (cp. 6). It is Robartes, however, who is ‘fire reflected in water’, and ‘the pride of the imagination brooding upon the greatness of its possessions’. A remark of R. Ellmann’s on this description of Robartes is pertinent: ‘To be fire reflected in water,’ he writes, ‘suggests a conflict of energy and stillness, a kind of suspended animation [. . .] where the speaker expresses a dreamy, contemplative passion in the most elaborate and allusive way’ (Identity, 301). It is the continuing suspension of animation, in WBY’s affair with OS, which is an underlying difficulty here, and for which (perhaps) forgiveness is being sought. That WBY wished to associate the Robartes persona with ‘permanent pos­ sessions’ is interesting, partly because of the changefulness and impermanence of the situation in the poem, and of the ‘Piteous Hearts, changing till change be dead’ (19). Pos­ sibly a degree of retrospective wisdom is present here, and WBY’s hindsight enables him to see the affair with OS as doomed by his inability to set aside his feelings for MG, who could effect changes in the poet’s emotional weather as and when she pleased. WBY had not met (and probably had very little contact with) MG since he saw her in Paris in early 1894, but his attachment to her seems to have troubled the beginnings of his relation­ ship with OS: Ellmann goes so far as to speculate that ‘With Maud Gonne never far from his mind, he [WBY] must have had a strong half-conscious repulsion to the elopement’ (Man and the Masks, 156). In the same week as this poem’s publication in SR, MG re­ opened correspondence with him (thanking him for a copy of P95), but with eventually disastrous consequences for the viability of his affair with OS. Whatever the poem’s personal impulses, they take their direction by using mystical bearings; and it is these, finally, that enable WBY to construct something that is more than merely personal in its effects. The elements of air and fire predominate, while two mythical figures occupy the central portion of the poem, each witnessed by the ‘winds’ that the speaker invokes. These are first Niamh, the air-riding lover from fairyland of the Fenian warrior Oisin (as featured in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, but also in ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ (1893), which was to be the opening piece in WATR), and second the phoe­ nix, a stage property new to WBY’s poetry, and the mythical bird which (as he would have known ultimately from Ovid) died in flame, only to be reborn out of its own ashes. (WBY was to use the phoenix as a symbol in writing about MG much later.) In terms of the elemental mix of the poem’s atmosphere (and it is in some ways a poem about atmosphere), the air carries the charges of both the otherworldly lover (Niamh) and the self-consuming, self-regenerating passion (here both sexual and male) of the phoenix; and it is this mystical air which the beloved must breathe, her hair carrying the scent of a rose – in SR this air, as well as the ‘twilight’ itself, is ‘rose-heavy’ – while her ‘sigh’ is one to ‘trouble . . . | The odorous twilight’ (23–24). In sensory terms, WBY’s poem is heavy with incense, as though ‘forgiveness’ could be won by invocation and ritual.

THE LOVER ASKS FORGIVENESS

397

As usual with WBY’s use of the word, ‘twilight’ is ambiguous: it can mean the growing light of dawn or the fading light of dusk. In the case of the SR title, ‘The Twilight of Forgiveness’, that ambiguity is potentially a serious one – serious enough, perhaps, to prompt the title’s later revision. Is ‘forgiveness’ in the process of becom­ ing more or less likely? It may be that, in relation to his life with OS, WBY felt that both things were possible in Aug. 1894, so that the ambiguity has its point. There is, however, one puzzle arising from the poem’s pre-publication life which is unlikely to be solved: how was it that MS4 came to be kept with Oscar Wilde’s papers? Wilde had been in prison since late May; WBY, to judge from his later accounts, was fully supportive of Wilde’s decision to face imprisonment and not flee the country in the spring of 1895, but there is no evidence that he was in contact with the incarcerated wit and playwright. It is possible that the copy of the poem was in the possession of Robert Ross, or even Alfred Douglas: in that case, a possible source would be Lionel Johnson, WBY’s friend who knew both men. Johnson was also OS’s cousin, though WBY was probably careful to keep any hint of the burgeoning romance (or potential scandal, since OS was a married mother) away from the alcoholic and ailing Johnson at this time. Critics have seldom spent much time on the poem, though C. Bradford, in the course of a discussion of the various drafts, records a dissatisfaction with it made more acute by the fact that it becomes less tied to the autobiographical as it evolves: ‘Surely this poem reflects Yeats’s affair with Diana Vernon [i.e. OS], yet Yeats in his successive drafts is making this fact less apparent. [. . .] The trouble is that Yeats is saying what he has to say  – here he is expressing his doubts and hesitations over beginning an affair [. . .] while still obsessed by Maud Gonne – too tangentially, too unurgently’ (Bradford, 39, 41). Being at a tangent to life, and a refusal of the ‘urgent’, are probably fundamental to this poem’s aesthetic; but even a reader with a deter­ minedly esoteric eye, such as A.R. Grossman, reads the poem as ‘another expression of the defeat of commitment,’ with its subject being ‘the failure of initiation’; he goes on to claim that ‘Yeats uses a special diction [. . .] to suggest the futility of the reverie’ (Grossman, 119–120). S. Putzel, insisting that ‘Robartes is always the initiator, one who has long ago undergone his own successful initiation’, sees the poem’s WATR speaker playing ‘the dual role of prompter and director’ for the loved one, to make her fit ‘to evoke the voices that live in the wind’ (Putzel, 193–194). On the evolution of the poem’s speaker in the title from Red Hanrahan to ‘The Lover’, and similar changes in the titles of other WATR poems, N. Grene notes how ‘The rather fussy distinctions have been removed, but the “Lover” and the “Poet” still speak from some dim, imaginary space in which they can be both individual and archetype,’ so that ‘The poet W.B. Yeats, writing of his feelings for Maud Gonne and Olivia Shakepaear, is no longer elaborately masked [. . .] instead he is subsumed within the category of lover/poet’ (Grene, 174).

398

THE LOVER ASKS FORGIVENESS

Copy-text: P49.

I

5

f this importunate heart trouble your peace

With words lighter than air,

Or hopes that in mere hoping flutter and cease;

Crumple the rose in your hair;

And cover your lips with odorous twilight and say,

‘O hearts of wind-blown flame!

Title] Thus from CWVP08 onwards. The Twi­ light of [Peace del.] [my peace del.] Forgiveness MS1 The Twilight of Forgiveness MS2, MS3, MS4, SR. Michael Robartes to his Beloved II TS. Michael Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods WATR. 1. importunate] A  possible dominant sense here is OED 1: ‘persistent or pressing in mak­ ing requests or offers, esp. to an irritating or distressing degree’, but also present is 2.b: ‘That constitutes a nuisance or inconvenience; persistently troublesome; annoying, irritat­ ing, irksome’. Another sense (OED 4) is ‘That requires or claims attention; pressing, urgent. Also: constantly or repeatedly active or hap­ pening, busy’: this is found in the phrase ‘importunate heart’ in some nineteenthcentury religious writings; and it is possible that this is the sense intended by the poet. Whatever the intended meaning, WBY’s use of the word raises immediate questions about what the heart might be pressing for, being troublesome about, or busy with: any deter­ minedly biographical reading in relation to OS might struggle to find evidence from the summer of 1895 of the poet’s being especially importunate in his relationship with her; and his romantic importuning, of course, had been reserved for MG earlier in the 1890s. 2. words] hopes MS1 words del. plans MS3 plans MS4. 3. Or hopes] Or plans MS1 And hopes WATR. 4.] Draw down your long dim hair MS1, MS2; (on the facing page in MS2, WBY has an alternative line: [Loosen del.] Unbraid your shadowy hair.) Unbraid your shadowy hair

MS3, MS4 Crush the rose in your hair SR Crumple the Rose in your hair TS. 5–6.] And make a twilight over your lips, and say: | [Poor del. MS1] O piteous candle flame MS1, MS2; (on the facing page in MS2, WBY has an alternative for 6: ‘ O heart like a thin flame’.) And shed a twilight over your lips and say: | ‘O hearts of wind blown flame! MS3, MS4 Cover your lips’ rose-heavy twilight, and say: | ‘O hearts of wind-blown flame! SR. 5, 24. odorous] WBY was late to arrive at this adjective, and it should be taken as another version of the earlier ‘rose-heavy’: the adjec­ tive must therefore carry its original mean­ ing of ‘sweet-smelling’, rather than later associations of the malodorous. These latter, however, were already in play in the 1890s: see. e.g. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), on flowering garlic: ‘Round Lucy’s neck, over the silk handkerchief which Van Helsing made her keep on, was a rough chaplet of the same odorous flowers’ (Ch. 22). In ‘odor­ ous twilight’, WBY had in fact been antici­ pated twice by the same (now obscure) poet, Mortimer Collins. It is unlikely that WBY ever read Collins, but it is possible that he encountered his poem ‘The Serenade of Troi­ lus’ (Summer Songs (1860)) in a back issue of the Dublin University Magazine, where it appeared in 1852, and in which ‘thy violet eyes | Do light the odorous twilight’ (14–15). 6. hearts of wind-blown flame] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Hunting of the Wolf of Bierna’, 519–520: ‘And as the wind-blown flame burns up the bent | On a brown mountain’s back’. WBY’s description of Red Hanrahan as ‘fire blown by the wind’ in the

THE LOVER ASKS FORGIVENESS

10

15

399

O Winds, older than changing of night and day, That murmuring and longing came From marble cities loud with tabors of old In dove-grey faery lands; From battle-banners, fold upon purple fold, Queens wrought with glimmering hands; That saw young Niamh hover with love-lorn face Above the wandering tide; And lingered in the hidden desolate place

notes to WATR directly echoes the phrase. Among the ‘uncertain shapes’ and ‘horrible nightmares’ in Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’ are ‘hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame’ (241): there may be some sense of that line behind WBY’s phrase here, and perhaps also in 17. 7.] Wavering in winds, older than night or day, MS1, MS2 ‘O winds, [older del.] elder than changing ^of^ night and day, MS3, MS4. older] CP33: elder, in all versions up to and including 1931 edn. of Later Poems. 9. old] gold MS1 gold del. old MS2. tabors] The tabor is a small drum, by the time of this poem (fittingly) archaic: see e.g. Grove’s Dictionary of Music (1880), ‘The  tabor  was a diminutive drum, without snares, hung by a short string to the waist or left arm, and tapped with a small drumstick’. WBY’s initial thought, ‘tabors of gold’ (MS1), stretched even the archaism and was wisely discarded. 10. dove-grey] This is the same epithet used in the P95 revision to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, when the hero first encounters Niamh: ‘And found on the dove-grey edge of the sea | A pearl-pale, high-born lady’ (I, 19–20). 11.] From altars, behind purple fold on fold MS1; on facing page of MS1, several alterna­ tives are entered: From bridal curtains fold on purple fold | From bridal beds, fold fall­ ing on purple fol[d] | behind many a purple fold. From [bridal del.] curtains, fold [on del.] upon purple fold, MS2; (on the facing page of MS2, the deleted ‘bridal’ is replaced with ‘battle’).

12. glimmering hands] Perhaps cp. R.W. Buchanan, The Earthquake (1885), ‘Julia Cytherea’, 36–37: ‘Looks up, ’neath glimmer­ ing hands that braid | Her dripping locks’. 13.] From Usheen gazing on Neave’s love-[pale del.] lorn face MS1; on facing page of MS1, WBY has the alternative line: That saw young Neave [ride del.] moving with love-pale face. That saw young Neave wander with love-lorn face MS2. That saw young [Neave del.] Niam [wander del.] hover with love-lorn face MS3 That saw young Niam wander with love-lorn face MS4. Niamh] The princess from the land of faery who persuades Oisin to follow her into three hundred years of pleasurable exile in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. Niamh also features in ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, WATR’s opening poem, ‘Calling Away, come away’. As WBY knew, she was not a mythic figure of any great antiquity (see notes on Sources to ‘The Wan­ derings of Oisin’), but by now she can func­ tion as part of the poet’s system of mythic self-reference. The scene being evoked here is that in which Niamh rides over the waves to entice Oisin into joining her in Tir na nOg: the ‘wandering tide’ of the following line here is probably influenced less by the (relatively frequent) occurrences of that phrase in eigh­ teenth- and nineteenth-century poems than by the title of WBY’s own poem of 1889. 14. Above] Amid MS1, MS2. 15–17.] These lines about the Phoenix draw ultimately on Ovid’s account of the mythi­ cal bird in Book 15 of the Metamorphoses. In Arthur Golding’s Elizabethan translation:

400

20

THE LOVER ASKS FORGIVENESS

Where the last Phoenix died,

And wrapped the flames above his holy head;

And still murmur and long:

O Piteous Hearts, changing till change be dead

In a tumultuous song’:

And cover the pale blossoms of your breast

With your dim heavy hair,

And trouble with a sigh for all things longing for rest

The odorous twilight there.

One bird there is that dooth renew itself and as it were Beget it self continually. The Syrians name it there A Phoenix. Neyther corne nor herbes this Phoenix liveth by, But by the jewce of frankincence and gum of Amomye. And when that of his lyfe well full fyve hundred yeeres are past, Uppon a Holmetree or uppon a Date tree at the last He makes him with his talants and his hardened bill a nest. Which when that he with Casia sweete and Nardus soft hathe drest, And strowed it with Cynnamom and Myrrha of the best, He rucketh downe uppon the same, and in the spyces dyes. Soone after, of the fathers corce men say there dooth aryse Another little Phoenix which as many yeeres must live As did his father. He (assoone as age dooth strength him give To beare the burthen) from the tree the weyghty nest dooth lift, And godlyly his cradle thence and fathers herce dooth shift. And flying through the suttle aire he gettes to Phebus towne, And there before the temple doore dooth lay his burthen downe. Strictly speaking, then, it is an error on WBY’s part to refer to ‘the last Phoenix’, since the bird is self-begetting in perpetuity; it is likely,

though, that the poet knows this, and is here adapting the myth to his specific purposes. Perhaps the alteration most pertinent to WBY’s own situation in this poem is the removal of any offspring for the male bird: this father will not have a son, even a self-begotten one. Just as Niamh was ultimately disappointed in love, and lost Oisin for ever, so here the phoenix’s immolation carries no promise of future resur­ rection. The result is a pair of mutually reflect­ ing (and bleak) cameos, one of female sexual loss, and the other of male sexual self-denial and self-defeat. 17. And wrapped] And blowing MS1 And rolled MS2, MS3 And wrapped MS4, And gathered SR. wrapped in flames] Cp. Thomas Gray, The Descent of Odin (1761), 93–94: ‘Till wrapped in flames, in ruin hurled, | Sinks the fabric of the world’. 19–20.] O piteous hearts that till all hearts are [be MS2] dead | Waver in winds of song. MS1, MS2. 19. changing till change be dead] For the effect here (along with charged imagery of air and fire), perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise (1871), ‘The Eve of Revolution, 44–46: ‘Yea, the whole air of life | Is set on fire of strife,  | Till change unmake things made and love remake’. 20.] [In the nine winds of del.] song MS3. 21–24] WBY’s various attempts at an ending may most usefully be given in series: Then cover the pale blossom of your breast With your dark shadowy hair And [bid del.] ^heave^ a sigh for [all del.] [?this] hearts without rest ^And^ Trouble the twilight there. MS1

THE LOVER ASKS FORGIVENESS

401

Then cover the pale blossom of your breast With your dark shadowy hair And heave a sigh for all hearts without rest And trouble the twilight there. MS2

With your dim shadowy hair, And [heave del.] bid a sigh for all hearts without rest [And del.] Trouble the twilight there. MS4.

And cover the pale blossom of your breast With your [long del.] dim shadowy hair, And bid a sigh for this heart without rest Trouble the twilight there. MS3

Then cover the pale blossom of your breast With your dim shadowy hair, And trouble with sighs for all hearts with­ out rest The rose-heavy twilight there. SR.

[On facing page of MS3, WBY has alter­ native lines for 23–24:] And trouble with sighs for all hearts long­ ing for rest The rose-heavy twilight there. MS3 And cover the pale blossom of your breast

And cover the pale blossoms of your breast With your dim shadowy hair, And trouble with a sigh for all hearts longing for rest The odorous twilight there. TS.

158

HE BIDS HIS BELOVED

BE AT PEACE

Date of composition, and textual and publication history. The poem was composed on 24 Sept. 1895. It appears in WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston Col­ lege), as what looks like an early (and possibly first) draft, which carries this 1895 date. A transcription is given here; a reproduction of the page along with a transcription is in Cornell WATR, 76–77. WBY composes on one side of the open book, and the fac­ ing blank page is used for a single revision (putting line 4 into what was to be its final form). At the foot of the draft, WBY dates his poem ‘Sept 24th’: there is no reason to suppose that composition had taken place before this. The poem appeared in print in the first issue of The Savoy (Jan. 1896), as the first in a pair of ‘Two Love Poems’, the other being ‘The Travail of Passion’ (S). Its next appearance was in WATR, and WBY retained the poem in all collected editions thereafter, giving it what was to be its final title in PW06. Context, reception, and interpretation. The poem, which was written as the romantic relationship between WBY and OS became more intense in the autumn of 1895, was seen by the poet himself as a love poem for OS as his soon-to-be mistress. In his 1915 draft autobiography, WBY remembered the poem in this context (Mem., 86): [.  .  .] for nearly a year [we] met in railway carriages and at picture galleries and occasionally at her house. At Dulwich Gallery she taught me to care for Watteau – she too was of Pater’s school – and at the National Gallery for the painter who pleased her best of all, Mantegna. I wrote her several poems, all curiously elaborate in style, ‘The Shadowy Horses’, and [blank] and [blank], and thought I was once more in love. I noticed that she was like the mild heroines of my plays. She seemed a part of myself. The two poems for which WBY leaves room here are identified by D. Donoghue (the edi­ tor of Mem.), as ‘He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes’ and ‘A Poet to His Beloved’; but this poem is the only one that WBY can remember in 1915 by its title (albeit in the form abandoned after publication in S). There are few signs of Watteau’s influence on WBY’s imagination at this (or any) time; and such Watteau horses as the poet might have seen at Dulwich are scarcely those of this poem; but OS’s praise must have been indebted in some measure to Walter Pater, whose piece on that artist ended, in a way that does seem suggestive for WBY’s work, ‘He was always a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all’ (Walter Pater, ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-160

HE BIDS HIS BELOVED BE AT PEACE

403

Macmillan’s Magazine 312 [Oct. 1885], 414). Whether the poem is appreciably more ‘elaborate in style’ than others of WBY’s poems of this time is hard to say: formally, it is a series of three abab quatrains made up of alexandrines, and presented as a single twelveline block; while its first eight lines examine the image of ‘Shadowy Horses’ allegorically, with images for the cardinal points being explained in carefully preserved order. The poem’s address to the loved one comes in the final quatrain, and seems to appeal to her to postpone or to conceal the onrush of these ‘Horses of Disaster’ through physical intimacy; though it is not possible to know – and the tone of the poem makes it hard to predict  – how far such closeness can continue to fend off the signs of their quasiapocalyptic approach. The meaning of WBY’s ‘Shadowy Horses’ is, of course, a matter of symbolism in poetic practice; and here the modern reception of the poem has found little in the way of solid correspondences. H. Bloom calls this ‘the most successful of the apocalyptic poems [in WATR] where a Blakean directional symbolism is intermixed with more esoteric mythological material’ (Bloom, 127), but does not provide an interpretation of the symbolism itself. The horses are included by A.R. Grossman among WBY’s ‘symbols of his own violent inwardness’ (Grossman, 177), but this does not go far in explaining what more precisely that may represent. The WATR attribution of the lines to Michael Robartes allows the poem to be aligned with oth­ ers of achieved romantic desire (unlike verses by Aedh, or ‘The Poet’ in that book), and S. Putzel notes how ‘Robartes asks his beloved to escape the tumult with him by entering the twilight world in a mystical yet sexual union,’ so that ‘The endless pursuit has in fact ended and union is imminent’ (Putzel, 182–183). J. Harwood (reading the poem explicitly in the context of WBY’s affair with OS) feels that ‘The erotic overtones [. . .] are muted, at odds with melancholy and a strong sense of isola­ tion and impending, though unspecified, defeat’, and goes further, saying that ‘The passive speaker longs for rest rather than ecstasy; the energies which might naturally animate the lovers are outside, embodied in the horses, threatening disaster rather than fulfilment’ (Harwood, 60). It may be that romantic ‘disaster’ is indeed one of the forces before which the poem quakes, and it is possible to imagine biographical speculation in which WBY is here discovering a sense of foreboding about his rela­ tionship with OS even as he registers its sexual force. In fact, nothing in the poem’s symbolism allows a reader to reach any firm conclusions about its overall symbolic import. F. Kinahan’s analysis of its symbolism led him to conclude that this poem ‘can be judged no more than one-half a success’: ‘The lyric does indeed lead the reader away from nature, as his experience of occultism had led Yeats himself; but it is by no means clear that, for all its dusky strivings, the poem manages to bring us near to what Yeats called “the archetypal ideas themselves” ’ (Kinahan, 219–220).

404

HE BIDS HIS BELOVED BE AT PEACE

Copy-text: P49.

I

5

hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake, Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white; The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night, The East her hidden joy before the morning break, The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away, The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire: O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire, The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:

Title] The Shadowy Horses S; Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be At Peace WATR. 1. a-shake] A  rare poeticism; OED finds no instance before E.B. Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), V, 209: ‘Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake’. 3–6.] F. Kinahan’s commentary on these lines begins from the judgement that ‘What Yeats was attempting here is more interesting than what he achieved’ (219): The natural images in the poem are meant to be suggestive of realities beyond them­ selves, with each of the cardinal points corresponding to one among the immor­ tal moods: North to sleep, East to hope, and so forth. The adjectives associated with those images, moreover, are meant to point through the natural symbol to the greater reality of which the natural symbol is but the reflection. Thus, for in­ stance, Yeats wants ‘clinging’ and ‘creep­ ing’ to be taken as if pausing briefly at the word ‘night’ in order to lend it a kind of non-specific colouring, then passing on through that word to group their conno­ tations around the word for which they are ultimately intended: sleep, the cling­ ing repose whose earthly type is darkness. 3. unfolds] unrolls S. 4.] The East tells all her secret joy before day­ break, S.

5. weeps in pale dew] Perhaps cp. W.M. Praed, Poems (1844), ‘A Child’s Grave’, 8: ‘the pale dew of tears’. sighs passing] sighs, passing S. 6–8.] For H. Bloom, these lines are where ‘Something of the astonishing strength of Yeats’s earlier visionary endowment can be felt in his power [.  .  .] to vivify abstraction’ (127). 6. is pouring down roses] would cover them with roses S. roses of crimson fire] ‘Crimson fire’ is something of a commonplace in nineteenth-century poetic diction, but perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 278–279: ‘an inextinguishable well | Of crimson fire’, and William Alling­ ham, Poetical Works (1884), ‘A Churchyard’, 5: ‘flowers like urns of white and crimson fire’. 7. O vanity] The rhetorical turn here inevita­ bly recalls Ecclesiastes 1.2: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire] These four things are to be correlated with the North, East, West, and South, respectively. 8. heavy] desolate S. the heavy clay] In arriving at this phrase, it is possible that WBY touches (perhaps subliminally) on the tradition of seeing the flesh as clay, common in Christian writing and hymnody; cp. e.g. Isaac Watts, Works (1810), Hymn 54, 13: ‘My soul would leave this heavy clay’.

HE BIDS HIS BELOVED BE AT PEACE

10

405

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast, Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,

And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

MS version in Boston College notebook: The Dark Horses I hear^always dark^ [the del.] horses [of disaster, their manes del.] their long manes a-shake, Their hoofs [laden del.] heavy with Tumult, their eyes glimmering white; The North unrolls above [them del. the del] the clinging, creeping night, The East tells them her secret joy before day-break, [on facing page] The East her hidden joy before the morning break The West weeps in pale dew, and sighs passing away, The South [pours down del.] [is heaping round them del.] is pouring down roses of crimson fire: [A del.] O vanity of sleep, [and del.] hope, [and del.] dream, [and keen del.] endless desire; The horses of disaster beat the ringing clay: [Let del.] Beloved let your eyes [be del.] half [closed del.] close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall about my breast [And drown del.] Drowning love’s lonely hour in [dropping del.] deep twilights of rest, That we forget their [streaming manes del.] tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

9–10.] The motif here is a recurrent one in the poems of WATR; the earliest appearance of the motif is in ‘The Heart of the Woman’ (com­ posed Mar. – Jul. 1894), 7–8: ‘The shadowy blossom of my hair | Will hide us from the bit­ ter storm’. The lines here are closely paralleled in ‘He tells of a Valley full of Lovers’ (composed in later 1896), with ‘cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes’ (4) and the instruc­ tion, ‘O women, bid the young men lay | Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair’ (5–6). Undoubtedly, WBY intended the recurrence of these elements to be noticed; and the poem printed along with this one in S, ‘The Travail of Passion’, has the line ‘We will bend down and loosen our hair over you’ (7).

The sources of this recurring motif have been discussed often with reference to figurative art (especially that of the Pre-Raphaelites, which was well known to the poet, partly by way of his father’s admiration for it). A  specifically poetic parallel, however, deserves also to be borne in mind – cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Before Parting’, 10–12: ‘To make your tears fall where your soft hair lay | All blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise | Over my face and eyes’. 10. over] about S. 12. tumultuous feet] WBY’s phrase here recalls his line in the 1895 version of ‘The Madness of King Goll’, ‘A tramping of tremendous feet’ (54).

159

HE TELLS OF THE PERFECT

BEAUT Y

Date of composition. The 1893 notebook version of this poem (Burns Collection, Bos­ ton College) carries a date of ‘Dec. 1895’ in WBY’s hand. The poet is here dating a fair copy, so there will have been efforts at revision before this point; nevertheless, later 1895 is a plausible time for WBY to have been engaged in remodelling the short poem that had previously been ‘A Salutation’: in Sept. 1895, he had returned to another of the short poems of The Rosy Cross. Lyrics gathering, working also in the 1893 note­ book: his revision of ‘A Song of the Rosy Cross’ was published in Oct. It is likely that this return to the intense poems for MG of 1891 and after included a creative reencounter with ‘A Salutation’, in the course of the autumn of 1895. Having published the poem in 1896, WBY continued to work at it; and although it is not possible to date the sheet in AG’s possession, it is very likely that this was written by WBY at Coole Park: he stayed there as the guest of AG in Jul. and Sept. 1897, and again in Jun. and Jul. 1898, and it is probable that he produced the drafts there in one or the other of these periods. Work continued on the poem up until a late stage before the publica­ tion of WATR in Apr. 1899. Context and interpretation. Just as in an earlier phase of its development, when it was ‘A Salutation’, this poem is closely related to WBY’s feelings towards MG. When he used the earlier lyric as the basis of this new poem in late 1895, WBY retained the element of address; and until the summer of either 1897 or 1898, the addressee was the ‘daughter of the Island of Woods’. This establishes immediate links with much earlier poetry by WBY, as far back as IoS, but the most immediate imaginative connections are, in terms of poetry, with ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and, in terms of WBY’s plans and activities in the mid- to late 1890s, with the scheme for an Irish ‘Castle of the Heroes’ on Castle Island in Lough Key, Co. Roscommon. Although it may be something of a stretch to see Castle Island as an ‘Island of Woods’ (its size of just over half an acre does contain trees, but is also largely occupied by a folly ‘castle’ built in 1800, on the site of earlier fortified residences), this location for the headquarters of WBY’s projected Celtic Mystical Order was one which the poet associated especially with MG. After visiting the spot in Apr. 1895, WBY thought of it as a place where he and MG could jointly participate in what might become an Irish Eleusis – the centre of a mystery rite, contributing to Ireland’s spiritual and political awakening: MG’s interest in political awakening helped her, for a time, to tolerate WBY’s devotion to the spiritual version. The textual and publication history of this poem suggests that ‘O daughter of the Island of Woods’ remained its first line until a late stage, and it might even have been reinstated for a time subsequent to DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-161

HE TELLS OF THE PERFECT BEAUTY

407

WBY’s arriving at a new opening line for the poem in 1897 or 1898. It is possible that the increasing closeness of WBY’s attachment to MG in late 1898 had something to do with this – possible too, that the momentous revelations of 8 Dec. from MG that year, when the poet learned about her long-running attachment to Lucien Millevoye and her children who had been fathered by the French politician, played a part in his decision finally to abandon the poem’s direct address. In its first appearances, the poem was assigned to ‘O’Sullivan the Red’, imagined to be addressing his beloved, ‘Mary Lavell’. This semi-fictional character of WBY’s (used also in his short fiction of the time, where he would eventually mutate into Red Hanra­ han) cropped up a good deal in the poems he published in The Savoy in 1895–1896: ‘He Remembers Forgotten Beauty’ was ‘O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell’ in Jul. 1896, ‘To the Secret Rose’ was ‘O’Sullivan Rua to the Secret Rose’ in Sept., and ‘He Reproves the Curlew’ appeared as ‘O’Sullivan Rua to the Curlew’ in Nov. the same year; the poem that would eventually become ‘Maid Quiet’ was ‘O’Sullivan the Red Upon his Wanderings’ in The New Review in Aug. 1897. Between 1895–1897 and the preparation of the poems for WATR, WBY evidently abandoned this character as a supposed source for the lyrics in question, substituting (in the case of this poem) the figure of Aodh who (according to WBY’s notes to WATR), because his name ‘is not merely the Irish form of Hugh, but the Irish for fire, is fire burning by itself,’ as well as being (more mysteriously) ‘the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers continually before all that it loves’. Such explanations of the name, at once diffuse in reference and vague in signification, suggest a motive of de-dramatizing poems that were already, perhaps, unconvincingly assigned to a dramatic/fictional character; but that they were still unconvincing to the poet him­ self with their new designations is suggested by his relatively quick decision to abandon these names in later collected editions. The poem’s development from ‘A Salutation’, composed some four years earlier, at first preserves and makes more explicit the link with MG, then sinks that connection some distance beneath the surface. What WBY does preserve in this process is the earlier poem’s central conceit, of the stars as ‘unlabouring’, and as the manifestations of the ‘beauty’ which demands the obeisance of the first-person voice of the poet. Both poems, also, speak about (or for) ‘poets’: the poets’ role becomes grander in revi­ sion, as the ‘labour [. . .] To let a little beauty be’ of ‘A Salutation’ becomes ‘the poets labouring all their days | To build a perfect beauty in rhyme’ (2–3). The metaphor derives from Milton, ‘Lycidas’, 10–11: ‘He knew | Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme’; and WBY was making full use of this, having already by the summer of 1895 started work on ‘He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes’ (where line 5, ‘Building a sor­ rowful loveliness’, is present in the earliest draft version). Returning to the metaphor now, WBY combines it with a more marked level of abstraction, to become ‘building a perfect beauty’; yet this register of platonic ideals is put up (so to speak) only to be immediately torn down again by the particular reality of ‘a woman’s gaze’. Unlike ‘a perfect beauty’ (which is, presumably, over and above all of its worldly instances), ‘a woman’s gaze’ seems likely to be the gaze of one woman rather than any woman, or women in general. ‘Overthrown’, too, requires a second look: the verb creates momen­ tarily the assumption that it is the ‘rhyme’, the thing that the poets have ‘built’, which

408

HE TELLS OF THE PERFECT BEAUTY

is ‘Overthrown’; but in fact it is ‘The poets’ who have been thus brought down. The contrast (which was already present in ‘A Salutation’) between labour and what is ‘unlabouring’ casts into doubt not the transcendent power of what has been built, but the human advantages (to ‘the poets’) of putting in that work; unlike them, the stars perform no labour and, in this, are akin to the beloved whose sharing in the essence of ‘the perfect beauty’ means that she, like them, may demand a total servitude from the poet/lover. (This sequence of ideas is thrown strikingly into reverse later in ‘Adam’s Curse’, where the word ‘labour’ is reassigned to real women in relation to their being ‘beautiful’.) In the 1897–1898 version of his attempted novel, The Speckled Bird, WBY gives an account of the religious/aesthetic teachings of the hero’s eccentric father, in which labour plays a significant role (SB, 98): He held that when we see a beautiful thing we see a moment of the spiritual paradise and that when St. Bernard wrote, ‘All things are subject to the com­ mands of the Virgin even God himself ’ and ‘God is subject to her because she is his mother’ meant that she is beauty, and that beauty is the ancient stillness from which all labouring things, the maker of the world and the saviour of the world and the ministering angels, have come and whither they shall return at the consummation of days. The ‘labouring ships’ of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (7) are perhaps also caught up in the ‘labouring’/ ‘unlabouring’ contrast which WBY engineers in this later piece. The poem is perhaps too fully integrated in the symbolic scheme of WATR to have attracted any extensive commentary on its own account. An early review, which quoted the poem almost in its entirety, thought it essentially self-explanatory: ‘Aedh, the type of pure abiding passion . . . understands the greatest power in all our world, and says [quotes lines 2–8]’ (The Bookman, May 1899). Mutatis mutandis, modern criticism has continued to be in the nature of paraphrase. S. Putzel’s treatment goes a little further, suggesting that it ‘reveals Aedh’s almost schizophrenic ambivalence towards the Ideal,’ because ‘By bowing down to Ideal Beauty and by bowing out of the objective world, Aedh and the master poet who created him are able to build their perfect beauty, but at great cost’ (Putzel, 196). J. Harwood’s biographical reading of the poem notes how, at a time when WBY was still romantically involved with OS, it ‘remains clearly a poem to Maud Gonne’: ‘The iconography of eyes and eyelids, always associated with Maud Gonne,’ and ‘the tone of hopeless longing’ mark it as this, along with ‘the poet’s convic­ tion that his situation will remain unchanged’ (Harwood, 72). Quoting the last lines of the poem, E. Cullingford reflects on how the beloved is offered ‘infinitely extended poetic service’, and how WBY ‘worshipped her completeness as if she were a replacement for the God who no longer sufficed’ (27). Textual and publication history. The earliest text for this poem is that of its revi­ sion, for WBY develops it from the earlier poem (in two MS collections devoted to MG), ‘A Salutation’ (1891). In the Boston College notebook, WBY enters the poem in what looks like fair copy (there is only one deletion, which is likely to be that of a slip of the pen) (MSa); on a facing page WBY tries out revisions of lines 2–4 (MSb).

HE TELLS OF THE PERFECT BEAUTY

409

The poem was printed in The Senate, Mar. 1896 (Sen), as the first of two pieces (the other being ‘A Poet to His Beloved’), under the general title of ‘O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell’. The following month, both poems were reprinted in United Ireland; first in the issue for 4 Apr., but again in the 11 Apr. issue, under a slightly different title, and in a text that corrected misprints in Sen which had been carried through to the 4 Apr. printing (UI later). Here, the poetry carried an editorial note, prompted by WBY himself (CL 2, 21–22): Mr. W.B. Yeats writes to us to say that the following poem, ‘O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell,’ which appeared on our front page last week, quoted from the Senate, ‘got a good deal on his nerves’ when he saw it in that journal. His proofsheets, he says, miscarried and so the result. The following is the correct version of the poem, or rather poems. After this, the next textual evidence for the poem’s evolution comes again in MS form, in a single sheet of writing paper laid in to AG’s copy of WBY’s P95 (now in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University), just after the page of the last poem in that book. The sheet has a draft of the poem on each side (Emory a. and Emory b.), and it preserves the beginnings of a process by which the poem was to lose its previous first line. What is probably the next text chronologically is a single TS sheet (Berg Collec­ tion, NYPL) which seems to have been part of WBY’s typewritten material building towards the volume WATR: this carries a title in WBY’s hand, and incorporates the (arduously arrived at) new opening of the sheet left with AG, corresponding closely throughout with the WATR text of the poem (TS). Reproductions and transcriptions of this material are included in Cornell WATR 133–137. In what would otherwise be a smooth textual history from this point, something of a disturbance occurs, in the form of a text which appeared twice in U.S. publications just before and at the time of WATR’s publication in Apr. 1899: The Living Age carried the poem in Mar. 1899 (LA), and an identical version was included in Apr. in the journal’s monthly round-up miscellany, The Eclectic Magazine and Monthly Edition of The Living Age (EM). While other poems from WATR appeared here in the course of 1899, they are textually extremely close to the printed book; but in the case of this poem, another text was used: the older first line is present (as are the consequences of its rhyme), and there are other textual features that indicate an authorial version other than that of WATR. It is possible that this shows an instability in the text which, although it had been resolved by the publication of WATR in Apr., had continued sufficiently long before then – perhaps up to proof stage (the proofs for the book are lost) – to put this version of the text in the hands of the American magazine editors. After WATR, the text of the poem (with the exception of its title, which changes in 1906) remains stable, and it is retained in all WBY’s collected editions.

410

HE TELLS OF THE PERFECT BEAUTY

Copy-text: P49.

O

5

cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,

The poets labouring all their days

To build a perfect beauty in rhyme

Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze

And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:

And therefore my heart will bow, when dew

Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,

Before the unlabouring stars and you.

Title] No title, MS; O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell I Sen UI 4 Apr. 1896; Two Poems by O’Sullivan the Red concerning Mary Lavell I UI 11 Apr. 1896; The Perfect Beauty TS; O daughter of the Island of Woods! LA, EM; Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty WATR. 1.] O daughter of the Island of Woods; MS, Sen, UI; O daughter of the Island of Woods! LA, EM. Emory a. has four attempts at a first line, all deleted: [Woman of pale eyelids and dim eyes] [O cloud pale^white^ woman with the dim eyes] [O woman with pale eyelids and dim eyes] [O woman with the dream-heavy eyes]. The final, undeleted line is O woman with [cloud del.] pale eyelids and dim eyes. Emory b. begins [O cloud-pale daughter of the Island of woods del.]. 2.] We poets have laboured all our days MSa; The poets who labour all their days MSb; We poets labour all our days Sen, UI, The poets who labour all their days TS, LA, EM. 3. a perfect] the perfect MSa. 4. Are] Still MSa. 5. brood] The singular here is adopted partly as a consequence of the freedom offered by the change of rhyme, once ‘O daughter of the Island of Woods’ has been dropped. ‘Broods’ had been unusual, and perhaps obtrusively so: WBY’s word is approximately OED 3., ‘A race, a kind; a species of men, animals, or things, having common qualities’, applied to the stars. Here, the plural is a little confusing (though ultimately defensible); but it is nota­ ble that WBY took the opportunity, once the

need for a rhyme was removed, and the word was further inside its line, to adopt the more usual singular form. In so doing, he pitches the word against the tendency of its use, which was (as OED goes on to observe) ‘usu­ ally contemptuous; = ‘swarm, crew, crowd’’. 5–6.] And [^by^ MSa.] the heavens’ unlabour­ ing broods; And therefore my heart bows down anew MSa, Sen, UI, LA, EM. And by the heavens’ unlabouring broods; And therefore my heart will bow when [the Emory a.] dew Emory a., b. And by the unlabouring brood of the skies: And therefore my heart will bow when dew TS. 6–7. when dew | Is dropping sleep] The phrase seems deliberately to recall ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 5–6: ‘peace comes dropping slow, | Dropping from the veils of the morn­ ing’. Dew, usually, is a thing that might be expected to drop (rather than itself drop­ ping something else); in the earlier poem, the repeated ‘dropping’ and ‘morning’ evoke dew without naming it, when what is named is in fact the abstract noun ‘peace’, just as here the abstract ‘sleep’ is being dropped by the dew. 7–8.] At hush of evening, till God burn time [Time Sen, UI], Before the unlabouring stars and you. MSa, Sen, UI, LA, EM.

160

THE LOVER SPEAKS

TO THE HEARERS OF

HIS SONGS IN THE

COMING DAYS

Date of composition. The poem was composed in Nov. 1895. The second MS version is dated thus by WBY, and it is likely that this was the month when he was writing the short story in which the lines are incorporated. A letter to Edmund Gosse of 23 Nov. speaks of being ‘busy working against time at a wretched story which has in the end refused to achieve itself ’ (CL 1, 476): it may be that this is ‘The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red’, and that the poem was intended to help the piece ‘achieve itself ’ (though the story was not published until Apr. the following year). Fictional context. In WBY’s short story, ‘The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red’ (first publ. in The New Review, Apr. 1896) the itinerant poet-hero in dejection visits the grave of his beloved: He had stopped a while at her grave before beginning to climb, but when twi­ light was falling and his work for the day at an end, he took the narrow, precipi­ tous boreen trodden into brown mud by the asses of generations of turf cutters, and was soon sitting under the wild-rose tree that was the only monument of so great passion and beauty. He sat there full of thoughts and memories, amid the dropping dew, and watched the stars coming out one by one, between the branches of the wild-rose tree, until gradually the old passion, softened with a new pity and remorse born from the fading of his powers and from the loosen­ ing of his hold upon life, had filled his eyes with tears. His fingers began to play with the wires of the little square harp and his lips to murmur, as the mood shaped itself into a song; and presently he sang to the now forgotten tune, so full of fathomless regret despite its uncouth name, The Herdsmen of Roughley O’Byrne: [poem follows] The attempt at a folk context for these lines is perhaps less than completely convincing, and it is hard to imagine them being sung to any popular air. That the beloved should be dead is a relevant contextual factor in the poem; and here, the poet too feels ‘the loosen­ ing of his hold upon life’, so that the whole piece functions as a lyric consideration of the lovers’ afterlife. In this respect, the afterlife of lovers on society’s (and propriety’s) fringe DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-162

412

THE LOVER SPEAKS TO THE HEARERS

is held in imaginative parallel with the afterlife of a poet’s works: each of them blown about, if not blown away, in the ‘violet air’. Context, reception, and interpretation. When composing this poem, WBY had recently moved into Arthur Symons’s rooms in Temple Court and was enjoying a degree of freedom which facilitated his intensifying romantic relationship with OS. There may well be some influence from this personal situation on the poem, especially if the affair between WBY and OS is being seen in the Paolo and Francesca–like plight of ‘my beloved and me’ (7): if Dante’s lovers from the Inferno are indeed somewhere in the poet’s mind (as ‘fly | Amid the hovering, piteous, penitential throng’ hints), then the point of contact with the poet’s own situation is that they are illicit lovers, whose passion goes against the norms of their society. For WBY and OS, too, any discovery of their relationship (which was to become more fully sexual very soon, in 1896) would be a matter of scandal and (for OS certainly) social and legal peril. The relationship was also strictly an adulterous one (OS being married), and while such a sin would have counted for little in religious terms to WBY at this time, its shadow neverthe­ less falls across the poem. ‘All that sin I  wove in song’ (5) was ‘the great sin’ up to 1922, and WBY allows himself to flirt here with the decadent dimensions of the poète maudit (with which he would have been familiar, especially given his friendship with Symons). In connection with this, the poem’s anti-religious ironies  – figured fairly explicitly as anti-Catholic ones  – are key to its intended effect. The poet-speaker in this lyric makes a link between the posthumous fortunes of his own poetry (which will live with the obediently church-going women) and the ultimate good fortune of his and his beloved’s rescue through the good offices of Maurya (the Irish form of Mary). In terms of WBY’s own situation, the poem is another expression of his hope that the ‘sweet cry’ of poetry can be made to harmonize with love; at the same time, it is an admission of the dangerous distance between these two things. S. Putzel notes how the poem in WATR expresses the poet’s ‘fear that until the end of time he will fly after his Ideal in perpetual pursuit’, but also a confidence that ‘his songs will outlast him and will obscure Christian piety’, so that ‘In his last statement of the volume, Hanrahan affirms the power of poetry’ (Putzel, 202). But the poem has seldom received detailed attention, even though it has been admired. Most extravagant praise came from F. Reid in 1915, who saw this as an example of ‘the greatest quality of all in Mr. Yeats’s poetry – its sheer beauty of sound’ (Reid, 85–86): What music of any modern poet have we to set beside the slow, trailing splen­ dour of those lines? Mr. Yeats’s characteristic rhythms approach to the rhythms of nature. They are wavering, passionate, deliberately uncertain; now lingering, dying like faint echoes, now rich and full and triumphant as the breaking of the sea. This is perhaps more impressed than it is (as criticism) impressive; and it can hardly be tested against the text. Formally, in fact, the poem belongs to the large group of WBY’s 1890s lyrics that employ an eight-line format (here, rhymed so as to form a

THE LOVER SPEAKS TO THE HEARERS

413

Petrarchan sonnet’s octave: abbacddc) with line lengths that gesture strongly towards the alexandrine. Text and publication history. Two drafts of the poem are on consecutive pages of WBY’s 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College): these copies in ink are almost without corrections, so neither is a first (or early) draft, and the second is dated, showing that the poet considered the lines in some sense completed (MS1 and MS2). The lines were first published in WBY’s short story ‘The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red’ in The New Review for Apr. 1896 (NR), and next in the revised version of the story (now ‘The Vision of Hanrahan the Red’) in The Secret Rose (1897) (SR). They were included as a poem in WATR, and contained in all subsequent collected editions by WBY. Copy-text: P49.

O

5

women, kneeling by your altar-rails long hence, When songs I wove for my beloved hide the prayer, And smoke from this dead heart drifts through the violet air And covers away the smoke of myrrh and frankincense; Bend down and pray for all that sin I wove in song,

Title] No title, MS1, MS2, NR, SR; Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of his Songs in Coming Days WATR; A  Lover Speaks to the Hearers of His Songs in Coming Days PW06 and all collected editions up to and including Later Poems (1931). 1. women] Colleens NR, SR, WATR. 2. songs . . . hide] song . . . hides NR, SR, WATR. 3. the violet air] Cp. Ernest Dowson, Verses (1896), ‘Chanson Sans Paroles’, 1–2 and 26–27: ‘In the deep violet air, | Not a leaf is stirred’. Although this poem was not col­ lected until 1896, it is likely that it was known to WBY in 1895. 4.] O acolyte swinging the myrrh and frank­ incense | When smoke from my burnt heart blot out the purple air MS1. 5. Bend] Kneel MS1 Kneel del. bend MS2. all the sin] Later Poems (1922) and after; the great sin MS1, MS2, NR., SR, WATR, PW06,

CWVP08. WBY’s speaker here takes pains to talk up his own evil, in ways that chime with certain aspects of ‘decadent’ poetry in the 1890s. The shock value of ‘sin’ diminished with time, but more slowly in Ireland than elsewhere, and Austin Clarke was still excited by the word’s promise of unseen evil in 1965 (Mikhail vol. 2, 349): I took down from the shelf The Wind among the Reeds and read it carefully in order to see if I  could find out the truth from the poems themselves. [. . .] Certainly in some of them there were indications that the poet’s relations with Maud Gonne had been immoral! [. . .] I was among those hearers as I read the line ‘Bend down and pray for all that sin I wove in song’. (Any ‘sin’ here is more likely to involve OS than MG, at least in 1895.) song] songs MS2.

414

THE LOVER SPEAKS TO THE HEARERS

Till the Attorney for Lost Souls cry her sweet cry, And call to my beloved and me: ‘No longer fly Amid the hovering, piteous, penitential throng.’

6.] Till Maurya [Mary PW06, CWVP08] of the wounded heart cry a sweet cry, NR. SR, WATR, PW06 CWVP08. Attorney for Lost Souls] WBY adopted this phrase in Later Poems (1922). ‘Attorney’ is OED 4., ‘An advocate, pleader, mediator’, which the dictionary flags as possibly obso­ lete. Perhaps cp. Shakespeare, Richard III, IV iv 436–438: ‘Be the attorney of my love to her; | Plead what I will be, not what I have been; | Not my deserts, but what I  will deserve’. WBY’s terminology is nevertheless odd, and it is possible that by 1922 the poet was much more willing than he had been in the 1890s to strike a pose of religious provocation: the Virgin Mary as Mediatrix is an ancient appellation and, although Roman Catho­ lic theology over centuries has been care­ ful to distinguish the secondary mediation of the Virgin from the primary mediatory

role of Christ, Protestant critique had from early times seized on this Mediatrix role as evidence of Roman Catholicism’s willing­ ness to bypass the teaching of 1 Timothy 2:5: ‘For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’. Although using an archaic or poetic sense of ‘attorney’, WBY inevitably allows the reader to stumble over the word’s more usual mean­ ing of a practitioner of law, and provider of legal services: in terms of religious sensibili­ ties, it is something of a crude piece of delib­ erate affront. What is more (and in terms of poetic quality, what is more serious) is that the earlier version achieved the same purpose (of challenging orthodox religious pieties) without raising its voice. S. Putzel writes that this revision ‘turns Hanrahan’s final prayer into self-parody’ (Putzel, 202). 8. throng.] throngs MS2 throng! NR.

161

THE TRAVAIL OF PASSION

Date of composition. Nov. to Dec. 1895, possibly finished early Jan. 1896. The two-line frag­ ment in the 1893 notebook (see Text and publication history) is on a page immediately follow­ ing a draft dated by WBY ‘Nov. 1895’, and on the next page is a draft poem dated ‘Dec. 1895’. The bulk of the composition must have taken place somewhere other than the notebook, but it is not possible to know whether the two lines are the germ of a poem composed in full at a later date or a revision of something that had been composed already. Since the poem was published in the second week of Jan. 1896, and there is no sign of it before Nov./Dec., it seems reasonable to suppose that WBY worked on it in the last month of 1895, though possibly also in the first week of Jan. 1896 (since he was sharing accommodation at Fountain Court with Arthur Symons, editor of The Savoy, last-minute copy was a practical possibility). Sources, reception, and interpretation. In 1902, John Quinn was able to report that this was one of the poems which Sir Charles Dilke (politician and owner of The Athenaeum), then coming to WBY’s work for the first time, admired in WATR (LTWBY 1, 65). Aside from this, early reaction to the poem is thin on the ground. This is understandable, since the poem is not one which in the early years of its publication was altogether unproblem­ atic. At the heart of this poem is a daringly direct (and artistically risky) punning confla­ tion of the Passion of Christ with the idea of sexual passion between lovers. J. Unterecker noted that WBY ‘puns on the double sense of passion to describe his Christ-like lovers comforted’ (A Reader’s Guide to W.B. Yeats (1957), 93); but this accurate enough formu­ lation fails to gauge the shock value which WBY almost certainly knows about in the poem. D.H. Purdy, in a very useful reading, still registers something of this shock while sorely underestimating the capacity of the poem’s original audience in The Savoy to relish it (they ‘took [the poem’s allusions] in a spirit of piety, and were taken in’). For Purdy, the poem is also operating in ways of which the poet himself was innocent: ‘Today, ‘The Tra­ vail of Passion’ reads in a way Yeats could not have imagined, the masochistic dream of a person of limited sexual experience’ (Biblical Echo and Allusion in the Work of W.B. Yeats (1994), 50). Yet neither the readers of 1896, nor the poet then and afterwards, should be assumed to be quite so oblivious to the workings of the poem. H. Adams, who regards it as ‘a curious effort by the poet to speak in the voices of moods which or whom he imag­ ines having invaded him in the form of sexual passion’, takes more judicious measure of the poem’s blasphemous energy (Adams, 72–73): This ambiguous treatment implies that any time sexual passion occurs the moods descend and enact the Passion of Christ and that the descent is the DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-163

416

THE TRAVAIL OF PASSION

Passion. This is certainly the poet’s ultimate effort to conflate the religious and the sensual, but he looks away from the bold general assertion and, instead, returns at once to the more mundane theme of the loss of his beloved. [. . .] Per­ haps the poet’s effort to join spirituality and sexuality in the ambiguous word ‘passion’ is doomed to failure and is itself the sin the poet fears. R. Ellmann’s 1954 reading took for granted that this poem was addressed to the lilies and roses of the last line, and that it ‘holds back the person to whom it is addressed until the close, so that the sentence seems to struggle in the middle describing the travail, and to reach its difficult end simultaneously with the revelation of the object of such suffering’ (Identity, 67). But this is by no means the obvious, or even perhaps the natural reading: the first-person plural speakers, who address an otherwise-unspecified ‘you’, might just as easily (or more easily, indeed) be promising that their loosened hair will be heavy not just with dew but also with lilies and roses. Ellmann’s interpretation nevertheless regis­ tered the religious recklessness of how WBY ‘implies that an immortal passion incar­ nates itself in every true lover as in Christ’, even if he found the poem ‘unsatisfying’, since ‘it does not have enough force to warrant its powerful religious images and their special use’ (Identity, 68). In this regard, it may be useful to understand the poem as being delib­ erately situated in a quasi-blasphemous relation to the religious orthodoxies, or at least the commonly accepted proprieties, which re-purposes ‘powerful religious images’ by re-directing their ‘power’ from the religious sphere to the world of the sensual and the transgressive. Undoubtedly, WBY was at some level comfortable with transgression, and his career in ritual magic might well be understood in such a context. A physical identi­ fication with Christ’s Passion was one of the features of GD ritual; and when he entered the first grade of the Second Order in Jan. 1893, WBY underwent as part of the 5 = 6 Portal ritual a symbolic tying to a cross, after which he received (again, symbolically) the stigmata. This is unlikely to have any direct bearing on the poem, but it does establish a magical, as well as an erotic/decadent dimension for its imagery and development. Iden­ tification of the human fate with that of Christ has a long history, but its artistic impli­ cations in the late nineteenth century inevitably take on a ‘decadent’ aspect. The final stanza of Oscar Wilde’s poem, ‘Humanitad’ (Poems, 1881) sets a kind of agenda for this: Nay, nay, we are but crucified, and though

The bloody sweat falls from our brows like rain,

Loosen the nails – we shall come down I know,

Staunch the red wounds – we shall be whole again,

No need have we of hyssop-laden rod,

That which is purely human, that is Godlike, that is God.

(Wilde’s ‘red wounds’ may be detected in the MS draft fragment of WBY’s poem – see note on 3–4.) E. Cullingford, rightly identifying the poem as ‘one of Yeats’s most deca­ dent works’, implies that an 1890s context might well be useful in approaching the writ­ ing here, and her analysis is not at odds with this when she says that the poem ‘describes

THE TRAVAIL OF PASSION

417

a male sexual martyrdom’ (52). The strength of sexuality in the poem, while it is matched by some other pieces in WATR, is especially striking because of its religious imagery; and as late as 1913, WBY was including this as one of his ‘Love Poems’, thus continuing the association between his own passion and the Passion of Christ. J.M. Hassett (Yeats and the Muses (2010)) sees in the voice of the speakers, which he associates with muse-led mediation ‘between the spiritual and material worlds’ ‘an incarnation of passion analo­ gized to the incarnation and passion of Christ’. Hassett interprets the speakers’ promise to loosen their perfumed hair over ‘you’ as an evocation of Luke 7:37–38, which is quite possibly a source upon which WBY draws here: ‘And behold, a woman in the city which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisees’ house, brought an Alabaster box of ointment,  And stood at his feet behind him, weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment’. Hassett goes on to identify this woman with Mary Magdalene (‘one of the traditional embodiments of the Wisdom figure’), and then Mary Magdalene with OS; he summarizes the situation created by the poem thus (22): In ‘The Travail of Passion,’ the passionate relationship of the Wisdom figures with the Christ-like poet reflects Yeats’s perception of his sexual experience with Shakespear as an encounter with the White Goddess. The poet experi­ ences Beauty, another name for Wisdom, but the price is death. Hassett does not mention another perfectly likely source for lines 6–7, in John 12:3: ‘Then took Mary a pound of ointment, of Spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.’ There is little need to rely on any Gravesian White Goddess figure here to see that WBY is identifying at some level with the suffering Christ, and that the ministrations of women bearing luxurious ointments are more to do with sexual fantasy than with any allegorical and disembodied ‘Wisdom’. The identification with Christ is in part an artistic matter: as T. Balinisteanu has written, here ‘The discipline of Christ is the discipline of the artist,’ and ‘In its symbolist appeal to sensory memory, the poem enhances the experience of epiphanic revelation of the condition of the artist’ (Religion and Aesthetic Experience on Joyce and Yeats [2015], 173). In these respects, the poem may be said to be of its time, as long as that time is understood to be one in which religiously daring imagery and themes were marks of a self-consciously ‘Decadent’ avant-garde. Having acknowledged this, it should be remembered that the poem was not likely to be read in the same way in Dublin as it would be in London. In an Irish context (which its surrounding poems in WATR necessarily provide), the poem’s religious imagery looks studiedly sacrilegious; and its focus on the Passion seems angled at what would be understood as specifically Roman Catholic aspects of devotional meditation and iconography. The freedom with which WBY engages in his personal appropriation of this imagery may not be without an underlying sectarian energy. Text and publication history. The only MS material for this poem which survives is in the 1893 notebook (Burns Collection, Boston College), where two lines are drafted, corresponding to lines 3–4 of the finished poem (MS). The poem was published as

418

THE TRAVAIL OF PASSION

the second of ‘Two Love Poems’ in The Savoy Jan. 1896 (S), and next in WATR. It was included by WBY in all subsequent collected editions.

Copy-text: P49.

W

5

hen the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide; When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay; Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side, The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;

Title] ‘Two Love Poems’: ‘The Travail of Pas­ sion’ S. ‘Travail’ is a word with strongly biblical resonance: in the King James Bible, it appears 26 times, often with the meaning of OED n.1, 4: ‘The labour and pain of child-birth’ (e.g. John 16:21: ‘A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come’). The word also means ‘Bodily or mental labour or toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature; exertion; trouble; hardship; suffering’ (OED n.1, 1) (e.g. 1 Thessalonians 2:9: ‘remember, brethren, our labour and travail’). In the Book of Common Prayer Communion service, the priest invites the congregation with Cranmer’s version of Matthew 11:28: ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I  will refresh you’. 1.] The effect is probably intended to be paint­ erly, of angels with lutes around an opened heavenly door, but no specific artistic source has been identified. 3–4.] [O del.] Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorn, the way | Crowded with bitter faces, the red wound in palm and side MS. Our hearts endure the plaited thorn, the crowded way, | The knotted scourge, the nailpierced hands, the wounded side, S. 3. plaited thorns] Perhaps cp. William Sharp, The Human Inheritance (1882), ‘Christmas Eve’, 13–14: ‘And there I  saw a shadowy crown, | Of plaited thorns ’twas wrought’. 5. vinegar-heavy] This is the reading of Selected Poems (1921), retained thereafter.

hissop-heavy S hyssop-heavy WATR-A Selec­ tion from the Love Poetry of WBY (1913). WBY corrects this in line with the three bibli­ cal references to the sponge held up to Christ’s lips during the crucifixion (Matthew 27:48, Mark 15:36, John 19:29), where it is vinegar, and not hyssop, which is the proffered mois­ ture. This mistaking of vinegar for hyssop (OED 1.a: ‘A small bushy aromatic herb of the genus Hyssopus’) is relatively seldom made in poetry; however, it occurs in Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘Humanitad’ (see Sources, reception, and interpretation) and crops up the follow­ ing year in Sharp’s The Human Inheritance, where ‘A New Hope: A  Vision of the Tra­ vail of Humanity’ has: ‘he sees the scourge, the cross, the hyssop rod, | Death, and the grave – beyond, the glory of God!’ (214–215). The ‘Travail’ in Sharp’s title may suggest that WBY knew this, as well as the Wilde poem. It is less likely, though still possible, that he had read Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World (1891) VI, 410–411: ‘For our King’s drink the hyssop on the sponge! | For our King’s purple the slow-trickling blood!’. Kedron] Selected Poems (1921) and after. Kidron S, WATR-A Selection from the Love Poetry of WBY (1913). Kedron (or Kidron) is a valley between the eastern edge of Jerusa­ lem and the Dead Sea; it separates the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives. Kedron is the site of Jesus’s betrayal by Judas in John 18:1: ‘When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his disciples over the Brook

THE TRAVAIL OF PASSION

419

We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,

That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Kedron, where was a garden, into the which he entered and his disciples’. In the Old Tes­ tament, this is ‘Kidron’, where King David conducts his people fleeing from Absalom in 2 Samuel 15:23: ‘And all the country wept with a loud voice, and all the people passed over: the King also himself passed over the brook Kidron, and all the people passed over, toward the way of the wilderness’. the flowers by Kedron stream] These flow­ ers point to the location in mind here as being that of the garden of Gethsamene. In a poem first collected in 1900, KT (who is most unlikely to have enjoyed WBY’s poem) celebrated Christ as a lover of gardens: ‘There was a garden where He took | His pleasures oft, by Kedron’s brook’ (‘The Garden’, The Flower of Peace: A Collection of Devotional Poetry [1900]). 7. heavy with dew] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870): ‘April’: ‘The Doom of King Acrisius’, 595–596: ‘her unbound yellow hair | Heavy with dew and washing of the sea’. 8.] R. Ellmann (see Sources, reception and inter­ pretation above) took this line as the deferred

announcement of the identity of whoever (or whatever) the voices in the poem address. This is possible  – though it requires some allegorical or symbolical travail to see why they should be shaking their hair out over flowers; also possible is that the flowers are contained in the hair, along with the dew. Lilies  . . . roses] WBY’s deployment of lilies and roses in his 1890s poetry has numerous literary, symbolic, and religious elements. Here, cp. line 11 of the 1891 poem ‘The White Birds’, ‘Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be’, and see note. It may be significant that WBY decides here to echo imagery and phraseology of a poem associated very strongly with the early phase of his love for MG: if the lilies and roses are to be shed on the ‘you’ of the present poem, then perhaps (however subliminally) MG’s love is to be delivered somehow as a result. The speakers of the poem who ‘bend low’ may then, whether as Mary Magdalene figures or simply the figures of lovers, be agents in the eventual delivery of the one ‘immortal pas­ sion’ that matters to WBY’s own ‘mortal clay’.

