The Poems of W.B. Yeats: Volume Three: 1899-1910 (Longman Annotated English Poets) [1 ed.] 1032419253, 9781032419251, 9781003360407

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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. Tis edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. Te edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specifc references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical infuences at work on the verse. Te 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 third volume, Yeats’s poetry of the frst decade of the twentieth century is brought into sharp focus, revealing the extent of his eforts to re-fashion a style that had already made him a well-known poet. all of the major modes in Yeats’s earlier work are subject to radical re-imagining in these years, from poetic narrative founded in Irish myth, in poems such as ‘Baile and aillinn’ and ‘Te old age of Queen maeve’, to the symbolist drama-poetry of Te Shadowy Waters, here edited in its two (completely diferent) versions of 1900 and 1906. In a decade when the theatre was one of Yeats’s principal concerns, his lyric poems, which were becoming increasingly explicit in personal terms, began to discover new intensities of conversational pitch and mythic resonance. Poems such as ‘Te folly of Being Comforted’, ‘adam’s Curse’, ‘No second Troy’, and ‘Te fascination of What’s Difcult’ are given close attention in this new edition, alongside topical and epigrammatic pieces that are ofen passed over in accounts of Yeats’s development. Te evolving complexities of Yeats’s personal and political lives are crucial to his artistic growth in these years, and the commentary gives these generous attention, showing how the poetry both feeds upon and ofen transcends the circumstances of its composition. Te volume ofers strong evidence for this decade as a crucial one in Yeats’s poetic life, in which the poet created wholly new registers for his verse as well as new dimensions for his imaginative vision. Peter McDonald is an Irish poet and critic. he has published eight books of poetry, including his Collected Poems (2012), and four books of criticism, including Sound Intentions: Te Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012). he has edited several critical collections, and is the author of numerous articles on nineteenthand twentieth-century poetry. he has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, and oxford, where he became Christopher Tower student and Tutor in Poetry in 1999. since 2016, he has been Professor of British and Irish Poetry at the University of oxford.

LoNGmaN aNNoTaTeD eNGLIsh PoeTs General editors: Paul hammond, David hopkins and michael Rossington founding editors: f. W. Bateson and John Barnard Recent titles in the series include: The Poems of Alexander Pope: Volume One Edited by Julian Ferraro and Paul Baines (2019) The Poems of W. B. Yeats: Volume One: 1882–1889 Edited by Peter McDonald (2020) The Poems of W. B. Yeats: Volume Two: 1890–1898 Edited by Peter McDonald (2020) The Poems of Ben Jonson Edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (2021) The Poems of Robert Browning: Volume 5 Te Ring and the Book, Books 1–6 Edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan (2022) The Poems of Robert Browning: Volume 6 Te Ring and the Book, Books 7–12 Edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan (2022) Shelley: Selected Poems Edited by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, Geoffrey Matthews, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Ralph Pite, and Michael Rossington. Selected and Revised by Kelvin Everest (2022) The Poems of Shelley: Volume 5 Edited by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Michael Rossington (2023) The Poems of Shelley: Volume 6 Edited by Carlene Adamson, Will Bowers, Jack Donovan, Kelvin Everest, Mathelinda Nabugodi and Michael Rossington (2023) The Poems of W. B. Yeats: Volume Three: 1899–1910 Edited by Peter McDonald (2023) for more information about the series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Longmanannotated-english-Poets/book-series/LaeP

The Poems of

W.B. YeaTs – Volume Tree: 1899–1910 –

eDITeD BY

PeTeR mcDoNaLD

Designed cover image: George Grantham Bain collection, Library of Congress first published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park square, milton Park, abingdon, oxon oX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Tird avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Peter mcDonald Te right of Peter mcDonald to be identifed 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 hereafer 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 identifcation 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 Names: Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939, author. | mcDonald, Peter, 1962– editor. Title: Te poems of W.B. Yeats / edited by Peter mcDonald. Description: abingdon, oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2020]– | series: Longman annotated english poets | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: v.1. 1882–1889—v. 2. 1890–1898—v. 3. 1899–1910 | Identifers: LCCN 2022042384 (print) | LCCN 2022042385 (ebook) | IsBN 9780367495602 (vol. 1 ; hardback) | IsBN 9780367497620 (vol. 2 ; hardback) | IsBN 9781032419251 (vol. 3 ; hardback) | IsBN 9781032419268 (vol. 3 ; paperback) | IsBN 9781003047148 (vol. 1 ; ebook) | IsBN 9781003047254 (vol. 2 ; ebook) | IsBN 9781003360407 (vol. 3 ; ebook) subjects: LCsh: Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Criticism and interpretation. | LCGfT: Poetry. | Literary criticism. Classifcation: LCC PR5900 .a3 2020 (print) | LCC PR5900 (ebook) | DDC 821/.8—dc23/eng/20220909 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042384 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042385 IsBN: 978-1-032-41925-1 (hbk) IsBN: 978-1-032-41926-8 (pbk) IsBN: 978-1-003-36040-7 (ebk) DoI: 10.4324/9781003360407 Typeset in minion Pro by apex CoVantage, LLC

T O e DNa LoNG L eY

Contents A Note from the General Editors Acknowledgements Chronology of W.B. Yeats’s Life and Publications, 1899–1910 List of Abbreviations Introduction

x xi xii xv xxi

THE POEMS

1

185 Te song of hefernan the Blind: a Translation

3

186 Te Shadowy Waters (1900)

6

187 Te Withering of the Boughs

53

188 Under the moon

62

189 [‘I walked among the seven woods of Coole’]

72

190 Baile and aillinn

83

191 Yellow haired Donough

104

192 [‘Do not make a great keening’]