162

THE VALLEY OF THE

BLACK PIG

Date of composition. Early 1896 or Dec. 1895. The item before this in WBY’s 1893 note­ book (Burns Collection, Boston College) is dated ‘Dec. 1895’, so the poem could have followed immediately on this, or in the next three months before its publication. Text and publication history. A draft of the poem (MS) is the notebook which WBY had been using since 1893 (Boston College): it is the last draft of a poem in that note­ book. The next text in the chronological sequence is the poem as it was published in The Savoy (Apr. 1896): here, it is the second of ‘Two Poems Concerning Peasant Visionaries’ (S). WBY next wrote a fair copy of the poem which was inserted in AG’s copy of P95 (now in Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University); there are also two TSS, each a single sheet, in the Berg Collection, NYPL (Emory, TS1, TS2). These three texts are essentially the same as that which appeared in WATR in 1899. The poem was included in all collected editions by WBY thereafter. Title and subject matter. The Black Pig’s Dyke (in Irish, Clai na Muice Duibhe) runs from southeastern Ulster westward to Co. Sligo and the northeast of Co. Connaught. Ancient earthworks, along with remains of religious, ritual, or funerary sites, are found in the area. The name follows from association in folklore with a huge black boar, which after terrorizing the countryside, was hunted to its death. WBY would have encountered the physical feature, and references to it, quite readily; in particular, he would probably have been aware of its western manifestation in Co. Sligo. On the other side of the coun­ try, in Co. Tyrone, the Dyke was mentioned in the autobiography of William Carleton (The Life of William Carleton (1896), I, 58): We went up by Ballyscally, which had consisted of houses scattered over the top and side of an elevated hill, that commanded a distant view of a beautiful country to an extent of not less than fifty miles. The long depression of the land before you to the west and north under the hill constitutes that proportion of the county known in ancient Irish history as the ‘Valley of the Black Pig.’ The other aspect of this Valley which is centrally important for WBY’s purposes is as a site of a future ultimate reckoning in Ireland, where a great battle against the island’s enemies is to be fought. Carleton knew of this also, and uses it to comic effect in a piece first published in The Irish Penny Journal in 1841, and collected as recently as 1889. This occurs in a portrait of ‘Barney McHaigney: The Irish Prophecy Man’: ‘Now, I have a little book (indeed, I left my books with a friend down at Errigle) that contains a prophecy DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-164

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

421

of the milk-white hind an’ the bloody panther, an’ a forebodin’ of the slaughter there’s to be in the Valley of the Black Pig, as foretould by Beal Derg, or the prophet with the red mouth, who never was known to speak but when he prophesied, or to prophesy but when he spoke.’ When asked ‘An’ what is the Black Pig, Barney’, the prophet replies: ‘The Prosbyterian Church, that stretches from Enniskillen to Darry, an’ back again from Darry to Enniskillen’ (W. Carleton, Amusing Irish Tales (1889), 68.) Prophetic dimen­ sions would be far from comic ones for WBY later, but the relation between the mythic Valley and the actual remains of the Black Pig’s Dyke became a subject for study in the later nineteenth century. One contemporary scholar of ancient Irish history was W.G. Wood-Martin, whose work on Sligo was known to and used by WBY. In a series of long scholarly articles from 1886 to 1888, Wood-Martin gave a version of the ‘Black Pig’ story which, if not necessarily one read by WBY, is certainly very close to the material which he would have known (‘Rude Stone Monuments in Sligo’, The Journal of the Royal His­ torical and Archaeological Association of Ireland 8 /73–4 [Jan.–Apr. 1888], 292): Many years ago there was, in the North of Ireland, an enormous magical boar which committed great devastations throughout the country, so much so that all the hunters of the kingdom assembled with the determination to pursue the animal until they succeeded in killing it. The chase sustained until the boar, finding the province of Ulster to be uncomfortable quarters, made off from it, but was overtaken in the ‘Valley of the Black Pig,’ a little vale in the county Sligo, situated partly in the townland of Mucduff, and partly in the neighbour­ ing denomination. Here the boar turned at bay, and was slain on the spot where he was subsequently buried; his pursuers stood around, leaning on their spears, and viewing with amazement the vast proportions, and the length and strength of the bristles with which he was covered. Muckduff townland (the name means ‘Black Pig’) is just to the south of Enniscrone in Co. Sligo, and close to Enniscrone strand. The ‘neighbouring denomination’ is another small townland, Scurmore, where traces of ancient earthworks and monuments remain. Local tradition associated Scurmore with the hunting down of the Black Pig (Weekly Irish Times 7 May 1904, 16): [. . .] the country people aver that the pig was hunted all the way from the north to the little hollow at Scurmore, where, surrounded by enemies, he met his fate. It is possible that we have the two ends of the same story here – the home of the Black Pig in Tyrone, ‘The Valley of the Black Pig,’ where he dwelt in peace until, attacked by his enemies, he was forced to fly away westward, until finally he met his death in ‘The Valley of the Black Pig,’ in Sligo. Scurmore, like Muckduff, lies within sight of the coast, along the road south towards Bal­ lina. This area would have been known to WBY from childhood onwards. While the physi­ cal and historical Black Pig’s Dyke was well known, the more mythic dimensions WBY’s poem exploits and inhabits were much less so. WBY’s 1896 note in S introduces the idea

422

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

of an Irish Armageddon by way of an old man in ‘the barony of Lissadell, in county Sligo’, some way away from the Black Pig’s Dyke sites. The much-expanded version of this in WATR has the same old man ‘fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle’. Like many of the old people of Co. Sligo who favoured WBY with their knowledge and insight, this man has left no other record of himself; but he seems to have had an equally elderly equivalent in Co. Galway, who was invoked by AG in 1899, a few weeks after the beginning of the Boer War. Writing to The Spectator, AG delivered herself of a perspective hardly likely to be pleasing to patriotic British sentiment (The Spectator, 11 Sept. 1899, 693): An old man came down from the side of the Echtge Hills the other day, and asked me what news there was of the war, and if the Boers were winning. ‘For,’ he said – “There will be plague and famine soon: it is to come in the next century, and it’s likely this war with the Boers is the beginning of it. For it was prophesied that it would be when there is a Queen over England that her fall will come. And when the Queen is bet, the Orangemen will come from the bottom of the North and kill all before them, and then there will be long nights and bloody blankets, and where the fighting is, will be called ‘Rinne Muice Duibhe’ – that is, the Valley of the Black Pig. [. . .] There was a prophecy that men would come marching from the Mass as if they were going to battle, and I  saw them do that myself, with their hurling-sticks to their shoul­ ders, in the time of the Land League. And it was prophesied there would be wooden carriages without horses running through Ireland, and that came true with the railways. [. . .] Some great thing happens every two thousand years, such as the deluge, or the birth of our Lord, so when I heard of this war with the Boers I thought it was likely the beginning of the big war, and that the Queen is likely to be bet by them, and that was what St. John the Apostle meant when he said that a star would fall from heaven.” The prophecy of the great final battle in the Valley of the Black Pig is found in all parts of Ireland. It is understood that this battle will be the final rout of the enemies of Ireland. The ‘Orangemen’ may be taken to mean some unknown force coming from the mysterious North. The prophecy has often pointed to the end of this century, and is probably alluded to in an old Irish verse which has been translated: When the Lion shall lose his strength,

And the bracket thistle begin to pine,

The Harp shall sound sweet, sweet at length

Between the eight and the nine.

AG included the quatrain later (with further Boer War context) in her Poets and Dream­ ers (1903), and WBY used it with very minimal adjustment in his collaboration with

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

423

AG, The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), II, 391–394 (CW 2, 227). [R. Finneran includes this quatrain amongst WBY’s poems in CW 1 (556), on the strength of a replacement of ‘When’ with ‘O’ in the first line and the removal of ‘begin to’ from the second: this seems the slenderest of evidence on which to deny AG the authorship of the poem, which is not included as WBY’s work in the present edition.] AG had already read WBY’s poem by the time she wrote this, and it probably colours her perceptions: the association of ‘Orangemen’ with ‘some unknown force coming from the mysterious North’ shows her knowledge of WBY’s verse, with its ‘unknown spears’ (1); but her informant might per­ haps have better known what he meant (less mysteriously) by ‘Orangemen’ – clearly, in context, British-identified Protestants from Ulster. The North is certainly present in WBY’s thinking when he writes the note for WATR; here, like AG, he has something in mind that is more cosmic than specific. Nevertheless, ‘Between the eight and nine’ seems to point at the turn of the century as a likely time for the great battle. AG’s anecdote highlights, despite her focus on the Boer War, the degree to which the Battle was thought of as an encounter with enemies in Ireland specifically from the North, and in the nine­ teenth century this inevitably took on a sectarian dimension. One account reveals a line of continuity between the mythic history of the Valley (and connections with the clash between the Firbolg and the Tuatha De Danaan at Moytura) and these more modern Irish tensions between South and North. The antiquarian scholar Nicholas O’Kearney perceived this as an altogether regrettable instance of ancient lore working in the present times (The Prophecies of SS. Columkille, Maeltamlacht, Ultan, Seadhna, Coireall, Bearcan Etc. [1856], 13–14): It is also deserving of remark that, for the vengeance denounced upon the con­ quered Firbolgs, the same tenor of opinion has been handed down to us, and the Saxons, in like manner, have been represented as a people who will make a bloody massacre of the Irish in the ‘Valley of the Black Pig!’ [. . .] This delusion about the massacre to be perpetrated in the ‘Valley of the Black Pig,’ laughable as it is, caused the breaking up of many a happy home in Ulster – the generally supposed doomed valley – in times not so very far gone by. It was the opinion of the people of Ulster – grounded on this pagan tradition – that some parts of Connacht and above the Boyne were safe from the range of this imaginary midnight massacre. A peck of meal is more valuable above the Boyne

Than a bushel of gold in Dundalk.

is one of the quotations our northern prophecy-mongers give in elucida­ tion of the terrible struggle and general massacre of the Catholic population of Ulster by the Protestant party in this ‘Valley of the Black Pig.’ This erroneous and wicked prophecy has done much harm; as remarked above, for, whenever any little commotion darkened the political horizon, families not unfrequently, in order to avoid the carnage, fled the country, or province, a circumstance

424

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

which has caused the ruin of many who might have been comfortable and highly respectable members of society, had they remained at home. It is possible  – though not especially likely  – that WBY was as unaware of the link between the Valley and its Battle with the northern Protestants and the ‘Orangemen’ as AG was to be; but this link was a live one in the mid- and late nineteenth century, and it may well figure somewhere in the imaginative power which the myth carried for the poet. The Black Pig made an appearance in rural Ireland at another point of national ten­ sion, in Apr. 1918, when the Irish Times reported how ‘A strange apparition has appeared at Kiltrustan, near Strokestown, in the shape of a black pig’ (27 Apr. 1918): Two little girls saw the pig, but, strange to say, none of the older people can see it. A clergyman visited the place, but could see nothing, although the little girls could see it, and they pointed out to him where the pig was standing. The appari­ tion has caused tremendous excitement in the district, where the people believe that this is the ‘black pig’ spoken of in the prophecy of Columcille. Crowds, full of awe, are visiting the place, and the children of the parish are in a state of terror. In 1902, WBY was to pick up the Black Pig theme again, in his article ‘War’, where he interviews ‘a poor Sligo woman’: ‘our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing, to the Battle of the Black Pig, which seems to her a battle between Ireland and England, but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral Darkness again’ (The Speaker, 15 Mar. 1902, repr. M, 73). This points towards the mythic interpretation contained in the WATR note (see below), suggesting that the poet saw a more mystical meaning to the battle, while at the same time being fully aware of the real warfare which others imagined there. Later, in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), WBY mentioned the poem in relation to the prophecies not of any Irish old man, but of his own occult col­ laborator and sometime friend MacGregor Mathers (CW 3, 257–258): He began to foresee changes in the world, announcing in 1893 or 1894 the imminence of immense wars, and was it in 1895 or 1896 that he learned ambu­ lance work, and made others learn it? [. . .] It may have been some talk of his that made me write the poem that begins [Quotes ll. 1–4 of ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’] Was this prophecy of his, which would shortly be repeated by medi­ ums and clairvoyants all over the world, an unconscious inference taken up into an imagination brooding upon war, or was it prevision? The intensity of otherworldly expectation and prophecy, by which WBY remembers Mathers being especially consumed, was far removed from the specifically Irish dynam­ ics of the Battle and its location. The poem itself, however, with its ‘cromlech on the shore’ and ‘grey cairn’, is sufficiently specific in its sense of place to suggest that the Val­ ley of the Black Pig is not being utterly transformed into a universal occult emblem, but rather still carries (with its own kind of occult significance) the marks and meanings of its Irish history and topography.

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

425

Critical reception and interpretation. The earliest reaction to the poem comes in humorous form, in a letter from George Russell to Robert Gregory, of 29 Nov. 1898. Russell had stayed at Coole in late Sept. 1898, and gave Gregory an account of WBY as comically united with the Black Pig, complete with a drawing in which the poet flies through the night sky, looking like an airborne porcupine, carrying in his arms a (some­ what anxious) pig (quoted (with illustration) in Foster 1, 192): He fondles it [the Black Pig] in his heart as a lover the sweetest glance of his girl. I believe in dreams he tucks this weird animal under his arm and roams through the vast. [Drawing] I foresee Yeats and his Black Pig in many a ballad and tale of future Ireland and many a wild vision: – Who is he that rides upon the storm?

Who carrieth a black porker

And sheds shadowy terror and laughter?

It is William MacYeats

Bard of the Gael!

If even so habitual a visionary as Russell could find matter for amusement in WBY’s pig-vision, less otherworldly reviewers, when encountering the poem in WATR, might be forgiven for finding little to say about it. Even so, the poem’s aspect of mythic/nation­ alist apocalypse was being picked up when one reviewer made his way carefully around the book, loading with irony his remarks on the ‘racial spirit’ of WBY (The Scotsman 21 Apr. 1899): And indeed Mr. Yeats would not be true to his acquired reputation if he did not continue, as he does, to be the interpreter for readers of current poetry of the beauty and symbolism of the old Irish mythology [. . .] nearly all the pieces are inspired by ancient legends. [. . .] Other pieces have reference to such mytho­ logical events as that battle in the Valley of the Black Pig (still, it is believed by the peasantry, to be fought) in which all the enemies of Ireland shall be finally vanquished. [. . .] If [the book] lacks solidity and substance, it is not for that reason untrue to its racial spirit; and it will be read with interest by anyone who can admire what is at once most characteristic and most poetical in the Irish imagination. The poem’s possible political meanings were not, however, generally noticed: partly, this is because WBY himself directed attention towards larger mythic dimensions in his long WATR note. These very dimensions were not universally acceptable, though, and even someone who was fairly closely attuned to WBY’s symbolic thinking could find their demands excessive; William Sharp included the poem amongst those that, in his view (or hers, since he was at this point being ‘Fiona Macleod’) threatened aesthetic value: ‘[WBY] does not always sing of things of beauty and mystery as the things of beauty and mystery are best sung’, Macleod wrote, ‘so that the least may understand; but

426

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

rather as those priests of Isis who, when bidden to chant the Sun-Hymn to the people, sang, beautifully, incomprehensible algebraical formulae’ (The North American Review Oct. 1902, 474). Modern criticism largely follows the lead provided by WBY himself in looking for large mystical significance in the Pig motif. T.R. Whitaker wrote of the poem’s ‘muted violence’ in its vision of ‘a European apocalypse’, its ‘syncretic myth’ that compounds Irish sources with J.G. Frazer and John Rhys, so that ‘the Irish Black Pig becomes the gnostic primal darkness, a paradoxical light bearer or Lucifer who opposes the priests and kings of ‘the world’s empires’’ (58.) A.R. Grossman claimed that ‘The ‘Black Boar’ is one of those symbols which [. . .] Yeats feels compelled to complicate’; he added that ‘the important thing about the poem is that the anticipated cataclysm does not take place’, and ‘the confused conflict of potencies which Yeats feels to be suggested by [the poem] remains unresolved’ (96). For H. Bloom, the poem was amongst those others in WATR that show ‘the defeated lover’s rejection of nature and his longing for cataclysm,’ and it ‘extends this longing to dream itself, the dream being of the Irish Armageddon’: writing of the ‘controlled hysteria’ of the poem, Bloom decides that ‘The use of Golden Dawn imagery [. . .] is of no imaginative value, but gives us another backwards clue of Yeats’s motivations in seeking occult comfort’ (129). Such large-scale perspectives on the poem neglect its detail, just as they turn aside from its more specifically Irish meanings; the tendency is perhaps summed up best by the approach of S. Putzel, who maintains that ‘Although the black pig and the valley battle grew out of local legends and prophecies of a final war between England and Ireland, Yeats transcends his sources to convey a vision [of Armageddon]’ (Putzel, 192). Something more sophisticated (and truer) is proposed in E. Larrissy’s reading of the poem, which acknowledges the complexity of any such transcendence. Noting that ‘the sidhe might be associated with apocalyptic violence,’ Larrissy writes that ‘A political meaning for this violence is part of the background’ to the poem, which ‘describes a twilight dream of some ferocious, unidentifiable battle, and goes on to depict those who live and labour bowing down to God at that hour, as if waiting upon his will’ (Larrissy, 80). P.L. Marcus writes of the poem’s ‘strategy for com­ bining political concerns with stylistic merit,’ where ‘Young Ireland verse has undergone a spiritual sublimation process’: ‘the sound patterns, repetitions, and predominance of monosyllabic words simultaneously create a deeper level meaning potentially drawing at least some readers towards reverie and chance rather than to the barricades’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 304). The balance between myth and the contemporary world in the poem is one that WBY’s very first readers could well have noticed. Those who read ‘Two Poems Concern­ ing Peasant Visionaries’ in S in 1896 would also have been able to read WBY’s ambitious short fiction, ‘Rosa Alchemica’, elsewhere in the same issue. Here, a moment of crossreferencing occurs, when Michael Robartes announces: ‘Their reign [the Irish Gods’] has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the shee still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig’ (S, 64). The nature of the Battle, then, is linked with the question of how the sidhe, and

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

427

the whole realm of the Irish Tuatha De Danaan, relate to the real-world conflicts of which their games and wind-borne manifestations are the otherworldly shadows. It is implied that the bloodshed of the modern world, and an eventual revolution there, is required in order for the sidhe to re-establish their above-ground kingdom and undo the damage done to them at Moytura in the mythic past. Or rather, WBY’s character Michael Robartes implies this; but in ‘Rosa Alchemica’ Robartes is destined to perish in the rubble of his Rosicrucian temple on Ireland’s west coast, when it is attacked by a gang of priest-driven locals. An encounter more different from the apocalyptic visions of the Battle is difficult to imagine; and it leads not to apocalypse, but to the narrator’s chas­ tened retreat from occultism to the bosom of the Church. The layers of irony in WBY’s short story are perhaps matched by a certain disjunction in the poem between the Black Pig myth as a figure of sectarian conflict or revolutionary struggle, and the same myth as a trans-historical motif, or a portent of universal mystical revelation. The poem is in some ways a compromise between WBY’s nationalist hopes for Irish revolution and his occult desires for a mystical renewal; neither ambition is entirely embraced, but nor is either one abandoned. The poem’s status as one of a pair ‘Concern­ ing Peasant Visionaries’ is straightforward insofar as its content is indeed a species of vision; but its ‘Peasant’ provenance is much more slenderly supported by the text, and it is inevitable (whether or not WBY intended this) that the speaker becomes identified with the poet himself. This very degree of identification may shade into the rhetorical, as the poem goes from first-person singular (1–4) to plural (5–8): those who ‘still labour’ by the cromlech and the cairn are intended as the notional peasantry of the poem’s first publication, but this particular work exists in the context of the WATR poems in which ‘The poets labouring all their days’ hanker after a point of apocalypse ‘Before the unla­ bouring stars’, until ‘God burn time’ (Aedh Tells of Perfect Beauty’). In each case, the lower activity waits for the coming of the higher. It may follow that the politics of Irish nationalist struggle, in this poem, are promoted by way of their myth in the Black Pig story into the different priorities of mystical vision. The ‘flaming door’ of the poem’s last line is, in a manner of speaking, part of the vision: but that vision is not sufficiently dis­ tinct to enable a reader to know whether the door is open or closed. Similarly, the poem does not decide between a revolutionary showdown and a mystical apocalypse, since it shows – or rather allows us to imagine – each in turn. Notes by WBY: In S, WBY prefaced the poem with a short note: The Irish peasantry have for generations comforted themselves, in their misfor­ tunes, with visions of a great battle, to be fought in a mysterious valley called, ‘The Valley of the Black Pig,’ and to break at last the power of their enemies. A few years ago, in the barony of Lissadell, in county Sligo, an old man would fall entranced upon the ground from time to time, and rave out a description of the battle; and I have myself heard said that the girths shall rot from the bel­ lies of the horses, because of the few men that shall come alive out of the valley. For WATR, WBY provided a much longer note on the poem. This is effectively an essay (in his The Celtic Twilight manner) on the poem itself. Like other such notes in WATR, it

428

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

is less direct commentary than it is an exploration of ideas raised by, or lying somewhere behind the poem. A principal point of interest is in the use of scholars such as John Rhys and J.G. Frazer to emphasise the extent of the poem’s mythic foundations. All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies of Ire­ land, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies are, no doubt, now, as they were in the Fenian days, a political force. I have heard of one man who would not give any money to the Land League, because the Battle could not be until the close of the century; but, as a rule, periods of trouble bring prophecies of its near coming. A few years before my time, an old man who lived at Lisadell, in Sligo, used to fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle; and a man in Sligo has told me that it will be so great a battle that the horses shall go up to their fetlocks in blood, and that their girths, when it is over, will rot from their bellies for lack of a hand to unbuckle them. The battle is a mythological battle, and the black pig is one with the bristleless boar, that killed Dearmod, in November, upon the western end of Ben Bulben; Misroide MacDatha’s sow, whose carving brought on so great a battle; ‘the croppy black sow,’ and ‘ the cutty black sow’ of Welsh November rhymes (‘Celtic Heathen­ dom,’ pages 509–516); the boar that killed Adonis; the boar that killed Attis; and the pig embodiment of Typhon (‘Golden Bough,’ II. pages 26, 31). The pig seems to have been originally a genius of the corn, and, seemingly because the too great power of their divinity makes divine things dangerous to mortals, its flesh was forbidden to many eastern nations; but as the meaning of the prohi­ bition was forgotten, abhorrence took the place of reverence, pigs and boars grew into types of evil, and were described as the enemies of the very gods they once typified (‘Golden Bough,’ II. 26–31, 56–57). The Pig would, therefore, become the Black Pig, a type of cold and of winter that awake in November, the old beginning of winter, to do battle with the summer, and with the fruit and leaves, and finally, as I suggest; and as I believe, for the purposes of poetry; of the darkness that will at last destroy the gods and the world. The country people say there is no shape for a spirit to take so dangerous as the shape of a pig; and a Galway blacksmith – and blacksmiths are thought to be especially protected – says he would be afraid to meet a pig on the road at night; and another Galway man tells this story: ‘There was a man coming the road from Gort to Garryland one night, and he had a drop taken; and before him, on the road, he saw a pig walking; and having a drop in, he gave a shout, and made a kick at it, and bid it get out of that. And by the time he got home, his arm was swelled from the shoulder to be as big as a bag, and he couldn’t use his hand with the pain of it. And his wife brought him, after a few days, to a woman that used to do cures at Rahasane. And on the road all she could do would hardly keep him from lying down to sleep on the grass. And when they got to the woman she knew all that happened; and, says she, it’s well for you that your wife didn’t let you fall asleep on the grass, for if you had done that but even for one instant, you’d be a lost man.’

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

429

It is possible that bristles were associated with fertility, as the tail certainly was, for a pig’s tail is stuck into the ground in Courland, that the corn may grow abundantly, and the tails of pigs, and other animal embodiments of the corn genius, are dragged over the ground to make it fertile in different countries. Professor Rhys, who considers the bristleless boar a symbol of darkness and cold, rather than of winter and cold, thinks it was without bristles because the darkness is shorn away by the sun. It may have had different meanings, just as the scourging of the man-god has had different though not contradictory meanings in different epochs of the world. The Battle should, I believe, be compared with three other battles; a battle the Sidhe are said to fight when a person is being taken away by them; a battle they are said to fight in November for the harvest; the great battle the Tribes of the goddess Danu fought, according to the Gaelic chroniclers, with the Fomor at Moy Tura, or the Towery Plain. I have heard of the battle over the dying both in County Galway and in the Isles of Arann, an old Arann fisherman having told me that it was fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he had for keeping fish, when it was over; and I have written about it, and given examples elsewhere. A  faery doctor, on the borders of Galway and Clare, explained it as a battle between the friends and enemies of the dying, the one party trying to take them, the other trying to save them from being taken. It may once, when the land of the Sidhe was the only other world, and when every man who died was carried thither, have always accompanied death. I suggest that the battle between the Tribes of the goddess Danu, the powers of light, and warmth, and fruitfulness, and goodness, and the Fomor, the powers of darkness, and cold, and barrenness, and badness upon the Towery Plain, was the establishment of the habitable world, the rout of the ancestral darkness; that the battle among the Sidhe for the harvest is the annual battle of summer and winter; that the battle among the Sidhe at a man’s death is the battle of life and death; and that the battle of the Black Pig is the battle between the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the end of all things; and that all these battles are one, the battle of all things with shadowy decay. Once a symbolism has possessed the imagi­ nation of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after age. Questions such as the relation of the pig or boar to mythological figures like Typhon or Attis are plainly not of direct relevance to the poem (nor does WBY claim them as such); but the proffered background (from J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough Vol. 2 [1894]) gives to the poem a dimension of historical significance which the closest of readings applied to the text itself could not deliver – an effect doubtless observed and certainly replicated by T.S. Eliot in his Notes to The Waste Land (1922). Similarly, WBY’s efforts to show an awareness of Rhys’s interpretation of the Black Pig in Irish narratives as part of a larger solar myth also serves to place his own poem in a tradition: in this case, however, he runs the risk of interpreting his own poem as though it had been handed down from

430

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

the remote past, and with a meaning that is surely more routine (the battle between the sun and the darkness and cold) than what either an averagely attentive reader or the poet himself might understand – specifically, this mythic reading disables the element of political meaning which is in fact vital to the poem’s energy. WBY’s proposal of three other battles with which the battle might be compared covers certain bases: the folk­ loric one, where someone is being taken by the sidhe; the seasonal mythic one, involving autumn and the harvest going into the dark of winter; and that of mythic history, and the conflict between the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danaan at Moytura. None of these explains the poem, but all are at least claimed as parallels to it. WBY’s final paragraph is his most intellectually ambitious, and the most obviously independent of his poem. It adduces the poem as evidence in its argument; but it is clear that the argument stretches far beyond (by going far below and maybe high above) the poem from which it has arisen. Copy-text: P49.

T

5

he dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes, And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears. We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,

1.] [The dew falls and dreams come del.] The [dews del.] dew drops slowly and dreams gather: [and del.] unknown spears MS The dew drops slowly; the dreams gather: unknown spears S. WBY settles on the plural, ‘dews’, only after some uncertainty; in doing so, he makes something more unusual and distinc­ tive out of a potentially commonplace obser­ vation. However, this was not entirely without precedent – cp. e.g. Christina Rossetti, Verses (1893), ‘They lie at rest, our blessed dead’, 2: ‘The dews drop cool above their head’, and KT, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘King Cophetua’s Queen’, 101–102: ‘and heard | The dews drop from the branches’. 2.] dream-awakened] dream wakened del. dream awakened Emory, TS1. 3. then the] then ^that^ MS. 4.] Of perishing armies wake in my dream wak­ ened ears del. MS. The ‘perishing armies’ here establish a connection with ‘Rosa Alchemica’

(which first appeared in the same issue of S as the poem), where the narrator speaks of how ‘One part of my mind mocked this phantas­ tic terror, but the other; the part that still lay half-plunged in vision; listened to the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimagi­ nable fanaticisms, that hung in those gray, leaping waves’ (S, 63). This, with ‘clash’ in line 3 earlier, suggests the influence of M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘Dover beach’, 36–7: ‘confused alarms of struggle and flight, | Where igno­ rant armies clash by night’. 5. We who still labour] We, who are labouring S. cromlech] S, CP33 and all later editions; crom­ lec TS2, WATR- Later Poems (1931). A crom­ lech (derived from the Irish and Welsh) is ‘A structure of prehistoric age consisting of a large flat or flattish unhewn stone resting horizon­ tally on three or more stones set upright; found in various parts of the British Isles, esp. in Wales, Devonshire, Cornwall, and Ireland’ (OED).

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG

431

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew, Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you, Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

6. the grey cairn upon the hill] There is no need to search for any particular location here, but the cairn best known to WBY was that at the top of Knocknarea, supposedly the burial place (or memorial to) Queen Mebdh. The meaning of ‘cairn’ here is OED 1: ‘A pyramid of rough stones, raised for a memorial or mark of some kind’. upon] upon del. on MS. 7. weary of the world’s empires] The phrase ‘the world’s empires’ is common in nineteenthcentury religious commentary, esp. with regard to the Book of Revelation (where, in ch.16, there is reference to Armageddon). WBY uses the phrase with this somewhere in the background, but the word ‘empire’ itself, in this context, is in contact with its most usual contemporary use, which was with reference to the British Empire (not uni­ versally valued or celebrated in the Ireland of WBY’s time). Readers of poetry will have taken the phrase less specifically (prompted by the Yeatsian adjective ‘weary’, which links this line and this poem to much of WBY’s writing of lyrical desolation and exhaustion at the time). C.F.G. Masterman, writing in The Living Age, cited this phrase as evidence of WBY’s Hamlet-like ‘defiant estrangement from all the courses of the world become

visibly flat, stale, and unprofitable’ (Jan. 28, 1905, 193). bow down to] bow to MS. 8.] Between the First and the Second Orders of the GD was an intermediate grade, the Por­ tal. It is possible that WBY intends a private echo of this in the line: he had himself been a member of the Second Order since 1892. The Portal Ritual involved darkness broken by light, though there was no invocation of any ‘Master’; the presiding ‘Hiereus’, who conducted the ceremony, held in the neardark a burning taper, and light was increased to mark the opening of the door. A.R. Gross­ man sees the ‘flaming door’ here as ‘the gate of Eden’ (presumably that of Genesis 3:24: ‘So he drove out the man: and he placed at the East of the garden of Eden, Cherubims, and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life’), and senses the influence of GD teaching; he sees this as a way of taming the specifically Irish dynamics of the poem: ‘The complexity and presump­ tive subjectivity of “the matter of Ireland” is resolved by the use of Golden Dawn sym­ bolism, which always provided Yeats with a stable hierarchy by reference to which he was protected from the violence of his desire to overthrow all order’ (Grossman, 96).

163

THE UNAPPEASABLE

HOST

Date of composition. Probably composed early 1896 and revised later summer 1896. It seems likely that this poem was written before the short story in which it is con­ tained, though the case for this is largely circumstantial. The first publication, when the poem was one of a pair given to Arthur Symons and published in The Savoy for Apr. 1896, does contain in its overall title (‘Two Poems Concerning Peasant Visionar­ ies’) some hint at fictional (or folkloric) context; but it is unlikely that WBY would have published the poem at this stage if he already possessed a finished short story within which to accommodate it (in The Savoy, or elsewhere). In Nov. 1896, the poem did appear in a published piece of short fiction, ‘The Cradles of Gold’, having in the meantime undergone some revision. Although comparable to the pieces that would go into The Secret Rose (1897), this story was never republished by WBY. It is not possible to know whether WBY would have thought the short story suitable for inclusion in The Secret Rose, and there are no references to it in his correspondence; but if it was recently finished in Oct. or Nov. 1896, it would have been too late for inclusion (proofs were already in hand, and on 14 Oct. he had to ask Clement Shorter of The Sketch for a copy of the story ‘Where there is Nothing, there is God’, since Lawrence and Bullen were ‘clamorous for copy’ [CL 2, 58]). ‘The Cradles of Gold’ appeared at the beginning of Nov., and may have been written in Ireland late in the summer: in early Sept., MG told WBY that she was looking forward to reading his ‘wild dreamy stories’ (G-YL, 63), and it is possible that ‘The Cradles of Gold’ was amongst these. Alternatively, the story could have been written in London, where WBY returned around 11 Oct., with revisions to the poem made then. Context and interpretation. WBY was aware in broad terms of Irish folklore in which fairies, or those in the captivity of fairies, came to nurse mortal infants. In 1888 in FFTIP he printed Edward Walsh’s poem, ‘The Fairy Nurse’:

S

weet babe! a golden cradle holds thee, And soft the snow-white fleece enfolds thee; In airy bower I’ll watch thy sleeping, Where branchy trees to the breeze are sweeping. Shuheen, sho, lulo, lo! When mothers languish broken-hearted,

When young wives are from husbands parted,

Ah! little think the keeners lonely,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-165

THE UNAPPEASABLE HOST

433

They weep some time-worn fairy only.

Shuheen, sho, lulo, lo!

Within our magic halls of brightness,

Trips many a foot of snowy whiteness;

Stolen maidens, queens of fairy –

And kings and chiefs a sluagh-shee airy.

Shuheen, sho, lulo, lo!

Rest thee, babe! I love thee dearly,

And as thy mortal mother nearly;

Ours is the swiftest steed and proudest,

That moves where the tramp of the host is loudest.

Shuheen, sho, lulo, lo!

Rest thee, babe! for soon thy slumbers

Shall flee at magic koelshie’s numbers;

In airy bower I’ll watch thy sleeping,

Where branchy trees to the breeze are sweeping.

Shuheen, sho, lulo, lo!

The ‘golden cradle’ and the ‘tramp of the host’ here provide verbal points of con­ tact with WBY’s poem, but the whole scenario, with its latent drama and unease, undoubtedly contributes to the development of this narrative theme in the poet’s thoughts. WBY’s ‘The Cradles of Gold’ (repr. UP 1, 413–418) offers an important context for the poem, though its probable date of composition, subsequent to that of the poem itself, means that it may also be in part a narrative interpretation (so to speak) of the earlier verses. The story has clear affinities to earlier work in the field of fairy lore by WBY, and may well (like much of that material) incorporate a story heard during his researches around Co. Sligo of the late 1880s and after, or one of the tales he heard in childhood from his mother and her Sligo circle. Its location is cer­ tainly that of WBY’s home ground: ‘the shore of Lough Gill about Dooney’ and ‘one of the more easterly of the Ox Mountains’ near ‘the Sligo and Ballina Road’ (UP 1, 413). Both locations have associations with WBY’s poetry of fairy abduction (Lough Gill with e.g. ‘The Stolen Child’ and the Sligo side of the Ox Mountains with e.g. Hart (or Heart) Lake in ‘The Host of the Air’), and the story itself concerns one such abduction, of a young wife. Peter Hearne, who lives by Lough Gill, asks his brother Michael to come from the Ox Mountains to help him recover his wife Whinny from her daytime captivity by the fairies. Each night, Whinny returns to attend to her infant child at home (UP 1, 414): A few nights after this Peter Hearne saw from where he lay in the big bed, the door open slowly and Whinny come in and sit down by the cradle, and take the child out and suckle it awhile, and then put it back in the cradle and rock it and croon over it; and all the while he heard the Shee talking out on the Lough side.

434

THE UNAPPEASABLE HOST

[. . .] She stopped there rocking and crooning for a good hour, and then went out, and he heard the talking grow fainter and fainter as though the Shee were going away over the water, and when she had gone the child was so soundly and sweetly asleep and slept so long, and woke so like a bird that he knew she must have crooned some druid song over its sleep. Peter brings his brother Michael to witness this, and to seize back the enchanted Whinny. Michael Hearne waits for night to come, and witnesses the return of Whinny, accompa­ nied by the fairy host (UP 1, 415): She sat down with a sigh and lifted the child, which had begun to cry feebly, out of the wooden cradle, covered it with kisses, and began to suckle it, gazing on it the while with a profound tenderness. [. . .] Then she looked at the child again, and pressed it passionately against her breast, and did this again and yet again, and then laid it in the cradle and began rocking the cradle and singing. He recognized the air and the words of ‘The winds from beyond the world,’ a very ancient cradle-song, made for her only child by the wicked wife of that wizard Garreth, who rides hither and thither over the hills of Munster, await­ ing the time when the shoes of his horse, now thin as a cat’s ear, shall be worn through, and the deliverance of Ireland at hand. He listened with a shudder to the wild air, at whose sound all wholesome desires and purposes were thought to weaken and dissolve, and to the unholy words which pious mothers had ever forbid their daughters to sing: [The poem follows here] ‘The wicked wife of the wizard Garreth’ is probably an invention of WBY’s (‘Garreth’ is, if anything, Arthurian – possibly by way of Tennyson – but is at any rate not an Irish name, despite the attempt to locate him in Munster); and the words to the ‘wild air’ are indeed WBY’s own poem. It is important that the lullaby’s unacceptability to the ‘pious’ is men­ tioned here, and it is this which aligns it with otherworldly and supernatural doings. Michael Hearne forcibly keeps Whinny in the house, despite all the fairy host can do, and then enters into negotiations with the fairy king, Finivaragh (whose child Whinny has been nursing in the kingdom of the Sidhe). Eventually, it is agreed that Whinny will finish the weaning of the fairy child, then return permanently to her home with Peter Hearne, but ‘have a chill touch and a low voice’. This comes to pass: ‘always, when the moon was at full, a desire to be far away came upon her, and she would stand at the door watching the wild ducks flying in long lines over the water, and would move restlessly hither and thither, and talk excitedly until the moon had begun to crumble a little at one side; but at all the other times her voice was low and her touch chill, as Finivaragh had said’ (UP 1, 418). The story may help to explain the poem, in various ways. First, it makes explicit what is in the poem broadly implied, that the speaker here is female: the voice of a mother is also that of maternal care menaced by circumstances. Second, it adds some highly suggestive elements to the poem’s background: Whinny Hearne has numer­ ous points of connection with WBY’s own (Sligo-born) mother, who by 1896 had for

THE UNAPPEASABLE HOST

435

seven years been suffering the consequences of a series of strokes, and was living in a semi-paralyzed condition in London. The locales of the story are hers, and the fact that two of her children had died in infancy may well colour the story’s depiction of maternal tenderness and solicitude, along with its frisson of forced separation. WBY’s mother was still alive at the time both poem and story were composed, but her degree of paralysis, and her mental condition, were such as to bring her close to the condition WBY imagines as that of a fairy abductee, both there and not there in the family home. (On this biographical point more generally, see D. Toomey’s important essay ‘Away’, in Toomey, 135–167.) Modern criticism has had relatively little to say about the poem. This is noticed by D.H. Purdy, who points out how the fairy host ‘are utterly other than the Old Testament and the New, Mary and the Law’, and identifies ‘the poem’s revision of a religious code, displacing the Old Testament with the older testament of Irish myth, or so Yeats’s fiction of Irishness would have it in this early poem’ (Biblical Echo and Allusion in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats [1994], 46–7). Unwisely, some criticism attempts the feat of taking the poem at face value: claiming that ‘Yeats was lucky to be born into a culture [. . .] in which traditional memory still lived, and he took full advantage of it’, E. Malins and J. Purkis report how ‘he shows his knowledge of Danaan folklore, and his awareness of early Celtic culture’ and, as proof that ‘he knows all the details’ they mention the possibility of real ‘cradles of wrought gold’ among early Celtic peoples, given their skill with bronze and gold dishes and horse-trappings (A Preface to Yeats (1994), 26). Whether or not this ‘culture’ ever existed, WBY was definitely not ‘born into’ it. More abstruse interpreta­ tions, however, are not without their critical limitations. In his study of WATR, A.R. Grossman emphasizes the poem’s connection with ‘the Cradles of Gold’, and proposes that because ‘The effect of poetry is to induce the trance that loosens the bonds of real­ ity’, ‘the reader overhears the poem as he would something occult and forbidden, some­ thing which does not belong to the order of God’s world’ (133). That the poem involves, and puts to use, particular tensions related to ‘God’s world’ and the ‘occult’ is certainly true; and it is also assuredly much more complex than is suggested here: if ‘The Unap­ peasable Host’ is the voicing of a challenge to established religious piety and practice, the voice it projects is one of female suffering and defiance. This defiance applies both to the conventionalities of the ‘candles at Mother Mary’s feet’ and – daringly, for WBY at this point – of the designs of the fairy world upon mortals. The poem’s fairy world, like WBY’s creative conception of it more generally, is as hostile as it is alluring. A reminder of the specifically Irish social and religious forces which may be in play is provided by R. Tracy’s use of the poem in the title of his The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities (1998), where Protestant Anglo-Irish Writers of the nineteenth century ‘often felt themselves surrounded and watched by an ‘Unappeasable Host’, a population that resented them’. Textual and publication history. The poem first appeared in The Savoy, Apr. 1896 (S), and next in WBY’s short story ‘The Cradles of Gold’ in The Senate, Nov. 1896 (Sen). It was included in WATR, and in all subsequent collected editions. No MS material sur­ vives, but a single sheet of TS (Berg Collection, New York Public Library) almost exactly corresponds with the S text (TS).

436

THE UNAPPEASABLE HOST

Copy-text: P49.

T

5

he Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,

And clap their hands together, and half-close their eyes,

For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,

With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:

I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,

And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.

Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;

Title] A  Cradle Song (the first of two poems, under the general description ‘Two Poems Concerning Peasant Visionaries’), S [No title, Sen] A Cradle Song WATR, and all subsequent collected editions until SP29. ‘Unappeasable’ (OED: ‘That cannot be appeased or placated; implacable, insatiable’) specifies the desire of the fairy world as against the world of mortals (see note on 7–9). 1. The Danaan children] The faery children S, Sen. 3.] For winds will bear them gently when [corr. from ‘where’ by hand in TS] the eagle flies S For they will ride the winds when the gier­ eagle flies Sen. ger-eagle] Leviticus 11: 18 (‘geir eagle’ in the King James Bible), meaning in fact a species of vulture. ride the North] This revision introduces a contrast with line 8, so that two cardinal points are specified in the poem, the North and the West. Cp. WBY’s note to ‘Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’ (WATR): ‘I follow much Irish and older mythology, and the magical tradition, in associating the North with night and sleep [. . .] and the West, the place of sunset, with fading and dreaming things’. 6. the narrow graves] ‘Narrow grave’ is a poetic commonplace, but its plural is much more unusual. WBY would have met it in Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Chil­ dren of Lir: An Ancient Irish Romance’ I, 465–466: ‘generations under torch and

pall | Borne forth to narrow graves ere long grass-grown’. 7–9. Desolate winds] Cp. William Sharp, The Human Inheritance (1882), ‘The Redeemer’, 11: ‘And hear the wail of desolate winds moaning around the world’. See also WBY’s note to the poem in WATR below. If the winds here symbolize ‘vague desire’, it may be important that the maternal voice in the poem is determined to resist them: her ‘hopes’ are not vague and general but specific and urgent. The fairy host is ‘unappeasable’, consumed with a desire that can never be satisfied; the woman (mortal, though forced to be part of their half-immortal world) still concentrates her desire on ‘my wailing child’. Seeing things in a more determinedly magi­ cal light, A.R. Grossman comments: ‘The sidhe are the rising wind [. . .] the apparition of the sidhe is a mental event’ (134): The wind from the inwardness, when conceived in relation to the conscious mind, is characterized by the privations which it requires of consciousness, itself a symbol of mortality. From the point of view of mortality it is ‘desolate,’ requiring either the total sublimation that would open ‘the doors of heaven’ or total reduc­ tion, the opening of ‘the doors of Hell’. While this may perhaps answer to one side of WBY’s mystical designs on the poem, it is less convincing in relation to the emotional force of the poetry itself here.

THE UNAPPEASABLE HOST

10

437

Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;

Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat

The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;

O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host

Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.

8. the flaming West] See note to line 3, and cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘Sep­ tember’: ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, 2348–2349: ‘Stood looking toward the flaming West | With eyes made strange’. 11. O heart] And heart S And hear Sen [almost certainly a misprint for ‘And heart’]. 12. comelier] This rare comparative form of ‘comely’ may carry several senses of the word. OED 1.a. is a possible primary meaning: ‘Of an object, item of clothing, building, etc.: elegant, beautiful, or delicate in appearance, form, or composition’, but insofar as the host is made up of fairy individuals, sense 1.b. is also relevant: ‘Of a person: attractive, beau­ tiful, handsome; graceful, elegant’. Although WBY was very probably ignorant of an archaic sense (OED 1.c.) in which the phrase was often applied to Christ, he may have been aware of OED 3, ‘Pleasing; gratifying; agreeable to the senses or feelings’, which has a number of nineteenth-century instances. Perhaps cp. Edwin Arnold, My Lady’s Praise (1889), ‘Amber’, 113–114: ‘More heavenly fair, | Comelier and brighter than Survarna’s brightness’. At Mother Mary’s feet] PW06 and all sub­ sequent collected editions; before Maurya’s feet S, Sen, WATR. Maurya is an Irish form of Maria, or Mary. WBY’s closing image in the poem of the Virgin Mary is part of a complex dynamic, evident in various pieces of his writing during the 1890s, generated by tensions between Irish Catholic belief, with its Marian devotion, and an insistence on ancient Irish belief systems, especially as they survive in the conscious and subconscious practices of the rural poor. The poem itself (as well as ‘the Cradles of Gold’) may be seen

as part of this dynamic: the verses are, in the story, ‘the unholy words which pious mothers had ever forbid their daughters to sing’, and thus in some sense subversive of established religious practice and beliefs. The opposition in the poem’s final lines is between ‘the unap­ peasable host’ and the candles that would be placed at the foot of images of the Vir­ gin Mary: that is to say, between the pagan past and the Christian present, each of these inflected in a specifically Irish, rural way (the poem is, originally, one ascribed by WBY to a ‘Peasant Visionary’, and ‘The Cradles of Gold’ makes such a context more specific). ‘Host’ is one of the first words in WATR (in ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ with its opening line, ‘The host is riding from Knocknarea’), and the book’s fifth poem is ‘The Host of the Air’: here, the idea of a numerous body of supernatural beings – what is called ‘The proud, majestical multitude’ in ‘To my Heart, Bidding it Have no Fear’ – uses the same word as that given in the Mass to the bread which is believed to be the Body of Christ (a pun which may even be consciously present in ‘The Host of the Air’, 25–6). The element of religious challenge in the poetry, probably at its most acute in ‘The Travail of Passion’ (see notes), is clearly articulated in the con­ trast between the fairy ‘host’ and the candles of the Virgin. WBY was much concerned with such contrasts in the lengthy process of work on his unfinished 1890s novel The Speckled Bird, in the latest version of which (whose composition ended in 1902) the hero is named, like one of the male principals in ‘The Cradles of Gold’, Michael Hearne; and in the first two concerted phases of composition (1896–1897), the hero’s father is notable for

438

THE UNAPPEASABLE HOST

WBY’s Note in WATR: WBY supplies a note covering both this poem and ‘Michael Robartes [later, The Lover] Asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods’: I use the wind as a symbol of vague desires and hopes, not merely because the Sidhe are in the wind, or because the wind bloweth as it listeth, but because wind and spirit and vague desire have been associated everywhere. A highland scholar tells me that his country people use the wind in their talk and in their proverbs as I use it in my poem. WBY alludes here to John 3:8, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: So is every one that is born of the Spirit.’ The ‘highland scholar’ is probably William Sharp.

his devotion to the Virgin Mary, which takes intense and eccentric forms. It is clear from this material that, in the period shortly after the composition of ‘The Unappeasable Host’, WBY was intent on making imaginative use of the Virgin Mary in a way parallel to the use he made of fairy belief; but the Marian devotion is seen as a psychologically derived baseline of supernatural apprehension; just as this is surpassed in the poem by the ‘come­ lier’ host of the fairies, so in The Speckled Bird, the hero is destined to pass beyond his father’s superstitions into higher, more elabo­ rate and mystical superstitions of his own, to be perfected not in Ireland but in the Paris of (a thinly disguised) MacGregor Mathers. In the 1897 draft of his novel, WBY has his hero’s father admire a young cousin on a visit by turning her into a (Rossetti-inspired) ver­ sion of the Virgin (SB, 88): There was a great bowl of white lilies, which he had plucked that day in the greenhouse, in the middle of the table and after dinner, when they had gathered about the great Gothic fire, he put the lil­ ies in one of the child’s hands and [said], taking a very old and precious vial out of a cabinet, ‘There is not another,’ and

turning to his son cried, ‘Look at her. Is she not like the Blessed Mother of God?’ and leaning back in his chair, said half to himself, ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’. The father tells his son of how ‘Our Lady had appeared to him in a dream, in the likeness of his lost wife, and released [him] from all ser­ vice except her service’ (SB, 92–93): His father saw his confusion and said in a gentle voice, ‘She has shown herself to me, not merely in a dream but to my ordi­ nary eyes. I saw her by the edge of Lough [BLANK] and she passed along over the tops of the rushes,’ and then after a pause, ‘She was like your mother, but more beau­ tiful even than your mother. She was your mother in paradise,’ and his eyes grew soft with tears at the thought of so much beauty. The poem’s final line seems to prepare the way for this kind of complex psychological imagi­ nation; but the verses as a whole can also be read as an exercise in replacing the conven­ tional image of religious devotion (specifically, Roman Catholic devotion) with another, and more powerful, iteration of the maternal (see Context and interpretation).

164

HE REMEMBERS

FORGOT TEN BEAUT Y

Date of composition. The poem was composed in May or Jun. 1896. In Jun., WBY was in London, and busy with writing (and securing the illustrations for) his article on Blake and the designs for the Divine Comedy, the first part of which appeared along with this poem in the Jul. Savoy (published at the beginning of the month). Context, reception, and interpretation. In early decades, this poem attracted little spe­ cific comment. In terms of ideas, its significance could be summed up by F. Reid in 1915 as that ‘when Michael Robartes loves a mortal woman, it is really an eternal and imper­ ishable beauty that he loves’ (Reid, 75). James Joyce’s retort, by way of Stephen Deda­ lus, perhaps marks a more widespread scepticism about the high metaphysical stakes of this piece (see note to 1–3). For modern criticism, the poem has seemed in some respects stuck in its artistic moment: D. Daiches, believing that ‘Yeats in the 1890s was seeking and finding ways of associating the elegiac and the heroic so as simultaneously to discipline the former and humanize the latter,’ noted how ‘The attempts are not of course always successful’: he regretted that the poem ‘moves from sighing and kissing and ‘white Beauty’ to the high and lonely in a way that does not really unite them’ (A.N. Jeffares and K.G.W. Cross (eds.), In Excited Reverie (1965), 65–66). The speaker’s orien­ tation, which is firmly towards the past, is half-deplored when T. Whitaker remarks how he ‘laments the loss of past loveliness and then sighs for a time when all will pass but Beauty’s apocalypse. [. . .] For him the present is non-existent except as a locus of reverie over the tapestries of past and future’ (Whitaker, 273). A.R. Grossman, alert as usual to more occult dimensions in such vistas, notes that in this poem ‘all true energy lies in the past, and true emotion is not with respect to the present object but moves by way of the present object in the direction of the lost absolute reality,’ adding that ‘The kisses of the mortal lovers create the ideal beloved who awaits the apocalyptic dawn’ (Gross­ man, 117–118). Biographical readings are a necessary complement to these reactions. Since the poem was written at a time when WBY’s relationship with OS was especially (if briefly) intense, it is reasonable to see it as a lyric of requited sexual passion; physicality, however, is usurped by the metaphysical almost as soon as the first lines are underway. J. Harwood finds evidence for the relationship’s impending end along with its compara­ tively recent beginning, calling it ‘closer to a poem of requited love than anything else in The Wind Among the Reeds,’ but drawing attention to the way in which ‘the poet’s atten­ tion turns, at the end, to the inscrutable ‘lonely mysteries’ of the icon, ‘white Beauty’, and away from the woman addressed at the beginning’: his conclusion is speculative,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-166

440

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY

but not unfounded, when he says that ‘If Yeats was on the edge of accepting Olivia fully into his imaginative world (and thus, perhaps, into his heart), the process did not con­ tinue’ (Harwood, 74–75). R. Foster, too, identifies this as one of the group of poems in WATR that ‘inevitably suggests the doomed affair with Olivia Shakespear and conveys the regrets of a lover who cannot quite convince himself, not lose himself in love’ (Foster 1, 215). It should probably be said that biographical interpretations such as these would be much more difficult (and maybe even unlikely to exist) without prior knowledge (from WBY and subsequent critics) of the poet’s life. They are persuasive, perhaps, in part because the poem itself leaves certain gaps in its own imaginative structure: what is, e.g., ‘the loveliness | That has long faded from the world’ if it cannot be defined or exemplified by the content, movement, and resonances of the poem itself? The fading in question is in fact downright loss: ‘jewelled crowns’ have been hurled away on purpose here, and not mislaid; the narratives of wrought tapestries have been gorged upon by the ‘moth’; and roses and lilies (the poet’s by now customary conjunction of symbolic blooms) have vanished into incense-clouds that seem more like the smoke of destruction. The present is in fact less ‘dream-heavy’ than the past; but this is its disadvantage; and physical inti­ macy, which is possible only in the present, thus becomes an exercise in futile clasping of what has already gone. All of this means that the poem is made of gaps, and of what can be desired but not experienced. The ending (over which evidently WBY had a good deal of trouble) finds itself obliged to celebrate a ‘white Beauty’ (where ‘white’ may be at some level a symbolic adjective, but is also, in terms of poetic effect, singularly blank) which can only sigh and wait for an apocalypse that cannot be named. The ‘mysteries’ which preside over this ending are impressive, but immobile; and their only action is the inaction of brooding. If the poem is a voicing of a certain kind of imaginative (and romantic) impasse, of ‘mysteries’ that are also ‘lonely’ and have nothing left to do, its manner of articulation suggests on the contrary decisiveness and argumentative order. Of all the poems in WATR, this is the only one in tetrameter couplets (formally comparable to such earlier poems of decision and direction as ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’). The four-stress measure itself is something of a rarity in the volume  – it is shared with only seven other pieces, none of them arranged in couplets – and it should probably be under­ stood as giving the lines at least the air of decisive engagement with ideas. H. Vendler has attended closely to this, though again she finds that something is finally lacking (213–214): The lovely potential ‘neatness’ of tetrameter couplets [. . .] is here consistently avoided, not only by the non-coincidence of item and rhyme-unit but also by the enjambment within and over items in the list. In spite of such deliberate counterpointing of sense to rhyme-unit, however, the iambs in their ‘dream­ heavy’ regularity fall back into a lulling habitual tetrameter beat that even Yeats’s reversed or spondaic feet, irregularities of inventory, and frequent enjambment cannot overcome. Drowsy with dreams, this early tetrameter sings its lists in a single tone, a repetitive music.

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY

441

Textual and publication history. No MS record of the poem exists prior to its appear­ ance in The Savoy for Jul. 1896. This text differs substantially from later versions, and is given in full after the notes. A subsequent TS with alterations in WBY’s hand is in the Berg Collection, NYPL (TS), and this precedes the poem’s publication in WATR. WBY retained the poem in all collected editions thereafter. Copy-text: P49.

W

5

hen my arms wrap you round I press My heart upon the loveliness That has long faded from the world; The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

Title] Michael Robartes to his Beloved III TS Michael Robartes remembers Forgotten Beauty WATR. The change of ascribed speaker from The Savoy’s O’Sullivan Rua (an Irish version of the poet-figure who was to become Red Hanra­ han) is, as D. Albright observes, ‘an instance of persona-switch’, though the poem ‘seems more appropriate to the aesthetical Michael Robartes’ (Albright, 462). WBY was to assign another ‘aes­ thetical’ poem from this summer to the same speaker, when publishing ‘The Secret Rose’ under the title ‘O’Sullivan Rua to the Secret Rose’ (also in The Savoy). The ‘III’ of the TS version shows that WBY thought of making a sequence of Michael Robartes poems, though this sequenc­ ing was not carried through for WATR. 1–3.] There are two possible – but faint – echoes here of D.G. Rossetti’s poem ‘Eden Bower’ (Poems (1870)), an account of the revenge taken by Lilith, Adam’s first mate, upon the human couple Adam and Eve in engineering their fall. Remembering the times when she and Adam ‘Heart in heart lay sighing and pin­ ing’ (32), Lilith addresses the ‘bright Snake, the death-worm of Adam’ (137), and asks it to ‘Wrap me round in the form I’ll borrow | And let me tell thee of sweet tomorrow’ (159–160). Another poem which may be in the back­ ground here, exercising a subliminal influ­ ence upon WBY’s figure of physically pressing a heart upon an abstract idea, is E.B. Barrett’s

‘The Sea-Mew’ (The Seraphim, 1838)), 8–9: ‘His heart upon the heart of ocean | Lay lean­ ing all its mystic motion’. WBY had already made the heart quasi-physical in its effect in ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’, 2: ‘His heart hung all upon a silken dress’. James Joyce was to have his character Stephen Dedalus paraphrase these lines by WBY in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), rejecting them with youthful vehemence: 9 April, later: Michael Robartes remem­ bers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world. Stephen (who is more interested in what arms can press than what can be pressed by a heart) slightly misreads Robartes’ lines; his quarrel, though, is with an embracing of something past rather than things in the future. 4–5.] No specific reference is likely here, but WBY would have known the story of the retreat of King John across the Wash in East Anglia in 1213, in the course of which a wagon carrying the crown jewels was caught by the tide and lost for ever. (These were not ‘hurled’ away, though, by the King or anyone else.)