108

193 Te Blood Bond

111

194 spinning song

114

195 Te folly of Being Comforted

119

196 Te Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and on Temselves

126

197 Te arrow

131

198 Red hanrahan’s song about Ireland

135

199 Te old men admiring Temselves in the Water

141

200 In the seven Woods

146

201 Te old age of Queen maeve

155

202 adam’s Curse

175

203 Te happy Townland

185

204 o Do Not Love Too Long

197

205 [‘I heard under a ragged hollow wood’]

201

viii

CoNTeNTs

206 old memory

205

207 Never give all the heart

209

208 songs from Deirdre: I

214

209 Te Ragged Wood

220

210 Te harp of aengus

224

211 Te shadowy Waters

228

212 [‘Come ride and ride to the garden’]

269

213 against Witchcraf

272

214 songs from Deirdre: III

277

215 songs from Deirdre: II

279

216 [‘Te friends that have it I do wrong’]

284

217 maid Quiet

287

218 [‘o Death’s old bony fnger’]

290

219 an appointment

295

220 [‘Accursed who brings to light of day’]

299

221 his Dream

302

222 all things can tempt me

310

223 at Galway races

314

224 Reconciliation

318

225 No second Troy

324

226 Words

332

227 [‘my dear is angry that of late’]

336

228 [on a certain middle-aged ofce holder]

338

229 a friend’s illness

341

230 on George moore

346

231 Te Coming of Wisdom with Time

348

232 To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of his and mine

351

CoNTeNTs

ix

233 Upon a house shaken by the Land agitation

353

234 Te fascination of What’s Difcult

359

235 [‘Irishmen, if they prefer’]

367

236 King and No King

369

237 a drinking song

377

238 on those that hated ‘Te Playboy of the Western World’, 1907

380

239 a Woman homer sung

388

240 Peace

394

241 against Unworthy Praise

400

242 Tese are the Clouds

405

243 Te mask

411

244 [‘But every powerful life goes on its way . . .’]

420

245 Brown Penny

422

Appendix 1: Contents of W.B. Yeats’s Volumes of Poetry, 1899–1910 Appendix 2: Prefatory Material by W.B. Yeats in Collections of Poetry, 1899–1910 Index of Poems Index of First Lines

427 437 443 445

a Note from the General editors Te Longman annotated english Poets series was launched in 1965 with the publication of Kenneth allott’s edition of Te Poems of Matthew Arnold. f.W. Bateson wrote then that the ‘new series is the frst designed to provide university students and teachers, and the general reader with complete and fully annotated editions of the major english poets’. Tat 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 glossing of obscure words and references to the evocation of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which the poems were created and frst received. Te editions draw on recent scholarship but also embody the fruits of the editors’ own new research. Te 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 that enjoyed by the poems’ frst audience. Te treatment of the text has varied pragmatically from edition to edition; some have provided modernized texts where the original conventions of spelling and punctuation 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 cultural 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 very grateful to all those institutions and individuals who have contributed to the research on which this edition is based. I have been fortunate to receive such generous help and advice throughout. a primary debt is owed to those libraries and research collections on whose resources I have drawn, and I must acknowledge in particular the stafs of the Bodleian Library in oxford, the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, and the John J. Burns Collection, in the library of Boston College. 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. I have built on foundations laid by fne editors of the poet, not least those of the late Professors a.N. Jefares, Daniel albright, and 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 profted, 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 once again proved exemplary in their care and patience, and I remain appreciative of the attention with which they have read and thought about this volume. any errors now (as before) are to be laid solely to my own account. among the many people whose advice and critical acumen have been necessary to the present work, and whose support has been invaluable for it, I thank especially Professor fran Brearton, Professor matthew Campbell, Professor Roy foster, Professor edward Larrissy, and Professor Rosanna Warren. Te support of my family has been, as ever, essential: I remain grateful and indebted to Karen, Louisa, and sammy. Tis volume is dedicated to Professor edna Longley, without whose lifetime of critical and scholarly work the understanding of modern poetry, and of Irish poetry in particular, would be immeasurably the poorer: I have learned from her more things about poetry and Ireland – and of course about Yeats – than I could hope to enumerate. Beyond that, edna Longley’s example, support, and friendship have contributed more to my own endeavours – as an editor, a critic, and as a poet – than I can ever satisfactorily express. Peter mcDonald Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2022

Chronology of W.B. Yeats’s Life and Publications, 1899–1910 for abbreviations of names, see p. xv. 1899 (feb.) In Paris, proposes marriage to mG, unsuccessfully. During his stay, meets with J.m. synge. (apr.) Publication of Te Wind Among the Reeds. (may) Publication of Poems (1899). first performance of Te Countess Cathleen in Dublin: despite success, the play is subsequently denounced in the press by Cardinal Logue as religiously unorthodox. WBY goes to Coole, where he is to be based until Nov. (sep.) spends time with mG in Dublin and Belfast. (oct.) Begins collaborative work with Gm on drama Diarmuid and Grania. on platform with mG and John o’Leary in Dublin public meeting against the south african War. (Nov.) Returns to London. 1900 (3 Jan.) Death of WBY’s mother, susan Pollexfen. (feb.) Debilitated by prolonged colds, WBY is cared for in London by aG. attends short season by the Irish Literary Teatre in Dublin. (mar.) Publishes a letter in protest at Queen Victoria’s projected visit to Ireland. Quarrel with macGregor mathers over provenance of GD foundational documents. (apr.) Confrontation with mathers’s lieutenant, aleister Crowley (armed and in highland regalia), at GD premises; later this month WBY and other GD members win legal case against Crowley. (may) Te Shadowy Waters published in the Us magazine Te North American Review. (Jun.) In residence at Coole, where WBY is based until oct. (aug.) attends public dedication of headstone at the grave of the poet Rafery, with aG, Douglas hyde and edward martyn. (Dec.) Publication of Te Shadowy Waters in book form. 1901 (apr.) Publication of P01. (may) Becomes a client of literary agent a.P. Watt. (Jul.) spends the month at Coole, and stays intermittently until oct. (oct.) Diarmuid and Grania produced in Dublin. (Dec.) In contact for the frst time with JQ. 1902 (apr.) Cathleen ni Houlihan, with mG playing the title role, produced to acclaim in Dublin, with WBY in attendance. aG’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, with a Preface by WBY, published. (Jun.) Visit with Gm to site of Tara, where destructive amateur excavations are in progress. WBY goes into residence at Coole for the summer. (Jul.) Publication of expanded edn. of Te Celtic Twilight. (sep.) Quarrel with Gm over collaboration on a play, Where Tere is Nothing, prompting WBY to write the play in great haste in order to produce a work wholly his own.

ChRoNoLoGY, 1899–1910

xiii

(oct.) Where Tere is Nothing published in Te United Irishman. Publication of Cathleen ni Houlihan. (Nov.) In Dublin, meets James Joyce for the frst time. 1903 (feb.) Learns of mG’s intention to marry John macBride, and of her decision to join the Roman Catholic Church; WBY begs her not to go ahead with either of these things, but mG is received into the Church on 17 feb. and marries macBride on 21 feb. (mar.) Te Hour-Glass performed in Dublin. (may) meets with mG in London, and hears from her of the unhappiness of her new marriage. Publication of Ideas of Good and Evil (a collection of WBY’s essays), and of the play Where Tere is Nothing. (Jun.) In residence at Coole, intermittently until mid-oct. (Jul.) Publishes letter of protest on the visit to Ireland of the new king, edward VII. (aug.) Publication of In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefy of the Irish Heroic Age by eCY’s Dun emer Press. Publication of Te Hour-Glass. (sep.) Te Hour-Glass published in the North American Review, and Te Pot of Broth published in the Gael. (oct.) Te King’s Treshold performed in Dublin. (Nov.) sails to america for Us lecture tour, organized by JQ. Based in New York City, WBY has an itinerary that takes him between now and mid-mar. 1904 across the whole country and into Canada. (Dec.) Dines with President Teodore Roosevelt: they discuss the fairies. 1904 (Jan.) aG’s Gods and Fighting Men published, with a Preface by WBY. (mar.) helped by JQ, in negotiations with macmillan in New York to become the american publishers of his work. Publication of On Baile’s Strand and Te King’s Treshold. sails back to england and arrives mar. 16. (may) annie horniman’s ofer to purchase the mechanics’ Institute in Dublin as a performance venue for the Irish National Literary Teatre is accepted by aG and WBY. (Jun.) Publication of P04. Where Tere is Nothing performed in London. Publication of WBY’s fction, Te Adoration of the Magi and Te Tables of the Law (frst published privately in 1897). (Jul.) In residence at Coole, where he works on his play Deirdre, until oct. (Dec.) opening season in Dublin of the new abbey Teatre. 1905 (Jun.) Publication of Stories of Red Hanrahan. has initial conversations at stratford-on-avon with a.h. Bullen which will lead to the project for Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908). (Jul.) having disliked a London production by florence farr of Te Shadowy Waters, WBY goes to Coole (where he is based until the autumn) and begins work on the play’s wholesale rewriting. 1906 (apr.) a heavily revised version of On Baile’s Strand is performed in Dublin. (sep.) Publication of Te Poems of Spenser, edited by WBY. (oct.) Publication of Poems 1899–1905. (Nov.) Publication of vol. 1 of Poetical Works in the Us.

xiv

ChRoNoLoGY, 1899–1910

1907 (Jan.) WBY goes hurriedly from scotland to Ireland on the news that the frst performance of synge’s Te Playboy of the Western World at the abbey has been disrupted by protesters. afer the week’s run has been completed (with help from the police), WBY takes part in public debate at the Teatre on the play. (mar.) although he is in Dublin, WBY decides he will not attend the funeral of his early mentor, John o’Leary, probably on account of o’Leary’s late association with mG’s estranged husband John macBride. (apr.–may) WBY tours Italy in the company of aG and her son Robert, visiting florence, Rimini, san marino, Venice, Urbino, and Ravenna. (Jul.) In residence at Coole, intermittently until oct. Publication of vol. 2 of Poetical Works (consisting of WBY’s plays) in the Us. (aug.) Publication of Deirdre. (Dec.) WBY’s short prose pieces, Discoveries, published by Dun emer Press. 1908 (mar.) Play Te Golden Helmet produced by the abbey in Dublin (published in america for copyright purposes in Jun.). Begins romantic involvement with mabel Dickinson. (may) Publication of Te Unicorn from the Stars, WBY’s collaborative rewriting with aG of Where Tere is Nothing. (Jun.) spends a week in Paris, in constant company with mG. P08 published. (Jul.) Takes up summer residence at Coole, staying until the end of sep. Believes himself to be in spiritual contact with mG, and by sep. in an occasional state of astral union with her. (sep.) first two volumes of CWVP08 published. (oct.) sees mG in London, though relationship moves no closer to a stable romantic state. Vols. 3 and 4 of CWVP08 published. (Nov.) Vols. 5 and 6 of CWVP08 published. successful Dublin production of Deirdre starring mrs. Patrick Campbell, which moves to London at the end of the month. (Dec.) Vols. 7 and 8 of CWVP08 published. Goes to Paris for over three weeks, seeing much of mG and probably in brief sexual relationship with her. 1909 (feb.) WBY is seriously perturbed by reports of aG’s serious illness (she does, however, recover rapidly from this). (mar.) Te death of J.m. synge (whose terminal illness WBY had known about for some time) occasions private distress, as well as being a serious event for the abbey Teatre. (Jul.) Goes to Coole for the summer, staying in Ireland until Nov. 1910 (feb.) Dublin performance of Te Green Helmet (WBY’s earlier Te Golden Helmet rewritten in verse). (mar.) Publication of Poems: Second Series, dated 1909. (apr.–may) Visits Colleville-sur-mer in Normandy, where he stays as guest of mG. (Jul.) In residence at Coole intermittently until mid-oct. (aug.) British government awards WBY a Civil List pension of £150 p.a. (sep.) Death in sligo of WBY’s uncle, George Pollexfen. advance copies of Te Green Helmet and Other Poems (Cuala Press) arrive, though the book is not published until Dec.