442

10

15

20

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY

The love-tales wrought with silken thread By dreaming ladies upon cloth That has made fat the murderous moth; The roses that of old time were Woven by ladies in their hair, The dew-cold lilies ladies bore Through many a sacred corridor Where such grey clouds of incense rose That only God’s eyes did not close: For that pale breast and lingering hand Come from a more dream-heavy land, A more dream-heavy hour than this; And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew, But flame on flame, and deep on deep,

4. jewelled crowns] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poeti­ cal Works (1884), Alexander the Great IV viii 129–132: ‘The jewelled crowns | Of those dusk sovereigns fell flat before us: The innu­ merous armies opened like the wind | That sighs around an arrow’. 6–7.] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Poems by the Way (1891), ‘Hildebrand and Hellelil’, 5–8: But there whereas the gold should be With silk upon the cloth sewed she. Where she should sew with silken thread The gold upon the cloth she laid. 6. wrought] wove TS, WATR. 8.] This was a line employed in a bravura sat­ ire of the Irish Theatre by Susan Mitchell (a Yeats family friend since the late 1890s, and an associate of both SMY and George Rus­ sell) in which WBY (‘Bates’) is parodied by the device of voicing his own lines in a ludi­ crous and deflating context. The effect is witty, and biting (Aids to the Immortality of Certain Persons in Ireland (1913),‘The Voice of One’, 122–129): All the world o’er the uncommercial few, Gathering in companies of one and two,

Sit humbly while the miracle is wrought By the unresting ravens of my thought, While the mob theatre’s expensive cloth Makes ever still more fat the murderous moth; And dew-pale ladies gather lilies tall To weave o’er my white brow Fame’s coronal! 11. dew-cold] Perhaps cp. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), The Brides’ Tragedy II ii 2–3: ‘thou that with dew-cold fingers softly closest | The wearied eye’. 14. only God’s] only the god’s TS only the gods’ WATR-The Augustan Books of English Poetry: W.B. Yeats (1927); changed for SP29 and after, but the earlier reading recurs in 1931 repr. of Later Poems. Of this history of change with regard to gods and God, R. Ellmann commented, ‘The only motivation for this monotheism seems to be rhythm’ (Identity, 53). 21–24.] In TS, the originally typed text is: But wing on wing, throne over throne, Deep under deep, when each alone With swords upon their iron knees Brood her high flaming mysteries.

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY

443

Throne over throne where in half sleep, Their swords upon their iron knees, Brood her high lonely mysteries.

WBY revises this by hand to: But flame on flame, deep under deep, Throne over throne, where in half sleep Brood her high lonely mysteries, Their swords upon their iron knees. 21.] But flame on flame, deep under deep, WATR, PW06, Selected Poems (1921); All but the flames, and deep on deep, CWVP08-A Selection of the Love Poetry of William But­ ler Yeats (1913). Final reading is from Later Poems (1922) and subsequent printings. flame on flame] WBY here echoes his own ‘Dream of a Blessed Spirit’ (later, ‘The

Countess Kathleen in Paradise’), 16: ‘Flame on flame, and wing on wing’. deep on deep] WBY’s TS ‘deep under deep’ did not survive, perhaps on account of its echo of late Tennyson, The Death of Oenone and Other Poems (1892), ‘Mechanophilus’, 35–36: ‘Deep under deep for ever goes, | Heaven over heaven expands’. 24.] ‘Brood’ here does not suggest that swords will be leaving iron knees any time soon. H. Orel comments that ‘they brooded; theirs was a ‘half sleep,’ they would not rise to action’ (82).

444

HE REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY

Text of the poem in The Savoy Jul. 1896: O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell When my arms wrap you round, I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded in the world;

The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled

In shadowy pools, when armies fled;

The love-tales wrought with silken thread

By dreaming ladies upon cloth

That has made fat the murderous moth;

The roses that of old time were

Woven by ladies in their hair,

Before they drowned their lovers’ eyes

In twilight shaken with low sighs;

The dew-cold lilies ladies bore

Through many a sacred corridor

Where a so sleepy incense rose

That only God’s eyes did not close:

For that dim brow and lingering hand

Come from a more dream-heavy land,

A more dream-heavy hour than this;

And, when you sigh from kiss to kiss,

I hear pale Beauty sighing too,

For hours when all must fade like dew

Till there be naught but throne on throne

Of seraphs, brooding, each alone,

A sword upon his iron knees,

On her most lonely mysteries.

165

THE SECRET ROSE

Date of composition. No firm evidence for dating exists, but it is probable that the poem was composed in the summer of 1896. A letter written to WBY by ‘Fiona Macleod’ is from c. 22 Aug., and its enclosure of a copy of the poem makes it likely that composi­ tion was recent: there may well be a connection between the composition and the socalled ‘Vision of the Archer’ that took place at Tillyra Castle (where WBY was staying with Arthur Symons) on 15 Aug. As the editor of The Savoy, Symons was well-placed to secure the poem for publication within the month. Context and interpretation. It is possible to see this poem as having three kinds of context, corresponding to its first three places of publication; and possible, too, that WBY was able to envisage all three as in some ways mutually accommodating. In its first periodical publication, the poem is assigned to ‘O’Sullivan Rua’: this was not the first time WBY had made use of this persona as a supposed speaker, for he had published two poems as ‘O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell’ (later ‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’ and ‘A Poet to His Beloved’) in Mar. 1896, and ‘O’Sullivan Rua to Mary Lavell’ (later ‘He Remembers Forgotten Beauty’) appeared in The Savoy in Jul. 1896; O’Sullivan the Red had been the subject of a short story in The National Observer in Sept. 1894, and WBY’s ‘The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red’ was published in the New Review in Apr. 1896; ‘O’Sullivan Rua to the Curlew’ was printed in The Savoy (later ‘He Reproves the Curlew’) in Nov. 1896, while the story ‘The Death of O’Sullivan the Red’ would appear in The New Review in Dec. of the same year. The persona, then, in this poem’s first publication is one that WBY was in the habit of using: based on the Gaelic poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1748–1782), this offered WBY a voice located in Irish culture and history which could be that of a love poet who was also susceptible to visions of the other world. The persona suits this poem well enough: its mysti­ cal address is plausibly that of an aisling poet (if in a somewhat abstract and exalted register), while its instances of ‘frenzy’ and erotic abandon are all drawn from Irish sources. The poem’s second context is that of the collection of stories in which it was published in 1897, The Secret Rose: here, it comes after the book’s two epigraphs and before its first short story. In this role, the poem establishes a context for the fiction that follows, as an invocation (but not an explanation) of the volume’s titular symbol, along with a number of condensed vignettes that pave the way, in a historical/folkloric register, for the narratives the book contains. Now, the presumed speaker is no longer a persona, but is more closely identified with the author himself – an author who is a poet, but also expressing a devotion to the ‘Rose’, and waiting upon the symbol’s future moment of apocalyptic fulfilment in the world. A  third public context is the 1899 DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-167

446

THE SECRET ROSE

volume WATR, where the poem finds its place in a mystical sequence of lyrics and ballads: its principal symbol is contained prominently in the poem with which WBY precedes it, ‘The Blessed’, where ‘one has seen in the redness of wine | The Incorriptible Rose’ (35–36); and it is followed directly by ‘Hanrahan Laments because of his Wan­ derings’, a poem which has for speaker a new version of O’Sullivan Rua. At 32 lines, the poem is the longest non-ballad piece in the volume; it is also the only substantial poem in rhymed couplets (the only other verse in couplets being the 10 lines of ‘The Song of the Old Mother’). WBY’s use of the Rose as a symbol was not new and had been one of the distinguish­ ing features of his CK volume in 1892. This poem does, however, have some feeling of a climactic engagement with the symbol: the first-person direct address to the Rose and the announcement of its persistence through history, with special emphasis on episodes drawn from Irish myth, and the concluding apocalyptic question, suggest that matters have come to a point of culmination and crisis. Yet the word ‘Secret’ in the title is impor­ tant; and the Rose is as much a secret at the end as at the beginning (the poem also ends by repeating its own opening line). Insofar as the Rose has specifically magical associa­ tions for WBY, in the Rosicrucian symbolism of the GD, this is a procedure in keeping with his other public allusions to hermetic matters: secrets here do not exist in order to be given away, but can figure in poetry without any betrayal of their ritualistic mean­ ings. While WBY’s employment of the Rose as a symbol had always been shadowed by possible Irish reference (see especially ‘The Rose of Battle’, and notes to that poem), ‘The Secret Rose’ is the most explicit of all his ‘Rose’ poems in its allusions to Irish material. If the first eight lines are a mystical invocation or prayer, largely in line with the earlier pieces from CK, the transition to a series of four compressed narratives drawing upon Irish mythic history and folklore is a marked departure for WBY in this mode. The refer­ ences to Cuchulain and Fergus involve figures whom WBY’s readers had already met in his poetry – in ‘The Death of Cuchulain’ and ‘Fergus and the Druid’ from CK – but Con­ chubar, and the character from W. Larminie’s ‘The Red Pony’, introduce further levels of reference which (although the notes in 1899 to WATR fill in the gaps more than gener­ ously) suggest strongly that a fresh reader has a great deal still to read. Whatever in this material has not yet been addressed by WBY, it is perhaps implied, will be treated by him in the future. One of the poem’s very first readers, William Sharp, wrote enthusiastically to WBY using his ‘Fiona Macleod’ persona (Elizabeth A. Sharp, William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir (1910), 271): With what delight I have read your lovely lovely poem ‘O’Sullivan Rua to the Secret Rose!’ I have read it over and over with ever deepening delight. It is one of your finest poems, I think: though perhaps it can only truly be appreciated by those who are familiar with legendary Celtic history. Sharp shared much of WBY’s familiarity ‘with legendary Celtic history’, but he was able to discern there also the limits which the poem set to its own appreciation. Writing

THE SECRET ROSE

447

as William Sharp, he made the point in print in 1899, praising ‘the prefatory lines to The Secret Rose, with their rare and distinctive music and individuality of thought and method  – if also, for most readers, their obscurity of allusion’ (Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1899, 53). In 1897, the contents of WBY’s The Secret Rose mean that readers will gain a good measure of the familiarity required to make the poem’s narrative vignettes seem more natural forms of allusion. By the time of WATR, WBY is willing to be more explicit about the mystical significance of his own poetic symbolism (the book carries forty-three pages of notes  – in a volume with only sixty-two pages of [mainly short] poems – and these are themselves composed in a style reminiscent of the narrative voice of WBY’s fiction). It is worth remembering that WBY places five poems later in that volume’s sequence of poems, ‘Aedh Pleads with the Elemental Powers’: this is an unstint­ ingly hermetic performance without any obvious debts to Irish material, on the fate of ‘the Immortal Rose’. The word ‘Secret’ in WBY’s title, then, is partly an acknowledgement of an occult (and therefore duly occluded) significance. For any reader of the whole WATR vol­ ume, this measure of secrecy necessarily touches all of the numerous references in its poems to the Rose, or roses: even something so apparently decorative or fash­ ion-derived as ‘Crumple the rose in your hair’ (‘Michael Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods’, 4) feels within range of hermetic symbolism. Given this,‘The Secret Rose’, with its direct first-person address to the major symbol, might be expected to be something of a climax. Yet it is not that exactly; instead, its poetic power resides as much in what it withholds as in what it discloses. The poem’s main disclosures, in fact, are oblique ones: they are in narrative rather than symbolic lan­ guage, and are expressions of temporal incident and meaning rather than timeless essence and completion. If the secrecy of the rose can be penetrated, this is not to be achieved in any direct fashion. Even the apocalyptic atmosphere of the poem’s closing lines is one of a present tense hoping to witness a future revelation; in the meantime, it is implied, mystical bearings have to be taken from the imperfect evi­ dence of art, story, and myth. The time of the poem’s composition was one at which WBY found himself ponder­ ing with great seriousness the nature of the visionary evidence on which much of his writing was founded. One incident in particular, which took place in Aug. 1896, had a profound imaginative effect on WBY. In his 1915 recollections, it is remembered in this way (Mem., 100–101): It was at Tulira I  decided to evoke the lunar power, which was, I  believed, the chief source of my inspiration. I evoked for nine evenings with no great result, but on the ninth night as I was going to sleep I saw first a centaur and then a marvellous naked woman shooting an arrow at a star. She stood like a statue upon a stone pedestal, and the flesh tints of her body seemed to make all human flesh in contrast seem unhealthy. Like the centaur she moved amid brilliant light.

448

THE SECRET ROSE

This incident, which culminated in the vision of ‘Diana’ on the night of 14–15 Aug., is likely to be very close in time to the composition of the poem. Documentary evi­ dence from the week itself (in WBY’s GD notebook for the Second Order) confirms the substance of the later recollections, recording that he ‘invoked lunar forces and gave myself into their hands,’ that he ‘visualized a Kerubim’, ‘saw centaur with bow’, and finally experienced a ‘vision of Diana’. That WBY did not feel he fully understood these visions at the time is clear; and it is clear also that he moved quickly to commu­ nicate them first with his companion at Tillyra, Arthur Symons (who claimed a simul­ taneous and analogous vision), then by letter with ‘Fiona Macleod’ – William Sharp, to whom he also evidently sent a version of the newly-composed ‘To the Secret Rose’. The poem’s status as an act of invocation is at least analogous to WBY’s ‘lunar’ efforts, while its swerve from invocation to narrative vignette could perhaps mirror the events at Tillyra, where four nights brought at least three distinct visions, whose meanings awaited full understanding. Each of the four characters in the poem’s narratives acts impulsively, or under irresistible coercive force, and WBY’s ‘archer’ vision, which was so explicitly aligned in his thoughts with questions of his own creative force and direc­ tion, brought him up against the problem of symbolic meaning and consequence in a way he could not yet completely interpret. (For a detailed account of the vision and its later implications for WBY, see ‘The Vision of the Archer’ in Biographical and Critical Appendix to CL 2, 658–663.) Publication history. This poem was first published in The Savoy in Sept. 1896 (S), where it occupied a full page and had a title that identified it with a character in WBY’s fiction (see Title). This issue also contained the third part of WBY’s essay, ‘William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, and three chapters from OS’s novel Beauty’s Hour. Its next publication was in WBY’s book The Secret Rose (1897) (SR), where it is the volume’s first item (following two epigraphs), and functions as a kind of preface. This version of the poem (which was set in italics) continued to be printed in subsequent gatherings of WBY’s fiction, prefacing items from The Secret Rose, including that in vol.7 of CWVP (1908) and in EPS (1925). The poem found its place as a lyric item, rather than prefatory verses, in WATR (1899); and from then on was included in all collected edi­ tions by WBY. MS and textual history. There is no extant MS material for the poem, but a proof from Nov. 1896 for The Secret Rose carries corrections in WBY’s hand (NLI 30204, reproduced and transcribed in Cornell WATR, 146–149). The slight differences between the poem as preface to The Secret Rose stories and its WATR form in later collected editions were corrected in the 1931 proofs for a future Collected Works on WBY’s instructions (‘To correspond with same poem in vol.1’).

THE SECRET ROSE

449

Copy-text: P49.

F

ar-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those

Typeface] The poem is set in italic type for SR, and subsequent appearances in col­ lected editions where it precedes the short stories of SR. Title] O’Sullivan Rua to the Secret Rose S To the Secret Rose SR, EPS. O’Sullivan Rua, or O’Sullivan the Red, later Red Hanrahan, featured in WBY’s fiction of the 1890s as an itinerant Irish poet of the eighteenth century. 1. inviolate] This adjective (OED ‘Not vio­ lated; free from violation; unhurt, uninjured, unbroken; unprofaned, unmarred; intact’) is not especially common, and is more often used ‘Of laws, compacts, principles, institu­ tions, sacred or moral qualities’ (OED a.) than ‘Of persons, places, sacred things, etc.’ (OED b., and WBY’s sense here). WBY had used it strikingly before in 1896, near the end of ‘The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red’ where the spirit of Dervadilla (i.e. Dervogilla, who eloped with Dermot MacMurrough in the twelfth century, causing ultimately the Nor­ man invasion of Ireland) says to O’Sullivan: ‘We loved only the blossom of manhood and of womanhood in one another, the decidu­ ous blossom of the dust and not the eternal beauty,’ adding that ‘When we died, there was no inviolate world about us; the demons of the battles and bitterness we wrought pronounced our doom’ (The New Review Apr. 1896, 407). Here, ‘the deciduous blos­ som of the dust’ is in contrast to the roses which surround O’Sullivan to give rise to his supernatural vision, while the ‘inviolate world’, like these roses, is something above and beyond the violated world in which Der­ vadilla (and O’Sullivan) experience suffering.

The ‘inviolate Rose’, it may seem, is already being posited in the vocabulary and imag­ ery of WBY’s story. How far ‘inviolate’ car­ ries a specifically sexual meaning is open to speculation: E. Cullingford assumes this to be WBY’s primary meaning, since ‘Yeats’s ‘invi­ olate Rose’ fuses the courtly worship of the sexually unavailable goddess with the rep­ resentation of Ireland as a beautiful woman’ (Cullingford, 54), but there is little firm proof that the poet has this combination of possible associations at the forefront of his mind in these lines. 2. Enfold me] WBY’s verb here is necessar­ ily (but perhaps problematically) abstract. E.B. Loizeaux notes how ‘the image invoked does not correspond to what we know of our world,’ and ‘The rose and its leaves are entirely symbolic, as is the place where such roses enfold beards and helms’ (Loiseaux, 70). S. Putzel sees here an aspect of the larger paradoxical workings of WATR: ‘The para­ dox of the opening lines [.  .  .] is, to a large extent, the paradox of the entire volume: the Rose is ‘far-off ’ – beyond human reach – and ‘inviolate’ – beyond human sexuality, yet the speaker wishes to be enfolded’ (Putzel, 200). The most productive critical engagement with WBY’s verb is that of M. Campbell, for whom ‘The key word is “enfold” ’. Campbell shows how the word ramifies through the texture of the surrounding lines as ‘the sonic turning inwards and backwards in the play of rhyme and assonance’ (‘The English Roman­ tic Symbolists’, Holdeman and Levitas, 317): Listen to the playing through of s and r sounds, in ‘most secret . . . Rose . . . hour of hours . . . those’; or the enclosed echo­ ing spaces of Sepulchre and wine-vat [. . .] ‘Deep’ unavoidably rhymes with ‘sleep’, and when enfold comes back again, it

450

5

THE SECRET ROSE

Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre, Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep

loses itself in the beards, jewels, and ‘gold’ of the Magi. my hour of hours] This phrase is far from uncommon, but WBY might well have encoun­ tered it in the context of modern poetry: cp. e.g. J.C. Mangan, ‘St. Patrick’s Hymn before Tara’, 73–75: ‘In this hour of hours | I place all those powers | Between myself and every foe’; Barry Cornwall, English Songs (1851), ‘Night Song’ 1–2: ‘The Hour of hours, | When Love lies down with folded wings’; D.F. MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘To Henry Wadsworth Longfel­ low’, 5–6: ‘With what delight my memory now recalls | That hour of hours, that flower of all the rest’; and William Allingham, Life and Phantasy (1889), ‘Bona Dea’, 65–66: ‘Till the hour, the hour of hours, | When she called me from my flow’rs’. 3. in] at S, SR. the Holy Sepulchre] This is the empty tomb of Christ, where three Marys (Mary Mag­ dalene, Mary Salome, and Mary mother of James) came to look for his body, only to find the tomb empty after his resurrection. The location is therefore Jerusalem, where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built over the supposed site of the tomb. 4. in the wine-vat] WBY’s juxtaposition of this with the religious reference of the pre­ vious line is notably bold. On wine as both analogue and metaphor for mystical experi­ ence, Gould and Toomey cp. a passage from WBY’s story ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (M, 308; ‘Rosa Alchemica’ S version only, Apr. 1896): I remembered, as I read, that mood which Edgar Poe found in a wine-cup, and how it passed into France and took possession of Baudelaire, and from Baudelaire passed to England and the Pre-Raphaelites, and then again returned to France, and still wanders the world, enlarging its power

as it goes, awaiting the time when it shall be, perhaps alone, or, with other moods, master over a great new religion, and an awakener of the fanatical wars that hov­ ered in the gray surges, and forget the wine-cup where it was born. 4–5. stir | And tumult] This enjambment (and these words) are matched in Wordsworth’s The Prelude: ‘and the stir | And tumult of the world’. Yet what may seem a distinct echo here is in fact very problematic, for the Wordsworth lines are from his 1805 iteration of The Prelude only (XII, 113–114), and this was not available in printed form until 1926. The conjunction of words is plausibly coinci­ dental (both ‘stir’ and ‘tumult’ occur together elsewhere, and derive from the King James Bible text of Isaiah 22.2, ‘Thou that art full of stirs, a tumultuous city’); but the enjambment is less so – or at least, the odds against it seem very high. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Eurydice’, 95 echoes part of the Wordsworth line, in ‘The splendour and the tumult of the world’ (the available Prelude, that of 1850, had ‘the world’s tumult’ rather than 1805’s ‘tumult of the world’). Dowden did in fact have access to the 1805 Prelude MS  in the possession of the Wordsworth family, which he studied as part of his (abortive) project for a biography of the poet; but that MS did not come to Dublin, and it is difficult to imagine WBY coming into contact with such textual information, and then retaining the detail for some time before echoing the enjambment in a poem of his own. The echo remains a puzzle. 5. tumult] If (as a number of critics have thought) Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819) lies behind this poem, then WBY’s choice of word here may indicate a point of contact with its line 59: ‘The tumult of thy mighty harmonies’.

THE SECRET ROSE

10

451

Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise In Druid vapour and make the torches dim;

defeated dreams] WBY’s phrase here was taken up with some alacrity by William Sharp, since the volume From the Hills of Dream, which he published as ‘Fiona Macleod’ in 1897 features the phrase ‘haunted valley of defeated dreams’ not once but twice in a short prose-poem, ‘The Weaver of Hope’. 6. eyelids, heavy] eyelids heavy SR, EPS. 7. Thy great leaves] Your heavy leaves S Your great leaves SR. 8–9.] WBY’s strongly visual image of the Magi here is very likely to be at least informed by particular artworks. According to T.R. Henn, WBY’s wife George saw here ‘Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi’, with a pre-Raphaelite overlay’ (Henn, 252); but the Botticelli does not really fit the poem’s image (one of the three (unbearded) Magi wears a turban-cum­ crown, but the only proper crown visible is of plain gold, laid relatively inconspicuously on the ground). There are many depictions of the Three Kings at Christ’s nativity which the poet might have seen, and upon which he may be drawing; but one strong pos­ sibility as an influence here (identified in Gould and Toomey, M 308) is Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Star of Bethlehem (1888; exhibited in London, 1891), where golden jewel-encrusted crowns are present (though they are not actually worn by the kings), and one of the Magi has a grey beard. More important than any specific correlation, how­ ever, is the general effect of pre-Raphaelite artistic practice which WBY seeks to impart to his image in these lines. 9. the king] As the first paragraph of WBY’s note in WATR acknowledges, this is Conchu­ bar MacNessa, king of Ulster. WBY quotes

the 17th-century period Irish historian Geof­ frey Keating, from the material translated in Eugene O’Curry’s Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861). O’Curry treats the story of the Irish king’s reaction to Christ’s Passion (taking place, it is implied, around the same time), and his subsequent death, with reference primarily to the twelfth-century Book of Leinster, which Keating uses and augments: this is, according to O’Curry, ‘a modified, and less accurate, but fuller version of the tale from some ancient authority no longer known to us’ (642). 9–12.] Of the crowned Magi; and the Hound of Cu | Who met Fand walking among flam­ ing dew S. In Proofs for SR (NLI 30204), the lines are: Of the crowned Magi; and him whose Druid eyes Beheld the Tree and the Tree’s fruit arise On a grey vapour till the world grew dim And the blade fell from his cold hands; and him Who had for lord, the lord of the lightning, Lu, And met Fand walking among flaming dew And lost the world and Emer for a kiss; WBY made corrections to the first four of these lines, so that they read as follows: Of the crowned Magi; and enfold the eyes That saw the Tree and the Tree’s fruit arise On a grey vapour till the world grew dim And the blade dropped out of cold hands; and him It is evident that further revision followed this proof, to produce the published version of the lines in SR.

452

15

THE SECRET ROSE

Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him

Who met Fand walking among flaming dew

By a grey shore where the wind never blew,

And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;

And him who drove the gods out of their liss,

12–15.] This story about Cuchulain is given in some detail in the second paragraph of WBY’s note to the poem in WATR. WBY’s source is ultimately in the early twelfthcentury Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow), a compilation containing material of the Ulster mythological cycle. After the manuscript’s rediscovery in 1837, its con­ tents had gradually entered the mainstream of Gaelic scholarship (an edition appeared in 1870), and the story of ‘The Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn and the Only Jealousy of Eimar’ was first translated by Eugene O’Curry in The Atlantis 1 and 2 (Jan. 1858 and Jan. 1859). Its next appearance is probably WBY’s direct source, in John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (1888): this is summarized in the WATR note. From the SR proof stage onwards, WBY makes Cuchulain simply ‘him’, but he is named (as ‘Cu’) in the ear­ lier S text: the goddess Fand, however, along with her rival Emer, is allowed her name. In the Irish source, Fand takes Cuchulain away from his mortal wife Emer; he stays with the goddess in the immortal world for a time, until won back from it by Emer: the situation bears a broad resemblance to that of WBY’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (though its antiquity, as WBY probably knew, was considerably greater). The compression of the story offered here concentrates entirely on Cuchulain’s erotic capture by Fand, and the poem makes no reference to how both Emer and the world regained the hero who has ‘lost’ them ‘for a kiss’. Although both Fand and Emer would have been to most of the audience of SR not much more than exotic names, they had both, in fact, enjoyed a fairly recent literary outing in a long poem

by William Larminie, the title piece of his Fand and Other Poems (1892). Here, the con­ flict between Fand and Emer feels very much like one between Victorian mistress and wife; but the basic outlines of the story are kept fairly close to those of the Irish myth. WBY knew this poem, having reviewed the book in United Ireland, 23 Jul. 1892: there, he called Larminie ‘Irish enough,’ and though not lik­ ing his metrical habits conceded that ‘he can do fairly well now and then’ (CW 9, 171). WBY cites Larminie’s folklore work in the WATR note, but in the poem his compression of the longwinded Fand into a few lines may be, in part, a display of the superiority of his own poetic powers. (The other major work in Larminie’s volume, ‘Moytura’, also offered hints to WBY in his work on The Shadowy Waters through the 1890s.) 13. flaming dew] Gould and Toomey (M, 308), following the hint in WBY’s alteration of his note for CP33 on ‘walking among flam­ ing dew’, ‘because, I  think, of something in Mr. Standish O’Grady’s books’, compare Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ireland: The Heroic Period 2 (1878), 73 [on the goldsmith of the Bobh Derg]: ‘by the lake he worked, surrounded by rainbows and showers of fiery dew’. WBY would indeed have read this; but he would have come across ‘fiery dew’ in poetry too: cp. e.g. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Bridal of Tremaine’ II x 12: ‘Scat­ tering a shower of fiery dew’ and Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), LXXIII, 11: ‘Deep tulips dashed with fiery dew’. 14.] Not in S; accidentally omitted in WATR (but supplied in an errata page). 16–18.] The third paragraph of WBY’s note on these lines for WATR is not overly specific about ‘something I  read’ in relation to this

THE SECRET ROSE

20

453

And till a hundred morns had flowered red Feasted and wept the barrows of his dead; And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown

story, even though ‘I certainly read it some­ where’. The outline could have been found in Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ireland: Criti­ cal and Philosophical (1881), where ‘Coelte invaded the haunted hill of Ass-a-Roe, at Ballyshannon, expelled the weird inhabit­ ants, and dwelt there ever after’ (324–325). Here, ‘Coelte is said never to have died, but to have entered without death into the land of the Tuatha De Danan,’ and ‘From the haunted hill of Assaroe he drove the gods who dwelt there, and abode in it ever afterwards’ (351). O’Grady dicusses Caolte in comparison with his Fenian contemporary, Oisin (353): Coelte Mac Ronan, Coelte son of Ronan, is the nephew of Finn, being his sister’s son. He is one of the greatest Fian heroes, slender, and renowned for his swiftness. He and Ossian alone survived of all the Fi­ anna Eireen, but while Ossian, a withered elder, is taken possession of by the monks, and encouraged to relate the history of his people, Coelte, after the destruction of the Fians, entered the host of the Tuatha De Danan, and lived immortal and invisible in the island. He stormed the enchanted fortress of the gods of the Erne at Assaroe, and entered himself into its possession, where he dwelt for many centuries. WBY had alluded to Caolte in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’, and now he sees him (as does O’Grady) somewhat in the light of Oisin, as a figure who perhaps shares that other Fenian’s joys and sorrows, his feasting and weeping, as well as his exception­ ally protracted life on earth. The story of his driving the gods from their stronghold is quite specific in its location  – Assaroe, the falls on the river Erne at Ballyshannon in Co. Donegal  – though this was the dwelling of one of

the dispersed Tuatha De Danaan in particular. Naming this god in his WATR note as Ilbreac, WBY repeats the information contained in a story included in the fifteenth-century Book of Fermoy, the Altram Tige Da Medar [The Nurture of the Houses of Two Milk-Vessels’], where the god Manannan assigns places of refuge to the Tuatha De Danaan, and one, Ilb­ reac, is installed in the sidhe-mound at Assaroe (Aedha Easa Ruaidh). 16. liss] WBY here uses a word directly from Old Irish, which was employed in nine­ teenth-century scholarship, OED n.2: ‘A cir­ cular enclosure having an earthen wall; often used as a fort’. 18. the barrows of his dead] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, 71: ‘And grassy barrows of the happier dead’. Like ‘liss’, ‘barrows’ has some­ thing of an archaeological force, though here the derivation is English rather than Irish: OED ‘barrow’ n.3: ‘A mound of earth or stones erected in early times over a grave; a grave-mound, a tumulus.’ 19–21.] These three lines are, as WBY says in his WATR note, the story of Fergus MacRoigh, a king of Ulster who abdicated his throne to live the life of an itinerant poet. WBY had treated the subject at length in his 1892 poem ‘Fergus and the Druid’ (see notes to the poem for more on Fergus MacRoigh); now, he concentrates the narrative to pro­ duce a vignette of the chosen transition from royal station to life among ‘wanderers’. Again, the emphasis of the distilled narrative is on impulsive choice. In his note, WBY quotes lines 33–36 of Samuel Ferguson, ‘The Abdi­ cation of Fergus Mac Roy’ (Lays of the West­ ern Gael, 1865), where the ex-king explains how his beloved Nessa once looked in his direction, ‘And my soul that moment took | Captive in a single look’ (31–32).

454

25

THE SECRET ROSE

Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;

And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,

And sought through lands and islands numberless years,

Until he found, with laughter and with tears,

A woman of so shining loveliness

That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,

21. in deep woods] If there is a link between material for this poem and the substance of WBY’s ‘Vision of the Archer’ at Tillyra Castle, the decision to specify Fergus’s wanderings as being in woods may be a piece of circumstan­ tial evidence. Writing in 1915, WBY recalled that the vision came about after he ‘decided to evoke the lunar power, which was, I believed, the chief source of my inspiration’; shortly before setting off for Ireland that summer, OS had ‘obtained . . . sentences, unintelligible to herself ’ saying that ‘He [WBY] is too much under solar influence,’ and that therefore ‘he is to live near water and to avoid woods, which concentrate the solar power’ (Mem, 100). Fergus’s self-imposed exile ‘in deep woods’ may figure subjection to this ‘solar power’, which wins him away from his proper calling, just as WBY in 1896 had been fearful that an over-elaborate and mystical literary style was beginning to take him further away from the sources of his creative strength. 22–27.] This final narrative is, as the last para­ graph of WBY’s WATR note says, drawn from the folk-lore stories of William Larm­ inie, in his book West Irish Folk Tales and Romances (1863). WBY was much keener on Larminie as a folklorist than as a poet, and he published an enthusiastic review of the volume in The Bookman, Jun. 1894, calling it ‘as fine a book as the best that has been’. In the course of his review, WBY mentions the same story as the one used for the poem: ‘Our love for woman’s beauty is for ever a little more subtle once we have felt the mar­ vel of that tale of a boy who, finding on the

road a little box containing a lock of hair which shone with a light like many candles, travelled through numberless perils to find he from whose head it had been shorn’ (CW 9, 239). In one passage in his short story ‘Costello the Proud, Oona MacDermott, and the Bitter Tongue’, published first in The Pageant (1896), WBY makes this story one about ‘love sorrows’, which the protagonist Costello dwells on: ‘it was a lock of her [i.e. Oona’s] hair, coiled in a little carved box, which gave so great a light that men threshed by it from sundown to sunrise, and awoke so great a wonder that kings spent years in wandering, or fell before unknown armies in seeking, to discover her hiding place; for there was no beauty in the world but hers, no tragedy in the world but hers’. WBY retained this passage in the story for its appearance in The Secret Rose; so the lines in the poem here work partly as an anticipation of the story to follow (until 1913 at least, when the passage from the short story is revised away). Larm­ inie’s ‘The Red Pony’ (told to him, he says, by one P. Minahan of Malinmore, Co. Donegal) is what WBY’s lines are ‘founded upon’, though the story is not followed exactly: the boy who finds the box has no tillage, house, or goods to sell (he is a youngest son, expelled from the family home), and there is no mention of threshing corn at midnight. (WBY’s quotation from Larminie is largely accurate, though it compresses a few lines of dialogue which it summarizes as ‘Presently he had to go to become the servant of a king for his living’.)

THE SECRET ROSE

30

455

A little stolen tress. I, too, await

The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

27.] Set thus in S: A little stolen tress.

I, too, await

27–32.] The occult elements in these final lines met with disapproval from WBY’s old schoolfriend, Charles Johnston, when reviewing PW06: in contrast to the poet’s ear­ lier, Eastern-influenced mystical thoughts, he felt these verses spoke ‘of a later time, in London, when Yeats was busy with the Pro­ phetic Books of Blake, the Kabbala and the Rosicrucianism of his friend MacGregor Mathers, with which I had less of sympathy’ (North American Review, Apr. 1908, 614). For H. Bloom, the lines ‘are a great passage by any standards,’ but this greatness is something quite apart from any magical or hermetic associations: ‘It remains true that nothing in the poem works against an esoteric meaning, but the poem’s concerns are no longer with the Rose but with the poet and his state of consciousness’ (131, 130). Bloom is one of the critics who perceive Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ at work in WBY’s lines here; for G. Bornstein, ‘The only distinction [WBY] drew between his conception of the Intel­ lectual Beauty and Shelley’s has disappeared. [. . .] He no longer cautions the Rose to keep its distance and leave his sensory perceptions intact but instead longs for it to “enfold” him in its power’, and ‘concludes his poem’ ‘in a metaphor echoing the close of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Bornstein, 53–54). 28, 31. the hour  .  .  .  thine hour] WBY’s echo of line 2 (‘my hour of hours’) here helps to maintain the poem’s contrast between the time of the speaker and the timelessness of his symbol. J. Harwood notes that ‘the key­ note is the release of the energies of love and hate, in contrast to emotional paralysis; the

corollary is that the poet can only be freed from his paralysis by the destruction of the temporal world’ (79). 29–30.] Cp. R.W. Buchanan, Poetical Works (1874) Vol.1, ‘Meg Blane’, I, 240–241: ‘The wind drave past the stars, and faint they flew | Like sparks blown from a forge!’ Perhaps also cp. Keats, Poems (1817), ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring’, 3: ‘The stars look very cold about the sky’. The image’s primary per­ sonal association for WBY may be with Mac­ Gregor Mathers’s kabbalistic writings (S.L. MacGregor Mathers, Kabbala Denudata: The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), 301–302): For before the world was established Countenance beheld not Countenance. And therefore were the Prior Worlds de­ stroyed, for the Prior Worlds were formed without (equilibriated) conformation. But those which existed not in con­ formation are called vibrating flames and sparks, like as when the worker in stone striketh sparks from the flint with his hammer, or as when the smith smiteth the iron and dasheth forth sparks on every side. And these sparks which fly forth flame and scintillate, but shortly are ex­ tinguished. And these are called the Prior Worlds. And therefore have they been de­ stroyed, and persist not, until the Most Holy Ancient One can be conformed, and the workman can proceed unto His work. And therefore have we related in our discourse that the ray sendeth forth sparks upon sparks in three hundred and twenty directions. And those sparks are called the Prior Worlds, and suddenly they perished.

456

THE SECRET ROSE

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows, Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

Then proceeded the workman unto His work, and was conformed, namely as Male and Female. And those sparks became extinct and died, but now all things subsist. From a Light-Bearer of insupportable brightness proceeded a Radiating Flame, dashing off like a vast and mighty ham­ mer those sparks which were the Prior Worlds. ‘Sparks’ have another probable source in the closing lines of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘And, by the incantation of this verse, | Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth | Ashes and sparks, my words among man­ kind!’ (65–67) 32. Rose?] WBY’s punctuation here is of unusually strong significance. R. Ellmann, identifying this poem as a step into the

kind of mysticism which WBY had earlier regarded more warily, noted that ‘The use of a question mark instead of a period, and the deliberately vague connotation of the rose, are the only indications of the survival of his earlier caution’ (Man and the Masks, 98). For S. Putzel, ‘The final question mark undercuts the conviction of the declarative syntax and of the word ‘surely’, thus leaving the speaker exactly where he was at the beginning of the poem’ (Putzel, 201). Yet for H. Bloom, here the opening line is ‘now transformed into a genuinely open question,’ and ‘the ‘surely’ that begins the penultimate line is already more of a question than an assertion, or is perhaps balanced unevenly between the two’ (131–132). Again, the close of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ may be compared, with its final question, ‘O, Wind, | If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’

THE SECRET ROSE

457

WBY’s notes. In his notes to WATR, WBY writes a long commentary piece on the poem, which is reproduced with alterations in subsequent collected editions: CW08, Later Poems (1922, 1924, 1926, 1931), CP33, P49, and CP50. The text given here is that of WATR: I find that I have unintentionally changed the old story of Conchobar’s death. He did not see the crucifixion in a vision, but was told about it. He had been struck by a ball, made of the dried brain of a dead enemy, and hurled out of a sling; and this ball had been left in his head, and his head had been mended, the Book of Leinster says, with thread of gold because his hair was like gold. Keating, a writer of the time of Elizabeth, says, ‘In that state did he remain seven years, until the Friday on which Christ was crucified, according to some histo­ rians; and when he saw the unusual changes of the creation and the eclipse of the sun and the moon at its full, he asked of Bucrach, a Leinster Druid, who was along with him, what was it that brought that unusual change upon the planets of Heaven and Earth. ‘Jesus Christ, the son of God,’ said the Druid, ‘who is now being crucified by the Jews.’ ‘That is a pity,’ said Conchobar; ‘were I in his presence I would kill those who were putting him to death.’ And with that he brought out his sword, and rushed at a woody grove which was convenient to him, and began to cut and fell it; and what he said was, that if he were among the Jews that was the usage he would give them, and from the excessiveness of his fury which seized upon him, the ball started out of his head, and some of the brain came after it, and in that way he died. The wood of Lanshraigh, in Feara Rois, is the name by which that shrubby wood is called.’ I have imagined Cuchullain meeting Fand ‘walking among flaming dew.’ The story of their love is one of the most beautiful of our old tales. Two birds, bound one to another with a chain of gold, came to a lake side where Cuchullain and the host of Uladh was encamped, and sang so sweetly that all the host fell into a magic sleep. Presently they took the shape of two beautiful women, and cast a magical weakness upon Cuchullain, in which he lay for a year. At the year’s end an Aengus, who was probably Aengus the master of love, one of the greatest of the children of the goddess Danu, came and sat upon his bedside, and sang how Fand, the wife of Mannannan, the master of the sea, and of the islands of the dead, loved him; and that if he would come into the country of the gods, where there was wine and gold and silver, Fand and Laban her sister, would heal him of his magical weakness. Cuchullain went to the country of the gods, and, after being for a month the lover of Fand, made her a promise to meet her at a place called ‘the Yew at the Strand’s End,’ and came back to the earth. Emer, his mortal wife, won his love again, and Mannannan came to ‘the Yew at the Strand’ s End,’ and carried Fand away. When Cuchullain saw her going, his love for her fell upon him again, and he went mad, and wandered among the mountains without food or drink, until he was at last cured by a Druid drink of forgetfulness.

458

THE SECRET ROSE

I have founded the man ‘who drove the gods out of their Liss,’ or fort, upon something I have read about Caolte after the battle of Gabra, when almost all his companions were killed, driving the gods out of their Liss, either at Osraighe, now Ossory, or at Eas Ruaidh, now Asseroe, a waterfall at Ballyshannon, where Ilbreac, one of the children of the goddess Danu, had a Liss. I am writing away from most of my books, and have not been able to find the passage; but I cer­ tainly read it somewhere. I have founded ‘the proud dreaming king’ upon Fergus, the son of Reigh, the legendary poet of ‘the quest of the bull of Cualge,’ as he is in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in modern poems by Ferguson. He married Nessa, and Ferguson makes him tell how she took him ‘captive in a single look.’ ‘I am but an empty shade, Far from life and passion laid; Yet does sweet remembrance thrill All my shadowy being still.’ Presently, because of his great love, he gave up his throne to Conchobar, her son by another, and lived out his days feasting, and fighting, and hunting. His promise never to refuse a feast from a certain comrade, and the mischief that came by his promise, and the vengeance he took afterwards, are a principal theme of the poets. I have explained my imagination of him in ‘Fergus and the Druid,’ and in a little song in the second act of ‘The Countess Kathleen.’ I have founded him ‘who sold tillage, and house, and goods,’ upon something in ‘The Red Pony,’ a folk tale in Mr. Larminie’s ‘West Irish Folk Tales.’ A young man ‘saw a light before him on the high road. When he came as far, there was an open box on the road, and a light coming up out of it. He took up the box. There was a lock of hair in it. Presently he had to go to become the servant of a king for his living. There were eleven boys. When they were going out into the stable at ten o’clock, each of them took a light but he. He took no candle at all with him. Each of them went into his own stable. When he went into his stable he opened the box. He left it in a hole in the wall. The light was great. It was twice as much as in the other stables.’ The king hears of it, and makes him show him the box. The king says, ‘You must go and bring me the woman to whom the hair belongs.’ In the end, the young man, and not the king, marries the woman.

166

HE REPROVES THE

CURLEW

Date of composition. This poem was probably composed in mid-Oct. 1896. There is no direct evidence for a date of composition, but WBY claimed to have ‘not a scrap of verse by me of any kind’ in Sept. 1896, adding that ‘I thought I should by this time be at work on the last pages of [WATR] I have not even been able to have anything done for the October Savoy – any verse I  mean  – and I  had promised it monthly verse’ (letter to William Sharp, 4 Sept. 1896, CL 2, 54–55). No verse by WBY appeared in the Oct. Savoy, so it is likely that the two ‘Windle-Straws’ poems, of which this is the first, were written and sent in Oct., probably after WBY’s return to London from Dublin around 11 Oct. Reception and interpretation. William Sharp (a prompt imitator of this poem) was an early admirer and did not stint in his praise. Before WATR was published, he saw in the poem evidence that ‘Mr. Yeats is able more than any contemporary writer to con­ vey subtly the tragic note’: ‘Of this perfect lyric cry, to my mind the most poignant, the most intimately reaching in contemporary literature, for all its being what I have heard called ‘only a verse, not a poem’ – as if ultimate expression were any more impossible in six lines than in sixty or six hundred’ (Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1899). (His syntax having deserted him, Sharp went on to quote the whole poem.) Wearing a different hat, Sharp quoted the verses in ‘Fiona Macleod’’s ‘The Later Work of Mr. W.B. Yeats’: ‘To know intimately the mystery of these solitudes, it must be when the wind is the only traveller, and sunlight and shadow, the stars and darkness and the wandering plover are the sole visitors’; to prove this, she or he asked, ‘How else is one (though indeed the blind bird in the heart must have sung the same song) to feel as Hanrahan with the curlew wailing overhead and an old memory beating with bewildered wing against a sense of further sorrow yet to come ?’ (The North American Review, 1 Oct. 1902). F. Reid felt a poignancy in this short poem also, and in 1915 wrote that ‘The cry of the curlew becomes the symbol of a lost love, of a love through the world and beyond the gates of death’ (Reid, 80). Taking the bird’s cry as a handy representation of WBY’s gift, Arthur Symons reminisced in 1921 of how the poet’s ‘lyrical verse had vision and an abstract ecstasy; something wild and passionate, in which one heard the wind’s lament and the curlew’s crying, the cry of Heart’s Desire.’ Symons felt the need to add that ‘Like so many poets he is never quite human – life being the last thing he has learnt’, and claimed that ‘Never in these love songs, precise as their imagery is, does an earthly circumstance divorce ecstasy from the impersonality of vision’ (‘Some Makers of Modern Verse’, Forum (New York), Dec. 1921). Modern criticism has not DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-168

460

HE REPROVES THE CURLEW

generally lingered over the poem, though it is sometimes used in illustration of par­ ticular Yeatsian motifs in WATR. In his study of the volume, A.R. Grossman discusses the poem in the light of his view that ‘In the early Yeats he who listens to the cry of the birds listens to the complaint of his own inwardness’: ‘ “Hanrahan reproves the curlew” is a banishing gesture, an attempt to restore a protective condition of dream by committing the voice of infinite emotion to the West’ (Grossman, 122). J. Harwood, who associates the poem with WBY’s passion for OS, sees in the ‘shaken out’ hair ‘a reversal of the earlier associations of the image: the sheltering hair now falls between the poet and his preoccupation with the world of the immortals’; however, this degree of shelter is ‘inadequate’, since ‘the poet’s attention returns, at the end of the poem, to the powerful, threatening and yet engrossing presence beyond’ (Harwood, 70). In general, the poem’s aesthetic impact is in excess of what it has to communicate, or the extent to which it dramatizes a speaker’s voice; but that impact is nevertheless considerable, even if difficult to convey in terms of critical exposition. In the six lines, the curlew’s cry is both evoked and refused, and this may well have some bearing on WBY’s feelings about the emotional costs of his passing sexual relationship with OS: but the poem cannot sensibly be reduced to this aspect of its biographical implication. Beyond this, the poem conveys an acute attention to disembodied sound that triggers wholly embodied memory, in its painful acuteness. The effect of the final line is one of refusal and rejection; but the success of these impulses is put in doubt both by its plain abruptness, and by the piercing acuity of the sounds that have come before. Text and publication history. There is a copy of the poem in fair copy in WBY’s hand, in Kenyon College, Ohio, reproduced and transcribed in Cornell WATR, 78–79, (MS). The MS is earlier than the poem’s first publication in The Savoy, 2 Nov. 1896 (S); but like that first appearance, it makes the poem the first of two with the overall title ‘WindleStraws’, calling it ‘O’Sullivan Rua to the Curlew’. The poem was published next in WATR, and was retained in all WBY’s collected editions thereafter.

HE REPROVES THE CURLEW

461

Copy-text: P49.

O

curlew, cry no more in the air, Or only to the water in the West; Because your crying brings to my mind

Title] Windle-straws 1. O’Sullivan Rua to the Curlew MS, S; Hanrahan reproves the curlew WATR. A  windlestraw is, according to OED, ‘A dry thin withered stalk of grass, such as is left standing after the flower or seed is shed’ (1), but also figuratively ‘Applied to some­ thing (material or immaterial) light, trifling, or flimsy; occasionally contemptuously to a spear or lance’ (3a.); its origin is Scottish, and it is to be found (as ‘windlestrae’) in W. Scott’s Old Mortality (1816), and also in Shelley, Alastor (1816), 527: ‘tall spires of windlestrae’. WBY’s figure of O’Sullivan Rua (O’Sullivan the Red’) is an early version of Red Hanrahan, the eigh­ teenth-century wandering poet who features in both his stories and poems. 1. O] The reading ‘O, curlew,’ is first in print in WATR, and remains in all editions up to and including the 1924 edition of Later Poems; in the 1928 New York reprint of this book, the reading is changed to ‘O curlew’ (which is also, in fact, the reading of both MS and S); but in the London reprint of 1928 it is again ‘O, curlew,’ and this is retained for SP29 and the Later Poems edition of 1931. For CP33, in both American and British editions, the reading ‘O curlew,’ reappears; and this is reproduced in the text of P49. However, ‘O, curlew’ was the text of SP29 as repr. in 1936 and 1938. The page proofs of the projected ‘Coole’ edition of WBY’s works (NLI, 30 262) show a correction of ‘O, curlew’ to ‘O curlew,’ on a page with the date-stamp 25 Jul 1932. curlew] The long-legged wading bird Numenius arquata, whose cry is high pitched and prolonged. In the west of Ireland, the

curlew is predominantly a winter bird. In his 1891 MS poem, ‘A Dream of Other Lives’, WBY wrote of ‘The cries of the curlew’ and ‘The low-crying curlew’. Much later, in ‘Paudeen’ (first publ. 1914), WBY gives pro­ found personal significance to the moment when ‘a curlew cried and in the luminous wind | A  curlew answered’ (4–5); as late as 1927, quoting that poem, he told MG that ‘I was moved to write it by listening to the cry of curlew’ (letter of 3 Oct. 1927, G-YL, 437). At the end of his play The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), WBY has his musicians say, ‘My heart ran wild when it heard | The curlew cry before dawn’ (303–304: CW2, 316). The bird was something of a fixture in nineteenth-century Irish poetry, heard com­ monly in the work of poets from W. Alling­ ham to R.D. Joyce and KT; it is to be found in English and Scottish work too, especially in that of W. Scott. In the later 1890s, when WBY was working over scripts for the ritu­ als of his projected Celtic Mystical Order, room was found for the curlew in the ini­ tiation routine for the ‘Cauldron’ grade: the participant called ‘The Guide’ asks: ‘What is that sound now, farther out on the waters?’ and ‘The Teacher’ replies: ‘It is the searching sorrowful cry of the curlew’. cry no more in the air] Perhaps cp. KT, Bal­ lads and Lyrics (1891), ‘Of St. Francis and the Ass’, 53–54: ‘The very birds on wings | Made mournful cries in the air’. 2. water] waters MS, S, WATR and all printings up to and including Selected Poems (1921); changed for Later Poems (1922) and all print­ ings thereafter.

462 5

HE REPROVES THE CURLEW

Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair That was shaken out over my breast: There is enough evil in the crying of wind.

in the West] WBY’s notes in WATR help to ensure that this reference carries reso­ nance in the volume as a whole: in a note to ‘Michael Robartes Bids his Beloved be at Peace’, ‘I follow much Irish and other mythol­ ogy, and the magical tradition, in associating [. . .] the West, the place of sunset, with fad­ ing and dreaming things’; and in the note to ‘Mongan Laments the Change that has Come upon Him and his Beloved’, ‘I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West, because the place of sunset was in Ireland, as in other countries, a place of symbolic dark­ ness and death’. With these symbolic bearings taken, it may be that the speaker of this lyric should be understood as attempting to avoid both the ‘fading and dreaming things’ associ­ ated with the eyes and ‘shaken out’ hair of the loved one, and the ‘darkness and death’ which that sexual intimacy somehow brings closer. 4.] Eyes dim with love, and shadowy hair MS. WBY wisely rid the line of a fairly clichéd phrase (‘Eyes dim with love’) in revision here.

4–5.] This ‘long heavy hair’ that is ‘shaken out over my breast’ is another returning motif in WATR. ‘The Travail of Passion’, ‘Aedh Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers’, and ‘Michael Robartes Bids his Beloved be at Peace’ all have versions of the image. For discussion of meaning, sources, and analogues, see the note to ‘He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers’, 6. 6.] The line connects with the title of WATR, but more particularly with a poem written later than this one, ‘He Thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven’ (1898), 7: ‘I became a man, a hater of the wind’. the crying of wind] William Sharp (‘Fiona Macleod’) took full advantage of this phrase in From the Hills of Dream (1901), ‘The Unknown Wind’, 8–11: ‘What is the wind | That I  hear calling | By day and by night, | The crying of wind?’ Later, Dora Sigerson Shorter accom­ modated WBY’s line in a sentimental poem, ‘The Wanderers’, 14: ‘No evil in the whisper of the wind’ (Collected Poems (1907)).

167

TO HIS HEART, BIDDING

IT HAVE NO FEAR

Date of composition. There is no evidence for a precise dating of this poem, but it is prob­ ably from mid-Oct. 1896. See notes to ‘He Reproves the Curlew’, its companion piece in The Savoy. Context and interpretation. The degree of connection between this poem and its original companion piece, ‘He Reproves the Curlew’, is worth considering. Most imme­ diately, this poem develops from the final line of its predecessor, ‘There is enough evil in the crying of wind’, a determined rejection of the fear that this ‘wind’ might inspire. ‘The winds [. . .] starry winds’ of lines 4–5 are the ‘crying’ of the previous poem, but in another aspect: now, they are signs of power and transformational energy. They can only become this, though, if the ‘heart’ disowns fear. Undoubtedly, there is a sense in which the miniature drama staged by this poem replicates magical initiation, and phrases even found themselves worked into a GD initiation rite (see note on 3). But at the same time, the poem’s instructions to the heart bear artistic relevance and personal significance for WBY, and the specifically magical side of the lyric may indeed take second place to these. WBY quoted lines 3–7 (without their italics) at the beginning of section II of his essay ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1908). The sentences that follow this do not refer back directly to the verse, but do show how the poet was inclined to project some of the underlying meanings of the poem a good eleven years after its composition (CW 4, 183): Three types of men have made all beautiful things. Aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above the fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear, and the artists have made all the rest, because providence has filed them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleased them. From this distance, the poem is evidently being regarded as a manifestation of artis­ tic self-encouragement, or the praise of a specifically artistic kind of courage which WBY sees as akin to both aristocratic and peasant fearlessness. The poem’s more magical trappings are ignored in the process; and the effect, which is to aggran­ dize considerably the Yeatsian artist, seems slightly overblown, when the lyric with­ out this commentary preserves the kind of heightening of attitude that is (because DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-169

464

TO HIS HEART, BIDDING IT HAVE NO FEAR

mysterious) less open to sceptical resistance. There is an indicative uncertainty in WBY’s title: ‘my Heart’ and ‘his Heart’ come and go for a time (see note on Title); but in fact the pronoun makes a real difference: is this a lyric of personal reflection or dramatic projection? Another verbal instability over the years  – the last line’s ‘proud’ giving way to ‘lonely’ (see note on 7) – is a sign of some uncertainty on the poet’s part over what exactly the status to which the heart aspires might be: joining a ‘proud [. . .] multitude’ is a reward for, and vindication of, a still-hearted willing­ ness to face ‘the flame and the flood’; but to do this and join instead a more or less oxymoronic ‘lonely [. . .] multitude’ is a colder and more forbidding fate. ‘Lonely’ had been present in the line at an early stage, but not for WATR, and not again until 1922 (when ‘my’ also finally gives way to ‘his’ in the title). It should be noted that the address is to the heart: in the context of WATR, this places the poem firmly amongst other poems of (largely disappointed) love, and perhaps raises the question of what it is that the heart must steel itself against. If unsuccessful love is involved, as the other poems suggest it must be, then the fire, water, and wind that are to be embraced are the elements of that romantic failure. In WATR, this trial results in joining the ‘proud’; later, it consigns love’s initiate to the ranks of the ‘lonely’. R. Ellmann, noting how in poetry of this period WBY ‘varied the use and significance of the elements,’ cited this poem as an example of how ‘Sometimes he contrasts them, as aspects of the material world, with the heroic spirits who rise above them’ (Identity, 31). A.R. Grossman sees how in the poem ‘The conquest of fear becomes a condition of style,’ but foregrounds the GD initiation narrative as the expression of this conquest, and he understands the elements, too, primarily in this magical light, as ‘hostile’: ‘They symbolize the competing reality of the external world [. . .] which keeps man from his true inwardness and his destined marriage’ (Grossman, 91–92). S. Putzel also reads the poem as something of a magical formula or ritual: ‘those who tremble before the powers will never penetrate the subjective world [. . .] or find the way to transmute dreams into poetry’ (187). Text and publication history. There is a fair copy in WBY’s hand, in Kenyon Col­ lege, Ohio (reproduced and transcribed in Cornell WATR, 78–79: MS in notes). This precedes the poem’s first publication in The Savoy, 2 Nov. 1896 (S); but like that first appearance, it makes the poem the second of two with the overall title ‘Windle-Straws’, calling it ‘Out of the Old Days’. After the poem’s Savoy publication, a TS was produced, which is found in the Berg Collection, NYPL (reproduced and transcribed in Cornell WATR, 96–97): this carries alterations in WBY’s hand (TS). The poem was published in WATR, and in the month of the volume’s British publication it appeared in The Liv­ ing Age in the US (8 Apr. 1899). In AG’s copy of P95 (Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University), a single-sheet MS fair copy of the poem is inserted in the blank page just before Act I of The Countess Kathleen (Emory). The poem was retained in all WBY’s collected editions.

TO HIS HEART, BIDDING IT HAVE NO FEAR

465

Copy-text: P49.

B 5

e you still, be you still, trembling heart; Remember the wisdom out of the old days: Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.

Title] Windle-Straws 2. Out of the Old Days MS, S; To [his corr. to my] heart, bidding it have no fear TS; To my Heart, bidding it have no Fear WATR and all editions up to and includ­ ing Selected Poems (1921), but ‘To his heart . . .’ in Living Age and in Emory; ‘To his heart . . .’ Later Poems (1922) and after. 1.] Hearts tremble with some regularity in nineteenth-century and earlier poetry, but perhaps cp. Charles Wesley, Poetical Works (1868), ‘In Affliction’, 17–18: ‘Speak to my warring passions, ‘Peace;’ | Say to my trem­ bling heart, ‘Be still’’. 3.] This line was incorporated into the 0 = 0 initiation ritual of the GD (probably by A.E. Waite), where the presiding Hiereus says: ‘Fear is failure, so be thou without fear. For he who trembles at the Flame and at the Flood, and at the Shadows of the Air, hath no part in God’. Him who] Who MS, S. He who TS, Emory, Living Age, WATR: in WATR, this is corr. to ‘Him who’ on inserted errata slip. 4.] Cp. A. Swinburne, Songs of Two Nations (1875), ‘A Song of Italy’, 838–839: ‘Above

all storms and stars, | All winds that blow through time’. that blow through] blowing through MS, S. 4^5.] And blowing us evil and good; MS, S. 5.] The line is echoed in AE, The Divine Vision and Other Poems (1903), ‘The Voice of the Waters’, 15: ‘Flame and flood and stars and mountains’. 7.] With ^the^ lonely, proud, wingèd multitude MS; With the lonely, proud, wingèd multitude S, Emory, Living Age; in TS, the final typed line is heavily deleted, and only the last of the three new versions of the line written in by WBY is unde­ leted: in the initial typed version of the line, the reading is ‘With the lonely, proud, winged multi­ tude’, and ‘winged’ is corr. to ‘angelical’. Two lines are then deleted: ‘With the winged majestical multitude’ and ‘With the proud, angelical multi­ tude’. The final undeleted version in WBY’s hand here is ‘With the high, majestical multitude’. With the proud, majestical multitude WATR, and all editions until Later Poems (1922). majestical] WBY probably hits on this adjective by way of Shakespeare, Hamlet I  i 158–159: ‘We do it wrong, being so majesti­ cal, | To offer it the show of violence’.