abbreviations In the notes to the poems, abbreviations have been employed for references to some persons, 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 eCY Gm GY JBY JQ mG smY WBY

Lady augusta Gregory elizabeth Corbet Yeats (‘Lolly’), the poet’s sister George moore George Yeats (née hyde-Lees), the poet’s wife John Butler Yeats, the poet’s father John Quinn maud Gonne susan mary Yeats (‘Lily’), the poet’s sister William Butler Yeats

Books by W.B. Yeats CP33 CP50 CWVP08 EPS GH10 GH12 ISW LP22 LP26 LP31 P49 P99 P99–05 PSS PW06 R14

Te Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1933). Te Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1950). Te Collected Works in Verse and Prose of W.B. Yeats (8 vols.) (stratfordon-avon, 1908). Early Poems and Stories (1925). Te Green Helmet and Other Poems (Dundrum, 1910). Te Green Helmet and Other Poems (New York, 1912). In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefy of the Irish Heroic Age (Dundrum, 1903). Later Poems (1922). Later Poems (1926) Later Poems (1931). Te Poems of W.B. Yeats (2 vols.) (1949). Poems (1899). [Tirteen 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).] Poems 1899–1905 (stratford-on-avon and Dublin, 1906). Poems: Second Series (1909). Te Poetical Works of William B. Yeats vol. 1 (New York, 1906) and vol. 2. (New York, 1907). Responsibilities: Poems and Two Plays (Dundrum, 1914).

xvi R16 SP21 SP29 TSW

aBBReVIaTIoNs

Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). Selected Poems (1921). Selected Poems Lyrical and Narrative (1929). Te Shadowy Waters (1900, 1906).

other Writings by W.B. Yeats Letters CL 1 CL 2 CL 3 CL 4 CL 5 InteLex

Te Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats vol. 1 (1865–1895) eds. John Kelly and eric Domville (oxford, 1986). Te Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats vol. 2 (1896–1900) eds. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (oxford, 1997). Te Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats vol. 3 (1901–1904) eds. John Kelly and Ronald schuchard (oxford, 1994). Te Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats vol. 4 (1905–1907) eds. John Kelly and Ronald schuchard (oxford, 2005). Te Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats vol. 5 (1908–1910) eds. John Kelly and Ronald schuchard (oxford, 2018). Te Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Electronic Edition gen. ed. John Kelly (Charlottesville Va, InteLex Corporation, 2002). Edited Writings of W.B. Yeats

albright Bradford PQ Cornell Deirdre Cornell DG Cornell ISWGH CW 1 CW 2 CW 3 CW 4 CW 5 CW 6 CW 8 CW 9

W.B. Yeats: Te Poems ed. Daniel albright (1990). Te Writing of Te Player Queen ed. Curtis Bradford (De Kalb, IL, 1977). Deirdre: Manuscript Materials ed. Virginia Bartholome Rohan (Ithaca, NY, 2004). Diarmuid and Grania: Manuscript Materials ed. J.C.C. mays (Ithaca, NY, 2005). In the seven Woods and Te Green helmet and other Poems: Manuscript Materials ed. David holdeman (Ithaca, NY, 2002). Te Poems 2nd edn., ed. R.J. finneran (1997). Te 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 (1988). Te Irish Dramatic Movement eds. mary fitzGerald and Richard J. finneran (2003). Early Articles and Reviews eds. John P. frayne and madeleine marchaterre (2004).

aBBReVIaTIoNs

CW 10 DC M Mem. SB VE VP YP

xvii

Later Articles and Reviews ed. Colton Johnson (2000). Druid Craf: Te Writing of Te shadowy Waters eds. michael J. sidnell, George P. mayhew, and David R. Clark (amerst, ma, 1971). Mythologies eds. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (2005). Memoirs ed. Denis Donoghue (1972). Te Speckled Bird: An Autobiographical Novel with Variant Versions: New Edition ed. William h. o’Donnell (2003). Te Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats eds. Peter allt and Russell K. alspach (1956). Te Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats ed. Russell K. alspach (1966). Yeats’s Poems ed. a.N. Jefares (1989, 3rd edn. 1996).

Writings by Lady Gregory AGD92–02 CM GFM SY VBWI

Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892–1902 ed. James Pethica (Gerrards Cross, 1996). Cuchulain of Muirthemne: Te Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (1902). Gods and Fighting Men: Te Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland (1904). Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory (ed. Colin smythe) (Gerrards Cross, 1974). Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (2 vols.) (1920).

other Writings Denson G-YL LTWBY 1, 2 Mikhail 1, 2 Moore Murphy Servant TLAS

Letters from AE ed. alan Denson (1961). Te Gonne–Yeats Letters 1893–1938 eds. anna macBride White and a. Norman Jefares (1994). Letters to W.B. Yeats eds. Richard J. finneran, George mills harper, and William m. murphy (2 vols., Basingstoke, 1977). W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections ed. e.h. mikhail (2 vols., Basingstoke, 1977). W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Teir Correspondence 1901–1937 ed. Ursula Bridge (1953). William m. murphy, Prodigal Father: Te Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (1978, 2nd edn. syracuse, NY, 2001). maud Gonne macBride, A Servant to the Queen: Reminiscences (1938), eds. a. Norman Jefares and anna macBride White (Gerrards Cross, 1994). Too Long a Sacrifce: Te Letters of Maud Gonne and John Quinn eds. J. and R. Londraville (Cranbury, NJ, 1999).

xviii

aBBReVIaTIoNs

Critical and Reference materials Te following is a list of the most commonly cited books of criticism and reference in the present volume’s notes. It is not a critical bibliography: the fullest listings of critical work may be found in K.P.s. Jochum, W.B. Yeats: A Critical Bibliography of Criticism 2nd edn. (Urbana, IL, 1990), supplemented by annual bibliographies in YACTS and YA. adams Bloom Bornstein Bradford Brown Chapman Cullingford Donoghue ellmann, Man and the Masks ellmann, Identity engelberg finneran Greaves Grene harris henn holdeman holdeman and Levitas hone howes

hazard adams, Te Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahassee, fL, 1990). harold Bloom, Yeats (1970). George Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley (Chicago, IL, 1970). Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale, IL, 1965). Terence Brown, Te Life of W.B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (oxford, 1999). Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (New York, 1991). elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge, 1993). Denis Donoghue, Yeats (Glasgow, 1971). Richard ellmann, Yeats: Te Man and the Masks (1948, 2nd edn. 1979). Richard ellmann, Te Identity of Yeats (1954, 2nd edn. 1964). edward engelberg, Te Vast Design: Patterns in W.B. Yeats’s Aesthetic (Toronto, 1964, 2nd edn. 1988). Richard J. finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (Basingstoke, 1990). Richard Greaves, Tradition, Reception and Modernism in W.B. Yeats (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes (oxford, 2008). Daniel a. harris, Yeats Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore, mD: Johns hopkins University Press, 1974). T.R. henn, Te Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1950). David holdeman, Much Labouring: Te Texts and Authors of Yeats’s First Modernist Books (ann arbor, mI, 1997). David holdeman and Ben Levitas eds., W.B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge, 2010). Joseph hone, W.B. Yeats 1865–1939 (1943, 2nd edn. 1962). marjorie howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge, 1996).

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howes and Kelly marjorie howes and J.s. Kelly eds., Te Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006). Jefares a. Norman Jefares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Basingstoke, 1984). Kelly J.s. Kelly, A W.B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke, 2003). Larrissy edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet: Te Measures of Diference (hemel hempstead, 1994). Loizeaux elizabeth Bergman Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986). Longley edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge, 2013). mcGarry James P. mcGarry, Place Names in the Writings of William Butler Yeats (Gerrards Cross, 1976). macNeice Louis macNeice, Te Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941, 2nd edn. 1967). Parkinson Tomas Parkinson, W.B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of his Early Verse (Berkeley, Ca, 1951). Purdy Dwight h. Purdy, Biblical Echo and Allusion in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Cranbury, NJ, 1994). 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 (Philadelphia, Pa, 1957). schuchard Ronald schuchard, Te Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (oxford, 2008). sidnell michael J. sidnell, Yeats’s Poetry and Poetics (Basingstoke, 1996). Toomey Yeats and Women ed. Deirdre Toomey (Basingstoke, 1997). Vendler helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (oxford, 2007). Wade allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W.B. Yeats (1951, 3rd edn. 1968). Whitaker Tomas R. Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue with History (Chapel hill, NC, 1964). YA Yeats Annual (London and Basingstoke, 1982–). Cited by volume. YACTS Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (Ithaca, NY, and ann arbor, mI, 1983–1999). Cited by volume.

other abbreviations GD NLI NYPL

order of the Golden Dawn. National Library of Ireland. New York Public Library.

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

xx del. (following word or phrase)

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Deleted: where a replacement is made for one or two words, this is transcribed afer 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 beneath these del.] ^ and ^. . .^ Indicates written material entered by WBY either above a line or between two lines. hol. holograph. ms manuscript. repr. Reproduced. Ts Typescript.

Introduction In keeping with the principles of the Longman annotated english Poets series, this edition 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 specifc references, sets poems in their contexts, and ofers an account of particular infuences, 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 present his oeuvre to posterity. Tere have been many arguments (ofen intense ones) about the fgure Yeats ‘fnally’ intended his work to cut, in terms of its presentation in a ‘collected’ form. for the most part, these are not arguments that this edition feels obliged to address – nor are they, perhaps, arguments capable of any defnitive solution in editorial 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. Te 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. Te 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 ofers some editorial difculties that are not ofen 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. Te 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 afects 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, and which were subsequently played on stage, but to provide edited versions of those works which, though set out on the page in dramatic form, were either never performed or had no reasonable prospect of performance. such works belong mainly to the earliest phase of the poet’s career, and it is with Te Countess Cathleen (begun in 1889) that Yeats’s dramatic composition begins to be

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unambiguously an attempt at something which will be represented on stage. from this point onwards, the fact of generic diference means that Yeats’s verse-drama, though closely related to his body of lyric poetry, is not incorporated in the present edition (though on those occasions when the poet allowed a lyric from a play to be printed separately, that is brought within the purview of the present work). a difcult case is presented by the verse-play Te Shadowy Waters, which Yeats saw sometimes as a poem, and sometimes as a stage play, and which was indeed put on the stage; among its numerous printed incarnations are versions explicitly for the theatre, as well as versions that connect it much more closely with the nineteenth-century tradition of verse-drama intended for the page. Te present edition includes the latter but excludes the former: thus, the 1900 Te Shadowy Waters is edited, and its substantially re-written version of 1906 is included also, but the ‘acting version’ produced by Yeats is excluded. many of Yeats’s stage plays include snatches (or more) of lyric verse and songs. It is possible to make a case for the inclusion of these in an edition of Yeats’s poetry – and R.J. finneran places these in an appendix to his edition of Te Poems (CW 1) – but their stage context is more important than their separate generic identity as pieces of verse, and the poet himself did not ofer them as distinct poems. Te present edition excludes these, while including lyrics from the stage which Yeats did separately publish. for the reader of Yeats who wishes to gain a full sense of his creative achievement at any time, and his development as an artist, the plays themselves remain, of course, essential. Tis is particularly true of the period covered by the present volume, when a great deal of Yeats’s literary energy went into the production of drama; and works such as On Baile’s Strand, Te King’s Treshold, or Deirdre are indispensable to an understanding of the evolution of his technical resource as a writer of verse, quite apart from their inherent dramatic merit. Texts and copy-texts. Tis 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 Te Poems of W.B. Yeats (2 vols., 1949), prepared under the supervision of the poet’s widow, George Yeats, alongside his long-serving copy-editor at the publisher macmillan, Tomas mark. It was this text which served as the basis for A Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (frst 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 ‘fnal’ text with direct editorial links to the poet himself. Tere are places where the 1949 edition 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 Tomas 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 punctuation. Yeats’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. Te 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