168

HE TELLS OF A VALLEY

FULL OF LOVERS

Date of composition. Possibly composed in autumn 1896, and probably before Dec. 1896 (when WBY was in Paris). No evidence survives to confirm a date, but WBY could well have written this poem whilst in Ireland in Aug.–Oct. 1896, or after his return to London in mid-Oct. The version of The Shadowy Waters sent to Leonard Smithers by WBY on 25 Nov. 1896 is one which contains the compound adjective important in this poem, ‘cloud-pale’ (see note to 4), and it is reasonable to suppose that the poem came into being alongside continued work on the verse-play, which was especially intense in Nov. Reception and interpretation. This poem has received very little detailed attention from critics, though an early review of WATR (The Spectator, 8 Jul. 1899) did single it out for praise, by quoting it in full with the assertion that ‘few will deny the haunting beauty of lines such as these’ and adding: This is an exquisite and elaborate way of saying a very simple thing – a man­ ner of expression so picturesque and so personal that it gives strangeness and novelty to the thought. Mr. Yeats believes potently in the magic of words and possesses it. We wish that he felt and possessed equally the magic of masterful and far-reaching ideas. It is perhaps tempting to regard the poem as more a formal procedure and a presentation of WBY’s key images than a vehicle of ‘ideas’. Quoting the first four lines, R. Ellmann noted ‘The absence of energetic rhythms [. . .] as on entering a strange room one first remarks what is not there,’ observing that ‘Accented syllables and slurs pack the lines so closely that the reader is narcotized’ (Identity, 125). Yet this understates the poem’s actual cohesion and impact. In this respect, attempting to pin down an autobiographi­ cal meaning is more than usually unhelpful. Much as his recent experiences with both MG and OS might have contributed to WBY’s brooding over the costs of romantic fixa­ tion and the unintended unhappinesses of sexual love, the voice created in this poem is almost certainly meant to be something other than the poet’s alone. The ‘lost love’ here does belong to a tradition of femmes fatales, and that tradition is one which the poem announces very clearly. For J. Harwood, this is a poem in which ‘mortal women are bidden to hide the eyes of their lovers from the poet’s Medusa-like ‘lost love’’, who is ‘active and predatory’, ‘witch-like, threatening’: ‘by rendering the scene as dream, [WBY] is able to free himself from the obligations of worship and so to dramatise the sinister opposition between his ‘lost love’ and the mortal women without qualification’ (69, 76). DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-170

HE TELLS OF A VALLEY FULL OF LOVERS

467

Harwood seems to identify the ‘lost love’ first as MG, then as OS; but the poem does not work according to this measure of autobiographical specificity, even though both women, in all likelihood, contribute to its iconography. It is certainly the case that WBY draws here on a nineteenth-century tradition of dream visions in which the power of a bewitching ‘lover’ figure overwhelms the dreamer and puts him in danger of joining other unhappy victims of the same ‘lost love’; and this tradition derives largely from Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The Keats poem (which influences WBY’s ‘The Host of the Air’ as well as – arguably – the founding conception of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’) has its scene in an ‘Elfin grot’ rather than a valley, but the Lady displays some of the features adopted in WBY’s poem: ‘Her hair was long, her foot was light, | And her eyes were wild’ (11–12). One relatively recent interpretation of this motif had been D.G. Rossetti’s short fragment, ‘The Orchard Pit’ (published first in W.M. Rossetti’s 1886 edition of his brother’s Works). Here, past lovers are ‘Piled deep beneath the screening apple-branch’ (1), while the fatal enchantress stands ‘High up above the hidden pit’ (7): This in my dreams is shown me; and her hair

Crosses my lips and draws my burning breath;

Her song spreads golden wings upon the air,

Life’s eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair,

And from her breasts the ravishing eyes of Death. (11–15.)

There are no ‘happy lovers’ in Rossetti’s fragment (or in Keats’s ballad), but WBY’s poem does seek to protect those lovers from the kind of fate that has been suffered here. It is in its departures from the established narrative shape that the poem in fact reveals its ‘ideas’, for WBY attempts not to claim the unhappy enchantment as a universal misfor­ tune, but as something specific to the speaker, who rather than lamenting his fate, has understood the way to avoid it and makes this the basis of his advice to the lovers as they pass ‘two by two’ around him in the valley. Where Keats and Rossetti allow sexual love to become identified with inescapable doom, in WBY’s poem it is in fact the way of avoiding such a fate: the young men with their heads on their girlfriends’ knees may echo a moment of Shakespearean bawdry (see note to 5–6), but ‘my lost love’ – who does not, like Rossetti’s enchantress, cast an erotic spell over others with the glances of her eyes, and seems instead to look inward, in an inaccessible self-absorption (4) – belongs to a place (symbolized by the wood from which she ‘stealthily’ emerges) of unshareable secrecy. Biographical speculation here is beside the poem’s artistic point; but it may be that MG’s sexual unavailability had some role to play in WBY’s evocation of the kind of power exercised by this ‘lost love’, just as OS offered the poet a hint of the more common conditions of happiness which (despite everything) the poem itself commends. Text and publication history. There is no surviving MS material prior to this poem’s first publication in the Saturday Review for 9 Jan. 1897 (SR). After this, WBY prepared a TS (to which he made some MS additions in line 4), now in the Berg Collection, NYPL (TS). The poem was included in WATR, and retained without change to anything but its title in all collected editions thereafter.

468

HE TELLS OF A VALLEY FULL OF LOVERS

Copy-text: P49.

I

5

dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,

For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;

And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood

With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:

I cried in my dream, O women, bid the young men lay

Title: The Valley of Lovers SR; A dream of the valley of lovers Berg; Aedh Tells of a Valley full of Lovers WATR. 2. passed two by two] passed, two by two, SR. 4.] With ^her cloud^ pale eyelids – half cov­ ering del.] ^falling [upon del.] on ^ dream dimmed eyes TS. falling on dream-dimmed eyes] half cover­ ing her dim eyes SR. This line closely parallels the opening line of the 1895 poem ‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’ [in WATR ‘Aedh Tells of the Per­ fect Beauty’, and the poem which immedi­ ately follows this one in the volume], first printed in Mar. 1896: ‘O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes’. This line had already prompted further composition in The Shad­ owy Waters, including the version put into TS in Nov. 1896. ‘Cloud-pale eyelids’ occur here at line 230: ‘I spare you, woman of the cloud pale eyelids’, and in another speech of the character Forgael to Dectira (220–222): Gazing upon your sad and cloud pale eye-lids The white foam fades, when they are lifted up The stars cast their dim crowns into the deep. ‘Cloud-pale’ is, then, a highly deliberated epithet for WBY at this time. Like ‘dream­ dimmed’, it came to be associated with a cer­ tain pre-Raphaelite quality in WBY’s poetry.

In 1919, the critic Robert Lynd wrote of how in this poem ‘one may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously show him­ self an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets such as ‘cloud-pale’ and ‘dream­ dimmed’: ‘His too frequent repetition of simi­ lar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems sometimes like a decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than in the vehement beauty of life’ (quoted Jeffares ed. W.B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage (1977), 224). In modern criticism, these terms have also been noted as especially artistic, e.g. by E. Loizeaux: ‘The pale clouds to which the lost love’s eyelids are compared function meta­ phorically, but they also tend to become one more detail in a very sparely described land­ scape of valley and wood’ (69). Both ‘cloud­ pale’ and ‘dream-dimmed’ appear to have been coinages of WBY’s. However, ‘cloud-pale’ may derive in part from W. Blake, The Book of Uri­ zen, V, 9: ‘All Eternity shuddered at sight | Of the first female now separate | Pale as a cloud of snow | Waving before the face of Los’. 5. I cried] And I cried SR. bid] let del. bid TS. 5–6. young men lay | Their heads on your knees] It seems likely that there is a recol­ lection here of Shakespeare, Hamlet III ii 119–122: Hamlet. Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Ophelia. No, my lord. Hamlet. I mean, my head upon your lap. Ophelia. Ay, my lord.

HE TELLS OF A VALLEY FULL OF LOVERS

469

Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,

Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair

Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.

6. and drown their eyes with your hair] This image is repeated often in other WATR poems, the closest version to the present poem having come with ‘He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’ (composed in Sept. 1895), 10–11: ‘your hair fall over my breast, | Drowning love’s lonely hour’. The earliest appearance of the motif is in ‘The Heart of the Woman’ (composed Mar. – Jul. 1894), 7–8: ‘The shad­ owy blossom of my hair | Will hide us from the bitter storm’. The sources of this recur­ ring motif in WBY’s poetry of the 1890s have been discussed often with reference to figu­ rative art (especially that of the pre-Rapha­ elites, which was well known to the poet, partly by way of his father’s admiration for

it). R. Ellmann, quoting numerous instances of this motif, wrote of this projected female figure that ‘Pallor, dimness, and whiteness, one lifted hand, an abundance of hair, and an indistinct bosom give her the general­ ized look of a Burne-Jones figure’ (Identity, 23). A  specifically poetic parallel, however, deserves also to be borne in mind  – cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Before Parting’, 10–12: ‘To make your tears fall where your soft hair lay | All blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise | Over my face and eyes’. 7.] Or, remembering hers, they will hold no other face fair SR. 8. all the valleys] the valleys SR.

169

[‘O TUFTED REEDS,

BEND LOW . . .’]

Date of revision. This poem was probably revised in Nov. 1896. WBY’s book of stories, The Secret Rose, was published at the beginning of Apr. 1897, but the process of its pub­ lication had taken some time, and WBY had been correcting proofs in early Nov. 1896. It was after this, in fact, that WBY substituted his revised version of a song by Owen Hanrahan the Red (as his poet-protagonist was now called): in page proofs for The Secret Rose (NLI 30204) the earlier version of the poem is passed (with very minor corrections) by the author. It is likely that the new version of the poem was written by early 1897, and quite possible that WBY took the work in hand shortly after sending off the proofs in Nov. 1896. Sources. Ultimately, WBY’s model is an eighteenth-century poem by Liam Dall Ó hIfearnáin (William Heffernan the Blind), which he knew in translations by J.C. Mangan and Edward Walsh (see the note on Sources for the earlier version, ‘Veering, Fleeting, Fickle, the Winds of Knocknarea’). In this revision, WBY moves much further from these sources. Fictional context and interpretation. The story ‘Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan and Hanrahan the Red’ (a revised version of the story he had first published in 1894) fea­ tures the poet Owen Hanrahan the Red, who is relieved of his wanderings by a woman rejected by polite society, Margaret Rooney, and is taken in to dwell with her and another woman (also of doubtful repute), Mary Gillis. O’Sullivan’s fame as a poet draws attention and some prosperity to the house, but the story makes its focus a moment of melancholy, when Hanrahan performs one of his poems; this is amongst a class of ‘poems disguising a passionate patriotism under the form of a love-song addressed to the Little Black Rose or Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan or some other personification of Ireland’: Suddenly he ceased to sing and his eyes became dim, as though he gazed upon distant things. Mary Gillis, who was pouring the Brew of the Little Pot into a noggin which stood upon a creepy-stool at his feet, ceased to pour, and said, ‘Are you thinking of leaving us?’ Margaret Rooney heard the words without seeing their cause, and taking them too seriously, got up from her place by the hearth and came over to him, her heart full of the fear of renewed poverty, of weary tramps with a basket of herrings on her head, and of the loss of so wonderful a companion and of the importance he gave her house. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-171

[‘O TUFTED REEDS, BEND LOW . . .’]

471

‘You would not do that, my honey?’ she said, catching him by the hand. ‘No,’ he said, laying his hand upon her head. ‘I am thinking of Ireland and her sorrows.’ Then he began to sing these words to a wild, fitful air of his own making which rose and fell like the cry of the wind. [The poem follows here.] While he sang he became greatly moved, and a tear rolled down his cheek, and Margaret Rooney put her face upon her hands and wept too. Then a blind beggar by the fire shook his rags with a sob, and after that every one wept. O’Hanrahan’s poem, in this version much more than that of 1894, seems somewhat detached from the patriotic genre WBY outlines here and, although it continues to carry the formal marks of its source, it has moved quite far from political allegory, and is now more squarely in the visionary-apocalyptic mode with which a number of WBY’s lyrics of the later 1890s engage. By enabling Hanrahan to invoke the powerful winds by their ancient Irish (and in effect mystical) names, WBY makes the poet into something of a surrogate for himself, and echoes the tones of poetry like the introductory verses to The Secret Rose volume, and the invocation there of ‘thy great wind of love and hate’ by which the stars will ‘be blown about the sky’ (28, 29). Now, the entire story (which had always had a degree of identification between WBY and the poet-protagonist) resonates with aspects of WBY’s own position in the mid-1890s, especially his dependence on the affection and care of two different women. Evidently, this makes for a good rate of poetic production – one which, as a lyric poet, WBY might well have envied: Helped by the unwonted peace and order of this kind of life, Hanrahan began making poems rapidly. He sometimes got through several a day instead of spending a week over a few verses, and the poems, too, were better poems. The most of them were love-songs [. . .] The colours of the winds. The poem now depends on an extended structural reference to three colours of the winds, one in each stanza: these are black, red, and grey. Ulti­ mately, the source for this is in Irish tradition as preserved in early legal commentary, and WBY would have come across the translation of the (tenth-century) Seanchas Mór in the work of Eugene O’Curry (On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873) Vol.3, 133–134): Of the acquaintance of the ancient Irish with the nature and combinations of colours, an instance is preserved in the preface to the Seanchas Mór, that great law compilation, which is believed to have been compiled in St. Patrick’s time. The writer of this preface, which is evidently not as old as the laws themselves, when speaking of the design and order of the creation, gives the following poet­ ical description of the nature and character of winds. ‘He (the Lord) then created the colours of the winds, so that the colour of each differs from the other; namely, the white and the crimson; the blue and the green; the yellow and the red; the black and the gray; the speckled and the

472

[‘O TUFTED REEDS, BEND LOW . . .’]

dark; the dull black (ciar) and the grisly. From the east (he continues) comes the crimson wind; from the south, the white; from the north, the black; from the west, the dun. The red and the yellow are produced between the white wind and the crimson; the green and the grey are produced between the grisly and the jet black; the dark and the mottled are produced between the black and the crimson; and those are all the sub-winds contained in each and all the cardinal winds.’ Ole Munch-Pedersen, in ‘Some Aspects of the Rewriting of W.B. Yeats’s ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland’’, Orbis Litterarum 36 (1981), 155–172, suggests that WBY was also indebted to Douglas Hyde for his knowledge of this tradition and, while this is plausible, there is no direct evidence to prove it. Hyde did include an account of the colours of the winds in his Literary History of Ireland (1899), drawing additionally on another medieval source, the Saltair na Rann; and he would certainly have been in a position to help WBY with relevant information in 1896. Hyde remarks that ‘The attribution of colours to the winds . . . is curious and appears to be Irish,’ adding that ‘I have met traces of this fancy even amongst the modern peasantry’ (416). However, the fact that WBY’s friend Lionel Johnson was making use of wind-colour lore in poems written in 1894 may suggest that WBY had at least an opportunity to take an interest in this well before the time he revised his own poem. In terms of the revision itself, the single surviving MS shows that WBY began with just one wind – the Black Wind – rather than three, so the full complexity of the medieval Irish source materials might well have been incorporated very late, and perhaps in something of a hurry. Text and publication history. There is one MS, a fair copy, on a single leaf detached from a notebook, which survives in the Berg Collection, NYPL (MS). This has some differences from the poem as printed, and in particular has substantial variants in the second stanza. The poem appeared in print in The Secret Rose (1897). Copy-text: The Secret Rose (1897).

O

tufted reeds, bend low and low in pools on the Green Land, Under the bitter Black Winds blowing out of the left hand!

1, 14. low and low] This emphasis by redupli­ cation (on the model of ‘by and by’) is not unprecedented: cp. e.g. George Meredith, Poems (1919), ‘Phantasy’ (1861), 89: ‘They dragged me low and low to the lake’. the Green Land] This is a reference to Upper Rosses in Co. Sligo, where a road still bears the name ‘Greenlands’: the Greenlands were a stretch of common land above the beach from Rosses to Deadman’s Point.

2.] Because the cloudy winds are blowing out of the left hand! MS. bitter Black Winds] cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), VII, 16: ‘That black bleak wind vexed all her spirit still’, and Lionel Johnson, Poetical Works (1915), ‘De Amicitia’ (1894), 126–127: ‘Along the Queen of Heav­ en’s high halls, | Black wind never yet blew’. blowing out of the left hand] WBY would have known about the strong association in

[‘O TUFTED REEDS, BEND LOW . . .’]

5

473

Like tufted reeds our courage droops in a Black Wind and dies:

But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes

Of Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan.

10

O tattered clouds of the world, call from the high Cairn of Maive, And shake down thunder on the stones because the Red Winds rave! Like tattered clouds of the world, passions call and our hearts beat: But we have all bent low and low, and kissed the quiet feet Of Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan.

15

O heavy swollen waters, brim the Fall of the Oak Trees,

For the Grey Winds are blowing up, out of the clinging seas!

Like heavy swollen waters are our bodies and our blood:

But purer than a tall candle before the Blessed Rood

Is Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan.

Irish between the north (which is here the quarter of the Black Wind) and the left-hand side: the Old Irish tuaid meant both ‘left’ and ‘north’ (see Pederson, 165). 3.] [Like del.] Our courage droops like tufted ^reeds^ in the black wind and dies MS. 6–8.] O clouds upon the cairn of Maive tell all your bitter minds And shake down thunder on the stones because of the black winds. We are as passionate, as clouds, when hearts begin to beat MS. 6. the high Cairn of Maive] WBY here makes reference to Knocknarea, the mountain just outside Sligo on top of which is a monument

known in popular tradition as the burial place of Queen Medbh of Connaught. 7. the Red Winds] Doubtless acquainted with the same sources as WBY for the colours of the winds, Lionel Johnson wrote a lyric in 1894 devoted entirely to ‘The Red Wind’, each of its seven quatrains in suitably apocalyptic mode: ‘Red Wind from out the east: | Red Wind of blight and blood! | Ah, when wilt thou have ceased | Thy bitter stormy flood?’ (1–4) 11. the Fall of the Oak Trees] WBY is here translat­ ing an Irish name for Ballysodare in Co. Sligo, Baile Easa Dara, ‘town of the oak-tree falls’. 12.] Because the winds are blowing out of the clinging seas MS. 13. heavy swollen waters are our] [the rain waters del.] heavy swollen waters our MS.

170

THE SHADOWY WATERS

[1896 TS VERSION]

History. The beginnings of The Shadowy Waters seem to have been very early indeed, and WBY continued to work on this project as both a poem and a play for the stage – and eventually, as separate works in this respect – well into the twentieth century. In Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916), WBY recalled a nocturnal expedition with his Sligo cousin Charles Middleton, when the pair put out to sea in a small boat after midnight: ‘I had wanted the birds’ cries for the poem that became fifteen years afterwards The Shadowy Waters, and it had been full of observation had I been able to write it when I first planned it’ (CW 3, 86). In context, this incident must have taken place during one of WBY’s holidays in Sligo, probably in 1883. WBY, eager as he was to hear the cries of the dawn birds at sea, was not able, evidently, to make poetry from the experience at this stage; but something connected to what became the poem was nevertheless in the pro­ cess of being planned. The next account of the poem in its early stages comes in another memoir, that of AE in 1932 (Song and its Fountains (1932), 11): I remember when we were walking along Leinster Road [WBY] telling me the first conception of The Shadowy Waters. His hero, a world-weary wanderer, was trying to escape from himself. He captures a galley in the waters. There is a beautiful woman among the captives. He thinks through love he may have this escape and casts a magical spell on Dectora, but he finds the love so cre­ ated only echoes back to him the imaginations of his own heart of which he is already weary, and in the original form of the poem he unrolled the spell and went alone seeking for the world of the immortals. I think when the poet came himself to love, the thought of that lonely journey to the Everliving grew alien to his mood; and the poem was altered, losing, as I think, the noble imaginative logic of its first conception, for in the new ending the love won by the magic art becomes an immortal love. Russell had met WBY first at the Metropolitan School of Art in May  1884, and this memory could come from that year, or from later in the 1880s. In 1915, F. Reid reported that Russell had remembered a first version of the work from 1884 to 1885 (Reid, 108–109): Mr. Yeats has been writing The Shadowy Waters for the greater part of his life.

He began it, he told me, when he was a boy, and it has undergone as many

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-172

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

475

transformations as ‘mighty Proteus, the ancient one of the sea.’ ‘AE’ told me that Mr. Yeats when he was nineteen or twenty had already composed a ver­ sion of The Shadowy Waters. At this stage it was the story of a man who seeks to escape from himself through love. He meets and loves a woman who is in love with someone else. By casting a spell over her he makes her forget the old passion, and at the same time awakens in her a new passion which is for him­ self. But he finds now that she is merely an instrument obeying his will, merely expresses his own emotions and desires, and that he has not really achieved what he sought. Seeing his delusion he leaves her, and sets out on his quest over the Shadowy Waters. This version, AE told Reid, was full of beauty, and Yeats took it with him when he went to live in London. It is clear that the poem/play was a project from his youth that WBY was unwilling to abandon in the years of his greater artistic maturity. What this meant was years of slow progress, of sometimes radical rewriting, and (for the poet himself) a sense of frustration and repeated disappointment. A concept that was in fact older than that of ‘The Wander­ ings of Oisin’ proved to be far slower in moving towards literary completion. Partly, this was because WBY was developing material for which the main source was not that of prior narrative or myth, but his own imagination and (increasingly) symbolic medita­ tion. Where ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ was conceived and then written in a relatively efficient way, The Shadowy Waters was doomed to evolve, being reshaped repeatedly as it absorbed and re-absorbed the young writer’s latest circumstances and preoccupations. The protagonist, Forgael, becomes more complex as time goes on; and the dramatic shaping of incident undergoes many changes. Another instability is generic, for WBY vacillated between seeing the work as a verse-play in the tradition of his early poetic dramas (whose ambitions were for the page, in emulation of Shelley and Byron) and something which could be offered as a stage play: the poet is by no means always sure about which of these directions he wishes to take the work in at any specific time. The meaning of the actions represented, too, was something of a shifting matter for WBY: the play moves between allegory and pure fantasy, sometimes with philosophical and sometimes with more autobiographical resonances. In 1896, The Shadowy Waters still had a very long way to go – conceptually, structur­ ally, and poetically. It had already come a great distance. The voluminous draft materials are not always easy to separate into distinct phases, and it certainly must not be assumed that the 1896 text presented here (see Text) has the status of a finished work, or even a completed phase of such work. However, the next important point in the verse-play’s development came in 1900, with the publication of a version in The North American Review and a volume entitled The Shadowy Waters; this would be much-reviewed, and was a significant public milestone in the poet’s reputation. (WBY was still far from fin­ ished, though, and further revision even then lay ahead.) The Shadowy Waters (1900) is separately edited in the present edition, but that work includes remarkably little of what was present in WBY’s versions of the poem from the early 1890s onwards, while the 1896 version incorporates a good deal of the material which successive earlier attempts at the

476

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

work had generated. A full history of composition is only present in the major edition of the drafts published in 1971, Sidnell, Mayhew and Clark’s Druid Craft (DC). This gives transcriptions of MS sources, along with a commentary on changes at different stages, and datings of the main stages of composition. Text. WBY’s long-gestating poetic play seemed to be nearing publication in late 1896, when negotiations with the publisher Leonard Smithers produced a plan for an edi­ tion to be illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. A synopsis and substantial extract (from the middle of the play) were prepared in TS by WBY, and sent c. 25 Nov. 1896. There is a full TS copy, consisting of thirteen leaves stapled together, with covers marked in the poet’s hand, ‘Shadowy Waters W.B. Yeats’: to all appearances, this is a version of the play ready to be sent to Smithers. The editors of DC see this as ‘certainly an intact and complete unit of work,’ which is ‘the finished play of the time’, concluding that it ‘probably represents Yeats’s last effort to finish the play for publication by Leonard Smithers’ (DC, 332–333). It may very well be that this was never actually given to the publisher; alternatively, it might have been given to Smithers and eventually returned: the synopsis and extract (prepared on the same paper and with the same typewriter) ended up in WBY’s possession, and were amongst the Shadowy Waters materials donated to the NLI by GY in 1957. At all events, this TS version would seem to mark a point at which composition reached a sig­ nificantly concluded phase – albeit one which did not result in publication, and was sub­ ject to a radical (and painfully slow) rewriting process that began as early as Jan. 1897. The text as edited here is the most ‘finished’ snapshot of a long period of composition, and does probably represent a stage at which The Shadowy Waters was emphatically a dra­ matic poem rather than a piece intended primarily for the stage: had Smithers’ project gone ahead, it would have been the publication of a work of poetry rather than drama – ‘art’ poetry, moreover, with Beardsley’s work both prominent (there were plans for six major illustrations) and doubtless a selling point for a book designed to be attractive to the collectors’ market. The present text. The version of The Shadowy Waters given here cannot be assumed to be one which WBY was necessarily willing to publish when he sent it to Smithers in 1896; the fact that it was not published is due to more than just the vicissitudes of Smithers’s publishing plans, and must also be because WBY himself did not feel that it was ready for publication. A matter of weeks later, WBY wrote to Robert Bridges about how ‘I was more or less desperate about a poetic poem which refused to go faster than my average of some eight or nine lines a day, despite material necessities that it should’ (CL 2, 70). Perhaps these ‘material necessities’ would have won the day and argued for publication, had Smithers proved more forthcoming. (Though WBY had in fact accepted a £4 advance for the work earlier in the year, on 3 Jun.) The TS (transcribed in DC, 208–221) is in the NLI collection; its thirteen leaves are possibly from the typewriter of AG. In terms of presentation, the TS has a number of slips, and is lacking punctuation in places; the present text accordingly corrects and punctuates where this is needed. In the notes, references have been explained as far as possible, but no attempt has been made to account for the many previous versions in MS of many of the lines, or to present the earlier portions now abandoned, and the numer­ ous (sometimes radical) changes made in the narrative and its presentation by WBY up to this point.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

477

The Shadowy Waters The deck of an ancient galley, a high poop to the left hand, and a mast with a sail which flaps slowly to the right hand. It is night and the sea is covered with mist. Forgael, a sea rover, lies asleep upon the poop and close to the tiller. The poop and deck are strewn with draperies and ornaments of gold and silver taken out of captive galleys. A Seabar, a creature with an eagle’s head and having a grey robe, stands upon the bulwark and lifts its arms above its head and speaks at first in a half scream; while it speaks, other Seabar gather on the deck. Seabar on bulwark

C

hildren of Tethra, that were old before The pillars of the heavens were set up,

Names] The TS does not feature any Dramatis Personae list, but the main protagonists are Forgael, Dectira, and the creatures WBY calls the Seabar. Forgael] Standish J. O’Grady identifies the father of Cuchulain’s wife, Emer, as Forgal Mánach, the king of Lusk (History of Ireland vol. 2, 128). Dectira] In Standish J. O’Grady’s History of Ireland, the mother of Cuchulain is Dectera, daughter of Factna; her great-grandfather was the founder of the Red Branch, Rury of the Clanna Rury (vol. 2, 115). Seabar] WBY derives this from the Irish seabhac, sebac or seboc, which means a hawk: it was some­ times applied to warriors as a term of praise. 1. Tethra] This is the name of the king of the Fomo­ rians, who figures sometimes also as a king of the underworld. In the Irish Mythological cycle, Tethra is associated closely with a magical sword, Orna, which he uses at the Battle of Mag Tuired, where he is nevertheless destroyed. The name occurs first in a MS  version of The Shadowy Waters which dates probably from 1894; WBY could have come across it in Henri de Jubainville, where a perspective from comparative mythol­ ogy is offered, aligning Tethra with the Greek Kro­ nos, and the Fomorians with the Titans, as well as Eastern deities (Le Cycle Mythologique Irlan­ dais Et La Mythologie Celtique (1884), 199–200). In a MS fragment of work for the play from 1894–1895, WBY writes of ‘Tethra, and his [windy del.] throne in the North’ (DC, 91), in line with his depiction of the Fomorians as powers

of winter and darkness. Another possible source is in the translation by Whitley Stokes of the Cath Maige Tuired (Second Battle of Moytura), where Tethra is mentioned as a king of the Fomori­ ans (Revue Celtique 12 (1891), 52–130). In fact, Tethra had made a poetic appearance in 1892, in the long poem ‘Moytura’ by William Larminie (Fand, and Other Poems), where this figure is ‘the great destroyer’ (1270), and ‘that giant shadow’ (1404). The god’s famous sword is also voluble in Larminie’s poem (1863–1867): Ye boast of this world ye have made,

This corpse-built world?

Show me one atom thereof

That hath not suffered and struggled

And yielded its life to Tethra?

Larminie’s Tethra is a devouring god of the infer­ nal regions, who gorges on the sacrificial flesh of the Tuatha De Danaan, and the role comes very close to that occupied by the Seabar (or Formo­ rians) in this and earlier versions of WBY’s play. WBY had reviewed Larminie’s Fand for United Ireland in 1892 where, despite criticism of his ‘experimental rhythmic metres’, he managed some polite commendation of ‘Moytura’ (CW 9, 171–172). Privately, he would refer to Larminie as ‘a fine folklorist and bad but wildly eccentric poet’ (CL 2, 307). Nevertheless, Tethra (like other mythological characters in ‘Moytura’) may indicate a debt to Larminie which, though assuredly not a stylistic one, is still real. 2. pillars of the heavens] Perhaps cp. Isaac Watts, Works (1810), Hymn 170, 23: ‘The

478

5

10

15

20

25

30

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

Drop from the darkness between star and star; And rise from twilights where rapt silence broods Entangled in waters; and from pale sands, Where you have torn your breasts with iron talons And shrieked at the drowned image of the moon. The hunger of twenty days shall be appeased Though not with ample sacrifice; come close And still the rustling of the heavy plumes About your necks, and your fierce cries for food, Nor raise your arms and shake your sea-grey robes: Because I have a wonder on my tongue. They that in old times hung upon the wind And overwhelmed us on the Towery Plain, The children of Dana, have an island, hid Among the sighing foam, and roses hang Above the foam, like little dropping flames; And he who gathers them about his heart Endures the wisdom, day dragged after day, Until the sun and moon and stars are dead, And heaped up: in a winking of the eye It covers him like little dropping flames. When night had poured out cloudy dark to quench The candles of the foam, Forgael awoke Out of long torpor, and forbade his men To leave the benches where they row, and called Until I came out of the waters and winds. He bade me hide under the cloudy dark And heap up roses many enough to fill The painted sail of a great galley, behind The carved door of the poop; and when the foam Had ten times wet my sea-grey robe, and I

pillars of heaven’s starry roof ’, but the image is an ancient commonplace, as e.g. in the lines on Atlas of Odyssey 1.53–54: in George Chap­ man’s version, ‘Who for his skill of things superiour stayes | The two steepe Columnes that prop earth and heaven’. 3. between star and star] Perhaps cp. Lionel Johnson, Poems (1915), ‘To Morfydd Dead’ (1896), 35–36: ‘We would wander through the night, | Star and star’. 15.] The reference here is to the defeat of the Fomorians by the Tuatha De Danaan, as

related in the Cath Maige Tuired, The Second Battle of Moytura, a sixteenth-century manu­ script whose account is probably from the ninth and eleventh centuries. 25. of the foam] of foam TS: a syllable is clearly missing, and is supplied here from the version of this line in an earlier draft (DC, 169). Cp. ‘He Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes’, 10. 32–33.] Perhaps cp. Shakespeare, Hamlet V ii 15–17: ‘Up from my cabin, | My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark | Groped I to find out them’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

35

40

45

50

479

Ten times poured out and heaped behind the door The little dropping flames, that from old days Have troubled the proud sloth of the deep tide,

He cast him down and crushed them with his heart.

And then I saw his dream float up and hide

The heavens and burnished shields hang from the stars

Mirror on mirror, and a flame that shook In the mid-air, and saw its loneliness Leaping from shield to shield: when the dream died He came from the carved doors and cried aloud As an ox cries, and lifted his arms and cursed The cloudy waters and the glimmering winds, And being heavy with the enchanted breath Of Danaan roses fell into a swoon. Come close and close: wisdom has made him weak And he shall be the sacrificial flesh: Let all your talons be plunged into his heart.

(The Seabar gather about the poop with fierce cries and gestures. The sound of a harp comes over the waters.) Seabar upon bulwark

55

I hear a music heavy with the dreams

The children of Dana make with purple breath

Upon the burnished mirrors of the world,

And then smooth out with busy hands and sigh.

Waken, waken because the waters and winds Have given us sacrifice. Waken, waken, The Aquiline people cry for sacrifice. (Forgael awakes.) Seabar on the deck (Going slowly towards Forgael with

threatening gestures)

Let the sail fill and make a sacrifice,

For I have gone three times about the world,

40. mirror on mirror] The phrase returns to WBY’s poetry many years later, in ‘The Statues’ (publ. 1939), 22.

48. close and close] Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Day­ Dream’, 125: ‘More close and close his foot­ steps wind’.

480 60

65

70

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

Famished with hunger and shrieking to the winds, As when Iodana and the Silver Hand Threw down our temples and our altar stones: Though you have all the wisdom that was carved In ancient days on boards of hazel and oak And all that prophesying images, Made of dim gold, rave out in secret tombs; The eagle-headed multitudes keep watch, And shall before the moon fades many times Return to Tethra and his windy throne With blood upon their talons and their bills. Forgael

75

80

85

The sail fills, and your talons shall drip blood Until you lie down under the waters and sleep; But what are my great wages that I live A harrier of the world, a bondman bound To the wet tiller and the heavy sword? I dreamed I had the fatness of the world And then it changed into a windy hall Hung round with burnished shields, brimmed up with flame That shakes when the wind shakes the narrow flame That is my heart. Many cried out of old: Now I alone cry out in foaming brooks, In whirling sails, in labouring chariot wheels, In tempest-beaten woods, in plumy waves, In strings of silver, in men and women’s mouths, In heavy rustling raiment, in crossed swords, In bows of beaten bronze when galleys drive On galleys and the gleaming oar-blades break.

61.] The seabar is recalling past defeats at the hands of the Tuatha De Danaan. Iodana is unidentified, and does not occur in Irish myth: presumably, WBY intends a member of the Tuatha De Danaan; ‘the Silver Hand’ is a Tuatha De Danaan king, Nuada, who after receiving an artificial arm was known as Nuada Airgid Lamh, Nuada of the Silver Hand [Arm]: WBY could have found him in Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1878), 47.

66. dim gold] With this unusual phrase, perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Byzantine Mosaics at Ravenna’, 1: ‘Traced in dim gold, in azure vaults enshrined’. 81. foaming brooks] Perhaps cp. Wordsworth, ‘A Place of Burial in the South of Scotland’ (1831), 1–2: ‘a rugged steep | That curbs a foaming brook’. 83. plumy waves] Cp. James Thomson, The Seasons (1730), ‘Winter’, 754: ‘The forest bent beneath the plumy wave’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

481

Oh eagle-headed race, rush through the air Unhook the flaming shields and quench the world! Seabar on the deck 90

Ingrate, bow down and kiss our wandering feet,

Because like wrong bends all that hunger and sleep,

Dagda, and Partholan, and him who lies

At Irros Domman by a narrow tide,

And Balor, and the children of Heremon,

89. the flaming shields] Perhaps cp. Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer IV 121–122: ‘Whose Squadrons, led from black Aesepus’ Flood, | With flaming Shields in martial Circle stood’. 90. our wandering feet] Although the phrase was commonplace, WBY should probably be seen here to be echoing the last line of his own ‘The Rose of the World’ (1891). 92. Dagda] WBY here (and in MS  materials) has ‘Dagma’, but almost certainly intends the figure called Dagda, the leader of the Tuatha De Danaan. Found in the ninth- or tenthcentury ‘Wooing of Étain’ (Tochmarc Étaíne) and other early texts, the Dagda is a godlike character (possibly having absorbed various traits from the Roman Jupiter). In the Bat­ tle of Moytura, the Dagda lays waste to the Fomorians, but is killed by the wife of Balor. Partholan] This is Partholon, who in the medieval Lebor Gabala [the Book of Inva­ sions] comes from Greece to Ireland; he rules there for thirty years before dying, and his descendants perish after another century. Partholon defeats the Formorians at the battle of Mag Itha, an event mentioned also in Geoffrey Keating’s seventeenth-century work, the Foras Feasa ar Érinn. 93. Irros Domman] Thus TS; earlier MSS have ‘Irros Doman’, ‘Erros Domman’, and a later MS ‘Irris Doman’. It is not clear what WBY has in mind here: possibly, he intends a ver­ sion of Inbher Domnann, an ancient name for Malahide which has associations with the Firbolg invaders, and which features in

the work of Eugene O’Curry, glossing the translated phrase ‘the Domnann multitudes’ (O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materi­ als of Ancient Irish History (1878), 485): These were the men of Meath, poetically styled here the Domnann multitudes, from Inbher Domnainn, now the river and bay of Malahide, in the county of Dublin, so-called from a party of the Fir-bholg, the Domnann section of them, under their leader Sengand, having landed there. [. . .] A singular evidence of it remains on the spot itself; for, even to this day, the cur­ rent and eddy below the present bridge is by the inhabitants called ‘Moll Downey,’ which cannot possibly be anything else than a corruption of Maeil Domnainn, Maeil being an ancient name on the east coast of Erinn for an eddying or whirling current. If WBY was intending this, it is possible he confused Inbher (a bay, or river mouth) with Inis (an island). However, there is not enough evidence in the MSS and TS material to justify emending the text to Inbher Domnann. 94. Balor] A king of the Fomorians, who had an eye with the power of evil, opened only on the field of battle: this could defeat an entire army, and the services of four men were required in order for it to be opened. WBY had men­ tioned Balor in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889 and 1895 versions). In his note on the name in P95, WBY calls Balor ‘The Irish

482 95

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

And the great sea-born eagle-headed race. Loosen the grey sails out upon the winds And overwhelm white cities and forget. Forgael

100

105

110

This wrong has bowed down all that hunger and sleep; And therefore I, whom you have set above The masters of white cities and grey sails, The artificers that make pale images Out of enchanted gold, the Druids that carve Enchantments on thin boards of hazel and oak, The demons that shake storms out of their bags On shattered galleys, and the demons that guard The hordes of dead kings under the ancient stones. I that am mightier than the moon and sun, Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars, And have beheld all things in a wink of the eye, Cry there is no good hour but that great hour That shall puff out demons and gods and men. Seabar on the bulwark

115

He has condemned white cities and grey sails,

And them that offer sacrifice, and all

Demons and gods of earth and water and wind,

The passionate Orchil, and the goat-horned race,

Chimaera, the leader of the hosts of darkness at the great battle of good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, which was fought out on the strands of Moytura, near Sligo.’ Heremon] In the Lebor Gebala, Heremon (or Eremon) is a leader of the Milesian invaders of Ireland, who makes his capital at Tara. One of his victories is over the Tuatha De Danaan. WBY’s spelling of the name is that used by Standish J. O’Grady in his History of Ireland (1878). 96. out upon the winds] Cp. Keats, Poems (1817), ‘Sleep and Poetry’, 127–128: ‘the charioteer | Looks out upon the winds with glorious fear’.

102. the Druids] See note on ‘The Druid’ in WBY’s ‘Fergus and the Druid’ (1892). 115. Orchil] WBY’s spelling in the TS is ‘Orcil’, but this is emended here to his usual ‘Orchil’. This supposed goddess with Fomo­ rian connections had been present in WBY’s work since 1895: see editorial note to ‘The Madness of King Goll’ (1895 version), 62. WBY probably derived her from Standish J. O’Grady; subsequently, she was taken up by William Sharp, who in 1896 was using her in his work as ‘Orchil, the dim goddess’ who ‘sits dreaming at her loom under the brown earth’

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

483

And the proud sea-born eagle-headed race

And their old father Tethra, and must die.

Rush, rush upon him; drag at his long hair

Drag at his feet; lay hold upon his hands.

Forgael (Leaning down from the poop and stretching out his hands towards them) 120

125

I want nor battle axe nor battle stone: Though solitude heaves dripping from the tide Like a black ox, these hands have still the power That wisdom dragged out of the sun and moon And kneaded with the subtlety of the stars, And they shall crush the eagle-headed race. (They all rush towards the poop) Seabar on the bulwark

130

A sound of human feet bids us away Or wither in clouds of clinging weakness blown From hearts that have known love: mingle again With the white waters and unchainable winds And teeming darkness that no love can bend From their august and ancient purposes.

127. wither] TS reading, as well as previous and subsequent MSS readings. The sense suggested is ‘Bids us [go] away or [bids us] wither’. It is also possible that WBY intends ‘whither’, making the sense ‘Bids us go] away, or [go] whither . . .’, but this cannot be proven, and no emendation is made to the text here. 129. unchainable] WBY takes this word from J.C. Mangan, ‘O’Hussy’s Ode to the Maguire’, 13–16: Though he were even a wolf ranging the round green woods,

Though he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchainable sea, Though he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce bear, he, This sharp, sore sleet, these howling floods. WBY included Mangan’s poem in his A Book of Irish Verse (1895). 130. teeming darkness] TS here has ‘teaming’, but this almost certainly reflects WBY’s misspell­ ing, and is corrected in the present text. Cp. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742), IV, 141: ‘From darkness, teeming darkness, where I lay’.

484

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

(They vanish into the mist. The notes of the harp come now from much nearer). Forgael

135

Although you tear your breasts with iron talons

And rush about me wailing on the tide,

Till you are woven in a shadowy ring,

Your proud, insatiate hearts are not appeased. (A number of sailors enter from under the sail) White-haired sailor

140

You bade me from the deck with threats and blows And with fierce words, but I have come again, For I at all times long for hilts of gold And bowls of silver and of findrinny And whispering raiment: while we lay spread out Upon the benches where we row, I heard A music like a bird’s cry in the wind. Forgael

145

Bend down until the bulwark covers you That we may seem to them upon her deck A merchant galley caught under the mist. The tide narrows between: her decks are bare But for a helmsman, whom old age has turned More withered than the feet of seamew, and two who sit Where four long torches blot away the world,

135. insatiate hearts] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, A Century of Roundels (1883), ‘Before Sunset’, 5: ‘Ere yet the insatiate heart complains’. 138. hilts of gold] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876), I, ‘Of the Dwelling of King Volsung’, 209–210: ‘and on the hilts of gold | His hand, the battle-breaker, took fast and certain hold’. 139. findrinny] WBY had introduced this word to the P95 version of ‘The Wander­ ings of Oisin’ (see note on I, 21). ‘A kind of

red bronze’ was WBY’s explanation of the term in his notes to P95; in fact, it should be taken as referring to white bronze (from the Irish findruine, and Old Irish find-bru­ ine, where fionn [fin-, find-] means white). A definition of Findruine as ‘bronze coated with tin or some white alloy’ and ‘white metal (silver bronze)’ was given in Eugene O’Curry, On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), vol. 1, cccclxv, and vol. 3, 100.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

150

485

A maiden and a man who lifts a harp, Whose strings laugh as though time were no more Or gods hid them under the shadow of wings.

(A song comes over the waters, praising the happy life of the gods, who live only when they look into each other’s eyes.) Dark-haired sailor

155

The young man kissed her cloudy, fluttering hair

But now he bends above the harp once more

And I am trembling with the trembling wires: And tender faces folded up in peace And faces passionately pale float round me. Oh, that the hour of battle had passed away And I had taken that low-laughing harp.

(A song comes over the waters, praising the islands of the gods, because there beauty and song do not awaken desire and unquiet) Grey-haired sailor 160

165

Bend lower, lest your battle-axes gleam For we drift through the torchlight and their sails Flap over them, but they nor hear nor see, For one is drowsed with age and two with love. I am right glad the harp wakes me to war, For my bones melt upon the peaceable benches And my heart turns into a trembling mouse.

152.] Cp. W. Blake, Milton Pl. 30, 24–5: ‘Give us a habitation and a place | In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings’. 152^3, 158^9, 172^3 S.D.s] It is likely that WBY’s intention was in due course to provide lyrics for these intervals. 153. cloudy  .  .  .  hair] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Song’, 12 (of ‘midnight hours’): ‘And let the wind sweep back your cloudy hair’, but also AE, The Earth-Breath and Other Poems (1896), ‘The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty’, 22: ‘Dream faces, pale, with cloudy hair’.

155. the trembling wires] Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads of Irish Chivalry (1872), ‘The Four Comrades: Before the Battle’ 29–30: ‘music bland | Flowed from the trembling wires beneath his master hand’. 157. passionately pale] Perhaps cp. E. Bulwer Lytton, Orval (1869), ‘Matrimonial Consid­ erations’, 3: ‘the wild white mountain flowers turned passionately pale’. 163. drowsed with age] This unusual ‘drowsed with’ may owe something to Keats, ‘To Autumn’, 17: ‘Drowsed with the fume of poppies’.

486

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

Forgael

170

I guide the galley close under their stern.

Creep forward on your knees: fling grappling hooks

And search the rowers’ benches, the dim hold

And sleeping places, and kill old and young. For Tethra and proud Balor drove them hither And the Aquiline people cried for sacrifice.

(The song comes over the waters, praising the islands of the gods, because there is no battle there. The song cries out for protection against the dark multitudes who toss upon the sea in dreams and in rapines. The sailors creep forward and vanish under the sail. The sail begins to flap. Forgael is left alone, he takes up a shield from among the spoil upon the poop and looks at his own face reflected in it. While he looks at his face, cries and sounds of battle are heard.) Forgael

175

180

185

190

I tire of seeing always the same face

And shields that hang upon men’s shoulders: here

And here and here have swords pierced through my cheeks, And here an arrow ploughed my chin, and here A talon tore my forehead, when I first Subdued the ancient eagle-headed race, And days and labours and the driven foam Have wasted all: oh, shields hung from the stars, My heart is tired of many images Of famished, desperate, blown broken flame; Oh, Tethra, bow upon your wintry throne And grant for this and many a sacrifice That my heart look upon a flame blown up Out of some hate or love or accident, Nor know it but an image. I am heard!

Tethra has bid a sign wake in the shield:

The shadows that before the world began

Made him bow down upon his throne and weep And that are in the waters and the winds always, The shadows of unappeasable desire,

172^173.] The specific nature of the S.D. here implies that WBY envisaged composing a lyric poem to be sung at this point.

192–194.] This motif was to be a recurring one for WBY. In his work, it can be traced back to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889) I, 176–184:

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

487

A boy that follows upon flying feet A girl that has an apple in her hand; And I am blinded by a foam of dreams.

195

(The sailors return from the ship. They carry torches, which they fix in rings along the bul­ wark. They lead with them a young man and a young girl, who are dressed in white.) Forgael The hounds grow disobedient, for the whip

Has hung too long idle upon its hook.

White-haired sailor

200

The man is Aleel, a poet, and the girl

Is Dectira the daughter of a king.

Their ransom is three hundred sheep and ewes Heavy with unshorn fleeces, a hundred cows, Ninety great cauldrons and ten drinking horns Twi-handled with rings of well-wrought gold and silver.

On, on! and now a hornless deer Passed by us, chased of a phantom hound All pearly white, save one red ear; And now a maid, on a swift brown steed Whose hooves the tops of the surges grazed, Hurried away, and over her raised An apple of gold in her tossing hand; And following her at a headlong speed Was a beautiful youth from an unknown land. The lines were revised for the P95 version of the poem (I, 139–145). In the verse-drama, WBY removes the detail of the hound with one red ear (which had been present in drafts from earlier in 1896, when it was first introduced to the play), to leave the youth and the maid; and unlike in ‘Oisin’, he begins by giving their allegorical meaning, ‘Shadows of unappeas­ able desire’. In 1897, WBY composed the poem eventually entitled ‘He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World’, entitling it on first publication (Jun. 1897), ‘The Desire of Man and Woman’; here, the first-person voice is that

of the youth who pursues the girl. In the note he appended to that poem’s first appearance, WBY wrote how ‘other persons in other old Celtic sto­ ries see the like images of the desire of the man, and of the desire of the woman “which is for the desire of the man,” and of all desires that are as these’ (see note to poem). 198. Aleel] A  version of the Irish name Ailill [‘beauty’], later spelled Aileel by WBY (fol­ lowing the spelling in Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland). There are many different Ailills in Irish myth and history, including the husband of Queen Medbh. Here, WBY has no specific Ailill in mind, but is employ­ ing an available Irish name. 199. Dectira] In the TS here WBY has ‘Dectora’, the spelling he would later come to adopt more consistently for this figure. However, the rest of the TS opts for ‘Dectira’ (even chang­ ing ‘Dectora’ to this spelling at one point), so the present text adopts his preferred form (at this moment in 1896) throughout. 203. twi-handled] Two-handled. The prefix twi- to mean having two of something is

488

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

Dark-haired sailor

205

210

You bade us kill the old and young alike, And all are heaped in sacrifice but these Who are more lovely than the sun and moon. We pitied, for they heard no hurry of feet, Nor clangour of brazen shield and battle-axe, Being deafened by the birds that Angus made Out of the kisses of his musical lips. Forgael I shall have pity when horned women come Out of their ancient woods, and weep with girls That weary of the spindle and the thread. Dectira

215

Have pity and bid us live; or bid us die Quickly, because the heaviness of love Has made us weary of the waters and the winds. Forgael. I shall have pity when the horned women come Out of the ancient woods, and weep with girls About a broken spindle under the eaves.

attested at this time (though not in connec­ tion with handles): e.g. The Month Jun. 1895, ‘Illustrations of the eagle both single and twi­ headed’. WBY uses ‘twy-nature’ in The Secret Rose (1897), 178. 209–210.] A figure who was to become increas­ ingly important to WBY in the later 1890s is Aengus Óg (Aengus the Young), who was the son of Dagda Mor, and was of divine status among the Tuatha De Danaan. For WBY and others, Aengus was commonly referred to as the Irish god of love, and one story that

caught the fancy of a number of artists was that of how his kisses turned to birds and circled round him as he moved. Aengus was to remain relevant to The Shadowy Waters in later versions. 215. the heaviness of love] Perhaps cp. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘Death’s Jest-Book’, 378: ‘Swayed by the dewy heaviness of love’. 217. the horned] The definite article is added to the line by WBY, while the line above, which this echoes (211), remains unchanged.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

489

(He takes up an axe and goes down onto the deck. He gazes at Dectira and as he gazes, lowers the axe.) 220

Gazing upon your sad and cloud-pale eyelids The white foam fades; when they are lifted up The stars cast their dim crowns into the deep. Dectira

225

Your praise of my poor beauty bids me hope

That you, hearing the history of our love,

Will bid us live: Aleel played on his harp, Where apple-blossoms fell about his hair And at the third note of the silver strings I loved him, and when night covered the roads, I fled out of my father’s land with him. Forgael

230

I spare you, woman of the cloud pale eyelids, But do not spare this foam-light, reed-limbed man That is a harp note blown upon the winds,

(He lifts his axe, but Dectira flings herself between him and Aleel) For I am worthier.

She encumbers me.

(The sailors seize Dectira)

235

Tie her with that loose halyard to the mast Lest she slip from us and leap into the sea;

220. cloud-pale eyelids] ‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’ (1895) had in its opening line ‘cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes’, while a poem of autumn 1896, ‘He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers’, has a more elaborate version of this in ‘her cloudpale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes’ (4). ‘Cloud-pale’ may derive in part from W. Blake, The Book of Urizen, V 9: ‘All Eternity shuddered at sight | Of the first female now separate | Pale as a cloud of snow | Waving before the face of Los’.

222.] A reminiscence of Revelation 4:10: ‘The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne’. 231. foam-light] This epithet is sometimes to be found in mid-nineteenth century verse, e.g. James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘Greenland’, 16: ‘Where the blue halcyon builds her foam-light nest’.

490

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

But touch her gently, for the winds were made

Before the world was made, that they might sigh

About her heavy hair and lingering feet.

Aleel

240

Having beheld the lily of the gods, The rose of the world, I am content to die. (Forgael kills him. Forgael goes over to Dectira. She has covered her eyes with her hands. He takes her hands from before her eyes with his hands.) Forgael My dreams would drink your beauty as wolf-hounds,

Hot with the chase, drink up a wayside pool.

Dectira

245

Demons, wrapped in the weight of swords and waves, And in the ravening of wolves and hounds, And in the fire hidden under their paws, Scatter his blood upon the barren tide. Forgael (Taking up the harp of Aleel)

250

This dead man dreaded sword’s weight and waves’ weight,

And hound’s tooth and wolves’ tooth, being a man.

I, being half god, have gods upon my side,

And know the music that awakened the stars A music that can quell all elements And creatures, and make memory lie down Asleep under a purple coverlet Of indolent dreams.

239–240.] These lines concentrate the devo­ tional imagery used by WBY in relation to the beloved since the early 1890s, in their conjunction of the lily and the rose. The use of the title of WBY’s poem of 1891, ‘The Rose of the World’, feels deliberately self-allusive. 241–242.] The conceit here (without the wolf­ hounds, but with an ox) is repeated from WBY’s short story ‘Rosa Alchemica’, publ. in The Savoy in Apr. 1896: ‘Suddenly I remem­ bered that her eyelids had never quivered and

that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and understood with a great horror that I  danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool, and I fell, and darkness passed over me’ (69). 253–254. purple coverlet | Of indolent dreams] Perhaps cp. Tennyson, ‘The Day-Dream’, III, 2–3: ‘She lying on her couch alone, | Across the purple coverlet’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

255

491

(He goes towards the poop) When I come from this door New love shall wake and old love drop away Like memory of the moth that touched your hair When you stood last before a glimmering casement And watched the dawn creep down the eastern hills. Dectira I lie upon the anvil of the world. Forgael (to the sailors)

260

265

Cast this dead man among the other dead, For I, being glad, would have the Aquiline race Lie down with dripping claws on some white strands And hush the feathers round their necks and sleep. Then lower the sail, and leave the deck and sleep, For heaviness shall come out of this harp And cover the fluttering moth-wings of the foam. (Forgael goes onto the poop and closes the doors behind him.) Dectira

270

275

Children of Dana, you that heap up clouds About your ancient doors, because no hearts But gentle hearts can look on you and live; You who lean down over a reedy pool And take a little stillness in your hands, And make plumed armies drop away like reeds In autumn; let him look on your dim eyes And starry bodies under the heavy boughs, And when you shake your hair out on the tide. I cry to you who wait, trembling with hope, The hour when all things shall be folded up, Finding no help in anything that lives.

257. glimmering casement] A concentration of another line from Tennyson: The Princess, ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ 14: ‘The casement slowly grows a glimmering square’.

266. moth-wings of the foam] In his poem ‘Car­ rowmore’ (first publ. Mar. 1898) AE wrote of ‘the moth-wings of the twilight’, possibly under WBY’s influence. AE and WBY were in correspondence about the poem in 1898.

492

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

White-haired sailor

280

Come from the doors lest we be overheard. What have you hidden underneath your tongue Old man, who have twice dared to disobey? Dark-haired sailor

285

290

First let us throw the dead into the tide And then aboard the galley and be gone, And so loosen our limbs out of the net. A moon ago the gods cried out for food, And freckled Aodh was flung into their claws; To-morrow I or you may follow him. Good words were hidden underneath your tongue But let us lower the sail that Forgael may Believe we are but sleeping; when dawn comes We will make men out of the fluttering foam And set them at the helm and in the shroud, And shadowed by this woman’s hair, forget That human feet have trodden on these boards. (They lower the sail) Dectira

295

Have pity and take me too: I am not poor: I have these armlets and this collar of gold. (No one answers her) If children’s children wait for you at home And say, were he but here, we would grow wise, Have pity and take me with you, white-haired man. White-haired sailor

300

I pity but I do not dare, king’s child.

286. freckled Aodh] Aodh is the Irish form of Hugh; in context here it is little other than a name of the former victim, but WBY will use it further when assigning speakers to poems in WATR, where he gives it semi-private symbolic significance.

292. shroud] OED shroud n.2, 1: ‘A set of ropes, usually in pairs, leading from the head of a mast and serving to relieve the latter of lateral strain; they form part of the standing rigging of a ship’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

493

Dectira If children dig the fields for you at home

And sit under the rusted thatch at eve,

Have pity and take me with you, grey-haired man.

Grey-haired sailor I pity but I do not dare, king’s child. Dectira 305

If one you love leans by the fire at home And gazes on the bridal bed and sighs, Have pity and take me with you, dark-haired man. Dark-haired sailor

I pity but I do not dare, king’s child.

(They pass out, kissing her hand as they go. They take the torches with them.)

(Dectira is left alone)

Dectira

310

Oh, Reapers, come from the grey stones, heap up The threshing floor, pluck out the stars, Beat down the hills and bid all be at an end. (The Seabar appears suddenly upon the poop.) Seabar I had scarce dipped my talons when I heard Footsteps, and hearts that have known love were near. Another seabar Peace, they will fling the dead into the tide.

302. rusted thatch] i.e. the thatch is rustcoloured.

314^315] [That we may roll them in the ruddy foam del.] TS.

494

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

Another seabar 315

We have been given a broken sacrifice. Another seabar He has spared one out of the sacrifice. Dectira What are you, that look out of tireless eyes,

And stretch long talons and shake your sea-grey robes?

Seabar

320

We are destroying demons and we rushed Out of the water, before the light was made. Dectira Then hither to me and kill me; I grow tired

Of hills and stars and the long ripe grain of the world.

Seabar

325

His love protects you from us; when it ends Our talons shall be red. The silver strings Are gently calling to her memory.

317. tireless eyes] Cp. KT, Ballads and Lyrics (1891), ‘The Chapel of the Grail’, 56–57: ‘The sentiels of this Paradise, | Who pace all day with tireless eyes’. 322. the long ripe grain] This may be a recol­ lection of Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), ‘A Rally for Ireland’, and its bloodthirsty last lines (70–75):

The thirst for blood here is that of the Seabar, but it may be one of the things of which Dec­ tira declares herself weary.

Laws are in vain without swords to maintain; So, muster as fast as the fall of the rain: Serried and rough as a field of ripe grain,

325^326 S.D.] Here again WBY seems to be making provision for a lyric to be supplied at a future date.

Stand by your flag upon mountain and plain: Charge till yourselves or your foemen are slain! Fight till yourselves or your foemen are slain!

THE SHADOWY WATERS [1896 TS VERSION]

495

(A song comes from under the poop, singing away her memory of the gods. Dectira speaks.) Dectira

330

335

I had high friends that now had silver-grey

Or purple robes, now walked among the woods

Starry and naked: whither are they gone,

Oh what were their august and beautiful names?

(A song comes from under the poop, singing

away her memory of her lover.)