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as appendices in this edition, allowing readers to see the difering 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 specifed. 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. Te 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 ofen 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 fux for Yeats’s published texts. Te 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 afer his time, are kept largely in their frst-written guises. any impression of a stable set of spellings for Irish names in the poet’s time would be an illusion; and the fuidity of this state of afairs ofered 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 manuscript versions. Tese can be early rough beginnings, slightly less rough drafs, and then fair copies (and for many poems, all of these). for a long time critics have found this manuscript evidence suggestive and ofen worthy of study in its own right. Te 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 subjective 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 general, an attempt has been made to err on the side of inclusiveness where that is possible in practical terms: relatively small changes may, afer 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 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 without establishing what would be efectively an apparatus criticus, which demands careful navigation on the part of readers in order to arrive at relevant information for any given line. Te fullest available accounts of Yeats’s poetic manuscripts (where there are commonly photographic reproductions in addition to full diplomatic transcriptions) may be found in the Cornell series of manuscript materials, where individually edited volumes

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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. Transcription from Yeats’s handwriting is notoriously difcult, and it is to be expected that diferent pairs of eyes will come up with diferent readings from time to time. Te present edition has very ofen, in cases of doubt, gratefully accepted readings from the Cornell editors; occasionally, however, its readings do difer 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. Te 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 punctuation, 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 diferent 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. Te commentary ofered 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. Tese letters are cited, where appropriate, from the published volumes of Te Collected Letters, and afer that point from the electronic 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 infuenced. Te historical context of particular poems is also important, and an attempt has been made to locate work in relation to the moments of its composition and publication. a third aspect of the commentary is more specifcally 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 ofen one way of paying a debt, and can be understood in terms of what it has profted from). In order to allow the reader to gain some sense of the ways in which these poems embody a vast number of specifc points of contact with other poets’ works, the present notes invite specifc 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’

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(or ‘cp.’ as it is abbreviated here) does not mean necessarily 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 infuenced 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 confdent 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 qualifed 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 infuence on the composition, if only by being ‘in the air’ at a certain stage. Tat ‘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 signifcantly 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 fgures as Robert Dwyer Joyce or Tomas Caulfeld Irwin, or political poets like Tomas 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 ofering of some evidence about how, where, and when the poet came about his knowledge of the things concerned. here, the present edition is the benefciary of a long tradition of explicatory commentary, from the work of G.B. saul to that of a.N. Jefares, as well as the authors of major modern editions of the poet, including D. albright and R.J. finneran; Jefares’s 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 fnal level of the commentary ofered 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. Te same degree of critical context has not been applied to every poem, and here again reasons of proportion infuence 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). modern literary criticism on Yeats is voluminous, and shows many diferent aspects – historical, biographical, theoretical, and comparative – which would require

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more space than the present commentary afords to be treated comprehensively or with justice. It is noticeable that the sheer volume of modern criticism does not guarantee close attention being paid to every poem Yeats published: it is as though critical reception of his work is simultaneously heavy and patchy. With poems from the twentieth century, Yeats’s ‘famous’ pieces have drawn quantities of commentary that easily match those lavished on, say, milton or Joyce: in the case of these poems, the present commentary is necessarily very selective, and cannot sensibly hope to account for everything. Yet other poems, ofen with much in them to notice and debate, to evaluate and contextualize, still go generally short of attention. here, the present edition attempts to provide useful material for future criticism, and to suggest lines along which it might possibly develop. Yeats’s own insight (as he expressed it in 1901) that ‘one poem lights up another’ is one that a careful commentary may well bear out, and the implicit assumption of the commentary in the present edition is that seeing Yeats’s poetry whole (which is a good critical ambition, even if it is not the only one, or one that is comprehensively achievable) entails looking in places where a de facto canon of ‘famous poems’, however much these have been taught or loved, ofen does not extend. It is not wise, in any case, to presume or rush to impose limits on the critical utility of knowledge, according to one’s own taste or partiality: and seeing a great poet’s work whole, rather than in chosen parts, is not to study (or indeed edit) that poet to death, but into new kinds of life. Yeats’s ‘great’ poems are not somehow threatened or lessened by the other poems he wrote, and they may even be made all the greater by them. similarly, it is in the nature of real poetry to be able to absorb the history from which it emerges, and which it transforms; so knowing about that history will never, in the end, diminish the poetry. and however extensively great art is contextualized, it is impossible to contextualize it either out of its greatness or out of existence. It may be remarked, fnally, 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 traditions 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. Te frst is similar to problems that present themselves in establishing the order of any other poet’s writings, unless the writer has been an exceptionally careful keeper of records, and those records themselves have all been successfully kept: that is, there is ofen 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. Tis frst difculty, 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 frst set pencil or pen to paper: put simply, the poet returned to his poems many times afer they were frst written (or rather, afer 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,

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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 diferently, or simply done away with. Tis may present a confusing picture: a poem written frst 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. Te question of ‘when’ such a poem was composed is not one that can be given any straightforward answer. In negotiating the frst of these obstacles, the present edition makes use of such documentary help as can be mustered, supplementing this with contextual information that may point towards a particular date or period when a poem frst came into being. however, 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. Te situation is especially difcult with Yeats’s very early work, however; during the period covered by the present volume, it becomes more possible to be certain about dates of composition, based both on the evidence of manuscripts themselves, and on the circumstantial evidence of correspondence from Yeats and others, and (increasingly ofen) the records of periodical publication. 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 fnished (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 aferwards. Te 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 frst composition, but in its latest textual form, recording changes made to earlier 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 frst (and diferently) 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 frst published or written by Yeats in a specifc case. No editorial solution for this problem is ideal; but the present edition is arranged in such a way as to ‘freeze’ heavily revised poems at diferent points – ofen, in efect, 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. Tus, for example, ‘Te sorrow of Love’ (composed in 1891 and frst 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. Tis 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