And somebody has gone among the stars Or gone among the foam that I would love If I but knew the colour of his hair; Was it the autumn’s brown, or the sun’s red? (A song comes from the poop, singing away her memory of her hatred) And somebody I hated has gone too; I half remembered him like a windy flame That burned my hands and face. Oh windy flame, Why have I hated you, and what were you? Seabar

340

He is more mighty than the sun and moon,

For I have seen crowned dreams gather their robes

About them and be gone: all that has been, Since Alleel stood under an apple tree And played upon the silver harp, has gone.

326. high friends] Perhaps cp. Edwin Arnold, Griselda (1855), ‘All Saints’ Day’, 36: ‘All to all of us high friends’. 335, 336. windy flame] Perhaps cp. George Meredith, Poems Written in Early Youth (1851), ‘South-West Wind in the Woodland’, 16–17: ‘a stream | Of yellow light and windy

flame’. But WBY is here working with an image to which he will return with symbolic intent. In his notes to WATR, WBY wrote of his persona Hanrahan that he ‘is fire blown by the wind’, glossing this as ‘the simplicity of an imagination too changeable to gather permanent possessions’.

171

THE BLESSED

Date of composition. WBY was at work on the poem, but had not yet finished it, on 24 Mar. 1897 (letters to Robert Bridges and AG, CL 2, 84, 86). The poet was, as he told AG, ‘up to my eyes’ in the ballad then, since it had evidently been commissioned for the Apr. number of The Yellow Book, and the due date for copy was imminent. There is no evidence for when the poem was begun, nor when exactly it was commissioned: its composition, however, seems to be a consequence of the commission. Cumhal and Dathi. Cumhal is WBY’s version of Cumhaill, the mythic king who was father of the more celebrated Fionn Mac Cumhaill. WBY used the name (as ‘Cumhal’) in the version of his story ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’ which appeared in 1897 in The Secret Rose, revising this from a different name (‘Lua Ech Ella’) which had been used in the first version (1894). The name Dathi belongs to a king of Connacht from the fifth century, often identified as the last pagan king in Ireland; and none of the fragmentary material relating to this figure makes him a religious hermit. WBY was clearly aware of this king, however, and of the discussions about him conducted most prominently in the 1880s by Samuel Ferguson. In ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’, WBY has his hero say: ‘I would that the red wind of the Druids had withered in his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who brought the tree of death out of barbarous lands, or that the lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot of the mountain, had smitten him also’ (M, 99). The reference here is to a story in Irish chronicle materials first translated by John O’Donovan in 1844 (The Genealogies, Tribes, and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach, 19–21): Dathi went afterwards with the men of Erin across Muir n-Icht [the English Channel] towards Leatha [Italy], until he reached the Alps, to revenge the death of Niall of the Nine Hostages. This was the time that Formenius (or Parmenius), King of Thrace, took up his residence in the Alps, having fled from his kingdom and retired thither for the love of God as a pilgrim. He erected there a circular tower of sods and stones sixty feet in height, and he lived in the middle of the tower, eleven feet from the light, and he saw not a ray of sun or other light. Dathi came to the tower [. . .] When the king’s (i.e. Dathi’s) people saw the tower, they went to demolish it, and they tore it down and plundered it. For­ menius felt the wind coming to him, and God raised him up in a blaze of fire one thousand paces from the tower of sods which he had built, and he prayed for King Dathi that his reign might continue no longer; and he also prayed God that his monument or tomb might not be remarkable. The life of Dathi endured no longer than until he had the tower destroyed, when there came a flash of lightning from heaven which struck him dead on the spot. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-173

THE BLESSED

497

In 1882, Samuel Ferguson went to work on this story, partly by retracing Dathi’s sup­ posed European journey and discovering in the Alps the site of the Irish king’s sudden immolation; Ferguson also pursued research on Dathi’s possible resting-place in Ireland, its modest status being in accord with Fromenius’s prophecy. Although Ferguson’s work was published in the Proceedings of the Irish Academy, and WBY quite possibly read it there in the late 1880s or early 1890s, it would have come WBY’s way again as a result of its generous quotation as part of Lady Ferguson’s Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of his Day (2 vols., 1896), Vol.2, 49–59. Dathi was not a figure familiar to antiquarians alone, for he made his way into the nineteenth-century Irish poetry known to WBY. Thomas Davis wrote ‘The Fate of King Dathi’ (Poems (1846)), where Dathi is ‘Struck by the light­ ning’s blaze’ (62), and the poem ends by celebrating him as ‘Last of the Pagan race’ (95). Allusion to Dathi is made also in Aubrey De Vere’s ‘The Bard Ethell’ 255–256: ‘he sent them lightning; and so they died | Like Dathi, the king, on the dark Alp’s side’ (Poetical Works, 1884). The king also made appearances in Ferguson’s own poetry, including Congal (1872) IV, 72–73: ‘Remember how, when through the fields of France | Your sires the thunder-blackened limbs of glorious Dathi bore’. The relation of WBY’s poem to the story of Dathi presents something of a puzzle. Were it not for ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’, it might be sufficient to assume that the poet had read the story, forgotten most of it, but remembered the name of the king and something about a hermit, conflated the two, and gone on with his own ballad narrative. Plainly, this is not the case. ‘The Blessed’ makes Dathi resemble a cave-dwelling (rather than tower-dwelling) version of Formenius, turning the pagan king into a holy hermit. This hermit, moreover, is sought out by someone bearing the name of another Irish king, Cumhal, who is seeking religious enlightenment. However, the enlightenment he has to offer strikes at the root of monastic models of Christian devotion, and leads by way of a celebration of drunkenness and ‘the redness of wine’ to ‘The Incorruptible Rose’. Dathi, in the ballad, is the kind of hermit who might seem more at home in the GD. WBY takes from the Irish sources one very important element of his poem – that of the wind, which Formenius felt coming to him in his ‘tower of sods’. This aspect of the story is dwelt upon by Ferguson also, who notes that the wind here denotes the open air to which the hermit is suddenly exposed by Dathi: it would seem to have stuck in WBY’s mind enough for the poet to have made intimacy with the wind one of his hermit’s cen­ tral powers: ‘I can see where the wind goes | And follow the way of the wind’ (27–28). The Irish story of King Dathi’s having been struck by lightning at the foot of a tower did perhaps set up resonances of occult symbolism for WBY, including those derived from the tarot pack, where the card of ‘The Tower struck by Lightning’ often features a tower (sometimes a tree) and a lightning bolt; in the GD, use of Tattwas cards also assigned significance to the tower, and it played an important role in the ceremony of ini­ tiation for the first grade of the inner order (Philosophus). This remained for many years a key symbolic image for WBY, and he cannot have been anything other than struck by the extent to which the story of Dathi seems to anticipate some of its features. In a more general sense, the king’s supposed electrical end might have seemed an instance of the most extreme kind of enlightenment, rendering him thereafter a divinely touched figure, hidden away in the earth (the cave being the opposite of a tower) as the custodian of wisdom that goes against the Ireland of Christianity and the Church.

498

THE BLESSED

Reception and interpretation. This is one of WBY’s poems that, despite being a fixture in his canon, has attracted very little comment. The earliest reaction to it – in a notice of the Apr. 1897 The Yellow Book – was only that ‘The poets include Mr. W.B. Yeats, who might be more simple – the word “Rose,” for instance, has for Mr. Yeats many meanings that are strange to the non-political mind’ (The Academy, 5 Jun., 1897). In modern criti­ cism, A.R. Grossman sees in the poem ‘an image of the true pedagogic community,’ and explains this as ‘an archetypal self-finding, a re-ascent to Eden in the self which takes place when the mind, like the poem, abandons all illegitimate relations to the exter­ nal world’ (144): yet this summary seems to levitate extraordinarily far from the poem itself. S. Putzel chooses to concentrate on the poem’s form as ‘a brilliant variation on the traditional tetrameter-trimeter English ballad stanza and on the strong-stress lines of Irish ballads. [. . .] The result is a dramatic poem which uses this strophic construction to enable the reader to hear the dialectic between the two speakers’ (156). (What exactly that ‘dialectic’ consists of, though, Putzel’s readers do not hear.) H. Vendler, also with an ear to the form, hears a ‘dactylic lilt’ in the poem’s final stanzas, and seems to attribute this to ‘the revelatory potential of drunkenness for occult vision of a Rosicrucian sort’ (113). Arguably, the poem deserves more (and differently focussed) attention than this. In the larger patterns of WBY’s poetic development, it offers a relatively early openness to the question of visionary ‘drunkenness’ that will occupy the writer’s attention again in the early twentieth century. In terms of the volume WATR, it fills a significant role. Structurally, it is one of four ballads (the others are ‘The Host of the Air’, ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’, and ‘The Cap and Bells’) which are placed at intervals in the overall sequence, providing differently-pitched narrative moments that both absorb and effect formal contrasts with the other lyrics in the book. Of the four, this is the most ‘mystical’ in emphasis; but, like other poems in the collection, it gives an unorthodox perspective on religion. The poem’s pronounced emphasis on ‘the wind’ (‘wind’ and ‘windy’ appear five times) obviously places it in relation to the title of the volume (about which WBY was confident by 1897). It is noticeable, however, that ‘the wind’ for Dathi is something alto­ gether more positive than the wind as it features in e.g. what the wind cries in ‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge’, or the description of ‘a man, a hater of the wind’ in ‘Mongan Thinks of his Past Greatness’. The ‘great wind’ of ‘The Secret Rose’ is prepared for in this poem, but with a spiritual rather than an apocalyptic note. As the last ballad in WATR, the poem also delivers the volume’s final narrative. In early 1897, albeit while working under the pressure of a tight deadline, WBY was also preparing to complete his collection – which still lacked a number of symbolic lyrics – and was clearly thinking in terms of linkage with themes and images that had been present throughout his 1890s work. As a spiritual parable, the poem explores the inadequacy of orthodox religion – the very same religion which provides so many of the WATR poems with their sources of sym­ bolism – while insisting on a transcendental, mystical vision that exists hidden from the world and worldly powers. WBY’s decision to turn the figure of Dathi from swordsman to saint is in its own way an act of startling reversal, though one that suggests the distance between pagan and Christian mystic is not so great as it may seem. Text and publication history. No MS draft for the poem survives. The first text is that published in The Yellow Book (Apr. 1897), where the poem was the leading piece for the

THE BLESSED

499

issue (YB). Two TSS incorporating substantial revision postdate this first appearance (both in Berg Collection, NYPL), each with corrections in WBY’s hand (TS1 and TS2). The poem was next published in WATR and was retained by WBY in all subsequent col­ lected editions, without textual alteration. Copy-text: P49.

C

umhal called out, bending his head,

Till Dathi came and stood,

With a blink in his eyes, at the cave-mouth,

Between the wind and the wood.

5

10

And Cumhal said, bending his knees,

‘I have come by the windy way

To gather the half of your blessedness

And learn to pray when you pray.

‘I can bring you salmon out of the streams And heron out of the skies.’ But Dathi folded his hands and smiled With the secrets of God in his eyes. And Cumhal saw like a drifting smoke

All manner of blessed souls,

1–4.] YB has an opening stanza later cut by WBY: Cumhal the king, being angry and sad,

Came by the woody way

To the cave, where Dathi the Blessed had gone,

To hide from the troubled day. YB

1. bending] bowing YB.

3.] With blinking eyes, at the cave’s edge, YB.

cave] cave’s corr. to cave TS1.

4.] Despite the plainness of its diction, this line

strikes a note of slight oddness at the start of the poem, juxtaposing as it does the invis­ ible with the visible. The effect is to bring to early prominence ‘the wind’, which will play a major symbolic role in the poem (and is at the same time related centrally to the volume WATR itself). 6. I have come] I come YB.

8.] And learn the prayers that you say YB, TS1; corr. to And learn to pray when you pray TS2. 11.] Dathi’s physical attitude carries the sug­ gestion of an Eastern, Buddha-like model of enlightenment or sainthood. If this is so, there may perhaps be a sign here of the King Formenius of Thrace, who brings to the Irish story a hint of Eastern (Byzantine) Christian tradition. 12. secrets] secret corr. to secrets TS1. 13. like a drifting smoke] WBY here echoes his own ‘The Host of the Air’ (1893), 39–40: ‘Old men and young men and young girls | Were gone like a drifting smoke’. Besides the general phenomenon of poems in WATR sharing phrases, images and motifs, this repetition of a phrase serves to link two of the volume’s four ballads. 14. blessed] blessedest YB; blessed corr. to blessedest TS1; blessedest corr. to blessed TS2.

500 15

20

THE BLESSED

Women and children, young men with books, And old men with croziers and stoles. ‘Praise God and God’s Mother,’ Dathi said, ‘For God and God’s Mother have sent The blessedest souls that walk in the world To fill your heart with content.’ ‘And which is the blessedest,’ Cumhal said, ‘Where all are comely and good? Is it these that with golden thuribles Are singing about the wood?’

25

30

‘My eyes are blinking,’ Dathi said, ‘With the secrets of God half blind, But I can see where the wind goes And follow the way of the wind; ‘And blessedness goes where the wind goes, And when it is gone we are dead; I see the blessedest soul in the world And he nods a drunken head.

15.] Children and women and tonsured young men, YB; Women and children and tonsured young men TS1; Women and chil­ dren, and [tonsured del.] young men ^with books^ TS2. 16.] The vision here is one of the Church hier­ archy, from which Dathi is radically apart. But these figures (like the ‘young men with books’, who may be the Church’s novices) are perceived in one way by Cumhal, but in quite another by Dathi. 17, 18. Mother] mother TS1, TS2, WATR. 21. which] who YB. 23. these] those YB; those corr. to these TS1. golden thuribles] WBY uses the technical terminology of Catholic paraphernalia here: OED thurible: ‘A vessel in which incense is burnt in religious ceremonies; a censer’. Even by the standards of the medieval Church, however, thuribles of gold are extravagant. 26. secrets] secret corr. to secrets TS1. 27. But I  can see] But I  have found YB; But I have seen TS2.

see where the wind goes] In Dathi, this is obviously in the nature of a mystical gift. WBY will have been aware, though, of the possibility of bathos, since in Ireland the abil­ ity to see the wind is commonly attributed to pigs. Cp. Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘The ‘Whistlin’ Thief ’’, 19–20: ‘But, mother, you know they say | The pigs can see the wind’. goes] blows TS2. 28. follow] followed TS2. 30. we are dead] we die YB, TS1, TS2. 31. I see] And have seen YB; And seen corr. to And have seen corr. to have seen TS1; [And corr. to] I have seen TS2. 32–36.] For a link between drunkenness and mystical tendencies, cp. Ernest Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races (trans. W.G. Huchi­ son, 1896), 9–10: The essential element of the Celt’s poetic life is the adventure – that is to say, the pursuit of the unknown, an endless quest

THE BLESSED

35

40

501

‘O blessedness comes in the night and the day And whither the wise heart knows; And one has seen in the redness of wine The Incorruptible Rose, ‘That drowsily drops faint leaves on him And the sweetness of desire, While time and the world are ebbing away In twilights of dew and of fire.’

after an object ever fleeing from desire. [. . .] The race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and pursues it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The char­ acteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency to drunkenness  – a fail­ ing which, according to the traditions of the sixth century, was the cause of their disasters  – is due to this invincible need of illusion. [.  .  .] To this day in Ireland drunkenness forms a part of all Saint’s Day festivals – that is to say, the festivals which best have retained their national and popular aspect. 32.] By a spilled wine-cup lie. YB, TS1, TS2. 34.] While ‘the wise heart’ is a commonplace phrase, WBY’s use of it here in the context of knowledge drawn from the wind may recall KT, Ballads and Lyrics (1891), 5–8: For all the sky’s soft, shining fleece,

And winds that from southward blow,

My wise heart blackbird held his peace:

And when the Spring comes he will know.

36.] The vision here, emphasized by WBY’s use of capitals, is that of the central symbol of Rosicrucianism, as absorbed by the ritual magic of the GD and (most pertinently) by WBY’s own writings of the 1890s – the lyrics of CK, the short fiction of The Secret Rose, but also, in a very immediate sense, the poetry of the volume WATR, where the poem that follows this one is ‘The Secret Rose’ (a poem also speaking of ‘those [. . .] Who sought thee

[. . .] in the wine-vat’). Dathi’s mystical vision, then, is attuned to mystical and magical sym­ bolism, while also being (in a way) a vision of the works of WBY. ‘Incorruptible’ is not an adjective used of the Rose in this sense by WBY elsewhere; and it may be fitting, given Dathi’s saint-like status here, that it is espe­ cially rich in religious resonances: e.g. 1 Cor­ inthians 9:25: ‘And every man that striveth for the mastery, is temperate in all things: Now they to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible’ and 15:52: ‘for the trum­ pet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’ and 1 Peter 1:23: ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incor­ ruptible, by the word of God which liveth and abideth for ever’. 37–40.] “The Rose that must drop, out of sweet leaves, The heaviness of desire, Until Time and the World have ebbed away In twilights of dew and fire!” YB. 37. faint leaves] Cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Last Wish’, 28–30: ‘There is a lone white rose, | Shedding, in sudden snows, | Its faint leaves o’er the emerald turf around’. 38. the sweetness of desire] Perhaps cp. W. Mor­ ris, Love is Enough (1873), 944: ‘The lonely sweetness of desire grows pain’. 39–40: Till time and the world have ebbed away | In twilights of dew and fire TS1, TS2.

172

HE MOURNS FOR THE

CHANGE THAT HAS COME

UPON HIM AND HIS

BELOVED, AND LONGS FOR

THE END OF THE WORLD

Date and circumstances of composition. According to the date which he appended to the first published version, WBY composed this poem in Jun. 1897. Since it was published early in that month, this suggests unusual speed. It is (just) possible that it was written and posted from Sligo having been composed on the first of the month (Tuesday), for publication in Saturday’s Dome. There would have been very little time, though, for the proof sheet to be corrected and returned in this week; yet the proof itself carries ‘Sligo, June  1897’ already set up at the foot of the poem. Whatever degree of efficiency and dispatch the postal service (and WBY) commanded that week, it is still possible that the poem was written in late May, with WBY supplying the date as that of the anticipated publication. WBY had been in Sligo, where he stayed with George Pollexfen, while get­ ting on with his novel The Speckled Bird, since 14 May. The poem’s symbolic density may suggest regular contact with George Pollexfen, with whom WBY often exchanged infor­ mation and views on esoteric matters. At this time, also, arrangements were taking shape for the anti-Jubilee events in Dublin later that Jun., where WBY had reason to anticipate meeting and working alongside MG; that the nature of this anticipation was not wholly political is something readily inferred from the subject of the poem, where the apoca­ lyptic intimations of the ‘Boar without bristles’ and coming darkness are balanced – and maybe more than balanced – by the promise of the love-god Aengus and the excitement of a pursuit which is (as the first title says) ‘The Desire of Man and of Woman’. Reception and interpretation. For one reader, The Dome reported in Sept. 1897, the poem’s first appearance in print brought only disappointment: Some person who is quite good enough for The Daily Mail has been reading the twelve lines by Mr. W.B. Yeats which appeared in our last number. This ‘Sonnet,’ as he intelligently calls it, had the effect of sending him ‘careering back to com­ monplaceness with a sigh of relief.’ All humane men and women will feel glad that The Daily Mail person returned to his own place so safe and sound, and nice and early, after his venturesome little excursion in foreign parts. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-174

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

503

This was a spirited (if snobby) defence, but even so refinedly Celtic a sensibility as William Sharp’s found this poem lacking. In the Fortnightly Review Sharpe complained that it was in a category of poems that were ‘no more than exquisitely versified folklore’ and ‘rather a series of esoteric images than a poem [. . .] to nine tenths of its readers, however, this poem must surely be merely grotesque’ (‘A Group of Celtic Writers’, Fortnightly Review Jan. 1899): I know what Mr. Yeats means by the white deer with no horns, by the hound with one red ear, and what the Path of Stones is, and what the Wood of Thorns is, and who is meant by the man with the hazel wand, and the meaning of the uncouth Celtic image for Darkness or Night – Oblivion; but it is my business as well as my pleasure and racial heritage to know such things. A few years later, Sharp allowed ‘Fiona Macleod’ to join the discussion. As Macleod, Sharp told an American audience that this was a ‘strange poem of love with its fantastic dream-beauty’, but added gentle strictures: ‘To some’, she or he went on, ‘there is no need to explain “the white deer with no horns,” “the hound with one red ear,” ‘the boar without bristles out of the West”. [. . .] But these must be few: and though in a sense all excelling poetry is mystical, in the wider and not less true sense it should be as water is, or as flame is [. . .] an elemental, being in the spiritual life what wind is in the natural life’ (‘The Later Work of Mr. W.B. Yeats’, The North American Review Oct. 1902). Sharp’s scepticism was not his (or his and Fiona’s) alone, and in 1904, Eugenia Brooks Frothingham in the New York periodical The Critic saw in the poem ‘a meaningless category of fantastic and often absurd images’ (‘An Irish Poet and His Work’, The Critic, Jan. 1904): To the happy few initiated into the mysteries of Irish mythology these lines may contain suggestions of the mystic and the beautiful, but to the rest of us they pres­ ent a stupefying array of unrelated images. Convinced that no one would dare to appear so meaningless unless meaning a great deal, we ask ourselves feverishly why the hound should have a red ear, and if he calls to the white deer because of it, or because somebody has hid hatred and hope and desire and fear under his feet; and why the man with the hazel wand should have changed him; and what ‘Time’ and ‘Change’ and ‘Birth’ have to do with any of it; and last of all, why the red hound should have wanted this particular, bristleless boar to come out of the West. It was perhaps the poem’s symbolic density that meant it flew largely under the radar of the major modern critical works on WBY. Specialist studies of WATR by A.R. Grossman and S.Putzel discussed the poem, Grossman somewhat oddly effecting an out-mystification of the work itself as a ‘mystic morality’ in which ‘The avenues of initiation have now become a source of suffering’ in ‘Yeats’s early and incomplete fantasy of the solution of the problem of that dual self-conception necessitated by the tradition of idealism’ (Grossman, 177, 179). For Putzel, magical initiation is of the essence, and Aengus’s touching of the speaker with a hazel wand is literally initiatory: ‘Once touched by the hazel wand, Mon­ gan is like the members of the Golden Dawn who are touched with the Lotus Wand – the wand on the spine of The Wind Among the Reeds; he can only long for the end of time and

504

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

change, for the timeless moment when he will be reunited with his Ideal’ (Putzel, 190). The poem’s connection to magic, and to WBY’s rituals for the Celtic Mystical Order that were beginning their painful evolution in 1897, are noted by P. Kuch, who adds that they achieve relatively little poetically: ‘To argue that the symbols in this poem stir within the reader’s mind unconscious forces, the spirits of Anima Mundi, is to indulge in unwar­ ranted special pleading [. . .] Yeats would have been much better to have followed [AE’s] advice: ‘Your verse universally intelligible will help you more powerfully later on than a secret propaganda now’’ (Yeats and AE (1986), 127, quoting letter to WBY of Jan. 1898). Instead of magical, occasionally critics have looked for political meanings in the poem, and discovered these lurking in their own apparent absence: E. Larrissy sees the speaker ‘driven to a despairing hope about a boar’ in an ending that is ‘merely, perhaps, the blunt­ est embodiment of the familiar note of weariness, and of a figuring of the coming battle as mindless and destructive, rather than liberating’ (Larrissy, 82). Less subtly, but more wrongly, D. Holdeman speaks of the poem alongside ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’ as one that ‘target[s] the British empire and its materialist cosmos with the [.  .  .] impulse to destroy’ (Holdeman, 32). In more biographical terms, E. Cullingford mentions the poem as evidence that ‘[WBY] lacked confidence in his masculinity,’ so that ‘the poet’s desire for the Last Day is motivated by weariness and frustration’ (Cullingford, 53). It may be that the poem does in fact find itself hampered to some extent by its symbols: beyond questions of accessibility for readers, there is a problem about just how accessible this particular alignment of motifs is for WBY himself. It is important to take account of how the poem begins with a concentration of symbolic images that were already part of the texture of WBY’s poetic thought (see note on 1–2): the poem is thus, inescapably for its author, in the nature of an imaginative return upon material that, while it had evidently not been exhausted, was nevertheless exhausting in its continued pursuit of the poet. The arrival of Aengus with his hazel wand is also a reflection of the presence of this ‘Master of Love’ in WBY’s writing of the time; yet the change he is said to bring about is shown only in line 9, with its list of abstract nouns, all of them now ‘hurrying by’. Instead of erotic transformation, what comes to the speaker of the poem is a wish for the very thing that would obliterate his consciousness, symbolized by the ‘boar without bristles’ (see note to 10); and it is with this rough beast, rather than the transformed being and sensibility of the speaker, that the poem comes to an end. Any longing for the end of the world here is less a mystical position than an unshakeable despair. Undoubtedly, there are elements of the autobiographical in all of this, and perhaps especially of WBY’s relationship with OS, erotically real and romantically disappointing, which in the summer of 1897 offered the poet no clear indication of his life’s future direction, and was fraught with many kinds and degrees of risk. A note of despair in this autobiographical sense is partly one occasioned by the failure of symbolic meaning to issue in personal fact. The sexual realities of WBY’s involvement with OS did not start with symbolic longings; and a symbolic dance of desire and pursuit with MG showed no sign of resulting in sexual involvement of any kind. The despair, then, is a determined and weary opting-out. Waiting to meet MG again in the ‘June, 1897’ which he made sure was printed at the foot of the poem that month, WBY composed twelve lines in which the desire of a man for a woman, and the woman’s desire for the desire of that man, are matters of both excite­ ment and exhaustion. Only the boar without bristles, it may be noticed, seems to experience anything like a satisfactory (and vaguely post-coital) closure here.

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

505

Text and publication history. The poem was first published in The Dome, Jun. 1897 (D), and next in WATR. WBY retained it in his collected editions thereafter. There are no MS  copies, but a corrected proof for The Dome survives in the Berg Collection, NYPL (Proof), along with a TS copy prior to the WATR version, also in the Berg Col­ lection (TS).

Title] The Desire of Man and of Woman D, TS; Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved WATR; Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved and longs for the [final dark­ ness corr. to] end of the World Page proofs for PW06 (Berg Collection). The first published title is partially addressed in WBY’s note for The Dome in terms of ‘the desire of the man, and of the desire of the woman “which is for the desire of the man” ’. The author may be allowing an impli­ cation, in context, that this is a motif taken from ‘old Celtic stories’, but it is not: the source appears to be Coleridge, who was recorded as saying that ‘The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man’ (Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge (1835), 47). On this, see M. Gibson, Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (2000), 14. WBY’s slight misquotation is almost exactly that of his and Ellis’s Blake edition, where it is deployed (and attributed to Coleridge) as ‘The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man’ (Works of William Blake (1893), I, 281). This quotation is often attrib­ uted not to Coleridge but to Madame de Stael; and it is indeed possible that Coleridge was paraphrasing her in his conversation (in her Quelques réflexions sur le but moral de ‘Del­ phine’, she wrote that: ‘Les hommes aiment à éprouver pour les femmes la douce émotion qu’inspire la faiblesse et la douceur; les femmes veulent admirer et presque redouter cet être protecteur qui doit soutenir leurs pas trem­ blants), but WBY is certainly channelling  – and passing off as Celtic – S.T. Coleridge here.

With WATR, ‘Mongan’ enters the new title. In his note to ‘He thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven’ (then ‘Song of Mongan’) in The Dome Dec. 1898, WBY wrote that ‘Mongan, in the old Celtic poetry, is a famous wizard and king who remembers his passed lives’. The seventh-cen­ tury king Mongan features in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre (Book of the Dun Cow), where he is accredited with prophetic powers, specifically in relation to information that was known only to the long-departed Fenian, Cailte. In Eugene O’ Curry’s work, this is seen as indicating a belief that Mongan might be a reincarnation of Finn: ‘This Mongan was the most learned and wise layman of his time: so remarkable were his knowledge and wisdom that people believed him to be Finn Mac Cumhaill himself; and this belief or fact is asserted in the present legend’ (Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), Vol. III, 176). J. Rhys picked up on this in a footnote: ‘Though Finn is not said to be re-born as Oisin, there was an Irish story which gave him a second life, namely, in the person of an Ultonian king called Mongan’ (Celtic Heathendom (1888), 552). This seems to have been enough for WBY to adopt Mongan as the possessor of a memory of ‘passed lives’. 1–2.] As the WATR note acknowledges, this motif begins in WBY’s work with ‘The Wan­ derings of Oisin’ (1889) I, 176–184: On, on! and now a hornless deer Passed by us, chased of a phantom hound All pearly white, save one red ear; And now a maid, on a swift brown steed

506

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

Copy-text: P49.

D

o you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed into a hound with one red ear;

Whose hooves the tops of the surges grazed, Hurried away, and over her raised An apple of gold in her tossing hand; And following her at a headlong speed Was a beautiful youth from an unknown land. The lines were revised for the P95 version of the poem (I, 139–145): We galloped; now a hornless deer Passed by us, chased by a phantom hound All pearly white, save one red ear; And now a lady rode like the wind With an apple of gold in her tossing hand; And a beautiful young man followed behind With quenchless gaze and fluttering hair. WBY’s source was Michael Comyn’s Lay of Oisin on the Land of Youths, an eighteenth-cen­ tury Irish poem translated by Bryan O’Looney in Transactions of the Ossianic Society Vol. 4 (1859). The Lay has the following stanzas: We saw also, by our sides, A hornless fawn leaping nimbly, And a red-eared white dog, Urging it boldly in the chase. We beheld also, without fiction, A young maid on a brown steed, A golden apple in her right hand, And she going on the top of the waves. We saw after her, A young rider on a white steed, Under a purple, crimson mantle of satin, And a gold-headed sword in his right hand. Deer make appearances throughout Celtic myth. Oisin’s mother, Sadhbh, was at one stage transformed into a deer by a Druid whom she had refused to marry. Fionn encountered her in this form on a hunt, when the hounds Bran and Sceolan detected that she was human; Fionn

therefore did not kill her, but brought her to his home, where she regained human shape (albeit temporarily, since she was to be turned into a deer again, this time by Fear Doirich). WBY takes ‘red-eared’ in Lay in an unusual sense, as indicating that the hound possesses only one red ear; if there is an ambiguity in Lay, it is not present in P.W. Joyce’s version of Comyn, Old Celtic Romances (1879), where ‘a white hound with red ears’ is seen (389). WBY made much use of this motif, some of it specifically magi­ cal in intention. S. Putzel draws attention to the projected initiation rituals for WBY’s Celtic Mystical Order, worked and re-worked in the late 1890s and after. In ‘The Initiation of the Cauldron’, three participants are given lines relating to the hound/deer vision (Putzel, 188): First answers ‘I see a hound following a fawn  – I  see a girl holding an apple running along the tops of the waves. I see a young man riding upon a horse. Do not go that way,’ etc. The second says that is the way of illusion. Third says he cannot turn his eyes from the morning star. In work on the verse-play The Shadowy Waters during 1896, WBY introduced the motif as one of the ‘omens out of the darkness’ that have appeared to the questing protagonist, Forgael. In the earliest (prose) draft of this material, ‘A hound with one red ear pursued a pearl-white doe over the waves. A youth with pale face and bright eyes pursued a maiden who bore an apple of gold. They rode upon horses that were swifter than the wind’ (DC, 125; MS dated by the DC editors Aug. 1896). In the TS version from later in the year, this becomes an image of ‘The shadows of unappeasable desire’, as ‘A boy that follows upon flying feet | A  girl that has an apple in her hand’ (192–194), removing the hound and the deer.

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

5

10

507

I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns, For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear Under my feet that they follow you night and day.

A man with a hazel wand came without sound;

He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way;

And now my calling is but the calling of a hound;

And Time and Birth and Change are hurrying by.

I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West

1. horns?] CP33. horns! WATR and all editions to Later Poems (1931). 3. the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns] These locations link the poem back to earlier versions of The Shadowy Waters. In one draft (dated by the DC editors 1894), the protago­ nist Forgael is said to have ‘sailed up a broad river for nine days’ and come to Connla’s well (a mythic source of wisdom) with its hazel trees (DC, 90): And then in middle winter sailed beneath The roots of the great oak tree that divides The Place of Briars from the Place of Stones, And there the second dream flowed over him. This motif is repeated in drafts until its last occurrence in 1895, when in presenting it Forgael gives a more complicated account (DC, 106): I curse the hazel tree and the oak tree: The hazel tree that shadows Connla’s well Has changed the things that made my heart beat high To images in water that await A hand amid the water to vanish away; That loneliest oak tree, that divides The Wood of Briars from the Place of Stones And hides the well of darkness under its roots Has mixed up all the images in one.

To the extent that the speaker of the poem has assimilated aspects of WBY’s Forgael, he is an unsatisfied quester who has found the symbolic locations of wisdom but discov­ ered them to be incompatible with his mor­ tal being – also, perhaps, discovering that in himself he has now ‘mixed up all the images’, and is in some sense contaminated by the ‘well of darkness’. In removing the briars and stones from his play, WBY brings them into this poem as stages in the journey of spiritual hardship which has led to no consummation or enlightenment. 4. For somebody hid] And I have D [And I have del.] [There is del.] For somebody hid TS. 5. that they] that I D; thus corr. to that Proof; that [I del.] they TS. 6. a hazel wand] a wand of hazel D. WBY’s notes establish the god Aengus as the fig­ ure intended here, and hazel is traditionally a wood with supernatural or otherworldly connections. Connections within WATR are made when this image recalls ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ some pages before, and its ‘hazel wood’ and ‘hazel wand’ (1,3): in fact, that poem would not be written until later in the summer of 1897. 10. the Boar without bristles] WBY’s ‘The Val­ ley of the Black Pig’ is found eight poems further on in WATR; it had been written in late 1895 or early 1896, so WBY is here drawing on relatively recent work of his own. In the WATR notes, WBY discourses

508

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky

And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.

at length on the Pig (see ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’ notes), associating it (by way of J.G. Frazer) with the powers of winter and darkness. One point in WBY’s notes is that ‘the black pig is one with the bristleless boar, that killed Dearmod, in Novem­ ber, upon the western end of Ben Bulben’. In the Irish Fenian narrative Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne (The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne), the hero dies when wounded on Fionn’s boar hunt on the slopes of Ben Bulben, despite having been given prophetic warning that he would meet his death from the boar. However, this boar does have bristles; in Standish H. O’Grady’s translation, Diarmuid ‘struck a heavy stroke upon the wild boar’s back stoutly and full bravely, yet he cut not a single bristle upon him’ (The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne (1880) vol.2, 44), and this is matched by P.W. Joyce’s account: ‘the spear fell harmless to the ground, having neither wounded nor scratched the boar, nor disturbed even a sin­ gle bristle’ (Old Celtic Romances (1879), 341). In Joyce’s version, moreover, this is ‘a great bristly wild boar, having neither ears nor tail’ (339). It may be the missing tail which sug­ gested to WBY an absence of bristles; though the subsequent interpretations of these fea­ tures are relevant to tail and bristles alike. ‘It is possible,’ WBY wrote in his WATR note to ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’, ‘that bristles were associated with fertility, as the tail cer­ tainly was’; for some reason, with whatever degree of intent, the poet is associating this boar with one whose threat to the hero is something other than sexual competition (in terms of Frazer’s analyses of myth, or that of J. Rhys in Celtic Heathendom (1888), where Diarmuid is read as a ‘Solar Hero’ whose fate

replicates that of the sun and the day). The question arises of how far Diarmuid’s fate is being incorporated in the present poem; if there is some measure of identification with Diarmuid, is that a matter of dramatic projection in the character of Mongan (the WATR speaker  – but not that of the D ver­ sion), or something autobiographicallytinged for WBY himself? Diarmuid has become the lover of the wife of a much older man (Fionn), whose vengeance is taken in the boar hunt and its aftermath (when he refuses to give Diarmuid the life-saving water he has cupped in his hands). WBY’s personal position was a lot less dramatic than this; but he was the lover of a married woman whose husband (certainly no Fionn) could still command considerable legal advantage over a compromised wife such as OS. Perhaps there is some degree of melan­ cholic identification with Diarmuid, in that WBY imaginatively acquiesces in Diarmuid’s fate, acepting in advance (as it were) the pos­ sibility of some as yet unknown catastrophe to follow from his affair with OS. That the boar is also, and explicitly, ‘darkness flying the light’ (as WBY says in his WATR note) remains a primary symbolic meaning; how the poet privately understood ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, in terms of his own romantic entan­ glements, is open only to speculation, and may very well be one of the issues on which he himself did not choose to speculate. 11.] And rooted the stars and sun and moon from the sky D, Proof, corr. to produce ‘And rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky’, the published D text. 12.] And lay, grunting in the dark, and turn­ ing to his rest D, Proof corr. to final version of the line.

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

509

WBY’s notes] In D, the poem is prefaced by a note: In the old Irish story of Usheen’s journey to the Islands of the Young, Usheen sees amid the waters a hound with one red ear, following a deer with no horns; and other persons in other old Celtic stories see the like images of the desire of the man, and of the desire of the woman ‘which is for the desire of the man,’ and of all desires that are as these. The man with the wand of hazel may well have been Angus, Master of Love; and the boar without bristles is the ancient Celtic image of the darkness which will at last destroy the world, as it destroys the sun at nightfall in the west. This was greatly expanded for WATR, where it was combined with ‘Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings’ (which contained a reference to ‘the death-pale deer’): My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends, leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin’s journey to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related to the Hounds of Annwvyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red ears, and were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants following some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related to the hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize the souls of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon, and to the hound the son of Setanta killed, on what was certainly, in the first form of the tale, a visit to the Celtic Hades. An old woman told a friend and myself that she saw what she thought were white birds, flying over an enchanted place, but found, when she got near, that they had dog’s heads; and I do not doubt that my hound and these dog-headed birds are of the same family. I got my hound and deer out of a last century Gaelic poem about Oisin’s journey to the country of the young. After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him to the seashore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niam, he sees amid the waters – I have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it from memory – a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns. This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man ‘which is for the woman,’ and ‘the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,’ and of all desires that are as these. I have read them in this way in ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’ or Oisin, and have made my lover sigh because he has seen in their faces ‘the immortal desire of immortals.’ A solar mythologist would perhaps say that the girl with the golden apple was once the winter, or night, carrying the sun away, and the deer without horns, like the boar without bristles, darkness flying the light. He would certainly, I  think, say that when Cuchullain, whom Professor Rhys calls a solar hero, hunted the enchanted deer of Slieve Fuadh, because the battle fury was still on him, he was the sun pur­ suing clouds, or cold, or darkness. I  have understood them in this sense in

510

HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE

‘Hanrahan laments because of his wandering,’ and made Hanrahan long for the day when they, fragments of ancestral darkness, will overthrow the world. The desire of the woman, the flying darkness, it is all one! The image – a cross, a man preaching in the wilderness, a dancing Salome, a lily in a girl’s hand, a flame leaping, a globe with wings, a pale sunset over still waters – is an eternal act; but our understandings are temporal and understand but a little at a time. The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Mas­ ter of Love; and I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West, because the place of sunset was in Ireland, as in other countries, a place of symbolic darkness and death.

173

THE LOVER PLEADS

WITH HIS FRIEND FOR

OLD FRIENDS

Date of composition, the Dublin ‘Jubilee’ riots, and publication history. The poem was probably composed in early Jul. 1897. When WBY wrote to Elkin Mathews à propos of WATR at the end of Jun. 1897, he began with the report that ‘I am getting the odd lyric written’ (CL 2, 114). The poet was staying with Edward Martyn at Tillyra at this time, and the editors of CL 2 suggest that this poem was one of those which WBY was now ‘getting . . . written’. This seems likely on circumstantial grounds: MG (to whom the poem is addressed) had her praise freshly on ‘the tongues of the crowd’ after the events of Jun. 1897 and the agitation in Dublin against the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee: on 20 Jun., she had given a well-received speech at a meeting of James Connolly’s followers and others on College Green in Dublin, and on 21 Jun. she and WBY took part in a major protest parade in Foster Place. An account of this appeared in The Irish Times for 22 Jun.: A gathering described as ‘a meeting of protest against the Jubilee celebration in Ireland’ was held in Foster Place. Of this Miss Maud Gonne was the central figure. In the course of a speech she said that she believed that their Irish rep­ resentatives in Parliament had raised their voices in protest against the celebra­ tion. The reign of Victoria had deprived Ireland of half her children. It would be fitter for those now assembled at the foot of their old House of Parliament, of which England had deprived them, to celebrate the anniversary of the martyr­ dom of the heroes of ’98, who nobly died for their country, than to take part in the hideous and shameless celebrations going on at present. She asked them to come tomorrow in their thousands, and to honour the memory of those men who gave their lives for the cause of liberty. According to the diary kept by T.W. Rolleston, on the afternoon of 21 Jun. ‘Yeats called . . . and told me Miss  Maud Gonne was organizing a riot in connection with the Jubilee celebrations tomorrow’. Events of 22 Jun. were indeed to prove riotous. Amidst more detailed accounts of Jubilee celebrations, The Irish Times for 23 Jun. reported: In Jervis Street Hospital as many as two hundred people were treated last night for injuries of a more or less serious character. These were received in various DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-175

512

THE LOVER PLEADS WITH HIS FRIEND

street rows during the Jubilee illuminations. Several police constables were injured; and one had his helmet knocked off. In the other hospitals many per­ sons were treated also for injuries received. Many police charges were made during the night in various parts of the city, the conduct of the mob being fre­ quently aggressive and outrageous. More detail came with the account in The Times for 24 Jun., which was headed ‘Disgrace­ ful Scenes in Dublin’: The disgraceful conduct of the mob on Tuesday night was continued up to a late hour, and caused very serious damage to property and a considerable amount of personal injury. There can be little doubt that it was due to the inflamma­ tory speeches which were made by Miss Maud Gonne and others and articles which were published in the Parnellite press on the eve of the commemoration. The police appear to have been too forbearing and wanting in vigour in allow­ ing the scandalous exhibition of a mock-funeral, which started from the City hall – where a committee was sitting to make preparations for celebrating the anniversary of the rebellion of 1798 – and the display of black flags with death’s head and crossbones and inscriptions calculated to arouse the angry passions of the populace and to embitter the feelings of loyal citizens. As the protests turned violent on the night of 22 Jun., WBY kept (or tried to keep) MG locked inside the premises of the National Club. Later accounts, by both WBY and MG, may not be entirely accurate; and each differs from the other. Material from the time offers the closest contact with the events of 22 Jun. as they affected WBY and MG. WBY evidently wrote to MG soon after the night of the disturbances and the (attempted, or actual) locking-down of MG in the National Club; this letter is lost, but MG replied to it a week or so later, writing from London on her way back to France: her letter to WBY, dated ‘Wednesday’, is probably from 30 Jun. (G-YL, 72–73): My dear Mr Yeats, Many thanks for your very charming letter. Yes we are friends, we will always remain so I  hope. You have often been of great help to me when I  was very unhappy. Our friendship must indeed be strong for me not to hate you, for you made me do the most cowardly thing I have ever done in my life. It is quite absurd to say I should have reasoned and given explanations. Do you ask a soldier for explanations on the battlefield of course it is only a very small thing a riot and a police charge but the same need for immediate action is there  – there is no time to give explanations. I  don’t ask for obedi­ ence from others, I only am answerable for my own acts. I less than any others, would be capable of giving lengthy explanations of what I want and I intend to do, as my rule in life is to obey inspirations which come to me and which always guide me right.

THE LOVER PLEADS WITH HIS FRIEND

513

For a long time, I had a feeling that I should not encourage you to mix your­ self up in the outer side of politics and you know I have never asked you to do so. I see now that I was wrong in not obeying this feeling more completely and probably you were allowed to hinder me on that comparatively unimportant occasion to show me that it is necessary you should not mix in what is really not in your line of action. You have a higher work to do – With me it is different I was born to be in the midst of a crowd. To return to the unfortunate event in Rutland Square everyone who remained in the club and did not go out to the rescue of the people who were batoned by the police ought to feel ashamed of themselves, owing to their action, or rather their inaction, that poor old woman Mrs Fitzsimon was taken to hospital on a car and allowed to fall from that car by a half-drunken, wholly mad policeman. This would not have happened if I had been able to do my duty. Do you know that to be a coward for those we love, is only a degree less bad than to be a coward for oneself. The latter I know well you are not, the former you know well you are. It is therefore impossible for us ever to do any work together where there is likely to be excitement or physical danger and now let us never allude to this stupid subject ever again. While MG was writing this, WBY (who had retreated to Edward Martyn’s Tillyra) wrote to William Sharp, explaining that he had been in poor health in Sligo, when he ‘got a letter from Miss Gonne saying that she wanted me to help her in some political nego­ tiations in Dublin and I had to start off in a hurry and when there got involved in the processions and riots which have been going on there’ (CL 2, 117): It was fortunate that I went as I was able by main force to keep Miss Gonne out of a riot in which one woman was killed. Miss Gonne had organized the pro­ cessions and felt responsible, and thought that she should be among the people when the police attacked them. She was very indignant at my interference. I refused to let her leave the National Club. She showed a magnificent courage through the whole thing. I dislike riots, and knew that a riot was inevitable, and went into the matter simply to keep her out of harm’s way. She is now the idol of the mob and deserves to be. It is likely that WBY’s relatively sanguine sense of the incident changed once he received (on 3 Jul.) MG’s letter of reproach. The poem’s reflections on MG’s popular­ ity with ‘the crowd’ may well be prompted by her boast that ‘I was born to be in the midst of a crowd’, while its tone of rueful separation, as one of the ‘old’ friends being replaced now by the ‘new’, also makes it likely that WBY composed the poem after 3 Jul. Decades later, the events of Jun. 1897 were subject to much change in recollec­ tion. In his draft Autobiography of 1915, WBY gave an account of the scene inside the National Club where ‘Maud Gonne got up and said she was going out and somebody else said she would be hurt,’ and ‘I told them to lock the door and keep her in’. After

514

THE LOVER PLEADS WITH HIS FRIEND

the addition of the incongruous detail of the poet’s regret that his tea was getting cold, WBY continues (Mem., 113): She was perhaps right to be angry when I  refused to let her out unless she explained what she meant to do. ‘How do I  know till I  get out?’ she said. I offered to go out myself if she would not try to get out when the door was opened, though what I could have done with my whisper I do not know, but she would make no promise. Later on she told me that I had made her do the only cowardly thing of her life. Immediately after this, WBY remembers MG’s oratory  – the Dublin speeches had been her first to large Irish political gatherings  – in terms of its power to move a crowd: ‘I said [. . .] ‘The people themselves made this movement.’ But a cry rose all over the great crowd, ‘No, no, it was Maud Gonne that made it’’ (Mem., 114). These ‘voices among the crowd’ are brought into the poem, in part as the rivals for WBY’s position as MG’s chief suitor; but behind this anxiety is the more immediate issue of the poet’s having frustrated MG’s intentions on the night of the riot – coming, as it were, between her and the crowd – and so putting his own intimacy with her in peril. In The Trembling of the Veil (1922), WBY cast his memories of events in another light; again, the three-way relationship between himself, MG, and the Dublin crowd is a central concern (CW 3, 177): It is eight or nine at night, and she [MG] and I have come from the City Hall, where the Convention has been sitting, that we may walk to the National Club in Rutland Square, and we find a great crowd in the street, who surround us and accompany us. Presently I hear a sound of breaking glass, the crowd has begun to stone the windows of decorated houses, and when I try to speak that I may restore order, I discover that I have lost my voice through much speaking at the Convention. I can only whisper and gesticulate, and as I am thus freed from responsibility, I share the emotion of the crowd, and perhaps even feel as they feel when the glass crashes. Maud Gonne has a look of exultation as she walks with her laughing head thrown back. Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the words ‘Brit­ ish Empire’ upon it, and police and mob fight for its ownership, and at last, that the police may not capture it, it is thrown into the Liffey. And there are fights between police and window-breakers, and I read in the morning papers that many have been wounded; some two hundred heads have been dressed at the hospitals; an old woman killed by baton blows, or perhaps trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two thousand pounds’ worth of decorated plate-glass windows have been broken. The memory of his loss of voice here combines with WBY’s later sense of himself at least sharing the centre-stage position with MG; the implication of his own underlying agency is immediately brought to the surface by his closing sentence: ‘I count the links in the chain of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and wonder if any link there is

THE LOVER PLEADS WITH HIS FRIEND

515

from my workshop’. The locked doors of the National Club had gone from the narrative by 1922, but by 1938, when MG published her own version of events, WBY’s actions in attempting to keep MG off the street were portrayed as both impudent and ineffectual (A Servant of the Queen, 218): We [WBY and MG inside the National Club] were having tea when suddenly we heard a noise outside and cries of: ‘The police!’ I rushed to the window. Some twenty policemen with batons drawn and a few people, mostly women and chil­ dren, were running in all directions; a woman lay on the ground quite still; a girl was bending over her; someone called out: ‘The police have killed her.’ I rushed downstairs to the door; it was locked and the key in Sherlock [of the National Club]’s pocket. Willie was saying: ‘Don’t let her out?’ ‘I must get out,’ I called and was making for the back door when Lorcan Sherlock consented to unlock the front door and Willie followed me out. A crowd was gathering again and the police were in an ugly mood [. . .] Slowly, Yeats and I walked down O’Connell Street. Suddenly we heard a crash of glass and a big plate glass window on the opposite side of the street was shattered. The news of the killing of the poor old woman had spread like wild fire and the people were avenging her death. This seems to be at variance with the evidence of MG’s letter to WBY of 30 Jun. 1897 (see above), which suggests that she was indeed forcibly prevented from leaving the Club, at least while the disorder outside was at its height. However great the distortions caused to MG’s memories here by the passing of time, the account does provide a certain amount of relevant contextual material as regards the anxieties which shaped WBY’s poem: as far as MG was concerned, her duties at that point rested squarely with the crowd, over whom she was discovering a degree of influence, and WBY’s place was to follow behind, and not to have his misconceived instructions of locking MG inside for her own protection obeyed. Read against the background of the ‘Jubilee’ riots in Dublin, the poem’s fears and anxieties have a greater weight. Assuming that WBY had already experienced the full force of MG’s rebuke when he composed the poem during his recuperation at Tillyra, both ‘unkind’ and ‘proud’, used in reference to MG, take on point and immediacy. Given this, two things about the poem are to be noticed: first, the appeal against MG’s passion­ ate affair with ‘the crowd’ is made not on behalf of a lone ‘friend’, but a plurality of ‘old friends’, as though WBY were enlisting the support of an intimate ‘crowd’ of his own confidants; and second, the poem’s voicing of admiration disowns praise for any ‘beauty’ in MG that is visible only to new admirers at the present moment, offering instead the enduring regard of a lover who will see more deeply than the merely temporal and tem­ porary when contemplating ‘your beauty’. As such, the poem is a very early instance of WBY’s sense of himself as someone whose particular perceptions are being defined against, and are fundamentally contrary to, those of contemporary opinion; the subject being here MG makes that process of distinction much more painful than, for example, a matter of political controversy might do. It is notable that WBY does what he can to ban­ ish politics (which were instrumental in making the poem’s occasion) from the verses he writes: beyond ‘the crowd’ (which could be any crowd), the events of 22 Jun. have evaporated (as it were) from the poetry.

516

THE LOVER PLEADS WITH HIS FRIEND

When first published in The Saturday Review for 24 Jul. 1897, the poem was entitled simply ‘Song’, and it is possible that the relative blankness of this title indicates some uncertainty on the poet’s part about how exactly these verses could be properly titled: their content is at some considerable distance from any sentiments that might conven­ tionally be assigned to a poetic singer. When the poem was included in WATR, where longer titles offering explanation are common, WBY assigned it to ‘The Poet’, who ‘Pleads With His Friend for Old Friends’. This makes it one of only two poems in the volume attributed to a ‘Poet’ speaker (the other is ‘A Poet to His Beloved’). When reprinting the poem in 1906, WBY replaced ‘The Poet’ with ‘The Lover’; and while this introduces a measure of retrospective candour, it might be argued that it also emphasizes a conflict which the poem itself manages (a little precariously) to contain, between the singular lover (who uniquely sees through ‘these eyes’) and the ‘old friends’ on whose behalf, sup­ posedly, he speaks: now, the slight friction between the registers of ‘Lover’ and ‘Friend’ is made more perceptible. After WATR, WBY retained the poem in all collected editions of his work. Critical reception and interpretation. It is not surprising that a poem of this length and apparent slightness should have gone largely without mention in contemporary reviews. An archly bewildered review of WATR in The Spectator (8 Jul. 1899) included this poem along with ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ and ‘The Song of the Old Mother’ as being ‘quite simple’ but nevertheless ‘exquisite’. Modern criticism has tended to pay the poem little attention: in his study of WATR, S. Putzel notices that it ‘seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the preceding poem’ [‘The Travail of Passion’] but that it ‘seems instead to be the mirror image of ‘Aedh thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved’’, and he summarizes the poem’s message as being that ‘The eyes of the poet will preserve the immortal beauty of the mortal woman’ (Putzel, 203–204). J. Harwood sees the poem as being ‘pitched [. . .] closer to actual life’ by the introduction of ‘the note of reproof or complaint’ in relation to MG (Harwood, 77). That this note is not always audible for critics is shown in E. Cullingford’s summary of the poem as one where WBY ‘promises to love his mistress even when she has lost the bloom of youth, and whether or not she yields to him,’ thus abandoning ‘the crude assumption that a woman’s worth is coterminous with her beauty’ (22–23). The stylistic plainness of the poem perhaps makes for relatively little critical material; and D. Toomey’s pairing of the poem with ‘Aodh Laments the Loss of Love’ as examples of ‘plain, almost a-metaphorical’ pieces that ‘shun the elaborate symbolic structure of other pieces [in WATR]’ (Toomey, 35) does something to explain its general neglect. It is of critical interest, though, that WBY was capable of this degree of plainness in 1897, when his symbolic writing was in its most intense phase, and also that he thought the poem’s inclusion in WATR necessary: here, in fact, it adds a degree of autobiographical ballast to the more symbolic vessel, and to that extent requires consideration alongside the more mystical elements of the volume as a whole. The poem’s status as the first of several later poems (some, much later) which lament the loss of MG to the esteem and embraces of ‘the crowd’ is also something that needs to be taken into account in any assessment of WBY’s love-poetry of the later 1890s.

THE LOVER PLEADS WITH HIS FRIEND

517

Text. A single TS survives (Berg Collection, NYPL), which dates from after the poem’s first publication, but is otherwise undatable (TS): the only point of difference between this and the WATR text is the title. Copy-text: P49.

T

5

hough you are in your shining days,

Voices among the crowd

And new friends busy with your praise,

Be not unkind or proud,

But think about old friends the most:

Time’s bitter flood will rise,

Your beauty perish and be lost

For all eyes but these eyes.

Text as first published: Song Although you are in your shining days,

And the tongues of the crowd

And of new friends are glad with your praise,

Be not unkind or proud,

But think of your old friends the most:

Time’s bitter flood will rise,

And your high beauty fall and be lost

For all eyes but these eyes.

(The Saturday Review, 24 Jul. 1897.)

Title: Old Friends TS, The Poet Pleads With His Friend for Old Friends WATR. 1.] shining days] Perhaps cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘A Day of Defection’, 12–13: ‘Must shining days foregone | Admit thee peer?’

4. Be not unkind] Cp. a poem of 1895 by Lio­ nel Johnson, Poetical Works (1915), ‘Carols’ I, 1–3: ‘Fair snow and winter wind, | Be not unkind | To this your King!’

174

THE SONG OF

WANDERING AENGUS

Date and circumstances of composition. Probably composed in late Jun. or early Jul. 1897. R. Ellmann in Identity gave the date for composition as ‘Jan. 31, 189(3?)’. This reproduced exactly the date as provided in a list by GY (carbon in NLI 30166), but the conjecture is very probably incorrect. A.N. Jeffares repeats this date in Commentary, though in YP it is changed to the (impossible) ‘31 Jun. [?1897]’. This may well be no more than a long-run­ ning misprint in YP, but it could nevertheless be the kind of mishap that coincidentally repeats a slip from WBY’s hand long before. Working from the scanty surviving evidence, it is possible to conjecture 31 Jan. as the date given on a MS now lost but available to GY when she drew up the list for Ellmann; there would have been no indication of year in such a MS, and she suggested 1893, though without any certainty. It is extremely unlikely that WBY would have kept a poem of this quality (and commercial viability) to himself for five years, and on these grounds alone the year 1897 is a much more plausible one than 1893. One might accept this, and continue to accept GY’s ‘Jan. 31’ (as does Kelly in Chro­ nology); but the end of Jan. 1897 does not seem an especially good fit as date of composi­ tion, since WBY was then only recently returned from Paris, and juggling urgent work on his commissioned novel SB along with an article on John O’Leary for The Bookman. If we assume that GY drew her information from a WBY MS, it would be prudent not to assume that ‘Jan.’ might have been there clearly distinguishable from ‘Jun.’; this would of course leave the question of the impossible ‘31’ in that month, but WBY’s habit of giving months more or fewer days than they possessed is amply attested in his MSS and letters: for WBY, a ‘31 June’ could well mean 1 Jul. It is not likely, either, that this poem was com­ posed at a single sitting. The present edition cautiously proposes late Jun. and early Jul. 1897 as times when the poem was composed. In the aftermath of the frantic activity sur­ rounding the protests against the Jubilee in Dublin of Jun. 1897, in the course of which his relations with MG had been put under severe strain, WBY had retreated exhausted first to Edward Martyn at Tillyra, and then to George Pollexfen at Rosses Point. He left there (with George Russell) on 26 Jul., and began a two-month stay with AG at Coole Park, in the course of which he busied himself with collecting folklore. Russell accompanied WBY and AG on one such excursion to the Burren on 27 Jul., and it is possible that the mystical poet’s presence helped bring to birth this aisling-influenced lyric of pursuit of the super­ natural. It is likely that the poem was sent to The Sketch from Coole. Text and publication history. The poem’s first publication was in The Sketch (a sis­ ter publication to the Illustrated London News, which had been started in 1893) for 4 Aug. 1897 (S). The editor of both papers was Clement Shorter (known personally DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-176

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

519

to WBY because then engaged to Dora Sigerson), who had first contacted the poet (seeking a poem for the occasion of the annual meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club, commemorating Edward Fitzgerald) in early 1896. WBY politely declined that com­ mission in a letter of 24 Mar. 1896, but promised ‘I should be delighted, but not for about ten days, to do you a poem on an Irish matter or on some emotion or feeling which is nationless, but doubt if I could write even within those limits on a set sub­ ject’ (CL 2, 17). Although WBY published his prose in the paper, in the following year this was his first verse publication there. The poem (an identical version, along with the title from The Sketch, ‘A Mad Song’) was quickly reprinted in the United States, in the New York Times for 26 Sept. 1897. ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ next appeared in WATR, but before this a TS version had been prepared (now in the Berg Collection, NYPL) (TS) which alters the previously published text to produce two 7-line stanzas and one stanza of 8 lines. Although some textual differences here are likely to be the results of errors on the part of the typist, others show signs of revi­ sion on WBY’s part. After WATR, the poem was used in a revision of WBY’s story ‘The Vision of Hanrahan the Red’ (from The Secret Rose [1897]), ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’ in the Dun Emer edition of Stories of Red Hanrahan (1904), which was subsequently published in McClure’s Magazine for Mar. 1905. Here it features at the beginning of the story, in the following context: It was in the month of June. Hanrahan was on the road near Sligo, but he did not go into the town, but turned towards Beinn Bulben; for there were thoughts of the old times coming upon him, and he had no mind to meet with common men. And as he walked, he was singing to himself a song that had come to him one time in his dreams: – I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel rod,

And put a berry on a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And stars like moths were shining out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And hooked a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on a stool

I stooped to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name.

It had become a laughing girl,

With apple blossoms in her hair,

That called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

520

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

Hanrahan had begun to climb the mountain then, and he gave over singing, for it was a long climb for him, and every now and again he had to sit down and to rest for a while. And one time he was resting he took notice of a wild briar bush with roses on it, that was growing beside a rath, and it brought to mind the wild roses he used to bring to Marie Lavelle, and to no woman after her. And he tore off a little branch of the bush, that had buds on it and open blossoms, and he went on with his song: – Though I am old with wandering

Through hilly lands and hollow lands,

I will find out where she is gone

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk and walk through summer grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

And then he went on climbing the hill, and left the rath, and there came to his mind some of the old poems that told of lovers, good and bad, and of some that were awakened from the sleep of the grave itself by the strength of one another’s love, and brought away to a life in some shadowy place where they are waiting for the judgment and banished from the face of God. The text of the poem here has undergone some significant revision: most notably, per­ haps, the ‘glimmering girl’ of line 13 is now ‘a laughing girl’, while the ‘hazel wand’ of line 3 is a ‘hazel rod’. WBY’s decision to place the poem in the story (where it supplants what had been reprinted in WATR as ‘Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of His Songs in Coming Days’) is part of a collaborative process of revision of the Hanrahan stories undertaken with the help of AG; and while it is deeply unlikely that AG took any part in revision of the verse here, it is possible that the choice of the poem was made by WBY with memo­ ries of ‘A Mad Song’ having been composed earlier during a stay at Coole in 1897 (see Date and circumstances of composition). The 1904 revisions should be regarded strictly as adaptations to the poem for a specific context in WBY’s fiction, rather than necessarily as revisions to what WBY saw as the text of the poem itself in his evolving oeuvre; and they were not carried over to the text as it appeared next in PW06. Thereafter, WBY retained the poem in all collected editions of his work. Sources and WBY’s notes. The poem has a strong relation to the Irish poetic genre of the aisling (‘vision’ or ‘dream’). This form is especially characteristic of eighteenthcentury Irish verse, though it has its origins in medieval practice. The usual routine in aisling verse is for the poet to meet on his travels an attractive young woman, whose beauties receive due praise from him, and with whom he engages in dialogue, often discovering her to be a personification of Ireland. The utility of this form for Jacobite allegory is obvious, and its political nature remained a key element into the nineteenth century. WBY’s poem takes central motifs from the aisling tradition, but it displaces

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

521

political allegory altogether, in favour of supernatural and erotic content. If it was indeed composed during the folklore-hunting stay with AG, the bruising effects of WBY’s recent exposure to Dublin street-politics may have a role in its turn away from generi­ cally encoded political allegory. The poem’s ‘glimmering girl’ differs from earlier quasisupernatural objects of erotic pursuit – notably, Niamh in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ – in that she runs away and is not caught. The apple-blossom of line 14 establishes a point of symbolic connection between this figure and MG (with whom WBY habitually associated apple-blossom); but MG’s departure for France, and her rebuke of WBY in the wake of the Jubilee riots of Jun. 1897 may be the most sig­ nificant factors in the poem’s relation to the aisling woman. It is certainly possible that WBY (subliminally or otherwise) felt the influence of the genre’s Jacobite nature when contemplating an escape across the sea to France of someone whose return to Ireland was (in 1897) far from certain. In 1899, WBY gave the poem a note in WATR (retained up to and including Selected Poems [1921]), which makes use of the folklore gathered on the expeditions with AG: The tribes of the goddess Danu can take all shapes, and those that are in the waters take often the shape of fish. A woman of Burren, in Galway, says, ‘There are more of them in the sea than on the land, and they sometimes try to come over the side of the boat in the form of fishes, for they can take their choice shape.’ At other times they are beautiful women; and another Galway woman says, ‘Surely these things are in the sea as well as on land. My father was out fishing one night off Tyrone. And something came beside the boat that had eyes shining like candles. And then a wave came in, and a storm rose all in a minute, and whatever was in the wave, the weight of it had like to sink the boat. And then they saw that it was a woman in the sea that had the shining eyes. So my father went to the priest, and he bid him always to take a drop of holy water and a pinch of salt out in the boat with him, and nothing could harm him.’ The poem was suggested to me by a Greek folk song; but the folk belief of Greece is very like that of Ireland, and I certainly thought, when I wrote it, of Ireland, and of the spirits that are in Ireland. An old man who was cutting a quickset hedge near Gort, in Galway, said, only the other day, ‘One day I was cutting timber over in Inchy, and about eight o’clock one morning, when I got there, I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders; brown hair; and she had a good, clean face, and she was tall, and nothing on her head, and her dress no way gaudy, but simple. And when she felt me coming she gathered herself up, and was gone, as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her, and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to this, never again.’ The county Galway people use the word ‘clean’ in its old sense of fresh and comely. WBY’s emphasis on the water spirits amongst the Tribes of Danu has obvious points of contact with this poem, but it also extends its symbolic reach to other pieces in WATR,

522

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

in particular ‘Breasal the Fisherman’. The aisling woman’s initial appearance is in the form of ‘a little silver trout’ (a freshwater fish, rather than one found in the other poem’s ‘pale tide’ of the sea): this has a parallel which was known to WBY, in a story derived from folklore by Samuel Lover, ‘The White Trout: A Legend of Cong’, which the poet had included in his FFTIP edition in 1888. The story, related in an exaggerated stage Irish, concerns a lady whose betrothed is murdered, and who subsequently goes mad, ‘and the story wint that the fairies took her away’. As time goes by, the locals observe the prodigy of a white trout swimming in the local waters: ‘At last the people began to think it must be a fairy; for what else could it be? – and no hurt nor harm was iver put an the white throut’. A soldier comes to the district, however, who swears to catch the trout, and when he has done so he puts it straight in the pan. The trout speaks up in protest, but the soldier persists in trying to cook her, without success. Finally, he cuts her with a knife, and suddenly events take an alarming turn: ‘the minit he puts his knife into the fish, there was a murtherin’ screech, that you’d think the life id lave you if you hurd it, and away jumps the throut out av the fryin’ pan into the middle o’ the flure; and an the spot where it fell, up riz a lovely lady – the beautifullest crathur that ever eyes seen, dressed in white, and a band o’ goold in her hair, and a sthrame o’ blood runnin’ down her arm’ (FFTIP, 36). Eventually the trout is returned to the stream, there to wait for her lover, while the soldier, after a good telling-off, resolves to mend his violent ways. If WBY decides to use this story, he changes it very considerably; and the note which he appends to Lover’s tale suggests that he was aware of many such trans­ formation narratives: ‘These trout stories,’ he writes, are common all over Ireland,’ and he mentions ‘a trout in a well on the border of Lough Gill, Sligo, that some pagan­ ish person put once on the gridiron’ (FFTIP, 38). The possible significance of Lover’s story is argued for first in R.K. Alspach, ‘Two Songs of Yeats’s’, MLN 61/6 (Jun. 1946), 395–400; but Alspach also pursues the significance of what WBY gives in his note as a source, ‘a Greek folk song’. In The Bookman for Oct. 1896, the poet reviewed two volumes of Greek Folk Poesy, translated by Lucy Garnett and with voluminous com­ mentary by J.S. Stuart-Glennie. WBY was unimpressed by the translated verse, and openly scornful of Stuart-Glennie’s prose style, being also unwilling to take the Greek folklore seriously as any kind of competitor to the superior Celtic item: ‘It has noth­ ing of that search for some absolute of emotion, some mysterious infinite of passion which is in so much of Gaelic poetry’ (CW 9, 317). If WBY found the poem mentioned by Alspach as an analogue to Lover’s trout story, he did not mention it in the review: ‘The Three Fishes’ (vol.1, 69) is a poem that does feature fish-to-woman transformation over the cooking fire, but involving three different girls, and it is little more than a play on the efficacy of the young fisherman’s ever-questing ‘spear’. This is a poor candidate for the ‘Greek folk song’ claimed as a source in WBY’s note; but other poems in the work are more plausible, even though at best they provide WBY with hints rather than any kind of full-blown ‘source’. In each case, the Greek material is of a broadly erotic (or at least, discreetly bawdy) nature. In one poem, ‘The Fruit of the Apple-Tree’, a youth who is out hunting runs into ‘A maiden fair [. . .] at marble fountain washing’: ‘With whitest pearls she is bedecked, and strings of golden sequins’. The pair address one another flirtatiously, and there is talk of dowries (Vol.1, 135):

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

523

‘No dowry dost thou ask of coin, nor dowry of adornment?

Then will I give this apple-tree, all covered o’er with blossom;

All laden, too, with rosy fruit, with fairest, sweetest apples.’

‘Thou, maiden, art the apple-tree, and now let fall the apples!’

She broke the strings, and far and wide her pearls and sequins scattered.

‘Come gather, youth! come, gather them, the apples of my fruit-tree;

And gather them again, again, and stoop again and gather!’

Two other poems, each in the tetrameter couplets that WBY was to use for his poem, may also be in his mind. The first is ‘The Tree’, which has apples for the picking, with gold and silver in the leaves and the branches (Vol.1, 59–60): A tree within my courtyard grew,

To me ’twas pleasure ever new;

I gave fresh water to its root,

That it might thrive and bear me fruit.

Its leaves were all of gold so bright,

Its branches all of silver white;

Fair pink and white the flowers it shed,

Its fruit was like the apple red;

And I believed it was for me

That they had made it fair to see.

When the apples from the tree

Gathered were, the housewife (she

A skyla was) would give me none;

Into stranger hands they’re gone.

In ‘The Garden’, the courtship of ‘a youth’ is not at all welcome to the jealous tree (Vol.1, 193): Picturelike, dear garden ground,

Hedged with marguerites around,

Zones about with beds ablow,

Marjoram is the utmost row,

In the midst an Apple-tree,

Soon to earth ’twill falling be.

To the fruit a youth approaches,

Him the Apple-tree reproaches:

‘Come not, youth, the apples gath’ring;

See, the leaves are sere and with’ring;

Counts the master every one,

And for thee, youth, there are none.’

On the page, a note adds that ‘By the apple-tree and its master an elderly husband is probably meant; and by the desirable fruit, his wife.’ It seems clear that WBY imitates

524

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

none of this material; but his poem may have drawn on at least some of it sufficiently to allow him to cite it in his note. Nevertheless, the decision to draw attention to nonIrish sources, when the poem contains so much that could readily be claimed as Irish, is a curious one. Jeffares’ Commentary refers to a suggestion by S. O’Sullivan in B. Almqvist (ed.), Heritage: Essays and Studies (1975) that WBY was indebted to Standish H. O’Grady’s translation of The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne (see note to 3–4); but this appears to be a matter of local detail rather than the identification of a significant source. Another possible source goes unmentioned by WBY; and strictly speaking, this becomes a possible source only once the poem’s second title is arrived at, since it follows from the identification of the speaker as Aengus, rather than being strongly suggested by the content of the poem itself. This is an Irish aisling narrative found in the twelfthcentury Book of Leinster, the Aislinge Óenguso (The Dream-Vision of Aengus). In it, Aengus Og pines away for love of a beautiful girl who has appeared to him in a dream: he searches for her, discovering that she takes the form of a swan every other year on a lake in Munster. He finds the girl, Caer Iborméith, but cannot be with her until he too takes shape as a swan; this happens, and the pair fly away together back to his seat at the Boyne, where they live as man and wife. WBY was aware of this as narrative material: it was presented in paraphrase by John Rhys, in Celtic Heathendom (1888), 169–171, which WBY knew; it is possible that he read the translation by E. Muller in Revue Celtique 3 (1876), 347–350, and he would have been familiar with the version of the Aislinge included in AG’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) well before its publica­ tion. Although WBY makes considerable use of Aengus Og in other work  – notably, The Shadowy Waters – it is not certain that this poem draws on the Aislinge as a source; rather, perhaps, the poet aligns his poem with the beginning of the Aislinge as part of the process of presenting it as something other than its first incarnation as ‘A Mad Song’. The opening, nevertheless, does seem relevant to the poem (here in AG’s version, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 143): Angus, son of the Dagda, was asleep in his bed one night, and he saw what he thought was a young girl standing near him at the top of the bed, and she the most beautiful he had ever seen in Ireland. He put out his hand to take her hand, but she vanished on the moment, and in the morning when he awoke there were no trace or tidings of her. He got no rest that day thinking of her, and that she had gone away before he could speak to her. And the next night he saw her again, and this time she brought a little harp in her hand, the sweet­ est he ever heard, and she played a song to him, so that he fell asleep and slept till morning. And the same thing happened every night for a year. She would come to his bedside and be playing on the harp to him, but she would be gone before he could speak with her. And at the end of the year she came no more, and Angus began to pine away with love of her and with fretting after her; and he would take no food, but lay upon the bed, and no one knew what it was ailed him. And all the physicians of Ireland came together, but they could not put a name on his sickness or find any cure for him.

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

525

(The refusal of Aengus to take food when he is smitten with love is in marked contrast to the activities of WBY’s speaker in the poem’s first stanza, who seems to be eager to secure himself a fish supper.) Reading and speaking about his poems in Dublin on 29 Jun. 1923, WBY recalled the point in his early years ‘in the neighbourhood of Sligo and Ballysodare’ when he ‘came to take delight in the minds of the country people because of the quality of those minds’, and in particular the mind of one old man encountered there (report in The Irish Times, 30 Jun. 1923): The old man of 70 might have the secret of the ages, but he observed nothing. He (Mr. Yeats) was not an observer of nature himself, and neither was primitive man. [. . .] The only thing that that old man had ever observed was an appari­ tion, a beautiful girl who at once vanished into the ground. And so mournfully he would repeat, ‘Never again, never again.’ From that old man’s life-long grief at never again beholding the beautiful vision came ‘Wandering Angus.’ That poem really meant nothing but what it seemed to mean. One of the Dublin papers, however, offered a prize to anyone who could point out its meaning. The prize was won by a person who interpreted the poem as a political allegory. The prize was a volume of Tennyson. (It was in fact George Russell who had first lighted on an old man outdoors – on the Wicklow Mountains, and not in Co. Sligo – and speculated on his possessing ‘the wis­ dom of the ages’.) WBY’s mischievous humour in telling the anecdote, with its punchline in the prize volume of Tennyson, may be a salutary reminder of the perils of too much interpretative effort.

Copy-text: P49.

I

went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

Title: Mad Song S; The Song of Wandering Angus TS. Aengus: WBY refers here to the figure from Irish myth, Aengus Óg (Aengus the Young), who was the son of Dagda Mor, and was of divine status among the Tuatha De Danaan. For WBY and others, Aengus was commonly referred to as the Irish god of love, and it was this which, from the mid-1890s onwards, made him especially important for the poet,

particularly in the versions of The Shadowy Waters which culminated in the text of 1900. Whether or not the medieval Aislinge Óenguso (see Sources) was significant in this poem’s composition, WBY’s decision some time after 1897 to make Aengus explicitly its speaker is in keeping with the increasing importance of the Irish god in his creative and symbolic thought in this period. In a letter to George Russell of 27 Aug. 1899, WBY wrote (CL 2, 443–444):

526

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

Aengus is the most curious of all the gods. He seems both Hermes and Dionysus. He has some part perhaps in all enthusiasms. [. . .] Christ himself must himself have been one of the followers of Aengus. Has not somebody identified him with Hermes? Writing about The Shadowy Waters in CWVP08 vol.2, WBY remembered 1897 as a year in which he became especially involved with the figure of Aengus: I took the Aengus and Edain of The Shad­ owy Waters from poor translations of the various Aengus stories, which, new trans­ lated by Lady Gregory, make up so much of what is most beautiful in both her books. They had, however, so completely become a part of my own thought that in 1897, when I was still working on an early version of The Shadowy Waters, I saw one night with my bodily eyes, as it seemed, two beautiful persons, who would, I  be­ lieve, have answered to their names. In Sept. 1898, also, WBY evoked Aengus while staying at Tillyra; he evoked the god again twice in Sligo with George Pollexfen at the end of Dec. Aengus was a significant character in the rituals being devised through the mid-to-late 1890s by WBY in connection with his projected Celtic Mystical Order: in its Outer Order ritual of the Sword – summarized by WBY as ‘The chase after the Ideal’ – the initiate was to be told of Aengus as ‘the eternal Male principle’, with Etain being ‘the eternal Feminine principle’, and then asked to choose between these two, symbolized as the sun and the moon. A huge amount of reading fed into WBY’s ritual plans, but in this case it may very well be that the sun and moon symbolism of his poem influenced the ritual; or, indeed, that the evolving ritual had some influence upon the poem itself. At any rate, the figure of the Celtic love-god was on WBY’s mind both when the poem was first published and in the years before it appeared with its new title in WATR. There is some doubt about how far Aengus may really be

considered a god of love, analogous to Eros or a male Venus or Aphrodite: the evidence upon which such an image was based in the nine­ teenth century was exceedingly slender, but it was considerably inflated by Standish J. O’Grady, for whom in the History of Ireland (1878) Aengus was ‘the god of love and youth and beauty’, ‘daz­ zling bright, round whom flew singing-birds, purple-plumed, and no eye sees them, for they sing in the hearts of youths and maidens’ (Vol.2, 260 and Vol.1, 265). This embroiders on a sliver of information found also in Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on Manuscript Materials of Irish His­ tory (1878), 478: ‘the four kisses of Aengus [. . .] which were converted by him into birds which haunted the youths of Erinn’. In 1895 (when WBY was in the process of working Aengus into his revision of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, where he becomes the father of Niamh), Whitley Stokes translated a fragment which mentioned Aengus’ ‘four kisses’: ‘He had shaped them into the form of four birds that they might be girding at the nobles of Erin’ (‘The Rennes Dindsenchas’, Revue Celtique 16 (1895), 69). Aengus’s role in the story of Diarmuid and Grainne, where he is a tutelary guardian of the lovers, also contrib­ uted to an association with love; but WBY and others made this aspect of Aengus much more conspicuous than anything to be deduced from the source materials alone. The prominence of Aengus in the writings of the Irish Celtic renais­ sance is explored illuminatingly by M. Williams, who concludes that ‘The Anglo-Irish Aengus emerges as an ambiguous product of individual and collective influences, arising from but also obscuring the Óengus of early Irish saga’ (Wil­ liams, 360; also see 346–360 and 444–452). 1. the hazel wood] The primary meaning here is the obvious one – a wood with hazel trees. WBY’s Sligo readers (and the poet himself) would have been familiar with the desmesne of Hazelwood (its name derived from the Irish Coill an Eanaigh) just outside the town. A  more consequential creative association,

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

5

10

527

And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire aflame, But something rustled on the floor, And some one called me by my name:

however, is that between the hazel and wis­ dom. WBY is aware of the accounts of how Fionn Mac Cumhaill acquired his ‘thumb of wisdom’ by touching a cooked salmon which had fed on hazel nuts from trees growing over a pool near the river Boyne. This reflects a more general early Irish and Celtic belief in the magical properties of the hazel. 2.] Cp. Arthur Symons, ‘The Broken Tryst’, 1: ‘That day a fire was in my blood’. The poem had appeared alongside WBY’s work in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892), and this close con­ vergence with the phrasing (and metre) of a contemporary and friend is unusual in WBY’s verse. It seems likely, though, not to have been intended as an allusion, and it may be simply that WBY half-remembered the content and movement of Symons’s opening line (the only striking line, in fact, in his whole poem, which is an exercise in Tennysonian sub-Maud romantic anticipation and disappointment). Symons might have owed his effect, after all, in some ways to WBY’s own ‘The Madness of King Goll’, 28–29: ‘In my most secret spirit grew | A fever and a wandering fire’. 3–4.] These lines seem to have a verbal debt to a moment in Standish H. O’Grady’s transla­ tion of the Irish Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne, in Transactions of the Ossianic Soci­ ety Vol. 3 (1857), 81: [. . .] Muadhan dressed a bed of soft rushes and of birch-tops under for Diarmuid and Grainne in the further part of that cave. He himself went into the next wood to him, and plucked in it a straight long rod of a quicken tree; and he put a hair and a hook upon the rod, and put a holly berry

upon the hook, and went and stood over the stream, and took a fish that cast. The hazel tree carries many magical and oth­ erworldly associations in Celtic myth and in Irish folklore (see note on 1). It is less usual to encounter the hazel being used, as here, for a fishing rod; and the ‘hazel wand’ of 3 does perhaps make this a little more of a surprise. (In 1904, in ‘Red Hanrahan’s Vision’, WBY changed this to ‘hazel rod’, either to lessen the surprise or to accord better with the nature of the speaker: see the poem as quoted in Textual and publication history.) WBY would have encountered ‘a hazel wand’ in W. Scott, The Lady of the Lake (1810) I, xxviii, 11–12: ‘As light it trembles in his hand | As in my grasp a hazel wand’, as well as Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘The Poor Blind Boy’, 5–6: ‘A light hazel wand in his hand, | He in finding his way did employ’. Closer to home, there was also Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘The Divining Rod’, 9–11: O thou, | Diviner of my buried life; pace round, | Poising the hazel-wand’. 5.] Perhaps cp. a singularly innocuous holi­ day poem by John Todhunter, Forest Songs (1881), ‘By the Schluchsee’, 9–12: The beautiful moths come hovering Like restless ghosts in white, The fond white moths fly trooping To burn at my bed-room light. 6.] Line not present in TS. 9. laid] lain S the floor] a stool S. 10. went] bent S. aflame] and flame TS. 11. the floor] the stool S.

528

15

20

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done

14.] Line not present in TS. 15. name and] name, and S. 16. through the brightening air] This phrase could well derive from a line which was to become something of a touchstone for WBY, by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe, ‘Adieu, farewell Earth’s bliss’, 19: ‘Brightness falls from the air’. But the phrase itself had occurred in contemporary poetry: cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), ‘The Statue of Victor Hugo’, 121–122: ‘the soul transfigured and dilated | Puts forth wings that widen, breathes a brightening air’. air] door TS. This is unlikely to be the typ­ ist’s error: the removal in TS of line 14 above also removes the rhyme to ‘hair’, and it looks very much as though WBY has adjusted this line’s end-word accordingly, to rhyme with ‘floor’. No such repair operation, however, is to be seen in the first stanza, where the TS loss of line 6 leaves ‘trout’ without a rhyme. 17.] This line presents something of a puzzle if the speaker is indeed to be identified with the god Aengus – who, being a god, did not grow old. Furthermore, youth is part of the Irish Aengus’s identity, since it is built into his very name: Aengus Óg (sometimes Aengus

Mac Óg, or simply Mac Óg) means Aengus the young. There have been attempts to rec­ oncile WBY’s line with the god’s perpetual youth (including the idea that his love quest has made him feel old), but these are forced and unconvincing. The line makes more sense, however, if it occurs first in a poem where the speaker was not Aengus, but some­ one unnamed; and this is possible when the poem is entitled ‘A Mad Song’. Once Aengus arrives as the poem’s speaker, his fit with the material is not always a perfect one; and this is the case here. The concept of ‘wandering’, however, also links the poem to other places in WBY’s work, notably ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. There, Oisin wanders for three hun­ dred years, but does not grow old during that time; the speaker here (Aengus or not) expe­ riences ageing along with his wandering. 18.] In barren hills and marshy land, S. hollow lands] It is possible that WBY knew a poem by Ernest Dowson, not published until 1899 in his posthumous Decorations, ‘A Last Word’, 9–12: ‘Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold, | To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust | Find end of labour’. lands] sands TS. 20. hands] hand S.

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

529

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

23–24.] In a general way, these lines develop from WBY’s awareness of the Greek myth of the Hes­ perides, who were the guardians of a tree with golden apples. The garden in which this tree stood was thought to be beyond the Atlas mountains, and the apples themselves featured in mythic stories, including those of Hippomanes’s pursuit of Atalanta and of Hercules, who slew Ladon (the dragon protecting the tree) to bear away the golden fruit. In Greek Folk Poetry, J.S. StuartGlennie (for whose writing WBY was full of dis­ approval) compared Greek folklore concerning golden and silver apples with Irish mythic stories, quoting A. Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (Greek Folk Poetry Vol.2, 438):

The orange and kindred fruits, such as the lemon, lime, citron, etc., with their delicious flavours and medicinal virtues, were probably the originals of ‘gold’ and ‘silver apples,’ which are, in folk-tale, invariably possessed of magical quali­ ties. Compare, for instance, the ‘glit­ tering fairy branch with nine apples of fairy gold upon it,’ in exchange for which Cormac gave his wife and child, for none could ‘bear in mind any want, woe, or weariness of soul when that branch was shaken for him’. 24. The golden] And golden TS.

175

HANRAHAN LAMENTS

BECAUSE OF HIS

WANDERINGS

Date of composition. Jun. to Jul. 1897, with revision in 1898. The poem revises a previous text, which appeared in a story by WBY first publ. in 1892 and again in The Secret Rose, publ. in Apr. 1897. WBY revised this substantially while staying at Tillyra Castle in Co. Galway with Edward Martyn, where he had come on 16 Jun., sending the poem to W.E. Henley for The New Review by the first week of Jul. The poem was revised again (more lightly) for inclusion in WATR; this probably took place in the summer of 1898. Context and interpretation. In the note prefacing the poem in The New Review, WBY alludes to the story of how a youthful Setanta took on the name Cuchulain. The initial connection is between this story and the mythic figure Culann. Culann in Irish myth was the smith who hosted King Conchobar, welcoming him and his retinue and then, once the king had assured him that everyone had arrived, closing his gates and setting loose a singularly ferocious watchdog to see off any intruders. The king had forgotten that the young Setanta might follow, and the assembled company was taken aback to discover later the boy with the dead watchdog, which he had encountered on approach­ ing Culann’s stronghold and had immediately slain. In compensation for Culann’s loss, Setanta was to raise a new watchdog, and in the meantime himself act as guard; as a result, he was given the new name, Cu-Chullain (the hound of Culann). WBY’s note is probably indebted to John Rhys’s account of this episode (Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Celtic Heathendom [1888], 447): Such is the old account of the way in which little Setanta obtained the name by which he is best known; but when this tale of the killing of Culann’s dog comes to be compared with others in point, it is found that Culann must have origi­ nally been a form of the divinity of the other world, and that his terrible hound may doubtless be compared with the Cerberus of Greek mythology. The sun as a person makes war on the powers representing darkness and the inclemency of nature; but with these last would naturally be associated evil of all descrip­ tion, including death, the greatest of all ills: these men are the demons and monsters, under their many names, with which Cuchullain repeatedly fights. The setting here, Slieve Gullion, is heavy with associations in the Cuchulain stories; though the hunting of quasi-supernatural deer is also a feature of stories in the slightly DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-177

HANRAHAN LAMENTS BECAUSE OF HIS WANDERINGS

531

wider locale of the Fews forest, referred to in the WATR note by WBY when he writes about the hunt for ‘the enchanted deer of Slieve Fuadh’. In P.W. Joyce’s Old Celtic Romances (1879), adjacent chapters have the stories first of ‘The Chase of Slieve Culinn’ and of ‘The Chase of Slieve Fuad’; although these centre on Finn and not Cuchulain, they might well have influenced WBY’s association of the whole area with the chasing of preternatural deer. While all of this may be relevant to the ‘death-pale deer’ (5), it is also possible that Hanrahan’s reference to ‘our Mother of Peace’ connects the verses with the Fews/Slieve Gullion area. Slieve Gullion, besides its associations with Culann and Setanta/Cuchulain, has links with the important Irish saint, St Brigid, who was thought to have been born near its slopes, at Faughart. This Christian figure – seen sometimes as the ‘Irish Mary’, and subject of devotions that echoed those to the Virgin – has connec­ tions with the pre-Christian figure of Brigid, a daughter of the Dagda who, although only scantly attested in the surviving bardic literature, played a role in the beliefs of pagan Ire­ land that attracted nineteenth-century research and speculation. WBY was aware of this divine personage. In his story ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’ (first publ. in The National Observer as ‘A Crucifixion’, 24 Mar. 1894, and again in 1897 in The Secret Rose), the name Brigid (1897: Bridget) occurs, when an abbot addresses a monk: ‘Brother, the bards and the gleemen are an evil race, ever cursing and ever stirring up the people, and immoral and immoderate in all things, and heathen in their hearts, always longing after the Son of Lir, and Angus, and Bridget, and the Dagda, and Dana the Mother, and all the false gods of the old days’. In the materials relating to WBY’s rites for his projected Celtic Myster­ ies in the late 1890s, one MS in the hand of Dorothea Hunter – which almost certainly incorporates discussions known to the poet, if not indeed stemming from him directly – identifies not one but three Brigid figures, each a goddess, who guard ‘the entrance to the land of the gods’. The three are ‘the Smithworker’ (perhaps triggering associations with Culann the smith, working near Slieve Gullion), ‘Bridget of Medicine’, and ‘Bridget of Poetry’. In the tenth-century Glossary of Cormac, the third of these Bridgets is described in terms that are suggestive, and may well influence WBY here: Brigit: a female poet, daughter of the Dagda. She is Brigit the female sage of poetry (or woman of poetic skill), i.e. Brigit a goddess whom the filid [poets] used to worship. For very great and very splendid was her application to the art. Therefore they used to call her goddess of poets, whose sisters were Brigit the female physician and Brigit woman of smithcraft, daughters of the Dagda, from whose names almost all the Irish used to call Brigit a goddess. WBY knows that a pagan Brigid stands in the past behind the St Brigid of Irish Roman Catholic devotion, and that both Brigids are associated with the same locale. An encounter such as the one wished for by Hanrahan would be, in a way, a meeting with both pagan and Christian traditions. Another hint along these lines may have been delivered in more recent Irish poetry. In Samuel Ferguson’s Congal (1872), the setting of Slieve Gullion is one which Ferguson’s narrative links with St. Brigid. At the beginning of Book III (1–12):

532

HANRAHAN LAMENTS BECAUSE OF HIS WANDERINGS

At early blush of morn, the King of Ulster and his train

Assumed their southern Meath-ward route through craggy Mourne again.

Herd Borcha’s peaks behind them left, by Narrow-Water side

They rode, and by the Yews that shade Kin-Troya’s refluent tide.

Thence, lifted lightly on their steeds, up through the desert lone,

Where gloomy Gullion overlooks his realm of quag and stone,

Passed Brigid’s cell; and, issuing forth high o’er Muirthevne’s plain,

Where Fochard takes the morning sun, passed Brigid’s cell again.

“Go where you will, their Saints intrude,” said Congal. “Nay, ’twas here,”

Sweeny returned, “Lafinda, she to both of us so dear,

In all her maid-beseeming arts was nurtured in her youth

By Brigid’s maids, and learned from them the lore of Heavenly truth.”

(See also the possible echo of Congal in note to 2.) The deliberate conflation by WBY of pagan and Christian traditions sits comfortably enough with the character of Hanrahan as speaker; at the same time, it adds to the element of what might be called subversive Catholic appropriation which is evident in other poems of WATR (see e.g. ‘The Travail of Passion’). For A.R. Grossman, the subversion had a pro­ nounced sexual accent, and ‘Like all the poems of Hanrahan the subject [.  .  .] is sexual excitement [.  .  .] the force which symbolizes the emotion is cosmic rather than personal and involves the usurpation by the mortal lover of the same energy by which God created the world’. With ‘our Mother of Peace’, however, Grossman sees WBY attempting to regulate such excitement: ‘In the face of the sexual demand the poet yearns for the pregenital Wisdom figure, here under the awkward guise of the Virgin’ (Grossman, 123). S. Putzel, too, interprets the female figure as a kind of cold shower for the overheated libido, made all the colder in revision: ‘Rather than pray­ ing to ‘Maid Quiet,’ who could be the object of sexual desire,’ he writes, ‘Hanrahan prays to a far-off ‘Mother of Peace’, a queen-of-heaven figure who is both sadly and comfortably out of reach’ (Putzel, 202). But the ‘Virgin’ figure is for WBY partly St. Brigid, ‘Virgin of the Irish’; and because she is Irish, she is also fraught with mythic weight that renders her other than solely (or even primarily) Christian. Instead, she is (amongst other things) a goddess of poetry itself. As such, this figure is certainly something other than what R. Ellmann calls ‘little more than a personified counter­ weight for the poet’s distress’ (Identity, 100); rather, she is Hanrahan’s driving but unattainable muse, in whose perpetual absence he wishes for an end to the world’s and his own existence. In all of this, the speaker is retracing mythic steps (of Cuchu­ lain and others) of quest and frustration. The degree to which the poem’s quasi-dramatic function in WATR suggests (and diverges from) the frustrations and aspirations (romantic and other) of WBY himself is a matter for speculation; yet that very speculation is perhaps something which the poet does not welcome, and against which in 1908 he took decisive steps by cutting the poem again, and returning to the ‘Maid Quiet’ of 1892, while removing the mythic pursuit and solar-hero/death symbolism.

HANRAHAN LAMENTS BECAUSE OF HIS WANDERINGS

533

Text and publication history. First publication was in The New Review Aug. 1897 (NR); a MS is preserved which formed the copy for The New Review (Berg Collection, NYPL), along with the note which prefaced the poem, marked up by the editor, Henley (repr. and transcribed in Cornell WATR, 158–161). In Jul. 1903 WBY wrote this poem into AG’s copy of P95, now in Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University (Emory). The poem next appeared in WATR, but was heavily revised when it became ‘Maid Quiet’ in CWVP08: this is presented separately in the present edition. Copy-text: WATR.

O

5

where is our Mother of Peace Nodding her purple hood? For the winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood. I would that the death-pale deer Had come through the mountain side, And trampled the mountain away,

Title] O’Sullivan the Red upon his Wanderings, NR; ‘Hanrahan the Red upon his Wanderings’ Emory. 1. Our mother of Peace] In making a change from the earlier ‘Maid Quiet’ (to which he would in fact revert in 1908), WBY employs the ‘Our mother of ’ phrase which is usu­ ally associated with devotional reference to the Virgin Mary. One of the Virgin’s titles in the Roman Catholic church is ‘Our Lady/ Mother of Peace’, a designation which first became popular in seventeenth-century France. In the present case, the figure may be not Mary, but St  Brigid, though a St  Brigid associated by WBY with earlier, pagan Irish, Brigid figures. 2. her purple hood] WBY’s alteration from the ‘russet’ of previous versions may echo Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 270–273: Last night, at midnight, by my bed an awful form there stood, Whom, by her vermeil-lettered book, and by her purple hood,

And hoary, gory-beaming locks, that shone like sun-lit snow For Blessed Brigid of Kildare I could not choose but know. In WBY’s Celtic Mysteries materials, the first of ‘The three Bridgets’, the ‘Smithworker’, has a tunic ‘of blue and purple’ and a purple ‘bratta’ (an Irish cape-like garment). 3–4, 9–10.] Perhaps cp. Wordsworth, The Pre­ lude (1850), I, 337–338: ‘With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind | Blow through my ear!’ 5–7.] I would the pale deer had come

From Gulleon’s place of pride,

And drunk up the murmuring tide; NR.

‘Gulleon’s’ here results from a misreading of WBY’s MS, which has ‘Gullion’s’ (as also in the MS version of the prefatory note). 5. the death-pale deer] pale deer NR. WBY’s inten­ sification makes more explicit the identification with ‘night and shadow’ as a figure of death. 7. mountain] mountains MS, NR, Emory.

534

10

HANRAHAN LAMENTS BECAUSE OF HIS WANDERINGS

And drunk up the murmuring tide;

For the winds that awakened the stars

Are blowing through my blood,

And our Mother of Peace has forgot me

Under her purple hood.

WBY’s note in NR] Prefacing the poem is a bracketed note: [‘Gulleon’s place of pride’ is the mountain now called ‘The Fews,’ and once called ‘Sleive Few.’ It is fabled to be his tomb, and was doubtless the place of his worship, for Gulleon was Cullain, a god of the underworld. The ‘pale deer’ were certain deer, hunted once by Cuchullain in his battle fury, and, as I understand them, symbols of night and shadow.] In the note, ‘Gulleon’ misprints WBY’s MS ‘Gullion’ (see also note on 5–7); ‘Sleive’ is WBY’s mistake (carried over into the printed text) for ‘Slieve’. A more serious error was introduced in VE 171, by the insertion of ‘(Hanrahan’s)’ to explain ‘his tomb’ (as the phrase stands in both the NR and WBY’s MS copy for the note): ‘his’ refers to Culann. The Irish Sliabh gCuillinn (‘mountain of the steep slope’) is also known as Sliabh Cuilinn (mountain of Culann’). WBY’s WATR note] This poem was combined with ‘Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved’ [‘He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World’] in a note for WATR. WBY refers to ‘the hound the son of Setanta killed, on what was certainly, in the first form of the tale, a visit to the Celtic Hades’ (confusing ‘Setanta’, which was Cuchulain’s first name, with that of his father). Commenting on the ‘white deer with no horns’ at the start of ‘Mongan laments . . .’, along with the girl carrying a golden apple in the story of Oisin, WBY writes: A solar mythologist would perhaps say that the girl with the golden apple was once the winter, or night, carrying the sun away, and the deer without horns, like the boar without bristles, darkness flying the light. He would cer­ tainly, I  think, say that when Cuchullain, whom Professor Rhys calls a solar hero, hunted the enchanted deer of Slieve Fuadh, because the battle fury was still on him, he was the sun pursuing clouds, or cold, or darkness. I have under­ stood them in this sense in ‘Hanrahan laments because of his wandering,’ and made Hanrahan long for the day when they, fragments of ancestral darkness, will overthrow the world. The desire of the woman, the flying darkness, it is all one! The image – a cross, a man preaching in the wilderness, a dancing Salome, a lily in a girl’s hand, a flame leaping, a globe with wings, a pale sunset over still waters – is an eternal act; but our understandings are temporal and understand but a little at a time.

176

THE HOSTING OF

THE SIDHE

Text, date of revision, and publication history. By the time this poem appeared as the opening piece in WATR (1899), it had undergone a good deal of revision from its incarnation as ‘The Host’, when prefacing the stories of The Celtic Twilight (1893). At some point before WATR, WBY prepared versions of the poem in TS: four of these are preserved in the Berg Collection, NYPL (TS1–TS4). It is not possible to be certain about the order in which these TSS were produced, but the notes make a tentative judgement and are keyed thus (from earliest to latest) to the TSS listed in the Cor­ nell WATR Census of Manuscripts: TS1 = Berg (21) (this TS is closest in content to ‘The Host’, and has ‘The Hosting of the Children of Dana’ as a title); TS2 = Berg (33) (here the title is still ‘The Hosting of the Children of Dana’); TS3 = Berg (11) (there is here an additional version of 12–16 in holograph (see the notes later), which was not subsequently adopted); TS4 = Berg (22) (this is essentially identical to the poem as it appears in WATR). In addition to these TSS, there is a holograph MS of lines 1–9, listed in the Cornell WATR Census as Berg (12) (MS): this probably postdates TSS 1 and 2. There is no evidence for dating of any of this material, but the number of TSS generated seems to point to a relatively protracted time between the (essentially) com­ pleted revision and the submission of material for the volume. It appears that WBY began to use the services of a typist (a Miss Alport of Bedford Park) in London in Aug. 1895 (see CL 2, 604), so this may be the earliest date for any TS to have been produced; beyond this, however, all dating of the revision process is speculative. It is possible that TS1 contains a clue about when WBY started revision in earnest: its title has ‘Dana’ as the name of the Tuatha De Danaan; this is changed in ink to ‘Danu’. The form ‘Danu’ is that used in WBY’s ‘The Tribes of Danu’ in The New Review for Nov. 1897, and the title of TS1 may well date from the same year, but probably not much later. (As late as the 1899 WATR note, though, WBY was still employing ‘Danu’.) The poem once revised remained in all collected editions, with only relatively minor changes. How­ ever, the verses also continued to be printed as a preface to subsequent versions of The Celtic Twilight (though now under the title ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’), appearing in vol. 5 of CW08 and in the 1902 and 1912 editions of The Celtic Twilight itself; when WBY published EPS in 1925, he removed the poem from the Celtic Twilight material reprinted there. Reception and interpretation. The poem’s leading position in WATR helped it to be quoted in a number of early reviews and articles about WBY’s work, though seldom with much in the way of interpretation or comment. The nature of the attraction exercised DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-178

536

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

by representatives of the other world, and in particular by Niamh, was seen by one early reviewer as more admonitory than glamorous (Dora M. Jones, London Quarterly Review, Jul. 1900): But this impatience of compromise and vulgarity, this passionate idealism, this scorn of common, dusty, homely paths, has its perils and its dire catastrophes. In The Wind Among the Reeds there is the legend of the men who saw the vision of the faery riders in the mysterious hour between the lights, [quotes 3–4] and ever after walked among the living as those who belonged to the dead. In later critical reception, the glamour here tends to outweigh any perceived danger. R. Ellmann asked, ‘Can a unique passion be satisfied by a common experience?’, and said that WBY ‘prefers the state of temptation or of half-seduction with ‘Niamh call­ ing Away, come away’ (Man and the Masks, 81); but he could also offer a reading of WATR as beginning ‘with an appeal from the other world, this time from the Sidhe who call, ‘Away, come away’’, while concluding that ‘We listen to their musical voices without obeying’ (Identity, xiii). Altogether more neutral interpretations of the Sidhe are typified by T. Parkinson, who quoted 3–5 in support of the contention that WBY’s early poetry ‘had for its main matter the opposition of two worlds or schemes of value, the natural and supernatural, praising always the remote and vague, yearning for a life of dream, casual revery, and innocent inconsequential delight’ (53). The innocence here has not always struck critics, and hints of this may be gleaned from A.R. Grossman’s description of the poem as ‘Ossianic’, since ‘the diction and met­ ric of manic dream are marked by excited breathing’ and the ‘threat of uncontrol­ lable energy’ (14). More substantially, H. Bloom (124–125) uses the poem as a way of approaching WATR as a whole: Yeats’s host is hardly the traditional Sidhe, including as it does Caoilte, a warrior of the Fenian cycle, and Niamh, the enticing beauty of ‘The Wander­ ings of Oisin’. This odd placement of warrior and ideal beauty is a clue to the meaning of the poem. The courage and splendour of the world have been taken up into the faery host, and so the poem can resolve itself in the rhetorical ques­ tion [quoting 13–14]. Yeats has no answer, in this volume, but the odd strength of the volume is in his subtle, never quite spoken resistance to the ‘sweet ever­ lasting Voices’ that have appropriated all of human passion, and yet left a man suffering in and from time. The extent to which this poem marks a departure for WBY (and, implicitly, a declaration of direction for WATR) is emphasized by F. Kinahan, who notes how Niamh from ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ is here in ‘a different guise’, and ‘occupies the same place Beauty had held in the Rose poems [. . .] that of a force inimical to the peaceful life of home’; this is a ‘Niamh who, with her gleaming eyes and parted lips, was the prototype of the women who were to enter the spotlight in Yeats’s verse up through the turn of the century’ (220).

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

537

The point is elaborated (and perhaps a little exaggerated) by D. Holdeman, who sees the poem as ‘a bold demonstration of the author’s late-nineties perception that his ear­ lier depictions of Irish fairies had associated them too much with pettiness’ (Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats (2006), 30): And indeed, the poem’s sexy, dangerous, horse-riding host of male and female spirits is a far cry from the prancing troop that tempts ‘The Stolen Child’. Their pale cheeks, unbound hair, heaving breasts, and parted lips recall the iconogra­ phy of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry. [. . .] [The poem’s] depiction of the fairy host may also imply a massing of ancient forces hostile to the modern, materialistic world of Britain, and its empire. S. Putzel’s judgement that the poem ‘allures or seduces readers toward the otherworldly poems that follow while at the same time warning against the necessary consequences of answering Niamh’s call and following the flaming spirit-figure Caolte’ restates the essential ambivalence in the poem which readers have detected from early on (Putzel, 168). Nevertheless, it is important not to underestimate what G. Watson calls ‘The energy and personal force Yeats brought to his art of apocalyptic vision’ here, where ‘The fairy host are as far as it is possible to be from the domesticated denizens at the bottom of English gardens’ in a poem where ‘they converse with the elements of fire and air, they are in furious motion (accentuated by the hammering rhythm), and their pas­ sage stuns the human watcher’ (Howes and Kelly, 53). Watson’s mention of the poem’s rhythm (whether or not one accepts that it is ‘hammering’) points to the importance in this poem of metrical resource. WBY begins by employing what is recognizably an iambic tetrameter; but this mutates, very subtly to begin with, into a kind of broken triple rhythm, ushered in by extra syllables and reversed feet (‘calling Away’ (4), ‘Empty your heart of its’ (5), ‘hair is unbound’ (7), ‘heaving, our’, ‘are agleam’ (8)). By line 9, and decisively in lines 10 and 11, the iambic framework has been usurped by a dactylic movement. WBY’s technique here is both subtle and persuasive; and these powers of persuasion are being vested, in fact, in the voices of the Sidhe, who have effectively given acceleration to the poem – its metrical words, too, are in the process of ‘rushing’. The piece’s circularity (15–16 repeating 3–4) is important to its meaning and effect; it may not be entirely fanciful to see this circling as an image of those ‘leaves whirling on the road’ which the WATR note makes into a manifestation of the Sidhe themselves, and it is certainly the case that the poet intends this return to the beginning to figure an intensification, rather than a resolution, of the promises and dangers which the poem contains. This energy that is not any kind of conclusiveness fits the poem well for its opening position in WATR, where other female figures will follow (and complicate) Niamh in both their appeals and their perils. Where Niamh stands for erotic invitation, Caoilte is a figure of visionary fire, who offers to light a mystical path. As a whole, the poem divides its symbolic powers between the elements of fire (in Caoilte’s ‘burning hair’) and air (in the awakening winds, the whirling leaves, and the ‘rushing’ of the moving host itself).

538

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

Copy-text: P49.

T

he host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair,

Title] The Hosting of the Children of Dana [Dan[a del.]u TS2] TS1. ‘Hosting’ is OED a., ‘The raising of a host or armed multitude; hostile encoun­ ter or array, raid; an encampment; (formerly, esp. in Ireland) a military expedition.’ WBY would have encountered the term in Standish O’Grady, A History of Ireland: The Heroic Age Vol. 2 (1880), in the title of ch. 25: ‘The Last Hosting against Cuculain’. The term is usual in Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), e.g. V 105–6: ‘A mighty hosting, by my head; a ter­ rible array | This potent king of Erin makes’, and is used by Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queen Maeve’ III, 533: ‘Came down with all the hosting of her kings’ and R.L. Dwyer, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Sojourn in Alba’, 624: ‘One morn the King and prince a hosting made | Far in the west’. W. Morris’s poetry makes much use of ‘hosting’, but the major English instance – which sits behind all the nineteenth-century Irish uses – is Milton, Paradise Lost VI, 92–93: ‘that angel would with angel war, | And in fierce hosting meet’. 1.] The movement of this line is almost cer­ tainly not intended to recall that of a wellknown Irish poem by John Keegan Casey; but that poem was very well-known, and it was known to WBY. Cp. John K. Casey, Reliques (1878), ‘Soggarth Aroon’, 35: ‘Black Johnson and his blood-hounds are riding from Rathmore’. Knocknarea] The 327-metre-high limestone hill overlooking Sligo town, familiar to and much mentioned by WBY. The name (in Irish Cnoc na Riabh) may mean ‘hill of the kings’ or (as thought by P.W. Joyce) ‘hill of the exe­ cutions’. The large cairn at the top is generally

associated with Queen Mebdh of Connacht, and is taken as hers by WBY (despite the lack of any firm evidence from recorded legend). In English-language poetry, it appears before this only in Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 211–213 (where the Washer of the Ford is speaking): ‘my cave | For sleep is in the mid­ dle of the well-shaped Cairn of Maev, | High up on haunted Knocknarea’. 2. the grave of Clooth-na-bare] In his WATR note WBY refers to a chapter of The Celtic Twilight, ‘The Untiring Ones’, and quotes from this with some expansion. The Old Woman of Beare (Cailleach na Bheara) is a much-mentioned character in Irish legend and folklore, and WBY has a great deal of source material to choose from here. In the poem, the main consequence of the refer­ ence, at least insofar as that is explained in the note) is that ‘the grave’ is a watery one, in ‘little Lough Ia’: this is most likely Lough Daeane, situated on Slieve Daeane (Sliabh Da Ean, the mountain of two birds) to the south of Sligo town, above Lough Gill. 3, 15. Caoilte] Caolte until P33. The Fenian warrior Cailte mac Ronain, who was stew­ ard to Finn, had appeared previously in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), III, 195 (for this figure’s relevance as a survivor of the pagan order in early Christian Ireland, see note). Caoilte had made a brief appearance in KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, IV, 41 (as Cailte). 3. tossing his burning hair] See the poet’s note to WATR. Although WBY claims that ‘I do not remember where I  have read this story, and I have, maybe, half forgotten it’, it is likely that he came across it in Standish J. O’Grady, History of Ireland Critical and Philosophical Vol.1, 354:

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

5

539

And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

The King of Ireland once lost his way in a dark forest, when suddenly a tall, slender warrior preceded him, bearing a torch. At parting, the King said, ‘What art thou?’ ‘Thy candlestick,’ answered the warrior. Said the Monarch: ‘Methinks the two eyes of Coelte are in the candlestick.’ ‘This Coelte,’ O’Grady goes on, ‘has in his character something more weird than the others’ (i.e. the rest of the Fenians). A  sec­ ond possible source (suggested by Gould and Toomey, M 438) is Thomas M’Laughlan, The Dean of Lismore’s Book: A Selection of Ancient Gaelic Poetry (1862). Here, an Irish poem (ascribed by Eugene O’Curry to the ninth century) spoken by Caolte is translated, and this also contains the ‘candlestick’ image (64): From whence it happened, it is true,

I became candlestick to Cormac.

Then did I many strange things do,

In presence of the King of Erin.

“Though ye may wonder at my speech,

Caoilte’s two eyes are in my candlestick.”

While it is certainly possible that WBY had encountered this text, it is more likely that he was indebted to O’Grady’s account of this ‘candlestick’ incident. ‘Tossing his burning hair’, however, is not accounted for in either of these two possible sources, and may very well be WBY’s own contribution to the story of Caolte. 4, 16.] This line compresses a piece of mythic narrative already used by WBY in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889). In Irish mythology, Niamh was the daughter of the god Aengus, a king in the land of the young, and his queen Edain. The name itself is from the Irish níam, meaning brightness. In his earlier poem, WBY makes this figure one of the Tuatha De Danaan, who lures the Fenian hero Oisin away to a world apart from the

mortal one (‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), I, 102–109): ‘Oisin, thou must away with me

To my own kingdom in the sea –

Away, away with me,’ she cried,

‘To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide,

Where the voice of change is the voice of

a tune, In the poppy-hung house of the twilight fluted; To shores where dying has never been known, And the flushes of first love never have flown [. . .] These lines had been revised so heavily as to have disappeared from the text of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ in P95. The earlier poem’s ‘Away, away with me’ is here reconfig­ ured as ‘Away, come away’: this phrasing is in fact something of a commonplace in poetry, and by the later nineteenth century it works as partly a gesture towards Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poetic diction (with its meaning of ‘Come to me [i.e. away from where you are now]’); cp. e.g. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘The Forsaken Merman’, 28–29: ‘She will not come though you call all day; Come away, come away!’. An instance of this which WBY would probably have known is J. C. Mangan, in Anthologia Germanica Vol.2 (1845), ‘Home-Sickness’, 1–8: There calleth me ever a marvellous Horn,

“Come away! Come away!”

Is it earthly music faring astray,

Or is it air-born?

Oh, whether it be a spirit-wile

Or a forest-voice,

It biddeth mine ailing heart rejoice,

Yet sorrow the while!

5–6.] [And brood no more when the fire is bright, | To fill your heart with a mortal

540

10

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand,

We come between him and the hope of his heart.

The host is riding ‘twixt night and day,

dream; del.] To the windy fields and the dim twilight | And empty your heart of its mortal dream; TS1 (with holograph correction). Empty] [And empty del.] Empty MS. its mortal dream] Cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King (1859), ‘Merlin and Vivien’, 114– 115: ‘ride, and dream | The mortal dream that never yet was mine’. 6.] The WATR note here, on how the Sidhe ‘journey in whirling winds, the winds that were called the dance of the daugh­ ters of Herodias in the Middle Ages, Hero­ dias doubtless taking the place of some old goddess,’ faithfully reports an association between the Sidhe and the wind blowing up leaves that WBY uses elsewhere. However, it may also mark a point of contact between WBY and the poetry of his friend Arthur Symons; certainly, the image is not pres­ ent in this poem’s earlier life as ‘The Host’ (1893), and here seems to be close to a poem in Symons’s Images of Good and Evil (1899), with the title ‘The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias’ (1–12): Is it the petals falling from the rose? For in the silence I can hear a sound Nearer than mine own heart-beat, such a word As roses murmur, blown by a great wind. I see a pale and windy multitude Beaten about the air, as if the smoke Of incense kindled into visible life Shadowy and invisible presences; And, in the cloudy darkness, I can see The thin white feet of many women dancing,

And in their hands . . . I see it is the dance Of the daughters of Herodias [. . .] WBY and Symons were in close contact in the later 1890s, and it is not possible to say with certainty who here is being influenced by whom  – though ongoing mutual influ­ ence seems the most likely assessment. T. R. Whitaker noted the parallel, and remarked that ‘Like Symons’s daughters of Herodias, the Sidhe embody the fatal lure of immortal passion and beauty, present also in the ‘great wind’ of Yeats’s ‘The Secret Rose’’ (230). winds awaken] wind awakens TS3. 7.] For arms ^Our garments^ are wav­ ing and eyes a-gleam: TS1 with holograph superscript. 8–9.] ‘Away, come away to the dim twilight: | For [lips del.] breasts are heaving and lips apart; TS1. 11. the deed of his hand] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Chants for Socialists (1885), ‘The Day is Com­ ing’, 9: ‘Then shall a man work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand’. 12. the hope of his heart] This matching term for line 11 above may also be an echo of W. Morris: perhaps cp. Sigurd the Volsung (1876), ‘The Birth of Sigurd’, 64: ‘And the hope of her heart was quickened, and her joy was a living fire’. 13. ’twixt night and day] In one sense, this phrase means simply the time between night­ fall and dawn; but WBY’s ‘’twixt’, combined with the ‘rushing’ of the host, creates the image of time as a distance physically cov­ ered (and such distances have already been

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

15

541

And where is there hope or deed as fair?

Caoilte tossing his burning hair,

And Niamh calling Away. come away.

WBY’s note in WATR] The powerful and wealthy called the gods of ancient Ireland the Tuatha De Danaan, or the Tribes of the goddess Danu, but the poor called them, and still sometimes call them, the Sidhe, from Aes Sidhe or Sluagh Sidhe, the people of the Faery Hills, as these words are usually explained. Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly the Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling winds, the winds that were called the dance of the daughters of Hero­ dias in the Middle Ages, Herodias doubtless taking the place of some old god­ dess. When the country people see the leaves whirling on the road they bless themselves, because they believe the Sidhe to be passing by. They are almost always said to wear no covering upon their heads, and to let their hair stream out; and the great among them, for they have great and simple, go much upon horseback. If any one becomes too much interested in them, and sees them over much, he loses all interest in ordinary things. I shall write a great deal elsewhere about such enchanted persons, and can give but an example or two now. A woman near Gort, in Galway, says: ‘There is a boy, now, of the Cloran’s; but I wouldn’t for the world let them think I spoke of him; it’s two years since he came from America, and since that time he never went to Mass, or to church, or to fairs, or to market, or to stand on the cross roads, or to hurling, or to nothing. And if any one comes into the house, it’s into the room he’ll slip, not to see them; and as to work, he has the garden dug to bits, and the whole place smeared with cow dung; and such a crop as was never seen; and the alders all plaited till they look grand. One day he went as far as the chapel; but as soon as he got to the door he turned straight round again, as if he hadn’t power to pass it. I wonder he wouldn’t get the priest to read a Mass for him, or something; but the crop he has is grand, and you may know well he has some to help him.’ One hears many stories of the kind; and a man whose son is believed to go out riding among them at night tells me that he is careless about everything, and lies in bed until it is late in the day. A doctor believes this boy to be mad. Those that are at times ‘away,’ as it is called, know all things, but are afraid to speak.

specified at the beginning of the poem). The phrase had had a figurative use before, in the hands of W. Morris – cp. The Earthly Paradise (1870), IV, ‘Bellerophon at Argos’, 128–129: ‘a woman clad in grey, | Like to the lingering time ’twixt night and day’.

14–16.] And where is the hope or deed as fair The host is riding ’twixt night and day And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare. TS3 (added in holograph).

542

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

A  countryman at Kiltartan says, ‘There was one of the Lydons  – John – was away for seven years, lying in his bed, but brought away at nights, and he knew everything; and one, Kearney, up in the mountains, a cousin of his own, lost two hoggets, and came and told him, and he knew the very spot where they were, and told him, and he got them back again. But they were vexed at that, and took away the power, so that he never knew anything again, no more than another.’ This wisdom is the wisdom of the fools of the Celtic stories, that was above all the wisdom of the wise. Lomna, the fool of Fiann, had so great wis­ dom that his head, cut from his body, was still able to sing and prophesy; and a writer in the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ writes that Tristram, in the oldest form of the tale of Tristram and Iseult, drank wisdom, and madness the shadow of wisdom, and not love, out of the magic cup. The great of the old times are among the Tribes of Danu, and are kings and queens among them. Caolte was a companion of Fiann; and years after his death he appeared to a king in a forest, and was a flaming man, that he might lead him in the darkness. When the king asked him who he was, he said, ‘I am your candlestick.’ I do not remember where I have read this story, and I have, maybe, half forgotten it. Niam was a beautiful woman of the Tribes of Danu, that led Oisin to the Country of the Young, as their country is called; I have written about her in ‘The Wandering of Usheen;’ and he came back, at last, to bitterness and weariness. Knocknarea is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still a great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones upon it. I have writ­ ten of Clooth-na-Bare in ‘The Celtic Twilight.’ She ‘went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at last, she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the bird mountain, in Sligo.’ I forget, now, where I heard this story, but it may have been from a priest at Collooney. Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places. Mr. O’Grady found her haunting Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac Buil­ lia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate moonshaped lake, with made wells and sunken passages upon its borders, and beset by marsh and heather and gray boulders, and closes his ‘ Flight of the Eagle’ with a long rhapsody upon mountain and lake, because of the heroic tales and beautiful old myths that have hung about them always. He identifies the Cailleac Buillia with that Melu­ chra who persuaded Fionn to go to her amid the waters of Lough Liath, and so changed him with her enchantments, that, though she had to free him because of the threats of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as white as snow. To this day the Tribes of the Goddess Danu that are in the waters beckon to men, and drown them in the waters; and Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever name

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

one likes the best, is, doubtless, the name of a mistress among them. Meluchra was daughter of Cullain; and Cullain Mr. O’Grady calls, upon I know not what authority, a form of Lir, the master of waters. The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be but another of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and earthly trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her, a different form of the threats and violence the country people use, to make the Tribes of Danu give up those that are ‘away.’ Bare is now often called an ugly old woman; but Dr. Joyce says that one of her old names was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhen was the god­ dess of the tribes of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made immortal, and who loved her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality, to fight among them against the stranger, and died on the strand of Clontarf.