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there are advantages for readers in being able to encounter them separately within the larger sequence. Te major instance of this in the present volume is the verse-drama Te Shadowy Waters: its volume publication in 1900 is edited frst in its chronological place (while recording diferences from the text as published in an american periodical by Yeats earlier in the year), and its later published incarnation of 1906 is separately edited along with other work fnished in that year. some shorter pieces, such as ‘Red hanrahan’s song about Ireland’ or ‘maid Quiet’, are versions of poems written in the 1890s (and edited in Volume Two of this edition), and these are edited from their revised texts in chronological position here. a critical assumption which is central to the present editorial procedure 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 ofen, 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 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.

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THE SONG OF HEFFERNAN THE BLIND: A TRANSLATION Textual history. Tis quatrain survives in one MS version, inscribed by WBY on a preliminary leaf of a copy of P99 presented to AG by the poet on 10 May 1899, two days afer its publication (now in the Woodruf Library, Emory University). Here, the quatrain follows and faces a MS version of the 1893 poem ‘On A Child’s Death’. Te translation of Hefernan was never put into print by WBY, and it was frst published in R. Schuchard, ‘Te Lady Gregory-Yeats Collection at Emory University’, YA 3, 159. William Hefernan (Liam Dall Ó hIfearnáin) and context for the translation. WBY had frst become interested in the Irish poet William Dall Hefernan (Hefernan the Blind) as long ago as 1888. Tis poet was a very obscure fgure, who seems to have lef behind only around twenty poems when he died in 1803. Born in Co. Tipperary c.1720, he was strongly associated with Irish Jacobitism; some of his writing calls down curses on the Damer family, the local landholders who were originally planted in Shronehill by Cromwell. On 15 Dec. 1888, WBY wrote to Douglas Hyde with a request for an English translation of a quatrain by Hefernan (CL 1, 115–116): Can you tell me any thing about a Gaelic-speaking poet of the last century called William Hefernan or more usually William Dall or Blind William. He lived in Shronehill in county Tipperary and abused in verse Damer the usurer. I know Walsh’s account both in “Irish Popular Songs” and “Irish Jacobite Poetry” but there are no dates. Could you tell me of any other authorities who speak of him? I know, by the way, Hardiman quotes him. Do the peasantry still remember his name and verse in Tipperary or elsewhere – On page 15 and 16 of Walsh’s Irish Jacobite Poetry are some pieces of untranslated Irish of two and four lines each. I am afraid I will have to ask you to translate them for me. Have you the book if not I will lend you my copy. I hope you will not mind my giving you all this trouble but the fact is I want to write an account of Hefernan for the Dictionary of National Biography. It is likely that Hyde obliged on this occasion, though any translation sent by him to WBY does not survive. Te projected entry on Hefernan was not wanted by the DNB, and was not written for it (by WBY or anyone else), so in fact the poet had no immediate need for this translated material. It appears that WBY kept Hyde’s crib in reserve DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-2

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for some possible future use, and by 1899 he was able to employ it in constructing the quatrain for AG’s copy of his newly published Poems. Over recent years, WBY had spent much energy on Hefernan’s political poem, ‘Caitilin ni Uallachan [Kathleen ni Houlihan]’, in poems of 1894 and 1896 deriving from it (see ‘Veering, Fleeting, Fickle’ and ‘O Tufed Reeds, Bend Low’, in vol. 2 of the present edition), and he would return to it for ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland’ in 1903. In fact, the quatrain produced by WBY incorporates material from two separate quatrains by Hefernan, which are to be found on facing pages of John Daly’s editorial material in Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844, 2nd edn. 1866): the frst is, according to Daly, one of the ‘many short distichs heard amongst the people [which] bespeak [Hefernan’s] poverty and his afictions’: this gives WBY Hefernan’s complaints of the need to labour painfully for his bread. Te second quatrain is introduced by O’Daly thus: ‘Of [Hefernan’s] frst essays there is one more popular than the rest – not for any intrinsic merit it possesses, but because it throws some light on the domestic circle of a man whose life is much less known than it deserves – I shall conclude these quotations with it’. Tis second piece provides WBY with the ‘I ofen am in. . .’ locution (applied here to Lattin, Shronehill, and Conroy’s town), as well as the companion-fgures of Teig and Nora. Te poem which WBY ofers to AG as a ‘translation’ is just this, but it is also more precisely a confation of the two Hefernan quatrains. It is, as Nancy Rutkowski Nash has written, ‘a rather loose adaptation of one quatrain and a borrowing from another, all of which was originally translated by Hyde’ (‘Yeats and Hefernan the Blind’, YA 4, 203). Te reason for WBY’s decision to inscribe these lines in AG’s copy of P99 is a matter of speculation. One possibility is that the poet was aware of AG’s ongoing researches into folk tradition and Irish poetry, and saw these lines as a suitable invocation of one (now obscure) fgure from the previous century. AG’s Poets and Dreamers (1903) has in fact only the scantiest of references to Hefernan, whom she refers to as ‘O’Hefernan’, and reads entirely in relation to Jacobite propaganda. AG does, however, register that Hefernan qualifes as a ‘wandering’ poet, and this itinerant quality seems to have struck WBY also as important. O’Daly’s conclusion in efect prepares the ground for the fgure WBY would go on to develop (and invent) once the historical Hefernan turned into characters such as Red Hanrahan (Irish Jacobite Poetry, 95): Every thing that fred the poet’s fancy, or roused his passions, or flled his heart with indignant scorn of the miser and his alien horde, has disappeared; but the peasant’s fame, the smallest traits of his character, the most trivial incidents of his life, and those rich and exuberant strains of Celtic eloquence, which came with the force and copiousness of a torrent upon his enemies, are remembered and recited by the people as if they were the productions of yesterday. Date of composition. Tere is no evidence to provide a frm date when WBY might have fashioned this translation. It is possible that it dates back as far as the late 1880s, when the poet solicited a translation of the Irish from Hyde; but it seems much more likely that WBY turned back to Hyde’s crib a good deal later than this, and the quatrain may well date from shortly before the time the poet inscribed it in AG’s book.