543

177

HE WISHES FOR THE

CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

Date and circumstances of composition. No evidence exists to establish an exact date, but it is possible that the poem was conceived and written in the new year of 1898. J. Hone’s biography of WBY made use of his discussions (from much later) with the poet’s sister, SMY: ‘Yeats spent the Christmas of 1897 with his family at Bedford Park,’ Hone wrote (correctly), adding that ‘His sister Lily remembers how he came down to breakfast one morning very much excited, and recounted the dream which gave him that strange and symbolic love poem, ‘The Cap and Bells’’ (Hone, 151–152). It is clear that ‘The Cap and Bells’ was not composed at this time, but in 1893 (see notes to the poem): either SMY was remembering a different Christmas, or a different poem. Hone (who is presumably following SMY’s lead) immediately goes on to connect ‘The Cap and Bells’ with ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, saying that ‘The Cap and Bells’ was ‘A poem of which [WBY] said long afterwards at some lecture that it was ‘the way to win a lady’, whereas the better known ‘Embroidered Cloths’ of the same period was the way to lose one’. Hone repeats this later (321), with WBY’s lecture identified as one he delivered as part of his U.S. tour in Jan. to May 1920. The conjunction of these two poems in both WBY’s and SMY’s minds may have its origin in what Hone adds next: ‘Maud Gonne was in the States, and WBY had had (he told Lady Gregory) some very nice letters from her; one began ‘my dear friend’, and ended ‘affectionately your friend’’ (152). MG had indeed been in the United States, but she was coming back soon, and WBY had hopes of meet­ ing and working with her early in 1898. This was a time when WBY’s romantic hopes of MG were once again on the rise. On 22 Jan. 1898, WBY wrote to George Russell, report­ ing that he was now ‘deep in ‘Celtic Mysticism,’’ [i.e. his plans for a Celtic Mystical Order] ‘forming in elaborate vision’: ‘Maud Gonne and myself are going for a week or two pres­ ently to some country place in Ireland to get as you do the forces of gods and spirits and to get sacred earth for our invocation’ (CL 2, 176). The plans for this mystical-romantic getaway did not quite come to pass; but WBY did see MG in London over some days in Jan., when at least some of the excitement generated by the letters before Christmas, as recalled by SMY, was dashed. ‘It was very pleasant seeing you’, MG wrote in Feb., ‘but you must think very well, what is best for your genius, that should be your first consideration’, continuing ‘If you find that an absolutely platonic friendship which is all I can or ever will be able to give, unsettles you and spoils your work then you must have the strength and courage at once to give up meeting me’ (G-YL, 85). Nevertheless, MG and WBY met again in London in Feb., and busied themselves with WBY’s mystical, as well as MG’s political labours: ‘I have done a lot at celtic mysticism’, the poet reported to Russell on DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-179

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

545

15 Feb., ‘and with most beautiful results’ (CL 2, 189). ‘Beautiful’ here suggests that some element of costume and stage design had been going on, pending fresh visions to be shared on Irish soil. WBY’s private accounts of the ‘Visions of Old Irish Mythology’ were ‘Begun Dec. 13 1898’ – probably almost a year after the composition of the poem – but these sup­ ply useful information about the magical significance of colours in any prospective ritual: e.g. ‘She [i.e. MG] saw the talismans also against the following grounds – [Spirit] on yel­ low, [Spear] on blue [Sword] on red [Cup] on purple [Stone] on green’. In the light of this, it is worth taking stock of the large variety of colours considered for this poem’s ‘Cloths of Heaven’ ‘Enwrought with golden and silver light’: green, grey, gold, purple, and blue (see note to 3). A great deal of the hermetic and magical systems of imagery known to WBY demanded specific colours, so it is no surprise that the Celtic mysteries, also, should be particular on this subject; and there is no reason why the various colours that come and go through the poem and its drafts should be keyed strictly to discussions about colour­ related matters with MG (or others); but the question of mystical colour was certainly on WBY’s mind early in 1898, and it plays a major (perhaps a dominant) role in the poem. However circumstantial this aspect of the context may be with regard to dating the poem’s composition, WBY’s arrangements for his new collection of poems at the time should also be remembered. It was in Feb. 1898 that WBY sent Elkin Mathews the poems for WATR (or at least, in the view of the editors of CL 2, thirty-two or thirty-three of its thirty-eight poems); a further (final) typescript for the volume was sent in the summer of 1898 from Coole Park. This poem is unlikely, then, to have been composed after Jul. 1898, and it is possible that it was begun in Jan. to Feb. of that year. Sources. One piece of verse in particular has importance as a text from which WBY’s short lyric develops; it is a source for the title, undoubtedly, but also needs to be considered as a potential influence on the poem itself. This is a passage from early in W. Morris’s terza rima poem, the title piece of his The Defence of Guinevere (1858). The speaker is Guinevere, Arthur’s queen, whose relationship with Launcelot has become a matter of public scandal and accusation. The queen asks her audience to consider how easy it might be for anyone to make the wrong choice in matters of profound significance (16–41): “Listen, suppose your time were come to die,

And you were quite alone and very weak;

Yea, laid a dying while very mightily

“The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak

Of river through your broad lands running well:

Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

“ ‘One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,

Now choose one cloth for ever; which they be,

I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

“ ‘Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!’

Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,

At foot of your familiar bed to see

546

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

“A great God’s angel standing, with such dyes,

Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands

Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

“Showing him well, and making his commands

Seem to be God’s commands, moreover, too,

Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

“And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,

Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;

No man could tell the better of the two.

“After a shivering half-hour you said:

‘God help! heaven’s colour, the blue;’ and he said: ‘hell.’

Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

“And cry to all good men that loved you well,

‘Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known.’

The connection between these lines and the present poem was first pointed out by F.A.C. Wilson, W.B. Yeats and Tradition [1958], 251–252. This passage had earlier played a role in WBY’s ‘The Cap and Bells’, a poem with which the poet himself linked ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ later in his life. The colours red and blue are centrally important to the ballad; in this later poem, however, a range of other colours offer themselves for the ‘Cloths of Heaven’. More important than this, though, is the notion of choosing, and the enormous implications of what is (essentially) an impossible choice. WBY’s speaker wishes for, he does not choose; in a way, choice is not even open to him, for he possesses only ‘dreams’ and not the heavenly cloths themselves. Reception and interpretation. Initial reactions to the poem were approving, and The Spectator’s reviewer of WATR noted especially the delicacy of technique, calling it ‘a lyric interesting as well as beautiful, because of the echoes of the metrical artifices of Celtic poetry’ (8 Jul. 1899). The poem could be taken as standing for one side of WBY’s artistic identity, ‘that dim and lovely fabric of sound and image which [WBY] calls ‘The Cloths of Dreams’’(‘The Gaelic Revival in Literature’, The Quarterly Review Apr. 1902). Intensely as it might be expressed, this praise could still be faint, and another commentator of 1902 managed to combine it with suggestions of successful (that is, improving) plagiarism (The Academy and Literature 25 Oct. 1902): But in the bulk of Mr. Yeats’s work, even of this latest work, there seems to us nothing beyond the proper and beautiful indefiniteness of remote suggestion. Such is that exquisite poem [quotes poem in full] There is a poem by an older Irish writer, which ends with one fine line: ‘Dance light, for my heart it lies under your feet, love!’ If Mr. Yeats ever saw the poem, then with the skill of a consummate artist he has ennobled the line into a thing of perfect beauty, which is rightfully his own. His highest work, like this poem, stirs echoes in the imagination which reverberate to the dimmest verges of consciousness.

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

547

It is this unique power of subtly remote suggestion which makes him typi­ cally the poet of what we understand by Celtic spirituality. The words seem to awaken a series of answering harmonics, which are lost at last on the other side of this life. (For the possible indebtedness, see note to lines 5, 7.) The poem found itself quoted in full in The Academy again within a few months, but now being seen as almost an emblematic expression of ‘Celtic’ failure in a cosmopolitan modern world, the world which is able (like Arnold’s Philistines) to take the ‘forward view’ (The Academy and Literature 24 Jan. 1903): That forward view is foreign to the average Celtic temperament. If it sees the future at all it sees it as a re-created past. [. . .] It is one way of literature as well, but hardly a way to rouse the spirit, to give the call to action, to wrest from cir­ cumstance the reluctant jewel of crowned endeavour. It is good to have dreams to offer, but what of the future? No literary revival will awaken a race. Modern criticism has received the poem without such preconceptions getting in the way, but it has also tended to see the piece as typical of the kind of verbal beauty in WBY’s 1890s work that demands admiration more than explication. N. Grene’s respect­ ful attentiveness is representative of much criticism that came before it: ‘the poet seeks tenderness for his offerings. [. . .] The ethereal insubstantiality of the lover’s dreams is admitted, yet with the plea for the beloved to tread softly on them, they are given a kind of substance’ (54–55). A similar attitude to the poem’s aesthetic quality is evident when M. Howes says that ‘the speaker [.  .  .] may not have the cloths of heaven to offer his beloved, but instead he produces a poem whose intricate patterns of repetition create a beautiful, tapestry-like effect’ (Howes and Kelly eds., 4). Yet a lot is involved in the casual word ‘instead’ here, for WBY at least: and it is important to remember how the poet later saw in this poem ‘the way to lose’ the beloved, since from one angle the verses are something of a confession of romantic defeat. At the same time, poetry is no easier than courtly love; and this much is usefully acknowledged in A.R. Grossman’s observation that ‘the poet conceives his overthrow as an unweaving, an incapacity to compose his own destiny, analogous to the difficulty of making poetry’ (83). Certainly, S. Putzel takes too rosy a view of the compensations of poetry when he writes that the poem’s ‘pattern is also a celebration of the poet’s almost magical powers; the poem itself contradicts the poet’s claim of poverty’ (160). H. Adams, reading with an eye to the order of poems in WATR, sees this poem as one in which WBY ‘would make amends, though somewhat obsequiously’ for ‘He Wishes his Beloved Were Dead’; but he adds a note of caution: ‘One might say, though, that the poem, lovely tribute to [the beloved] that it is, is also yet another appeal to protect the dreams of her that have made it so difficult for him [the speaker] to see her clearly’ (73). E. Cullingford also, in speaking of the poem’s ‘traditional romance structure of elevation and abasement’ is inclined to read ‘I, being poor’ (line 6) as strictly literal in a line where ‘The spare, impoverished diction [. . .] demands sympa­ thy for the indigent male’ (25).

548

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

Given the frequency with which critics refer to the poem’s elaborate form and dic­ tion, it is useful to establish more about how the lines actually work. Despite early talk of ‘the metrical artifices of Celtic poetry’, WBY’s versification is less Irish than French in character. Specifically, it relies upon rime riche, in which words of exactly the same sound are rhymed with one another. Its eight-line shape, which it shares with ten further poems in WATR, broadly resembles the Triolet (roughly speaking, eight lines with two rhymes, though the final two repeat the opening pair); but WBY does not tend to load himself with the chains of the specifically French rhymes and repetitions. This poem, however, does make very prominent use of the rime riche which comes from the traditions of French lyric form. The habit had been frowned upon in English, even by practitioners of elaborate French forms such as Austin Dobson, who spoke of ‘the French system of rhyming’ as ‘the license used by French writers to rhyme words of exactly similar sound and spelling so long as they have different meanings’ (‘A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse’, W. Davenport Adams (ed.), Latter Day Lyrics (1878), 348). Gleeson White, in a compendious anthology of English poems in ornate repetitive French forms, also ruled rime riche out of an English court: ‘In that language [French], words of exactly similar sound and spelling may be used to rhyme together, provided the meaning of the words is distinct – such licence the most doggerel bard would reject in English. [. . .] Purists forbid in our tongue the use of words of distinct spelling, but identical sound’ (Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles Etc., (1887), xliii). It is noteworthy that in WBY’s poem the rhyme words are not strictly in rime riche, for their meanings do not vary: the cloths are the same cloths, the light the same light, the feet the same feet and the dreams the same dreams when they return in their rhyming positions. At the same time, WBY includes an important rhyme, from the point of view of meaning, inside the lines in non-rhyming positions: the internal repetition ‘spread’/ ‘spread’ (5,7) develops into full rhyme – twice – in the course of the final line, and its ‘Tread [. . .] tread’. The poem’s technical intricacy has been addressed most fully by H. Vendler, examining it as ‘an eight-line experiment in rime riche and internal rhyme’, and articulating the ‘aesthetic effect he was working toward’ (93–94): [.  .  .] we see first of all the excessively foregrounded rhyme-words, three of which – cloths, light, and dreams – are repeated within lines as well. We also see the internal rhymes night/ light and spread/ tread, the assonance of being/ feet/ dreams and of embroidered/ enwrought, and the alliteration of had/ heaven/ half. In fact, the only significant word that dwells phonetically unattached to others in the poem is the word poor; Yeats thus makes it stand out unmoored, unmated, unwanted, awkward. [.  .  .] The eight lines here are printed as one stanza rather than two because there is no syntactic stop at the end of the first quatrain; the first sense-unit extends through line 5. [. . .] The conspicuously asymmetrical shape – a five-line, long-breathed curve of the counterfactual fol­ lowed by three one-line statements of the lover’s state [. . .] works by its evident singularity and irregularity against the static, even monotonous, round of the rime riche. We could say that the rime riche stands for the lover’s fidelity, while the irregular syntactic bursts stand for his hope, inadequacy, and nervousness.

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

549

This reads formal features in a quasi-psychological light; and as such, it may neglect the extent to which it is the very intricacy and completeness of the poem’s formal patterns that enable WBY to construct something in which ‘fidelity’ and ‘nervousness’ alike are not so much expressed in as absorbed by the structure of the verse. Text and publication history. Two MSS for this poem survive (both in Berg Collection, NYPL), each a separate sheet written in ink with corrections (MS1 and MS2). Of these, MS1 seems the earlier, and looks to be (at least in part) a working draft. The poem was first published in WATR, and retained in all collected editions thereafter. Copy-text: P49.

H

5

ad I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet:

Title] The clothes of heaven MS1; [Aodh to Dectora del.] The Cloths of Heaven MS2; Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven WATR. 1. cloths] clothes MS1 and clothes corr. to cloths MS2: this is WBY’s spelling through­ out MS1, and first spelling before correction in MS2 throughout: it is almost certainly his misspelling of ‘cloths’, rather than any specific reference to clothing. This is made more cer­ tain once the source in W. Morris is identified (see Sources). embroidered cloths] The phrase is suffi­ ciently unusual to suggest that WBY might have a faint memory of W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘Bellerophon at Argos’, 2072: ‘Gold combs, embroidered cloths, pearl-threaded strings’; the scene where this line occurs is one where ‘The next day wore, and thereto followed night, | And changed through dark and dusk and dawn to light’ (2066–2067), cp. line 4. 1^2.] [Of night and light and the del.] MS1. 2. enwrought] WBY’s word offers a point of contact with a similar (more laborious) metaphor given a stanza to itself in William

Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘The Music Mas­ ter: A Love Story’ II, 373–378: What comfort and what strength in dreams descend, Which do not wholly vanish in the light! When this our little story hath an end, That trembles, dreamlike, on the woof of night, Might so a slender memory be enwrought To glance among the threads of waking thought! 3.] [The green grey and golden and purple clothes del.] The dim and the blue and the grey clothes MS1; The grey and golden and silver cloths MS2. 4. night and light] light and night MS2. ‘Night and light’ is a favoured phrase of A. Swin­ burne, whose uses for it include Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), IX, 248: ‘Through night and light and twilight’, and Songs Before Sun­ rise (1871), ‘Genesis’ 21–22: ‘Then between shadow and substance, night and light, | Then between birth and death, and deeds and days’. 5. I would spread] Perhaps the opening of a met­ rical psalm by Isaac Watts is not quite out of

550

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

earshot here for WBY: ‘Lord, I would spread my sore distress | And guilt before thine eyes’ (Works (1810), ‘Psalm 51 v. 3–13’, 1–2). 5, 7. under your feet] A writer in The Academy in 1902 (see Reception and interpretation) heard an echo here of the title and last line of John Francis Waller’s ‘Dance light, for my heart it lies under your feet, love!’ (Poems (1854), 229–231). 7–8.] These lines are developed from the clos­ ing lines of WBY’s ‘The Pathway’ (1891), a poem which had remained in MS form only:

‘Tread gently, tread most tenderly, | My life is under thy sad feet’ (7–8). 8. Tread] [You del.] Tread MS1. on my dreams] In the context of the domi­ nant metaphor of cloths in this poem, ‘tread on’ is a natural phrase; even so, ‘on my dreams’ is an unusual locution. It is found, with something of the physicality given it by WBY, in J.C. Mangan’s poem supposedly from the Turkish, ‘The Karamanian Exile’ (first publ. Dublin University Magazine 1844), 9–10: ‘So thou loomest on my dreams, | Karaman!’

178

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED

WERE DEAD

Date of composition. The poem was probably composed in Jan. 1898. WBY’s letter to Clement Shorter of c. 22 Jan. 1898 (CL 2, 174) in all likelihood accompanied a version of this poem for Shorter to illustrate and then offer to The Sketch, and WBY had told Shorter of poems (probably including this one) nearing completion the previous week (see notes to ‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge’). The first weeks of 1898 were a time of anticipation for WBY: MG was to arrive in London on 20 Jan., and this poem, like the others that were to share the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ title, reflects a renewed intensity of the poet’s romantic interest in MG. Context and sources. This poem’s apparent strangeness of approach – a love poem tak­ ing for its occasion the lover’s fantasy of his beloved’s death and projecting a resolution of romantic dilemmas in just such an imagined event – is apt to puzzle, or even shock, contemporary poetic expectations. It takes nothing away from the poem’s strangeness to observe that the later nineteenth century was not without poems that adopted similar imaginative positions. Famously, E.A. Poe had written in ‘The Philosophy of Composi­ tion’ (1846) about his own ‘The Raven’: I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word ‘Nevermore’ at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object-supremeness or perfection at all points, I  asked myself – ‘Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death, was the obvi­ ous reply. ‘And when,’ I  said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poeti­ cal?’ From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious – ‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beau­ tiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.’ In French poetry, the work of poets such as Baudelaire (in particular parts of his Les Fleurs du Mal) established a lyric perspective in which the embrace of death found cre­ ative room for the death of the embraced, and even the embracing of the dead. Baude­ laire’s sonnet ‘Remords Posthume’ seems to mark out in advance some of the paths WBY’s poem will follow, beginning ‘Once you are sleeping, my lovely dark one, | At the DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-180

552

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED WERE DEAD

base of the monument made out of black marble’, and moving on to detailed fantasy about ‘When the stone, pressing on your frightened breast | And your flanks, supple now with a charming nonchalance, | Stops your heart beating and wishing’ [‘Lorsque tu dormiras, ma belle ténébreuse, | Au fond d’un monument construit en marbre noir’, ‘Quand la pierre, opprimant ta poitrine pereuse | Et tes flancs qu’assouplit un charmant nonchaloir, | Empêchera ton coeur de batter et de vouloir’]. Modern poetry in English picked up on some aspects of this, and Algernon Swinburne and after him WBY’s friend Arthur Symons found in their own versions of ‘Decadence’ resonances from the theme of the envisaged death of the beloved. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866) included the lurid monologue, ‘The Leper’, where a servant revels in the beauty of his dead mistress (13–20): I vex my head with thinking this.

Yea, though God always hated me,

And hates me now that I can kiss

Her eyes, plait up her hair to see

How she then wore it on the brows,

Yet am I glad to have her dead

Here in this wretched wattled house

Where I can kiss her eyes and head.

Swinburne reaches (or plumbs) levels of excitement that are wholly alien to the tone of WBY’s poem, and it is as well to be aware of this sharp difference when consider­ ing how WBY stands in relation to the ‘necrophiliac’ strain of Anglo-French poetry (105–108): Love bites and stings me through, to see

Her keen face made of sunken bones.

Her worn-off eyelids madden me,

That were shot through with purple once.

Symons hints at such extremes rather than articulating them, but poems of his such as ‘Morbidezza’ (Silhouettes, 1896) are full of French and Swinburnian suggestion: ‘White girl, your flesh is lilies | Grown ’neath a frozen moon, | So still is | The rap­ ture of your swoon | Of whiteness, snow or lilies’ (1–5). In pictorial art, too, there are parallels; but one work in particular may relate closely to WBY’s intended effect in this poem. The artist Althea Gyles (1868–1949) was a regular acquaintance of the poet, and she contributed significantly to books such as WATR and The Secret Rose by her cover designs for them, which WBY admired. In The Dome for Dec. 1898, WBY wrote about several of her drawings, including ‘The Knight Upon the Grave of His Lady’, where a knight in full armour stretches out over the grave of his beloved, head down and arms above his head, his hands clasped in prayer: the lower half of Gyles’s design shows as in cut-away the contents of the grave, where the skeleton lies

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED WERE DEAD

553

upwards in a rotted-away coffin, so that only the soil comes between the face of the knight and the skull of his lady. WBY’s interpretation of the piece markedly avoids morbidity (CW 9, 248–249): The Knight Upon the Grave of His Lady tells much of its meaning to the first glance; but when one has studied for a time, one discovers that there is a heart in the bulb of every hyacinth, to personify the awakening of the soul and of love out of the grave. It is now winter, and beyond the knight, who lies in the aban­ donment of his sorrow, the trees spread their leafless boughs against a grey win­ ter sky; but spring will come, and the boughs will be covered with leaves, and the hyacinths will cover the ground with their blossoms [. . .] The very richness of the pattern of the armour, and of the boughs, and of the woven roots, and of the dry bones, seems to announce that beauty gathers the sorrows of man into her breast and gives them eternal peace. This meditation on death and love, written within a year of the poem, in some ways revisits WBY’s own imaginative reception of the motif of the lover in the presence of a dead beloved. Although in the first place it is intended as commentary on Gyles, it also shows WBY’s own conception of romantic consolation as figured in the imagined death of the loved one. The goal of ‘eternal peace’ is of relevance to the poem, and this is in fact at odds with any supposed cultivation of decadent shock value. It is useful to recall that the poem was at first (and possibly for some time after its initial publication) intended as an address from Aedh to Dectora; and Dectora came to WBY primarily from his own The Shadowy Waters, where (in its many successive versions through the mid-to-late 1890s) she was in constant danger of death; and eventually, she would end the drama by celebrating, along with Forgael, an elaborate (and quasi-Wagnerian) Liebestod. It should also be remembered that this was the one poem of the sequence which WBY thought (rightly, as it turned out) suitable for a popular publication like The Sketch. That this was not the kind of paper to buy sub-Swinburne necrophiliac titillation is obvious from even a casual glance; and WBY knew his market. Reception and interpretation. Little in the way of contemporary reception survives, but there is no evidence that this poem struck its first audiences as especially shock­ ing. This is not to say that early readers were necessarily perceptive: in 1910, the poem was praised as ‘that song of estranged lovers, sobbing out its choking sorrow, and yet shot through with the generosity of belief that in the last resort the beloved would finally understand it was all a mistake and forgive and blot out the bitter remembrance of error’ (Geraldine Hodgson, Contemporary Review 1 Jul. 1910). This seems to mis­ read the poem at a basic level, but so perhaps does F. Reid five years later, writing that ‘Aedh would rebuild the whole world, making of it a shrine for love; and that the beloved might be more tender and compassionate, he would have her dead, “under the dock-leaves in the ground” ’ (Reid, 75–76.) Wisely unwilling to follow such lines of reasoning, modern criticism has had some difficulty with the poem, tending to read it psychologically, to pass over it quickly, or to avoid it altogether. A.R. Grossman draws attention to the poem’s structure: its apparent circularity, and its rhyme scheme

554

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED WERE DEAD

which, he says, ‘exposes an irrationality characteristic of Yeats’s poetry in the late nineties [. . .] the formal correlative of the syntactic design of the poem, an elaborate condition contrary to fact’. As far as rhyme and syntax are concerned, he points out that line 7 ‘introduces a new rhyme element and a new syntactic unit, though the poet is reluctant to admit an interruption of the single extended arc of speech’ (Grossman, 155). This may be so, though it could be explored in more detail by a critical analysis; certainly, WBY engineers a strange effect in lines 6 and 7, for ‘because you were dead’, which brings one clause to a stopping point, reintroduces not just the a rhyme but the very word, ‘dead’, which ended the first line. The rhyme scheme up to this point had suggested quatrain-structure, quite possibly that of a sonnet, in abab, followed by a c rhyme: the ear may expect cdcd, but ‘dead’ disallows this, and the sentence has to pick up from its interruption, with ‘Nor would you rise and hasten away’. As a whole, too, the poem disallows certain formal expectations: it is not a sonnet, and for more reasons than merely its having thirteen rather than fourteen lines, since it disperses rhymes and moves neither to conclusion nor towards formal closure, circling back to its beginning, and strengthening the first construction of ‘Were you but . . .’ to become ‘O would that you . . .’. It is as though the form of the poem as well as its expression is set against the possibility of any development or argument. The poem is naturally rich in symbolism: E. Loiseaux, writing of the hair and the stars in 9–10, says that ‘the image evoked does not correspond to what we know of our world’, becoming thus ‘entirely symbolic’ (Loiseaux, 70). But critics have been on the whole unwilling to allow the poem very much in the way of symbolic licence: the wish that the beloved were dead is, for some, to be taken only in a literal way. Oddly perhaps, this insistence on WBY’s literal making of the wish is understood in relation to poetic analogues and precursors (for which murderous wishes do not as a rule have much need). W.K. Chapman writes of ‘the sensational morbidity of Yeats’s misshapen sonnet’, saying that ‘it most recalls the necrophilia of Swinburne and Rossetti, whose House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence, with the imitative verses of Edward Dowden, almost certainly had a place in the background of Yeats’s poem’ (151). E. Cullingford is more thoroughgo­ ing: she asserts that ‘Necrophilia is a common fantasy of the rejected male’, and sees the poem as one where ‘Yeats’s dream of his beloved as a corpse has become con­ scious desire for her death’. Cullingford supplies WBY with an articulation of what she sees between the lines of all this: ‘The speaker longs for the beloved’s demise because in death she will forgive him, maternally caress him, and not abandon him for political meetings or holidays with her other lover’ (Cullingford, 48). Examples quoted by Cullingford from Swinburne and Rossetti go to show that fantasies of the dead beloved, which could have necrophiliac overtones, were in the late nineteenthcentury poetic repertoire; but the extent to which WBY’s poem stands at an angle to these, rather than following their pre-set formula, is barely registered – though when the critic notices that this poem ‘disarms by the frankness of its title’ (52), a reluc­ tance to be sufficiently disarmed results in her missing a clue. WBY does not disclose the shocking nature of the thought by developing it through the course of the poem, but makes that thought (possibly, indeed, already carrying much of its past poetic baggage) the starting-point for a lyric address. In a subtle and theoretically astute

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED WERE DEAD

555

reading, J. Ramazani notes how ‘Yeats’s lyrics reveal less the personal pathology of a necrophiliac than an awareness of unconscious desires. [. . .] Suggesting that their desire-charged language depends on the imagined absence or death of the loved one, these poems exemplify and highlight the psychological basis of much erotic poetry’. Ramazani goes on to see a ‘disjunction between the two levels of the poem’s rhetoric’, where ‘The beloved is a dead woman [. . .] and she is a divine principle of the cosmos, dispersed in interstellar space’, and where ‘the poem shows us that it must ‘kill’ the beloved as natural image in order to transfigure her into a divine principle of the imagination’ (Ramazani, 22–23): Though the beloved in Yeats does differ from the corpses in Poe and Baudelaire, this woman is both a disembodied essence and a cold, dead body, lying in the ground. Yeats even specifies the coarse weeds – dock-leaves – that cover her grave. In the dream-logic of this wish-poem, the poet ‘wishes his Beloved were dead’ because dead, she would generate language, not her own language but the words he wants to hear: ‘you would murmur tender words, | Forgiving me, because you were dead.’ These words forgive d’outre-tombe his transgressions, possibly even his having wished her dead. N. Grene makes some of these points when he writes of how ‘The poet does not really want the loved one dead; this is rather a wish-fulfilment fantasy expressive of the impossibility of her murmuring tender words to him in the present life’ (155). In all the literal, psychological, and broadly biographical readings of the poem, notice is seldom taken of the significance of the central core of the speaker’s morbid fantasy, which is that of forgiveness (line 6): pace some readings, it is most unlikely that the speaker wants to be forgiven by his own murder-victim here  – though the possible echo of Browning’s wife-killing Count Guido (see note) could doubtless be employed to bolster this view of the matter. Less dramatically  – but perhaps more interestingly  – there may be a suggestion here that WBY is aware of his own short­ comings in the conduct of his relationship with MG, all brought about, in one way or another, by his untiring efforts over years to make that love other than a physically unrequited one. In this sense, the death of the beloved puts in place an imaginative scenario which is the very opposite of necrophiliac: the beloved here moves beyond the claims of physical love, and a spiritual consummation is no longer a second best, but now the only option. However, that all of this is a fantasy rather than a realisable fact is something about which the poem is perfectly explicit. Like other fantasy poems of WATR, it looks for ways to make the most of what is primarily imagined, or belongs to imagination alone. Text and publication history. The earliest text is the poem’s first published version, in The Sketch for 9 Feb. 1898 (S). WBY made a clipping of this and pasted it into the beginning of a notebook, entering some revisions in ink (Berg Collection, NYPL); later, a TS was prepared, with holograph additions at the top of the page (also Berg Collec­ tion): these are TS 1 and TS 2 in the notes. The poem next appeared in WATR, and was retained by WBY in all collected editions thereafter.

556

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED WERE DEAD

Copy-text: P49.

W

5

ere you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast; And you would murmur tender words, Forgiving me, because you were dead: Nor would you rise and hasten away, Though you have the will of the wild birds, But know your hair was bound and wound

Title] Aodh to Dectora S; Aodh to Dectora IV TS 2; Aedh wishes his Beloved were Dead WATR. In TS 2, the typed ‘Aodh to Dectora’ has been cancelled, and replaced with the title and added ‘IV’ in WBY’s hand: ‘Dectora’ here shows signs of having been corrected from ‘Dectira’. The poem had not featured in the ‘Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs’ sequence for The Dome in May 1898, but it appears that for a time at least WBY thought of keeping the sequence for WATR and making this its final poem. 2. lights] light S; corr. to lights TS 1. 2, 13. were paling] The verb is OED 3.1.a: ‘To grow pale or dim; to lose colour or bright­ ness’. Here, cp. Samuel Lover, Songs and Bal­ lads (1858), ‘The Fairy Boy’, 1–2: ‘A mother came when stars were paling, | Wailing round a lonely spring’. In TS 2, WBY twice enters by hand, above the title, ‘while lights were paling’, deleting each (identical) version of the phrase. It is not obvious why this has been done: the phrase is already in place in the TS, and per­ haps WBY by writing it out at the top is won­ dering about its status: the writing-out may be in the nature of resolving a momentary doubt. 6.] Perhaps cp. R. Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868), XI, 1728–1729: ‘While she

leant back and looked her last at me, | For­ giving me’. 9–10.] The image in these lines is one that carries certain occult resonances, most notably with the elaborate symbolism of the Kabbalah in the hairs belonging to the beard of ‘Macroprosopus’ (detailed at length in MacGregor Mathers’s The Kab­ balah Unveiled). Noting this, D. Albright thinks the image ‘may suggest that the form of the beloved is a kind of symbolical diagram of the universe itself ’ (Albright, 474). Beyond and perhaps apart from this  – since even mystically conceived beards are not entirely felicitous in the context of this particular poem  – a con­ nection is probably being made to the various images of the beloved’s bound and unbound hair that run through the poems of WATR. S. Putzel comments that ‘In these lines the simple action of binding a tress has been refined into a richly laden sign that recalls [. . .] the winding serpent on the Tree of Life,’ so that the beloved’s hair ‘is the spiritual substance that eclipses all sources of worldly light, all reminders of time and change’ (209). 9. bound and wound] bound and bound S; corr. to bound and wound TS 1.

HE WISHES HIS BELOVED WERE DEAD

10

557

About the stars and moon and sun: O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.

10. About] In the 1913 Cuala Press A Selec­ tion from the Love Poetry of William Butler Yeats, the reading is ‘Above’: this is very unlikely to be a revision of WBY’s, and much more likely to be an error that he failed to notice when correcting proofs of the book in Apr. 1913. the stars and moon and sun] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Astrophel and Other Poems

(1894), ‘Grace Darling’, 101: ‘Stars and moon and sun may wax and wane, subside and rise’. 13.] While birds grew silent one by one. S; corr. to While lights were paling one by one TS 1. This rejected final line might well show the continuing influence of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, in its fourth line: ‘And no birds sing’. The same poem would be alluded to openly in ‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge’.

179

HE HEARS THE CRY

OF THE SEDGE

Date of composition. Possibly composed in Jan. 1898. It is very likely that this was one of the poems that WBY showed to Clement Shorter, who was hoping for a commission to illustrate verse by the poet in The Dome. In a short note to W.T. Horton of 13 Jan. 1898, arranging a time for that artist to call on him in Woburn Buildings, WBY wrote ‘I hope to have the poems for you’ (CL 2, 172): these are probably the lyrics of the ‘Aodh to Dec­ tora’ sequence, along with ‘He wishes his Beloved were Dead’, which appeared as ‘Aodh to Dectora’ in The Sketch for 9 Feb. 1898. Shorter had hopes of a Sketch commission also, and by 22 Jan. WBY had decided that only ‘He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead’ would suit that publication. Accordingly, he told Shorter ‘I send you only one of the verses that seems on consideration suitable for the ‘Sketch’. They stand better alone than the other two, for the others need the help of the atmosphere of other like verses’ (CL 2, 174). WBY’s ‘the other two’ here suggests that Shorter had been sent three poems; and, once the poem for The Sketch is taken from that number, then only two of the three poems published in the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ sequence can have been given to Shorter in Jan. There is no certainty, therefore, that the present poem was ready to send to Shorter in Jan., and strictly speaking only a two out of three chance that it was. Text and publication history. A holograph fair copy (Berg Collection, NYPL), along with a single TS sheet corrected by WBY (also Berg Collection) are likely to pre-date the poem’s first publication (MS1 and TS). Another holograph, of the entire ‘Aodh to Dectora’ sequence, has this poem as the first item (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) (MS2). The poem was published as the opening piece in a sequence, ‘Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs’ in The Dome for May  1898 (D). It appeared next, now detached from a sequence, in WATR and was retained by WBY in all collected editions thereafter. Reception and interpretation. In 1915, F. Reid singled out the poem for praise (79): There are few comparisons, but everywhere there is metaphor; and sometimes it is hard to tell even where the actual scene passes into a state of mind. In the very first words all that is given in the last words is given. The feeling of separation, of loneliness, of restless, hopeless sorrow seems to exist as much in the wind crying in the sedge, in the desolate lake, though these are suggested in three brief lines, as in the human cry of the man. The picture, the scene, is transfused by the idea, is indistinguishable from it. Later criticism has seldom paused over the poem as a distinct achievement in its own right, but G. Bornstein examined the effects of its Keatsian source (see note to 1–3) and DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-181

HE HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE

559

its Shelleyan conditioning, when ‘Aedh at first appears to have been lured to destruction by a belle dame sans merci’ (58–59): Aedh, whether as principle or personage, becomes more like Shelley’s wan­ derers than Keats’s by his hope for eventual reunion with his belle dame. The last four lines of the poem ironically reverse their apparent meaning  – the hopelessness of reunion  – when one remembers Yeats’s early belief in an apocalypse of regeneration and his knowledge that in Shelley, among others, death signifies ecstatic union. Like Adonais [.  .  .] Aedh must die to be one with what he seeks. Recognising the importance of Keats’s Belle Dame here, it is still possible to interpret Aedh’s situation in ways that reflect more directly on WBY’s own position. In this respect, E. Cullingford’s analysis lays stress on the poet’s ‘fears about potency’ that ‘translate into self-defeat’. Calling the poem WBY’s ‘apocalyptic version of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, she sees it lamenting ‘the absence rather than the malignancy of the beloved’ (53): Esoteric symbols from the Golden Dawn and fashionable fin de siècle apocalyp­ tic ideas converge to project personal despair onto the cosmic canvas. Arma­ geddon becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of consummation. Or, the poem hints, consummation might precipitate the end of the world. The poem does, in fact, achieve the remarkable feat of combining apocalyptic imagery with muted intimacy; and this is a matter both of tone and construction. There are two voices in the poem: strictly, Aedh has only the first three lines for himself, and these are largely bare ones – the one adjective is ‘desolate’, which immediately suggests a transfer­ ence of emotion between speaker and scene. On its own, this cannot produce enough interest or momentum for the development of a poem; but Aedh then repeats what ‘the wind cries’, and does not cap this with any kind of commentary or interpretation. The wind, then, bears all of the apocalyptic imagery – axle-tree/tree of life, mystical banners hurled in the deep, the unbinding of a ‘girdle of light’ – but makes these the presages of something entirely personal, directed to Aedh (or the speaker), and to him alone. In a way, apocalypse is thus put into second place, and its signs are not the worst things to be feared in this scenario; instead, romantic misery usurps apocalyptic transformation, with no great climax of revelation. If one aspect of this poem is the parallel existence of the mystical and the personal, and their mutually informing natures, then another is the maintained and perpetual gap between these two things, with the one unable to solve or soothe the other. WBY’s designedly restrained diction works in step with the syntax (the ten lines are one sentence), the rhymes (ababcdeced, where rhyme sounds work further apart, and the final ‘sleep’ is four lines adrift from its partner), and short two- or threestress lines to produce an effect of quiet, undramatic statement rather than any kind of rhetorical fireworks.

560

HE HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE

Copy-text: P49.

I

5

wander by the edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round, And hands hurl in the deep

Title] Aodh to Dectora MS1; Aodh to Dectira TS; Aodh to Dectora I MS2; ‘Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs I D; Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge WATR. 1–3.] Cp. Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, 3–4 ‘The sedge is withered from the lake, | And no birds sing’ and 47–48: ‘Though the sedge is withered from the lake, | And no birds sing’. It is likely that WBY intends the allusion to be perceived; at the same time, the scene here recalls that of ‘The Host of the Air’ earlier in WATR, and ‘the tall and the tufted reeds | Of the drear Hart Lake’ (3–4). A deso­ late lakeside as the scene of romantic despon­ dency had been present from an early stage in WBY’s imagination: the unhappy suitors at the start of IoS (1884) were by ‘the ruddy river sedge’ (I i 25), while the parting lovers of ‘Ephemera’ (1887) ‘stood | On the lone border of the lake’ (16–17). 4–5.] WBY refers here to the well-known mythological motif of the axle tree, present in both Eastern and Western esoteric tradi­ tions (as with e.g. the Norse Yggdrassil), of a tree around which the universe and the constellations circle. The poet would have encountered this frequently in his reading in comparative mythology, and it carried clear analogues in some of the mystical teachings that were built in to the rituals of the GD; but he would also have been aware of its long literary pedigree, and one instance of this, in Ovid, is perhaps especially apt here. In Meta­ morphoses II, 516–517 (‘ubi circulus axem | ultimus extremum spatioque bravissimus

ambit’) the axle tree keeps the stars in their round  – in the version of Arthur Golding (Ovids Metamorphoses (1567) II, 639–642): in the heigth of heaven hard by the Northren Pole Whereas the utmost circle runnes about the Axeltree In shortest circuit, gloriously enstalled for to bee In shape of starres. Discussing WBY’s uses for the symbol of the Tree of Life in three 1890s poems, R. Ellmann finds its deployment here the most effective: ‘the symbol is not gloated over for its own sake [. . .] but subordinated to its role in the poem [.  .  .] The danger with Yeats’s emphatic symbols in much of his early work lay in their taking on what he hoped to avoid, a value of their own apart from their poetic contexts’ (Identity, 78). break] breaks MS1, breaks corr. to break TS. WBY’s correction is probably in the inter­ ests of close rhyme rather than grammatical nicety. 6.] The banners of east and west del.MS2. (WBY skips line 6 in his fair copy and instantly cor­ rects his mistake.) hands hurl in the deep] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Last Mac Carthaymore’, 1–4: On thy woody heaths, Muskerry  – Carbery, on thy famished shore, Hands hurled upwards, wordless wailings, clamour for Mac Carthymore!

HE HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE

10

561

The banners of East and West, And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep.

In a less mystical sense, but surely part of the subliminal source or effect of WBY’s image, mention of a girdle followed soon by ‘is unbound’ and ‘breast’ (twice) suggests an ungirdling of something other than just the The apocalyptic opening of De Vere’s Jaco­ esoteric body. bite poem bears comparison with the deso­ 9–10.] These lines underwent some minor late cosmology of WBY’s speaker; and the vicissitudes. In MS1 and TS, they read: effect of ‘hands hurl’ is sufficiently specific to ‘Your breast will not lie on the breast | Of suggest that the poet had read (even if he had your beloved in sleep’. This is also the read­ long forgotten) these lines of De Vere’s. ing of MS2, and then of D. In the first two 7.] A.R. Grossman points out that ‘The Banners impressions of WATR, they read: ‘Your head of East and West symbolize for Yeats the pro­ will not lie on the breast | Of your beloved cess of initiation’ (92), and he reproduces these in sleep.’ An errata list in both impressions banners as known to the GD (135). Accord­ makes a correction to the final text: ‘for ing to I. Regardie discussing the GD Tarot, the “head” read “breast,” for “on” read “by.” ’ Banner of the East ‘indicates the rising of the Without a proof for WATR, it is impossible Light, the central fact of initiation’. In the cer­ to know how much of this was composito­ emony of admission for the Neophyte grade of rial error and how much WBY’s revision. the Order (0 =0), the banners of East and West However, ‘by the’ had been ‘on the’ in D, are both employed as parts of the ritual. and before that in TS and MS1, so WBY’s East and West] east and west TS. errata correction here must either make 8. the girdle of light] Girdles of variously sym­ or reinstate a revision of his own. There is bolic hues were called for as parts of the GD no MS evidence for ‘head’ ever having had ceremonies, and while this may well be in the place of ‘breast’: if this was a thought WBY’s mind here, the image itself is more of WBY’s, it cannot have been a long-lived poetic than magical. Perhaps cp. a heavily one, and it is certainly possible that it was symbolic passage in T.L. Beddoes, Poems entirely an error in the printing process, (1851), ‘The Romance of the Lily’, 90–94: caught too late. On the other hand, both ‘head’ and ‘breast’ are laid together in ‘He From the roof of his tower he talks to Jove,

Wishes His Beloved Were Dead’ (another As the god enthroned sits above:

poem of early 1898), 4: ‘And I  would lay Night roosts upon his turret’s height,

my head on your breast’: it is possible that And the sun is the clasp of its girdle of

WBY briefly wished to sound a strong echo light; between the two poems. And the stars upon his terrace dwell. He is gone; and never, never shall return to wild or wood Till the sun burns out in blackness and the moon descends in blood.

180

THE LOVER MOURNS FOR

THE LOSS OF LOVE

Date of composition. This poem was probably composed between Jan. and Apr. 1898. WBY was thinking of a suite of ‘Aodh to Dectora’ poems from Jan. (see note to ‘He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations of Heaven’) and this poem, if it was not initially one of these, was added to their number in time for its pub­ lication in the three-poem sequence in The Dome at the beginning of May. WBY’s work with the various interest groups planning events for the centenary of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 meant that he saw MG relatively often in the first part of 1898 (on 20–21 Jan., in mid-Feb., mid-Mar., and late Apr.): contact with her seems likely to be related to this poem’s address, and even (perhaps) its degree of confession to a love affair which ‘Dec­ tora’ is credited with having brought to an end. Background. This poem clearly derives from the conclusion of WBY’s affair with OS, which was reached early in 1897. In WBY’s unpublished 1915 Autobiography, he recalls the liaison with OS of 1896, but with strong overtones of regret: ‘It will always be a grief to me that I could not give the love that was her beauty’s right, but she was too near my soul, too salutary and wholesome to my inmost being’ (Mem., 88). After his return from a trip to Paris in Jan. 1897, WBY had an encounter that led to his break from OS (Mem., 89): My liaison lasted but a year, interrupted by one journey to Italy upon her part and by one of mine also to Paris. I had a struggle to earn my living, and that made it harder for me, I was so often preoccupied when she came. Then Maud Gonne wrote to me; she was in London and would I come to dine? I dined with her and my trouble increased – she certainly had no thought of the mischief she was doing. And at last one morning instead of reading much love poetry, as my way was to bring the right mood round, I wrote letters. My friend found my mood did not answer hers and burst into tears. ‘There is someone else in your heart,’ she said. It was the breaking between us for many years. This mirrors the poem fairly closely (and one early title was simply the term used here for OS, ‘A Friend’); but it might be as well to remember that when writing this account, WBY could have had the poem as well as the events themselves in his mind. R. Foster remarks of the prose account that ‘It is a painful passage, revealing more about the low voltage of WBY’s sexual feeling for Shakespear than he had perhaps intended,’ and add­ ing that ‘As always he viewed himself more clearly through the filtering lens of poetry’ (Foster 1, 173). Yet the poem should not necessarily be regarded as autobiographically DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-182

THE LOVER MOURNS FOR THE LOSS OF LOVE

563

far-seeing, and its attention is fixed not only on the past but also on the present: it is an address to a Dectora who (from The Shadowy Waters, and other Yeatsian lyrics) can be identified to a large extent with MG, and it is in a sense an act of homage to her and her power. If in life MG ‘certainly had no thought of the mischief she was doing’ when she contacted WBY in early 1897, here Dectora’s involvement in the unhappy affairs of the speaker’s heart is less confidently, but more emphatically, accounted for in the continu­ ing presence of ‘your image’ ‘in my heart’. This deliberate echo of a poem near the begin­ ning of WATR, ‘Aedh Tells of the Rose in His Heart’ (wr. 1892), and its final phrase ‘your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart’ (8) acknowledges how little has changed in the six years between the two poems. This is a fixed dilemma that Dectora – like MG – has done nothing either to lessen or resolve. Reception and interpretation. Early appreciation of this poem took its simplicity as something of a relief, rather than the occasion for critical interpretation. Noting the appearance that month of the ‘Three Songs’ of which the poem was a part, one journal noted that ‘Mr. W.B. Yeats sends three songlets, Celtic in every word, entitled “Aodh to Dectora” ’ (The Academy, 14 May 1898). As a Celtic ‘songlet’, the poem could be made to stand in contrast to the less easily assimilated side of WBY’s Irish imagination, in myth and arcane symbolism. The Athenaeum reviewed WATR, with reservations about WBY’s love of complexity (taking issue in particular with the notes to the volume, ‘an insult to the reader and to the poems themselves’); concluding the review, the author claimed that ‘a higher sincerity, a more perfect simplicity, are possible’, and the present poem was quoted in full as evidence of this, ‘of a quality delicate and charming’: ‘If it came to Mr. Yeats as an inspiration, he is to be congratulated; if it came after long labour, no trace of that labour is left’ (The Athenaeum, 15 Jul., 1899). A more subtle reading of the poem was evident by 1915, when F. Reid’s study of WBY observed how ‘yet again the hollowness of consolation is proved by time, which is powerless to obliterate the beloved’s image, as it is to cover away the memory of past happiness’ (77). Modern criticism has remained convinced of the poem’s transparency when approaching it from a biographical perspective. Even H. Bloom, reading it in the light of King Goll’s ‘god of love’ who is ‘a dangerously compulsive god’ says only that ‘The obses­ siveness of this god dominates the brief lyric, where the ‘beautiful friend,’ Mrs. Shakespear, abandons the poet because his heart retains the image of his past love’ (127). Some readings of this economical (even tight-lipped) poem opt for a fullness of explanation: ‘In terms of its biographical origins,’ N. Grene writes, ‘the scenario of a happy-ever-after union with Olivia Shakespear is revealed as a false alternative to the indelibly scripted love for Maud Gonne,’ offering the reflection that ‘Our limited understanding, our need for comfortable solutions, lead to such hopeful misreadings’ (56). Yet the poem does not dwell on a script, but comes up against an image. As J. Harwood puts this, ‘The phras­ ing is precise: Yeats’s obsession is “the old despair”, in which love might have ended’, and ‘What the beautiful friend sees in his heart is an image, rather than “someone else”, as in Memoirs – an image now wholly dissociated from the actual Maud Gonne’ (78). A per­ ception that ‘presence is helpless in the face of absence’ (E. Engelberg, 227) is linked to the situation where WBY’s ‘loss and the continuation of “the old despair” is inevitable because the speaker has internalised his Ideal; his spiritual lover [. . .] has become part of

564

THE LOVER MOURNS FOR THE LOSS OF LOVE

him [. . .] and she dwells within’ (S. Putzel, 184). While few critics go so far as J. Hassett in claiming that in this poem WBY ‘tells the story of his parting from Shakespear matter of factly, and with little visible evidence of mourning’, and the poem’s straightforwardness ‘is at once its charm and an indictment of the seemingly cavalier attitude of its author’ (Yeats and the Muses (2010), 24), a view persists that the verse offers a window on to the poet’s sexual dilemmas: ‘the speaker acknowledges that his affair with the “beauti­ ful friend” has failed to “end in love” because female reality cannot compete with male fantasy’ (Cullingford, 63). Yet WBY’s style in this poem may be (as the 1899 Athenaeum reviewer allowed, however archly) an aspect of ‘long labour’, rather than an uncharacteristic moment of confessional frankness. The style itself for WBY points forwards, rather than back: as D. Toomey has written, the poem seems ‘to anticipate the ‘new realism’ of the early 1900s’, since it is ‘plain, almost un-metaphorical, and shun[s] the elaborate symbolic structure of other late poems in [WATR]’ (Toomey, 35–36). The poem’s form, also, should not be taken for granted as natural and unforced. H. Vendler gives a detailed analysis of the piece as an early example of what she sees as WBY’s method of ‘subtraction’ in his lyric forms – the poet’s ability to create the formal expectation of rhymes, and lines, which are in the event withheld in the finished composition. For Vendler, the poem has a ‘missing’ eighth line (Vendler, 94–95): The first quatrain of this poem (abab) imposes itself solidly as it closes with a colon after the strong closing rhyme-word end of line 4 (duplicated internally in the same line). We expect a second quatrain as conclusive as the first, and we seem to be finding it: cac – but then the poem vanishes. We have read day/ there/away, but then a blank occurs instead of a rhyme word to match there. For symmetry of rhyme-units, the poem would seem to need an eighth line such as ‘And I lack your love and her care.’ But the lover’s double lack – his beloved woman unpossessed, his kind lover unloved – is expressed powerfully by the total absence of an eighth line. We notice that the poem is nonetheless formally complete, since the end-word of the second line of quatrain two, there, matches the a rhymes (hair/ despair) of the first quatrain, leaving no line unrhymed. While Vendler’s confection of a possible eighth line for WBY to have written here is unconvincing, and the ‘subtraction’ argument itself is open to various kinds of objection, this does catch something of the force exerted by this poem’s combination of straight­ forwardness and formal containment. Close reading of the lines would also demonstrate the degree to which the first line is at a certain syntactic distance from the rest of the poem: three attributes are listed, all of them with close links to other poems in WATR, but it is very far from clear either to whom they belong (to ‘you’, or to the ‘beautiful friend’?), or what they are doing in terms of grammar: while they may be a kind of quasivocative address (in which case they are the symbolic tokens of ‘you’), they may also be an enumeration of the qualities of the ‘beautiful friend’ placed syntactically in advance of any mention of her. The effect, whichever of these possibilities the poet intended, is that of a distancing of the ‘Pale brows, still hands and dim hair’ from the account about to be given by the first-person voice which will say ‘I had [. . .]’. To this extent, a confusion

THE LOVER MOURNS FOR THE LOSS OF LOVE

565

between reality and image is something that is both a dilemma for the speaker, and something which the speaker’s poetry is itself engineering. Vendler’s key perception is that ‘the poem vanishes’ in its final line; for the WATR’s floating feminine symbols of the first line, which also possess the volume’s characteristic dispersing and detaching syntax, are put far away by the report on a reality which is both a statement of personal failure and an achievement of formal conclusion. Textual and publication history. A single sheet holograph for the poem is in the Berg collection, NYPL (MS1), and another holograph copy, along with the other two poems of the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ sequence, is in the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS2). A TS copy with holograph corrections is also in the Berg Collection (TS). This may be later than the poem’s first appearance in print, in The Dome for May 1898, as the second poem in ‘Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs’ (D). The poem was included in WATR, and retained by WBY for all collected editions thereafter. Just after its publication in WATR, the poem appeared in the US, in The Living Age, 12 Aug. 1899. Copy-Text: P49.

P 5

ale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end: She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away.

Title] [Aedh to Dectora II or IV del.] A Friend MS1; Aodh to Dectora MS2; Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs 2 D; A  Friend del. and replaced in WBY’s hand Aodh to Dectira II TS; Aedh Laments the Loss of Love WATR; ‘The Old Despair’ The Living Age (this title is likely to have been editorially supplied). 1. brows] brow D. still hands] Cp. W. Morris, Poems by the Way (1891), ‘Another for the Briar Rose’, 15–16: ‘Thy still hands conquered in the strife; | Thine eyes were light; thy lips were life’. hands] hands, D. 3. the old despair] Not an uncommon phrase, but perhaps cp. the final line (1123) of James Thomson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’: ‘And confirmation of the old despair’ (Poetical Works [1895]).

4. Would end in love] Would [ebb del.] end in love MS1; Might fade in love MS2, D; Would end in love TS. The reading of MS2 shows an interest­ ing moment of experiment, when WBY decides not to persist with the doubling of ‘Would end . . . in the end’. This doubling had not been his first thought, as MS1’s deleted ‘ebb’ shows; ‘Might fade’ takes a verb commonly associated with the ending of love and reapplies it to ‘the old despair’, with striking effect: love becomes the condition of something that has faded. Wisely, though, WBY returned to his doubling of ‘end’, which has the dead finality of a repeated blow, and avoids any kind of verbal spin. 6. saw your] saw [that del.] your MS1; saw that your MS2. 7.] Cp. Byron, Hebrew Melodies (1815), ‘By the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept’, 5–6: ‘And Ye, oh her desolate daughters! | Were scattered all weeping away’.

181

HE THINKS OF THOSE

WHO HAVE SPOKEN EVIL

OF HIS BELOVED

Date of composition. This poem was probably composed in early 1898. For consider­ ations of the dating of the poems in the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ series, see notes to ‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge’ and ‘The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love’. The poem’s specificity of address to MG suggests that it was written when WBY was especially involved with her cultural/political engagements in the difficult matter of the 1798 centenary com­ memorations during the spring of 1898. Context and interpretation. It seems clear that MG is the intended addressee for this poem, and she was probably speaking about it when she wrote to WBY in late Jun. 1898 to say that she had been reading the Dome on her journey from Dublin to London: ‘I read over and over again your poem until I didn’t need the book to read it, it is so beauti­ ful’. It was fortunate that MG had such a good memory for poems about herself, since she proceeded to let WBY know that she had lent that copy of the magazine to her sister, who would ‘send it to you in a few days’ (G-YL, 91). Presumably, MG reacted well to this poem’s grandly indignant rejection of what has been ‘spoken against’ her; and much had indeed been said against MG over the preceding years, especially in the fractious and tight-knit circles of militant (and largely male) Irish nationalism. Personal scandal about MG was never far from the lips of gossip, in Dublin and elsewhere: WBY himself had been maliciously rumoured to be her lover, and even to have procured an abortion for her; and in France, the political enemies of Lucien Millevoye were happy to spread negative stories about MG. As R. Foster says, ‘From 1897 to 1898 the high temperature of extremist politics had been accompanied by feverish personal antipathies, with much slanderous gossip directed at Gonne’ (Foster 1, 195–196). When this poem was written, MG was weathering another storm of slanderous accusations. Here, a principal culprit was Charles McCarthy Teeling, who was involved with the 1798 commemoration plan­ ning, but who nursed an antipathy towards MG, which he acted on by suggesting widely that she was in fact a British spy; Teeling’s most notable occasion for spreading this rumour was at the very event in Paris, for St Patrick’s Day 1897, where MG was a starring speaker. WBY was well aware of Teeling (an old adversary of John O’Leary), and MG sought to use the poet’s good offices to ensure that Teeling was removed from their activ­ ist milieu. She wrote WBY a long letter in late Mar. 1897, asking for help (G-YL, 67–68): Last year when I heard Teeling’s attacks against myself in Dublin I did not think that necessarily he was in the pay of the English Govt. I thought more probably DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-183

HE THINKS OF THOSE

567

that he was some narrow minded idiot who was scandalised at a woman lead­ ing an independent life and perhaps was jealous of me into the bargain never having himself succeeded in anything but now I begin to think worse of him than that. He evidently lied when he said he had been sent by the National­ ists of Ireland to denounce me as a spy of the English and German Govts and I would like some authorised person to write to the secretary of the St. Patrick’s Association to say that Mr. Teeling is certainly not authorised to speak for the nationalists of Ireland, and that he was turned out of their committees. WBY obliged readily, and with some (albeit temporary) success. He also told O’Leary how ‘Teeling has for years been slandering Miss Gonne in the most ignoble and infamous way’ (letter of 31 Mar. 1897, CL 2, 88–89). The poem may be setting its artistic seal on the practical crisis-handling of a year before (though slanders about MG had scarcely ceased in the meantime). Insofar as this is a love poem, it takes full credit for chivalrous defence of the wronged beloved. There is an irony to the fact that, between its first publication in May 1898 and the appearance of WATR in Apr. of the following year, WBY had learned from MG herself that one of the central elements of scandalous gossip about her had all along been based on a truth: in Dec. 1898, she told him ‘the story of her life, things I had heard all twisted awry by scandal, and disbelieved’ (Mem., 132). MG had indeed been the mistress of a French politician (Lucien Millevoye), and had borne him children, without having divulged this to WBY in the previous years. When the poem was written, however, such knowledge was not as yet in WBY’s possession  – though of course it might have been subliminally present, without having become anything as definite as a suspicion. The poem’s gallant defence of MG needs to be set in the context of her demands of the poet in 1897–1898, to which he did his level best to rise. However, at a time when this poem had either recently been composed or was shortly to be composed, in Feb. 1898, WBY received another long letter from MG, in which she set limits to his talk on her behalf, at the same time confirming the limits that were to be set on their relationship (G-YL, 84–85): Once a long time ago I found you had repeated a great deal of conversations I had with you. Of course I did not tell you to do so and it really did not matter but still I hate it – I am very reserved always and talk of myself to VERY few people. While I do not mind in the least what wild lies and calumnies people tell of me it is very painful to me to find that the one or two people I speak freely to repeat my conversation [. . .] It was very pleasant seeing you in London and Liverpool. But you must think very well, what is best for your genius, that should be your 1st consideration. If you find that an absolutely platonic friend­ ship which is all I can or ever will be able to give, unsettles you and spoils your work then you must have the strength and courage at once to give up meeting me. You owe your genius to Ireland, it belongs to Ireland, you have no right to allow anything to injure it. MG was sensitive to loose talk, for she did have secrets to keep; there may be a hint here of why she kept some things from WBY for as long as she did. That WBY was

568

HE THINKS OF THOSE

something of an inveterate gossip was true, and was doubtless known to the poet himself (later, one of GY’s pet names for her husband would be ‘William Tell’). The poem may be an act of overcompensation for such failings, matching the ‘pride’ of ‘the great’ with a pride of its own, so that it finally and defiantly gives the lie to Teel­ ing and his like by a confident appeal to the far posterity that WBY feels is in earshot. MG’s insistence on a ‘platonic friendship’ is made to a man whose casual talk gets in her way; instead, in this poem, WBY puts himself in a position to deserve a closer relationship by a rhetorically confident assertion of his (and MG’s) superiority to the world of gossip. There is little in the way of early reaction to this poem (though MG’s attitude to it (see above) will have meant much to WBY). One sign of initial public welcome was that the poem was set to music by the composer Thomas Dunhill, with his score appearing in The Dome in Jan.1900, and became later a part of his song-cycle The Wind Among the Reeds (1912). The poem has not attracted much attention in modern criticism of WBY. The ending of the poem was seen by R. Ellmann as pre­ figuring later modes of WBY’s writing, especially ‘a language that is confidently racy and apt, tolerates no dullness or flagging, and is capable of being exploited for both high and low subjects’ (Identity, 193). This stylistic point remains important, and could be applied in slightly different ways to all three of the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ poems from 1898: to an appreciable degree, WBY is here already writing the more rhetori­ cal poems with pared-back diction that were to become common in his work of the next decade. Mostly, though, critical views are dictated by biographical interest. For H. Adams, the poem is a way for WBY to ‘express his faithfulness’ to the beloved: ‘The poem contrives to be one of comfort; beneath its surface is perhaps resentment at her failing to appreciate his own sort of magical conjuring power’ (71). This is perhaps more speculation than interpretation, but it can be taken still further. In his largely hostile study of MG, A. Frazier singles out the poem, claiming that ‘If the first line sounds like a masterful lover issuing commands to his pliant mistress, the second reveals that the speaker is not going to make love to the woman after all; he is a hypnotist at work’ (The Adulterous Muse [2016], 163). In later years, this poem would probably have announced itself more frankly as occasional in nature; but WBY does not yet have sufficient confidence in the purely occasional to find a place for this in a volume such as WATR: other kinds of resonance, then, are aimed for, and it is these on which critical attention tends to settle. Some resistance to exclusively biographical interpretation is offered by S. Putzel who, while conceding that the poem is ‘a thinly veiled autobiographical utterance’, notes that (in 1899 at least) ‘Aedh, not Yeats, is the speaker and the poem works symbolically in the con­ text of [WATR] [. . .] Aedh affirms the woman’s otherworldliness and contrasts her with the mortal world, ‘the great and their pride’; when the prophecy is fulfilled, the poet-priest’s song will outweigh all the slander mortals speak against the Ideal woman’ (Putzel, 198). The poem, then, is both occasional and (in intention at least) something other than occasional. Inevitably, this creates critical difficulties; but it must also have caused cre­ ative problems for the poet himself, and there is a sense in which it is itself the record

HE THINKS OF THOSE

569

of those uncertainties. The eyelids and hair of the first line are (by 1898) very definitely allusions to other poems which will make up the WATR volume: the poem begins by reminding readers where it belongs, and this reminder is made even stronger once the injunction to ‘dream’ arrives in the second line. But ‘the great and their pride’ are not much to be met with elsewhere in the book, while they will be encountered twice in this six-line poem. The rhyme scheme has only a and b elements; but ‘pride’, the b rhyme, is made to rhyme with itself before a closing resolution in the defiant ‘lied’. ‘Pride’ is doubly present, then, but it also functions as a double-faced word here: the ‘pride’ of ‘the great’ seems to be disdained, even defied in the dreaming of the beloved; but the whole poem, and the instructions it issues, are themselves matters of ‘pride’ – MG’s, but also WBY’s – now being implicitly celebrated and explicitly exercised. That ‘a mouthful of air’ can be made to do this much is something of a boast (perhaps the only boast in WATR, where so many poems are coloured by deep shades of disap­ pointment and defeat), while the open appeal to a future of ‘children’s children’ voices a steely confidence. For all that, it should be noted that the grandchildren in question are those of the enemy: possible posterities for MG and WBY are (at the very least) kept out of sight. Textual and publication history. The Berg Collection, NYPL has a single-sheet holo­ graph of the poem, along with a sheet with a TS version; a holograph copy of the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ sequence is in the Pierpont Morgan Library. None of these shows significant differences from the published text. The poem first appeared in print as the third item in ‘Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs’ in The Dome (May 1898) (D). It next appeared in WATR and was retained by WBY in all collected editions thereafter. Copy-text: P49.

H

alf close your eyelids, loosen your hair,

And dream about the great and their pride;

Title] Aodh to Dectora: Three Songs, 3 Dome; Aedh thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved WATR. 2. And dream about] In the context of the ‘Aodh to Dectora’ sequence, ‘dream’ here picks up from the previous poem, later ‘The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love’, ‘And dreamed that the old despair’ (3).

There is a marked change in meaning, or at least a change in connotation, between the two instances: here, the injunction to Dec­ tora (or MG) to ‘dream’ carries no overtly ironic implications. Nevertheless, the ver­ bal overlap between the poems means that the irony of one carries (however subtly) into the contemplative speculation of the other.

570

5

HE THINKS OF THOSE

They have spoken against you everywhere,

But weigh this song with the great and their pride;

I made it out of a mouthful of air,

Their children’s children shall say they have lied.

5. a mouthful of air] This was not the striking phrase’s first outing. In the final sentence of his review of Lady Wilde’s Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland (1890), WBY wrote of the faeries as ‘Nations of gay crea­ tures, having no souls; nothing in their bright bodies but a mouthful of sweet air’ (CW 9, 116). The phrase appeared in a prominent position in John Sherman (1891) also, where at the end of Part I  an old woman asks the hero: ‘Why don’t ye stay among your own people  – for what have we in this life but a mouthful of air?’ (41). WBY’s hopes for this phrase were borne out when it was used as a way of talking about poetry’s permanence

by Stephen Gwynne: ‘Kingdoms pass, build­ ings crumble, but the work which a man has fashioned “out of a mouthful of air” defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quiv­ ering substance’ (‘The Life of a Song’, Fort­ nightly Review, Feb. 1904). WBY re-used the phrase himself in his play The King’s Thresh­ old (1904), where Seanchan speaks of ‘some few mouthfuls of sweet air’. The phrase was brought back by Ezra Pound in his Guide to Kulchur (1938): ‘ “I made it out of a mouth­ ful of air” wrote Bill Yeats in his heyday,’ ‘the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet’ (152, first cited in Albright).

182

THE FISH

Date and circumstances of composition. The poem was composed Aug. to Dec. 1898. A letter from WBY to Arthur Quiller-Couch of 11 Aug. 1898 evidently responds to a request for a contribution to The Cornish Magazine, a new monthly publication edited by Quiller-Couch which appeared first in Jul. 1898: ‘I have been trying to write something for you among all kinds of distraction,’ WBY says, ‘but am not sure if what I have done has had its last touch yet,’ adding ‘An obstinate line defeats me’ and promising that ‘I will wait to send it until I get into the quiet of Galway again next week’ (CL 2, 258). Neither of the two surviving MSS shows especial obstinacy in one line, but if this letter refers to the poem, then it is unlikely that it was sent on the schedule given here, and it is more likely that WBY made good on his promise in Nov. The period over which the poem might have been composed was a busy one, during which WBY saw MG often (both in daily life and in spiritual vision); having been in Ireland earlier in the summer, the poet spent the first fortnight of Aug. in London, attending a 1798 centenary event, then returning to Ireland (with MG) for further centenary celebrations. The poet did go from Dublin to Galway, staying both with Edward Martyn at Tillyra and AG at Coole, before going on to spend Oct. in Sligo, where he was in low spirits for some time. It is tempt­ ing to speculate that the poem comes (in its final form, at least) from the time in Sligo, rather than the more hectic weeks beforehand, though it might equally well have been begun by Aug. Context and interpretation. MG wrote to WBY at Coole early in Sept., sending him a box of earth from New Grange, and two bottles, one holding water ‘from the golden Boyne’, and the other ‘containing water from a wonderful holy well at Ballina where I saw the FISH.’ Describing the place, MG added that ‘By it was buried the wife of King Dathai, they have just destroyed her grave to put her in the graveyard it was so wicked and the man who did it got an attack after and has lost all his strength’. At the end of her note, MG told WBY ‘The poem is most beautiful’ (G-YL, 94). MG was referring to Tobar Mhuire (The Well of Mary) near Rosserk Abbey (close to Ballina, Co. Mayo), and it is clear that she and WBY had already had occasion to discuss the fish which might inhabit the waters there. Many holy wells in Ireland contain, or are thought to contain, fish that have supernatural import (either in connection with the relevant saint, or in their own right). In his FFTIP (1888), WBY included a short story by Samuel Lover, ‘The White Trout: A Legend of Cong’ (where a maiden is transformed into a fish, lives in a stream until caught by a soldier, who attempts unsuccessfully to cook her), and follows this with a note (38): DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-184

572

THE FISH

These trout stories are common all over Ireland. Many holy wells are haunted by such blessed trout. There is a trout in a well on the border of Lough Gill, Sligo, that some paganish person put once on the gridiron. It carries the marks to this day. Long ago, the saint who sanctified the well put that trout there. Nowadays it is only visible to the pious, who have done due penance. WBY here refers to Tobernalt, of which he would have had local knowledge; but the story had also appeared in Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Supersti­ tions of Ireland (1887), vol.2, 166–167. (For more on the fish near holy wells, see notes to ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’.) MG’s sighting of the fish at the holy well in Ballina has no religious charge (clearly, both she and WBY are inclined to treat the matter lightly); on the other hand, it is in the context of her collecting materials for various attempts at evocation and meditation relating to the evolving rituals of WBY’s projected Celtic Mys­ teries. However, when WBY writes this poem it is not the mystical, the religious, or the mythic that is closest to the surface. Instead, it is the relationship with MG itself which is most important for the metaphor. Catching the tone of the poem’s understanding of that relationship is not easy. For H. Adams, the short lyric is ‘clearly an allegory of the poet’s relation to the beloved, the fisherman’s net being his strategy, including his poems, to capture her,’ but ‘the poem is a threat to her that his future readers will think her unkind’. Yet Adams goes on to claim that WBY imagines himself ‘a fisherman in search of the beloved, who is also wis­ dom,’ while this ‘blending of the beloved with wisdom has been trouble all along,’ since it is ‘abstracting the beloved from herself ’ (Adams, 66–67). The metaphor is slippier than this, though: if ‘you’ is ‘wisdom’ as well as MG, why should future readers ‘blame’ it for the failure to be caught, rather than blaming the fisherman himself? And if the context of tales like ‘The White Trout’ is brought to bear, along with the general prohibition on the catching of fish from holy wells, then catching this particular creature in a net, even one made from ‘little silver cords’, is something for which the fisherman is the more likely to attract ‘blame’. A.R. Grossman’s reading of the poem, and of this situation, is almost wholly mystical and hermetic in focus: ‘the fish is the prima materia, the lapis philosophorum, the ultimate identity of the self,’ he claims, appealing to W.M. Westcott’s Collectanea Hermetica vol.1 (1893), and the nugget of ancient alchemical wisdom there that ‘Philosophers have their sea also, wherein small fishes plump and shining with silver scales are generated; which he that shall entangle, and take by a fine and small net shall be accounted a most expert fisherman’ (quoted Grossman, 161). Yet this critic may be on firmer ground when he concludes that ‘the speaker of the poem objectifies the role of the artist,’ and that ‘When Yeats begins to refer to himself as an artist, he ceases to be a mystic’ (162). S. Putzel, who wants so much to see the fish as a symbol (whether magi­ cal, theosophical, or Celtic) that he does not consider its possibilities as a less hermetic metaphor, insists that we ‘do not blame the Ideal for avoiding capture,’ since ‘we realise that the Ideal, by definition, must remain uncaught for ‘times out of mind’, until the mind is no longer bound by time’ (175). And yet ‘blame’ is exactly the concept that the close of this poem decides to raise: it is arguably even the poem’s point. In this respect, it is impossible to discount the biographical context, and not to sense a growing frankness

THE FISH

573

and confidence in the poet’s voice when he considers his unconsummated love for MG alongside his increasingly consummate art. That art is well exemplified in the poem itself, where rhythm is carefully measured and varied, and a single sentence weaves through eight lines of abbacddc-rhymed verse. The intricacy, as well as the resource, involved in this has been praised by J. Longenbach (The Virtues of Poetry (2013), 4–5): Not one line [. . .] is perfectly iambic [. . .] Yeats employs shockingly few multi­ syllabic words. Almost every word in the poem is derived from the language’s Germanic base (ebb, flow, tide, moon, set), and this drives the poem’s rhythmic sophistication. Without the subtle variation of the metrical pattern through which the poem’s single sentence moves, the poem’s almost unrelievedly mono­ syllabic diction would fall flat. Textual and publication history. Two MSS are extant, both in the Berg Collection, NYPL. Each is a single sheet, written in ink by WBY, with deletions and corrections (MS1 and MS2). The poem was first publ. in The Cornish Magazine Dec. 1898 (CM), then in WATR. It was retained by WBY in all subsequent collected editions. Copy-text: P49.

A

5

lthough you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords,

Title: CP33 and after. [Aengus del.] Braseal the Fisherman MS2 Bressel the Fisherman CM Breasal the Fisherman WATR The Fisherman PW06, CWVP08, Later Poems 1922- edn. of 1931.

the reference, as the translation goes on to say, is to the Echtra Bhresail, ‘Bresal’s Adventure’, contained in the medieval Book of Leinster (vol.2, 516–517).

Breasal] The name Bresal (possibly mean­ ing ‘brave in combat’) is relatively common in early Irish myth and history. Standish H. O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica (1892) translates a reference to ‘Bresel MacBrian, king of Ulidia’ who ‘on adventure bent dived down into Loch Laoigh, under which he abode for fifty years’;

1. hide] have hidden MS2. 2. tide] waters del. tide MS2. 3. of coming days] of [the del.] coming [times del.] days MS2. 6. little silver cords] WBY here echoes the ‘lit­ tle silver trout’ in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, 8.

574

THE FISH

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

MS1 draft.] Since it differs in so many respects from later versions, it is useful to give MS1 in full: The Fisher Aodh Perhaps because I have written rhymes

About the casting out of my net,

The people of [the del.] coming times

People will know in the coming times

How I cast it out when the sun had set

And the moon had risen, and times out of mind

Your heart [has del.] leaped out of the silver cords,

[And they will del.]

And believe that you were proud and unkind

And [they will del.] blame you many bitter words.

7. were] are del. were MS2. hard and unkind] WBY arrives at this phrase by way of ‘proud and unkind’ (see MS1 above), but it nevertheless echoes an otherwise very unlike poem by Tennyson, his monologue ‘The Grandmother’. The speaker, in advanced old age, remembers a quarrel with her husband just before their engagement (he had been seen walking out

with her cousin Jenny, who ‘had tript in her time’): ‘‘Marry you, Willy!’ said I, ‘but I needs must speak my mind, | And I fear you’ll listen to tales, be jealous and hard and unkind’’ (53–54). Both ‘Willy’ and the trials of courtship seem relevant to WBY’s case. 8. blame you with many] blame you [, it may be, with del.] with many MS2.

183

HE THINKS OF HIS PAST

GREATNESS WHEN A PART

OF THE CONSTELLATIONS

OF HEAVEN

Date of composition: The poem was probably composed in late summer/early autumn 1898. A letter written to WBY by MG of Sept. 1898 thanks him for his ‘beautiful poem’, and the editors of G-YL and CL 2 both identify this with the present piece. Reception and interpretation. The poem received little specific critical reading in WBY’s lifetime, although there is a creative gesture of homage in Ezra Pound’s poem ‘The Tree’ (‘I stood still and was a tree amid the wood, | Knowing the truth of things unseen before’), collected in his Personae (1909). Modern criticism only occasionally addresses the poem, though R. Ellmann in 1954 offered an admiring analysis (Identity, 126): The simplicity of the language and word order accentuates the startling images of the first seven lines; and the equally simple but varied syntax of the last five lines throws their passionate sorrow into relief. The poem concentrates on the expression of a single emotion [. . .] Rhythmically, the poem is astonishingly varied, the lines contracting and expanding to suit the thematic development, each shift in tempo precisely calculated, and the whole poem tightly bound together in spite of constant variation from the rhythmical norm. Most commentary fixes on the theme of reincarnation, and this was seen by A.R. Gross­ man as one in which ‘The symbol of absolute personal identity, the identity of the poet, is the knowledge of the past transformations of the self ’ (135). More elaborately, S. Putzel saw the poem as the culminating statement in WATR, returning the book’s attention to the pitch of its opening poem, ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’: ‘Mongan,’ Putzel wrote, ‘is the quintessential visionary seeker and sufferer [. . .] The volume ends on a note of sexual and spiritual longing, and it ends as it began – at the eternal moment before the always imminent apocalypse’ (211). For E. Larrissy, ‘the fact that Mongan will never in his whole life possess his beloved renders painful and ironic the ubiquity of desire, and painful the whole lengthy business of transmigration’ (76). The question of past lives, transmigration, and what Ellmann called ‘passionate sor­ row’ in this poem’s speaker is one that has a relation to WBY’s own position in 1898, and the bringing to a close of the lyrics for WATR. In assigning the lines to Mongan, WBY is not necessarily adopting a persona or wearing a dramatic mask; instead, Mongan’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-185

576

HE THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS

account of how he has had many identities reflects directly on the extent to which the poems of WATR have themselves worn varying identities – Aedh, Hanrahan, Aengus, Breasal, Michael Robartes – that are something less than fully-formed dramatic char­ acters, and that have been, indeed, to a great extent different versions of the same voice and attitude. As WBY puts it in his WATR note, ‘I have used them in this book more as principles of the mind than as actual personages’; and it is the poet’s own mind of which they are ‘principles’. It may be that WBY’s decision to remove the names of speakers from the titles when he came to reprint these poems is an acknowledgement of their com­ mon nature, and this finds expression in the simple pronoun ‘He’, or terms such as ‘The Lover’. The entire volume allows images – or, for WBY, symbols – to float in and out of the various, notionally distinct lyric pieces: it is as though one poem can often remem­ ber being another poem elsewhere in WATR, and in this sense there is a transmigration of image, phrase, and self-expression throughout. ‘He Thinks of His Past Greatness . . .’ may be a concentrated exploration of this very condition. At the same time, it is another lyric in which the poet’s own life as it was being lived is essential to the expression. Lines 8–10 offer a singularly bleak kind of knowledge, which is essentially and inescapably self-knowledge, regarding the failure of love. This has been an abiding theme in the vol­ ume, but it is not a theme (as this final poem confirms) that is going to find any kind of resolution. Knowing ‘all things’, it turns out, means also knowing the very worst; and here, the original ending (the ending that was in place until 1922) represents an excep­ tionally poignant and disciplined moment, in which all of WATR’s symbolic weight is brought to bear on a repeated series of ‘pitiful’, but forever unavailing, ‘cries’ (see note to 11–12). That the poem’s voicing of the unrequited lover’s plight is its centre of bitter pathos is hardly to be doubted; but nor is it a matter that WBY attempts to make more explicit, or to amend. Textual and publication history. A handwritten fair copy on a single MS leaf (Berg Collection, NYPL) predates the first publication of this poem (MS), as does a TS with MS corrections also in the Berg Collection (TS). The lines appeared in The Dome for Oct. to Dec. 1898 (D), and were immediately republished in The Academy of 8 Oct. 1898. The Academy text is identical, but the poem appears without the authorial note by which it is prefaced in D. The poem was included in WATR (where it was the final poem) and in subsequent collected editions; for Later Poems (1922) WBY put in place revision and a new ending, and this remained in the text of all future collections.

HE THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS

577

Copy-text: P49.

I

have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now:

Title] Song of Mongan (D); Mongan Thinks of his Past Greatness WATR. Before the appear­ ance of the title in its final form in PW06, the poem was initially ‘He Thinks of his Past Greatness’: the remainder of the title is added at proof stage (page proofs for PW06, Berg Collection). The eventual title places a degree of emphasis on the poem’s stellar aspect, which in fact would otherwise remain a relatively subordinate one: line 4 refers to stars, but only as they are represented in effigy, hung in the hazel tree’s branches  – and it is an existence as a tree, not as a star or stars, which is being remembered by the speaker at that point. ‘When’ in the title may also, however, be taken in the sense of ‘once’, so that Mongan remem­ bers a ‘past greatness’ on earth when he is a star in the firmament. 1898 note] In D, WBY prefaced the poem with a note: Mongan, in the old Celtic poetry, is a fa­ mous wizard and king who remembers his passed lives. ‘The Country of the Young’ is a name in the Celtic poetry for the coun­ try of the gods and of the happy dead. The hazel tree was the Irish tree of Life or of Knowledge, and in Ireland it was doubt­ less, as elsewhere, the tree of the heavens. The Crooked Plough and the Pilot Star are translations of the Gaelic names of the Plough and the Pole Star. The seventh-century king Mongan features in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre (Book of the Dun Cow), where he is accredited with prophetic powers, specifically in relation to infor­ mation that was known only to the longdeparted Fenian Cailte. In Eugene O’ Curry’s work, this is seen as indicating a belief that Mongan might be a reincarnation of Finn: ‘This Mongan was the most learned and wise layman of his time: so remarkable were his knowledge and wisdom that people believed

him to be Finn Mac Cumhaill himself; and this belief or fact is asserted in the present legend’ (Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), Vol. III, 176). John Rhys picked up on this in a footnote: “Though Finn is not said to be re-born as Oisin, there was an Irish story which gave him a second life, namely, in the person of an Ultonian king called Mongan’ (Celtic Heathendom [1888], 552). This would have been enough for WBY to adopt Mongan as the possessor of a memory of ‘passed lives’, but a further source for the idea had appeared more recently, and seems to have influenced directly at least WBY’s note. The edition and translation by K. Meyer and A. Nutt, The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal (1895) featured Nutt’s ‘Essay upon the Irish vision of the happy otherworld and the Celtic Doctrine of Rebirth’, where dis­ cussion of Mongan in the Voyage of Bran in terms of historical and other literary evi­ dence includes a summary conclusion (139): The above evidence, and the tales them­ selves, as found in the eleventh century MS, the Book of the Dun Cow, clearly prove that stories at the very least as old as the tenth century existed concern­ ing a Mongan, son of Fiachna, a noted wizard and a rebirth of Manannan, and also, by some accounts, of Finn, son of Cumal. [. . .] the evidence that Mongan was a rebirth of Finn is every whit as good as that for his being a rebirth of Manannan. It is also certain that by the end of the tenth century at the latest this wizard Mongan was identified with the historical son of Fiachna, whose death at the hands of an Arthur of Britain is as­ signed to the year 620. WBY’s ‘famous wizard’ is a version of the ‘noted wizard’ here. Reference to Mongan as the reincarnation of Finn had also been made

578

5

HE THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS

I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung

The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough

Among my leaves in times out of mind:

I became a rush that horses tread:

I became a man, a hater of the wind,

in Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville’s Cours de litté­ rature celtique vol. 2 (1883), but although WBY was aware of this work, it would be unwise to assume he studied it closely in the original French (a translation into English was not pub­ lished until 1903). 1. the Country of the Young] This reference to the mythic Tir na nOg may take for granted a reader’s prior contact with the Land of the Young from WBY’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. No ale is consumed there, however, despite its many intoxicating entertainments. 3–5.] In WATR, a note which includes refer­ ence to the present poem mentions the con­ stellations that ‘move about the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many countries, and are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology’. At this point WBY has the only sentence in the note which refers specifically to this poem: ‘It is this Tree of Life that I have put into the ‘Song of Mongan’ under its common Irish form of a hazel; and, because it had sometimes the stars for fruit, I have hung upon it ‘the Crooked Plough’ and the ‘Pilot’ star, as Gaelic-speaking Irishmen sometimes call the Bear and the North star.’ R. Ellmann commentated that the ‘Tree of Life’ association ‘was less certain than [WBY] and George Russell assumed (Identity, 77): We may still wonder why the Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough are hung from it. Yeats’s note says only that they are Gaelic names for the North Star and the constel­ lation of the Bear. The answer, which he does not divulge, is that the Pilot Star, like the rose, suggests direction, guidance, and a goal, while the Crooked Plough, like the

cross, suggests difficulty and hardship. The union of the two on the tree of life is thus a fresh way of presenting the rosecross conjunction. 4. the Pilot Star] OED, listing the term as poeti­ cal and now rare, gives: ‘A star regarded as a guide or a source of inspiration, spec. the Pole Star; (also) the morning star (Venus)’. There is no evidence that the term is (as WBY’s note implies) specifically Irish in origin. the Crooked Plough] Again, this is not a usual term for the constellation of the Plough (in Ursa Major, thus associated with the Bear in WBY’s WATR note earlier); the term ‘crooked plough’, however, is found in poetry from the seventeenth century onwards, but used to describe a literal plough, deriving from Vir­ gil’s Georgics (e.g. I, 169 ff.): astronomical, as opposed to literary, reference is lacking. 5. times out of mind] This phrase occurs also in another poem of 1898, ‘Breasal the Fish­ erman’ (later ‘The Fish’), 5: ‘And how you have leaped times out of mind’. It is a rela­ tively unusual phrase, and although there are instances of its being used in the nine­ teenth century in broadly the sense implied by ‘Breasal the Fisherman’ – i.e. to mean on occasions too numerous to remember exactly  – the use here, where it means past times now beyond the reach of memory, is an idiosyncratic one. 6. that horses] that ^the^ horses MS. 7.] This line sets the speaker’s humanity sym­ bolically at odds with the world of the super­ natural. In the first of his notes to WATR (to ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’), only a turn of a page away from this poem, WBY writes that ‘Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly

HE THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS

10

579

Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head

May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair

Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.

O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,

Must I endure your amorous cries?

the Sidhe have much to do with the wind,’ adding that ‘They journey in the whirling winds,’ and telling how ‘When the country people see the leaves whirling on the road they bless themselves, because they believe the Sidhe to be passing by’. E. Larrissy com­ ments that Mongan ‘has been blown my a malign wind away from the expressive heart of things,’ so that ‘when he becomes a man, he becomes ‘a hater of the wind’: that is to say, of the wandering principle of life Yeats has praised so often, but which seems here to ensure misery and humiliation’ (Larrissy, 76). 8.] Knowing one thing alone of all things that his head MS [with final form of the line entered at the bottom of the page]; the first MS form of the line survived in TS, where it was corrected to the final form. 9.] Final form of the line comes with CP33. Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair MS, TS, D, WATR-Later Poems (1931). 11–12.] Although the rushes and the fowl of the air | Cry of his love with their pitiful cries. MS, TS, D, WATR-CWVP08. The revision of the final couplet made for Later Poems (1922) and retained thereafter is by no means an obvious improvement; or rather, it changes the character of the entire poem in a radi­ cal way, when the quality of the earlier lines is ruthlessly sacrificed in the service of this change. As the final couplet in WATR, the earlier version also brings together motifs

from throughout the book – the rushes and the birds, both making their cries, are heard often elsewhere in the volume; ‘the fowl of the air’ echoes in itself WBY’s striking title ‘The Host of the Air’, while ‘his love’ is fit­ tingly in the last line of this book of (often stricken or unhappy) love-poems. In a book so careful of intricate repetitions, both within poems and between them, ‘Cry [. . .] cries’ is an entirely suitable (and, in aural terms, suit­ ably haunting) final sound in the drawn-out last cadence. All of this is lost in WBY’s revi­ sion. For the poem now to end on a rhetori­ cal question from the speaker is for it to be equipped with one of the later WBY’s more powerful rhetorical booster engines; and perhaps there is more thrust being applied here than the delicate structure of the poem itself can safely contain. The ‘beast of the wil­ derness’ could be anything from small and unthreatening to large and menacing, while the ‘bird of the air’ (unlike the earlier ‘fowl’) is now a single bird, who may be simply a oneoff annoyance: ‘Must I endure’ is the question of someone who is irritated and exasperated, and WBY creates the risk of ending his poem with the angry outburst of a man pestered by a beast and a bird. ‘Amorous cries’ are not meant (presumably) for the speaker’s ears; but the phrase is oddly distanced and formal, suggesting little in the way of direct recogni­ tion or personal pain.

184

THE POET PLEADS WITH

THE ELEMENTAL POWERS

Date of revision/composition. The poem was composed perhaps in Oct. or Nov. 1898. The piece itself is partly a fresh composition and partly a revision of ‘A Mystical Prayer to the Masters of the Elements, Finvarra, Feacra, and Caolte’ (1892). The single surviving MS of the poem in its revised state is a fair copy, which offers no clue as to its date, so all that can be said with certainty is that the work was completed sometime before the end of Nov. 1898, since it was published in The Dome on 3 Dec. It is possible to hazard a guess that WBY prepared this new version of an old piece while in Sligo and Dublin in Oct. to Nov. 1898. Reception and interpretation. An early (and doubtless disappointing) reaction to the poem after its publication in The Dome came from Arthur Symons, who in a letter to WBY told him ‘I thought your poem in The Dome by no means one of your best things – altogether vague, and, for you, a little ordinary’ (letter of 9 Jan. 1899, quoted in B. Morris, ‘Arthur Symons’s Letters to W.B. Yeats: 1892–1902’, YA 5, 55). In public, William Sharp (as ‘Fiona Macleod’) quoted the first stanza as an example of how WBY ‘does not always sing of things of beauty and mystery as the things of beauty and mystery are best sung, so that the least may understand; but rather as those priests of Isis who, when bidden to chant the Sun-Hymn to the people, sang, beautifully, incomprehensible algebraical for­ mulae’ (The North American Review, 1. Oct. 1902). Modern criticism of WBY has some­ times tended towards the ‘algebraical’ in its explication of the esoteric imagery; on the whole, however, this has the effect of rendering the poem merely esoteric. Reading the poem as ‘a densely woven prayer, quarried from the ineffable Madame Blavatsky as well as from Blake,’ H. Bloom warns that ‘its precise sense is perhaps not to be ascertained’. Nevertheless, for Bloom ‘its general direction is clear,’ and his detailed reading of the final stanza sees there ‘the poet’s obsessed desire, which is to remove his apprehension of the lost beloved entirely from the context of nature’ (129–130). It is true that this revision of an earlier poem is, more than its original, dependent on an imaginative sense of the beloved as being somehow ‘lost’, rather than in need of protection: in its transformation, the poem is no longer significantly driven by WBY’s desire for MG, in which esoteric powers are to collaborate in the work of spiritual protection and sexual pursuit, and is now more preoccupied with the (slightly schematic) presentation of a myth. The ‘Dim Powers’ are in fact less distinct than they were when they were named (in the previous version) after archangels and Irish divinities. WBY does not change the structure of the poem, with its distinctive alternating six- and three-foot rhymed couplets; whether the rewritten version improves on the effectiveness of this striking metre, though, is open to debate. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047254-186

THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS

581

Textual and publication history. For details of an early notebook version of the poem’s prior incarnation, in connection with its publication in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892), see notes to ‘A Mystical Prayer to the Masters of the Elements, Finvarra, Feacra, and Caolte’. A fair-copy MS of the rewritten version in ink is in the Berg Collec­ tion, NYPL (MS); this is reproduced and transcribed in Cornell, WATR, 176–177. The poem was published in The Dome (D) for Dec. 1898, and next in WATR; its text remained stable, and it was included in all WBY’s collected editions from PW06 onwards. Copy-text: P49.

T

he Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows Have pulled the Immortal Rose; And though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept, The Polar Dragon slept,

Title] Aodh Pleads with the Elemental Pow­ ers D; Aedh Pleads with the Elemental Powers WATR. 2. pulled] stolen MS. the Immortal Rose] See WBY’s notes for some of the bearings he wishes readers to take on this symbol; in addition, of course, the poet is in a position to expect a measure of familiarity with a symbol which he had been using in poems from the early 1890s onwards. Extensive as the note for WATR is, it does not mention the specifically mystical and magical associations (from Rosicrucianism to the GD) which the Rose carried for WBY: the basic framework within these were understood, however, was one in which a pri­ mal unity is broken and its beauty (for which the Rose is the symbol) is reduced to being part of the created universe, where it has to be sought out through mystical gnosis and initiation. WBY might well have been less familiar with the ways in which the phrase ‘the immortal Rose’ had in fact been used in poetry; here, it was a property shared by some early nineteenth-century women poets. See e.g. Sydney, Lady Morgan, Poems (1801), ‘The Recantation’, 14: ‘thy immortal rose oft sung’, Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘A

Thought of Paradise’, 10–12: ‘Might our eyes wander there | Through heaven’s transpar­ ent air, | And rest on colours of the immortal rose?’, and Emeline Stuart-Wortley, The Vil­ lage Churchyard (1835), 220–221: ‘Painful, to mark the immortal rose take root | From the dull burial-sod’. 4.] The Polar Dragon] WBY’s note directs read­ ers to an astronomical interpretation of this image, as the constellation Draco, which comprises fourteen stars and is in the far northern sky. In terms of symbolism, more than just this is involved, as the notes in both D and WATR explain. A very good summary is given by R. Ellmann, who also draws atten­ tion to the cover design for The Secret Rose by Althea Gyles (Identity, 78): Looking again at the cover of The Secret Rose, we find the serpent’s folds encircling the trunk of the Tree of Life as if it were indeed the ‘guardian of the Rose’. In Kab­ balism this serpent is the serpent of na­ ture in its benign aspect, and the occultist is said to follow the serpent’s winding path upwards through many initiations, corre­ sponding to each of the Sephiroth, until he reaches the top of the tree. Since in the poem the polar dragon sleeps, like Earth in the ‘Introduction’ to Blake’s Songs of

582 5

10

THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS

His heavy rings uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep: When will he wake from sleep? Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,

With your harmonious choir

Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,

That my old care may cease;

Unfold your flaming wings and cover out of sight

The nets of day and night.

Dim Powers of drowsy thought, let her no longer be

Like the pale cup of the sea,

Experience, the meaning seems to be that the natural world has become uncoiled or detached from beauty. 5. deep to deep] WBY uses a formula here which is a cliché in nineteenth-century poetry; although Tennyson is not its first user, much of the poetic use probably derives from his: cp. In Memoriam CIII, 37–39, ‘Until the forward-creeping tides | Began to foam, and we to draw | From deep to deep’. WBY’s gesture of relative originality in his use of this phrase is that he applies it to the heavens and not the ocean. 6.] Perhaps cp. W. Blake, Songs of Experience, ‘The Little Girl Lost’, 3–5: ‘the earth from sleep | [. . .] | Shall arise’. 7. windy fire] Cp. WBY’s description of Hanra­ han in his WATR note on “Aedh,’ ‘Hanra­ han’ and ‘Michael Robartes’ in these Poems’, as ‘fire blown by the wind’. The phrase itself is found only in the works of T.C. Irwin, e.g., Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘Ebba and her Sisters’, 79: ‘Fierce figures stretched around the windy fire’, and Poems, Sketches, and Songs (1889), ‘October Dusk’, 21: ‘Cut off by the windy fire’. 8. choir] quire MS, D. 9. love] love, D. 10. my old care] The ‘care’ here may be both sorrow (caused by love) and a duty of care,

a job of protection. Both are presented as long-standing commitments. The ‘care’ is now a good six years older than it had been in 1892, and its character has doubt­ less changed, with the protective element being now more definitely a thing of the past as far as WBY’s feelings for MG are concerned. 11. your flaming wings] A  conventional attri­ bute of cherubim, and so of these ‘Great Pow­ ers’. A  somewhat leaden poem by Edward Dowden, which WBY knew, began with this standard formula, cp. Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘The Initiation’, 1: ‘Under the flaming wings of cherubim’. WBY’s effect here falls rather short of his own ending to ‘A Dream of a Blessed Spirit’ (1891), 15: ‘Flame on flame and wing on wing’. wings] wings, D. 12.] This line establishes an echo within WATR, mirroring (and rhyming with) ‘Into the Twilight’ (1893), 2: ‘the nets of wrong and right’. Where in the earlier poem ‘nets’ carried a Blakean relevance to the issue of right and wrong, here the effect can be visual only; but this is not convincingly conveyed. 13. drowsy thought] What WBY intends to con­ vey here is the thought that discovers a spe­ cial set of powers when on the edge of sleep,

THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS

15

583

When winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim

Above its cloudy rim;

But let a gentle silence wrought with music flow

Whither her footsteps go.

WBY’s note in D] The Seven Lights are the seven stars of the Great Bear, and the Dragon is the constellation of the Dragon, and these, in certain old mythologies, encircle the Tree of Life, on which is here imagined the Rose of the Ideal Beauty growing before it was cast into the world. Three or four lines are taken from a poem of the author’s on the same subject in ‘The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club.’ WBY’s note in WATR] WBY wrote a lengthy note for WATR (retained up to and includ­ ing CWVP08) in which this is the major poem discussed; in his heading, he includes after it ‘Mongan Thinks of his Past Greatness’ (‘He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations of Heaven’) and ‘Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge’ (‘He Hears the Cry of the Sedge’): The Rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and supreme beauty. The Count Goblet D’Alviella thinks that it was once a symbol of the sun, – itself a principal symbol of the divine nature, and the symbolic heart of things. The lotus was in some eastern countries imagined blossoming upon the Tree of Life, as the Flower of Life, and is thus represented in Assyrian basreliefs. Because the Rose, the flower sacred to the Virgin Mary, and the flower that Apuleius’ adventurer ate, when he was changed out of the ass’s shape and received into the fellowship of Isis, is the western Flower of Life, I have imagined it growing upon the Tree of Life. I once stood beside a man in Ireland when he saw it growing there in a vision, that seemed to have rapt him out of his body. He saw the garden of Eden walled about, and on the top of a high mountain, as in certain mediaeval diagrams, and after passing the tree of Knowledge, on which grew fruit full of troubled faces, and through whose branches flowed, he was told, sap that was human souls, he came to a tall, dark tree, with little bitter fruits, and was shown a kind of stair or ladder going up through the tree, and told to go up; and near the top of the tree, a beautiful woman, like the Goddess

as on the borders of a visionary realm – the ‘things discovered in the deep, | When only body’s laid asleep’ of ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, 21–22 (1891). Here, however, the

unintended effect is one of powers dimin­ ished by mere drowsiness.

15. gathered] gathered, D.

17. silence] silence, D.

584

THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS

of Life associated with the tree in Assyria, gave him a rose that seemed to have been growing upon the tree. One finds the Rose in the Irish poets, sometimes as a religious symbol, as in the phrase, ‘the Rose of Friday,’ meaning the Rose of austerity, in a Gaelic poem in Dr. Hyde’s ‘Religious Songs of Connacht;’ and, I think, as a symbol of woman’s beauty in the Gaelic song, ‘Roseen Dubh;’ and a symbol of Ireland in Mangan’s adaptation of ‘Roseen Dubh,’ ‘My Dark Rosaleen,’ and in Mr. Aubrey De Vere’s ‘The Little Black Rose.’ I do not know any evidence to prove whether this symbol came to Ireland with mediaeval Christianity, or whether it has come down from Celtic times. I  have read somewhere that a stone engraved with a Celtic god, who holds what looks like a rose in one hand, has been found somewhere in England; but I cannot find the reference, though I certainly made a note of it. If the Rose was really a symbol of Ireland among the Gaelic poets, and if ‘Roseen Dubh’ is really a political poem, as some think, one may feel pretty certain that the ancient Celts associated the Rose with Eire, or Fotlan, or Banba  – goddesses who gave their names to Ireland  – or with some principal god or goddess, for such symbols are not suddenly adopted or invented, but come out of mythology. I have made the Seven Lights, the constellation of the Bear, lament for the theft of the Rose, and I  have made the Dragon, the constellation Draco, the guardian of the Rose, because these constellations move about the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many countries, and are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology. The note should probably be taken as an annotation to the Rose of line 2 in the first instance, which (like other such notes in the volume) quickly expands to something well beyond its initial brief. It can also be taken as a kind of retrospective commentary on the ‘Rose’ poems of CK, as well as supplementary material for ‘The Secret Rose’ (which has a long note of its own). How far the note succeeds in explicating the first stanza must be open to question; it is rather an essay that grows – opportunistically almost – from the lines, with their Rose and their constellations of the Bear and Dragon. The risk which WBY runs here is that of making the poetry itself appear to be mere shorthand, a versi­ fied schematization of the material which has more natural and loosely allusive expres­ sion in the prose.

Appendix 1

CONTENTS OF W.B.

YEATS’S VOLUMES OF

POETRY, 1892–1899

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892)*

T

he Countess Kathleen [verse-play] To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time Fergus and the Druid The Rose of the World The Peace of the Rose The Death of Cuchullin The White Birds Father Gilligan Father O’Hart When You Are Old The Sorrow of Love The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter A Fairy Song The Pity of Love The Lake Isle of Innisfree A Cradle Song The Man Who Dreamed of Fairy Land Dedication of ‘Irish Tales’ The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner When You Are Sad The Two Trees They Went Forth to the Battle, But They Always Fell [The Rose of Battle] An Epitaph Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days * Epigraph on title page: “He who tastes a crust of bread tastes all the stars and all the heavens” Paracelsus ab Hohenheim

586

APPENDIX 1

Poems (1895)* To Some I Have Talked With by the Fire

The Wanderings of Usheen

The Countess Cathleen [verse-play]

The Land of Heart’s Desire [verse-play]

The Rose

To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time

Fergus and the Druid

The Rose of the World

The Rose of Peace

The Rose of Battle

A Faery Song

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

A Cradle Song

The Pity of Love

The Sorrow of Love

When You Are Old

The White Birds

A Dream of Death

A Dream of a Blessed Spirit

The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland

The Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected From the Irish Novelists

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

The Ballad of Father Gilligan

The Two Trees

To Ireland in the Coming Times

Crossways The Song of the Happy Shepherd The Sad Shepherd The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes Anashuya and Vijaya The Indian Upon God The Indian to His Love The Falling of the Leaves Ephemera The Madness of King Goll The Stolen Child To an Isle in the Water Down by the Salley Gardens The Meditation of the Old Fisherman The Ballad of Father O’Hart

APPENDIX 1

587

The Ballad of Moll Magee The Ballad of the Foxhunter * Epigraph after title page: He who tastes a crust of bread tastes all the stars and all the heavens. Paracelsus.

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) [Where poems were later given different titles by WBY under which they appear in the present edition, these have been supplied within square brackets.]

T

he Hosting of the Sidhe The Everlasting Voices The Moods Aedh Tells of the Rose in His Heart [The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart] The Host of the Air Breasal the Fisherman [The Fish] A Cradle Song Into the Twilight The Song of Wandering Aengus The Song of the Old Mother The Fiddler of Dooney The Heart of the Woman Aedh Laments the Loss of Love [The Lover Laments for the Loss of Love] Mongan Laments the Change That Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved [He Mourns for the Change That Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World] Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace [He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace] Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew [He Reproves the Curlew] Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty [He Remembers For­ gotten Beauty] A Poet to His Beloved Aedh Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes [He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes] To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear [To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear] The Cap and Bells The Valley of the Black Pig Michael Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods [The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods]

588

APPENDIX 1

Aedh Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers [He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers] Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty [He Remembers Forgotten Beauty] Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge [He Hears the Cry of the Sedge] Aedh Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved [He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved] The Blessed The Secret Rose Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings The Travail of Passion The Poet Pleads With His Friend for Old Friends [The Lover Pleads With His Friend for Old Friends] Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of His Songs in Coming Days [The Lover Speaks to the Hearers of His Songs in the Coming Days] Aedh Pleads With the Elemental Powers [The Poet Pleads With the Elemental Powers] Aedh Wishes His Beloved Were Dead [He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead] Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven [He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven] Mongan Thinks of His Past Greatness [He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations of Heaven]

Appendix 2

DRAFT ‘SUBJECT FOR

LYRIC’ (LATE 1890s)

In the last used pages of the notebook that WBY began in 1893 (now in the Burns Collection, Boston College) are drafts in ink for the four parts (numbered I–IIII) of what the poet calls simply a ‘Subject for lyric’. The pages were never worked on beyond this, and do not relate to any more finished poem or sequence. They have attracted a certain amount of critical attention, although there is no consensus on when exactly they were written. WBY gives this material no date in his notebook, but it begins a page after a draft for ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’ which is from no later than Apr. 1896, and probably belongs to the end of 1895 or early 1896. This does not mean that the ‘Subject for lyric’ was written immediately afterwards, but it does make it unlikely that it was entered in the notebook any time before early 1896. It is much more difficult to determine when the pages were in fact used by WBY after this date. The other material after this in the notebook consists of two pages of poem titles for inclusion in WATR, both some way removed in terms of both contents and order from what was in fact to appear in that book: these may be from c. 1896 (or may perhaps be from an earlier year, having been jotted into late pages of the notebook at a time when the poet was still using earlier pages for composition). It seems clear that the subject of ‘Subject’ is MG; and it is this which has drawn critical attention over the years. Most of those who have written about the draft wish to associate it with a particular occasion in the course of the poet’s relationship with MG, and date it accordingly. R. Ellmann places the draft poem around summer 1887 (Man and the Masks, 157), as does A.N. Jeffares (Commentary, 88) while R.F. Foster suggests a date of Dec. 1900 (Foster 1, 238); this date is also accepted by J.M. Hassett (Yeats and the Muses (2010), 78). An even later date is proposed by D. Toomey, of ‘about 1901’ (Toomey, 13). All of these dates are plausible in biographical terms; but they are all, equally, of a circumstantial nature. None of the proposed dates is without a certain awkwardness of fit when it comes to the material context for the draft itself: if, as Ellmann and Jeffares suppose, the lines might be traced to WBY’s sojourn at Coole Park in summer 1897, the question arises of how the poet came to have this notebook to hand, not having used it at any other time that year (most likely, it stayed in Woburn Buildings during the poet’s trip to Ireland). The biographical supposition is neverthe­ less strong in itself, for summer 1897 was certainly a time when the poet experienced extreme romantic disappointment regarding MG and her imperviousness to his love poetry: H.J. Levine puts the draft in 1897, partly perhaps on the grounds that it men­ tions a swan, and that 1897 was the year in which WBY at Coole first made his count

590

APPENDIX 2

of the swans there (“Freeing the Swans’: Yeats’s Exorcism of Maud Gonne’, English Liter­ ary History 48/2 [1981], 413). It is clear that the poem (or sequence of poems) WBY was planning in this draft is intended to give imaginative form and substance to the poet’s deep emotional entanglement with MG: this was both ‘frustration’ and ‘obsessive unhappiness’, as Jeffares says (W.B. Yeats: A New Biography [1988], 102), while for T. Parkinson, ‘The aim of this poetry was to transpose the cruel beloved to the realm of mythic power’ (’Yeats and the Love Lyric’, James Joyce Quarterly 3/2 [1966], 112). It is also possible, however, to read the draft as a record of a later phase of WBY’s relation­ ship with MG, after her revelations to the poet (made on 8 Dec. 1898) about her life as a mistress and a mother. Toomey’s reading takes its bearings from this, remarking that ‘Although the verse regresses into stereotyped condemnation of the “cruel one” (I am not responsible for my own unhappiness, it is you who are to blame), Yeats does accuse himself of playing with images of life and marriage [. . .] Yet, although Yeats was patently intimidated by Maud Gonne in her new guise as sexual being and mother, it was this which he had to integrate when he returned to poetry’ (Toomey, 14). Again, persuasive as this is in biographical terms, it does not explain how in 1901 WBY would have gone to this old notebook in order to record a draft ‘Subject’ there – sandwiched between draft poetry from 1896 and a list of poems being tried out for WATR (made some considerable time before its publication in 1899). Just possibly, the notebook might have suggested itself by reason of its association with MG – the poems to her that it contained, and its embroidered cover, which had been her gift to the poet – but this seems an oddly sentimental gesture for WBY, given the levels of romantic disillusion and challenge proposed in Toomey’s reading. It is not possible to assign a firm date to this draft ‘Subject’. The present edition sug­ gests a date of 1896–1897 on bibliographical grounds, though this is not necessarily inconsistent with other aspects of the material. MG had likely called in at Woburn Build­ ings after arriving at the nearby King’s Cross railway station often enough by 1897 to make the details in section II plausible (the poet and MG had, for example, both come back to London from political meetings in Manchester on 5 Oct. 1897, before leaving together for Ireland two days later); and ‘the winds among the reeds’ of section III seem far more likely to be the anticipation of a volume whose title WBY already knew than a recollection made after its publication. The text given here is a diplomatic transcription of fol. 129 to fol.132 of the Bos­ ton College notebook. (Other transcriptions, including those of the critics noted earlier and Cornell WATR, differ slightly in places.) The notebook pages are narrow; but WBY’s lineation has been preserved, since it is possible that the draft is already anticipating in some ways the lines for a lyric that (as things turned out) was never composed. Subject for lyric O my beloved you only are

not moved by my [?sorrows del.] songs

which you only understand

APPENDIX 2

You only know that it it is of you I sing when I tell of the [sa del. swan del.] swan on the water or the eagle in the heavens or the faun in the wood. Others weep but your eyes are dry. II O my beloved. How happy I was that day when you came here from the railway, & set your hair a right in my looking glass & then sat with me at my table, & [then lay del.] resting in my big chair. I am like the children, o my beloved & I play at [? life ?living & del.] marriage. I play [at del.] with images of the life you will not give to me o my [cruel one del.] cruel one. III I put away all the romances. How could I read of queens & of noble women, whose very dust is full of sorrow are they not all but my beloved whispering to me. I went into the woods. I heard the cry of the birds & the [cry del.] of the deer, & I & I heard the winds among the reeds, but I put my hands over my ears for were not they my beloved whispering to me. O my beloved why do you whisper to me of sorrow always.

591

592

APPENDIX 2

IIII O my beloved what where verses to me if you [are del.] were not there to listen & yet all my verses a[?re] [?dull ?little] to you. Your eyes set upon upon [?far] magnificence upon impossible heroism Have made you blind & have made you deaf you gave your country a flame [I fear del.] you have no thing but these verses, that are but like [?rushes] & leaves in the middle of a wood, Other eyes fill with tears but yours are dry.

Index of Poems

Page numbers for main texts and commentary on poems are given in bold. A Cradle Song 3–5 A Dawn Song 155

A Dream of Death 84–87, 99

A Dream of Other Lives 25, 65–69, 464

A Dream of a Blessed Spirit 52–55 A Faery Song 37–38 A Mystical Prayer to the Masters of the Elements, Finvarra, Feacra, and Caolte 149–153, 580–581 A Poet to His Beloved 251, 379, 383,

385–389, 402, 409, 445, 516

A Salutation 39–40, 82, 406–408 A Song of the Rosy-Cross 76–78 Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists 13–16 Down by the Salley Gardens 220

Ephemera 32–33, 318, 560

Fergus and the Druid 79, 114, 131,

138–146, 360, 446, 453, 458, 482

Hanrahan Laments because of his

Wanderings 167, 446, 509–510,

530–534

He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace

402–405, 436, 469

He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

251, 300, 368, 377–382, 385, 387, 402,

407, 478

He Hears the Cry of the Sedge 498, 551,

557–561, 566, 583

He Mourns for the Change That Has

Come Upon Him and His Beloved, and

Longs for the End of the World 487,

502–510, 534

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty 407,

439–445

He Reproves the Curlew 67, 407, 445,

459–463

He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers 405, 462, 466–469, 489

He Tells of the Perfect Beauty 27, 39, 82,

386, 406–410, 445, 468, 489

He Thinks of His Past Greatness When

a Part of the Constellations of Heaven

462, 505, 562, 575–579, 583

He Thinks of Those who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved 516, 566–570 [‘He Treads a Road of Glint and Gleam’] 205–206 [‘He Who Bids the White Plains of the Pole. . .’] 63–64 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven 28,

183, 194, 544–550

He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead 547,

551–558, 561

[‘I Never Have Seen Maid Quiet’] 166–167 [‘I Will Not in Grey Hours Revoke’] 249–252 Into the Twilight 164–168, 582

King Goll: An Irish Legend 359, 367,

369–370

King Goll (Third Century) 359, 367

Love and Death [poem] 148

Love and Death [verse-play] 111

Mosada xxii

Mourn – And then Onward! 15, 56–58, 154–155 [‘O Tufted Reeds, Bend Low. . .’] 470–473

On a Child’s Death 76, 209, 212–217

[‘Out of Sight Is out of Mind’] 262–264

She Who Dwelt among the

Sycamores 167

Street Dancers 312

The Ballad of Earl Paul 177–182 The Ballad of Father Gilligan 6–12

594

INDEX OF POEMS

The Ballad of Father O’Hart 226 The Ballad of Moll Magee 587 The Ballad of the Foxhunter 587 The Blessed 163–164, 224, 446, 496–501, 588 The Cap and Bells 177, 183–196, 498, 544, 546 The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes 586 The Danaan Quicken Tree 97, 173–176 The Death of Cuchulain 31, 79, 88–98 The Everlasting Voices 390–394 The Falling of the Leaves 586 The Fiddler of Dooney 161–166, 587 The Fish 571–574, 578 The Glove and the Cloak 212–213, 217–218 The Heart of the Woman 253–255 The Host 152, 197, 203–207 The Host of the Air 163, 177, 219–234, 243, 433, 437, 467, 498, 499, 560 The Hosting of the Sidhe 190, 197, 203, 209, 228, 241, 299, 391–392, 396, 399, 437, 453, 521, 535–543, 575, 578 The Indian to His Love 265–269 The Indian Upon God 586 The Island of Statues xxii The Lake Isle of Innisfree 19, 38, 100, 164, 174, 343, 347, 351, 406, 410 The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner 17–21, 34, 244 [‘The Loud Years Come, the Loud Years Go’] 383–384 The Lover Asks Forgiveness because of His Many Moods 395–401 The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love 562–565 The Lover Pleads with his Friend for Old Friends 512–517 The Lover Speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in the Coming Days 411–414 The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart 157–160 The Lover to His Heart 259–261 The Madness of King Goll 357–370 The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland 22–27 The Meditation of the Old Fisherman 586 The Moods 197–202, 205, 264, 392 The Outlaw’s Bridal 37 The Pathway 28–29, 550

The Pity of Love 99–101 [‘The Poet, Owen Hanrahan . . .’] 256–258 The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers 580–584 The Protestants’ Leap 27, 257 The Rose of Battle 41–51, 446 The Rose of Peace 133–135 The Rose of the World 72, 79–83 The Sad Shepherd 586 The Secret Rose 445–458 The Shadowy Waters [1896 version] 474–495 The Song of the Happy Shepherd 318 The Song of the Old Mother 243–246 The Song of Wandering Aengus 518–529 The Sorrow of Love 43, 48, 50, 70–75, 123, 148, 408 The Stolen Child 360, 433, 537 The Travail of Passion 415–419 The Two Titans 292 The Two Trees 102–113 The Unappeasable Host 432–438 The Valley of the Black Pig 420–431 The Wanderings of Oisin 270–359 The Watch-Fire 154–156 The White Birds 28, 30–34 To a Sister of the Cross and the Rose 35–36, 247, 385 To an Isle in the Water 586 To his Heart, Bidding it Have No Fear 463–465 To Ireland in the Coming Times 124–132 To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire 373–376 To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time 41, 75, 114–123 [‘Veering, Fleeting, Fickle, the Winds of Knocknarea’] 235–242 [‘When to Its End o’er-ripened July Nears’] 15, 82, 210 When You Are Old 59–62, 250, 355 When You Are Sad 147–148 Where my Books Go 136–137 [‘White Daughter of the Iron Time . . .’] 247–248 Who Goes with Fergus? 320, 366 Wisdom and Dreams 211

Index of first lines

A man came slowly from the setting

sun 92

A pity beyond all telling 101

All the heavy days are over; 54

All the words that I gather 137

All things uncomely and broken, all

things worn out and old 159

Although you hide in the ebb and

flow 573

Archangels were I God should go 29

Be you still, be you still, trembling

heart; 465

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart 110

Beloved, hear my bitter tale! – 175

Children of Tethra, that were old

before 477

Cumhal called out, bending his head 499

Do you not hear me calling, white deer

with no horns? 506

I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long

manes a-shake, 404

I never have seen maid Quiet, 167

I pray that I ever be weaving 211

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and

blow 246

I sat on cushioned otter-skin: 363

I saw her glitter and gleam, 218

I wander by the edge 560

I went out to the hazel wood, 519

I will not in grey hours revoke 251

I would that we were, my beloved, white

birds on the foam of the sea! 32

If Michael, leader of God’s host, 134

If this importunate heart trouble your

peace 398

Impetuous heart, be still, be still, 259

Know, that I would accounted be 128

No daughter of the Iron Times, 36

O’Driscoll drove with a song 225

Oh wanderer in the southern weather, 265

Out of sight is out of mind: 263

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, 170

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed

Had I the heavens’ embroidered

eyes, 410

cloths, 549

O curlew, cry no more in the air, 461

Half close your eyelids, loosen your

O sweet everlasting Voices, be still; 393

hair, 569

O tufted reeds, bend low and low in pools

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair 24

on the Green Land, 472

He treads a road of glint and gleam; 210

O what to me the little room 254

He who bids the white plains of the

O where is our Mother of Peace 533

pole 64

O women, kneeling by your altar-rails

He who measures gain and loss, 77

long hence, 413

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate

Rose 449

Fasten your hair with a golden pin 381

I bring you with reverent hands 387

I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and

amid sighs, 468

I dreamed that one had died in a strange

place 86

I had a chair at every hearth, 20

I have drunk ale from the Country of the

Young 577

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, 565

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my

days! 121

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!

47, 51

Shield breaker, break a shield today, 180

596

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

The angels are stooping 4

The cries of the curlew and peewit, the

honey-pale orb of the moon, 67

The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of

wrought gold, 436

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather:

unknown spears 430

The host is riding from Knocknarea 538

The island dreams under the dawn 267

The jester walked in the garden; 191

The loud years come, the loud years

go, 384

The old priest Peter Gilligan 10

The poet, Owen Hanrahan, under a bush of may, 257 The Powers, not kind like you, came

where God’s garden blows, 151

The Powers whose name and shape no

living creature knows 581

The quarrel of the sparrows in the

eaves, 74

There was a green branch hung with

many a bell 14

This song unto all who would gather

together and hold 155

This whole day have I followed in the

rocks, 143

Though you are in your shining

days, 517

Time drops in decay, 201

Veering, fleeting, fickle, the winds of

Knocknarea 241

We poets labour all our days 39

We who are old, old and gay, 38

Were you but lying cold and dead, 556

When I play on my fiddle at Dooney, 164

When my arms wrap you round I press 441

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic

door is wide; 418

When you are old and gray and full of

sleep, 61

When you are sad, 147

While I wrought out these fitful Danaan

rhymes, 374

White daughter of the Iron Time, 247

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a

dream? 81

Ye on the broad high mountains of old

Eri, 57

You shadowy armies of the dead, 215

You who are bent, and bald, and blind, 297