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Copy-text: MS inscription by WBY on front fyleaf of AG’s copy of P99 (Emory University). I often am in Shronehill, in Conroy is my bed, I grind an old quern, I grind it for my bread, And Teig and Nora with me, no other souls than these; I grind an old quern and them I do not please.

Title] WBY’s title in MS. 1.] Shronehill] Shrone hill MS. Now more usually Shronell, from the Irish Srónaill [a noselike clif], this townland about three miles from Tipperary was settled by Joseph Damer (1630–1720), a Cromwellian ofcer whose activities caused general resentment, including in a later generation that of the poet Hefernan. Conroy] It is not clear where this is located: there are no townlands of the name in Co. Tipperary, though ‘Conroy’ is a fairly common surname in the area. In the second of the Hefernan quatrains, ‘Conroy’s town’ is mentioned. 2, 4. I grind an old quern] Te notion of menial (and hard) labour is conveyed here. WBY’s knowledge that a quern is ‘A simple, typically hand-operated, device for grinding corn, etc., consisting of two stones, the upper of which is rotated or rubbed on the

lower’ (OED) would have been reinforced (if it was not indeed gained from) references to labour at the quern by poets such as Aubrey De Vere, R.D. Joyce, and William Morris. WBY has ‘An old slave grinding at a heavy quern’ in his 1892 poem ‘Fergus and the Druid’ (35), and his short story, ‘Where Tere Is Nothing, Tere Is God’ (frst publ. 1896) mentions ‘Brother Bald Fox, whose business it was to turn the great quern in the quern-house, for he was too stupid for anything else’; this story also seems to show some awareness of the tradition of the ‘quern song’, of which the Hefernan poem may perhaps be an example: ‘the quern was never idle, nor was it turned with grudging labour, for when any passed the beggar was heard singing as he drove the handle round’ (M, 124). 3. Teig and Nora] O’Hefernan employs these two common names in the second of the two quatrains used by WBY.

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THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900) Date and circumstances of composition. Afer the aborted attempt at publication of the 1896 version of Te Shadowy Waters (edited in vol. 2 of present edition), WBY’s work on this long-running project seems to have faltered for some time, before being taken up again in earnest in May 1899. Te verse drama was nevertheless much in the poet’s thoughts in the interim, and his struggles with the work were announced to AG as early as 1897, as she noted afer a tea with WBY in London (entry for 23 Feb. 1897, AGD92–02, 129): He [WBY] believes there will be a reaction afer the realism of Ibsen, and romance will have its turn – He has put “a great deal of himself ” into his own new play – “the Shelter of the Waters”? – and rather startled me by saying about half his characters have eagles’ faces – In the course of 1897, WBY continued to think about revision and new composition in the piece, which by the summer he was still considering as his contribution to a newly founded ‘Celtic Literary Teatre’ involving both AG and Edward Martyn. In a letter of 7 Jul. 1897, JBY told his friend Sarah Purser about his son’s play, a version of which he had by now evidently read (quoted CL 2, 121): Next summer some sort of an association with some sort of a Celtic appellation is going to give in Dublin a series of theatrical entertainments under the management of Mrs. Emery – they are to present a play by Edward Martyn (of Tillyra Castle) and Willie’s play called the “Shadowy Waters” this latter to me absolutely unintelligible – however Mrs. Emery [Florence Farr] says she understands it and as she is to act in it one of the principal parts this is important though I suppose not absolutely necessary. Even in its 1897 form the play was evidently quite unsuitable for the stage, and in the event WBY’s Te Countess Cathleen ftted the new group’s theatrical purposes much more readily. In Jun. and Jul. 1897, while based at Tillyra as Martyn’s guest, WBY is likely to have discussed his poetic play in some detail with GM, whose later recollection (which may also draw on discussions the following summer) gives some favour of the conversations (Ave (1911), 241): DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-3

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[WBY] had come over to Tillyra from Coole a few days before, and had read us Te Shadowy Waters, a poem that he had been working on for more than seven years, using it as a receptacle or storehouse for all the fancies that had crossed his mind during that time, and these were so numerous that the pirate-ship ranging the Shadowy Waters came to us laden to the gunnel with Fomorians, beaked and unbeaked, spirits of Good and Evil of various repute, and, so far as we could understand the poem, these accompanied a metaphysical pirate of ancient Ireland cruising in the unknown waters of the North Sea in search of some ultimate kingdom. We admitted to Yeats, Edward [Martyn] and I, that no audience would be able to discover the story of the play, and we confessed ourselves among the bafed that would sit bewildered and go out raging against the poet. Our criticism did not appear to surprise Yeats; he seemed to realize that he had knotted and entangled his skein till no remedy short of breaking some of the threads would avail, and he eagerly accepted my proposal to go over to Coole to talk out the poem with him, and to redeem it, if possible, from the Fomorians. He would regret their picturesque appearance; but could I get rid of them, without losing the poetical passages? He would not like the words ‘poetical passages’ – I should have written ‘beautiful verses’. WBY established himself at Coole on 26 Jul. for a stay of two months; but there is no direct evidence on further composition of the play at this time. GM was, however, to have further involvement with the composition process, and WBY was to read him the play aloud (in the company of Arthur Symons, JBY, and Edmund Gosse) on two occasions at Christmas, 1898. Whatever the outcome of conversations at this time, sustained work on rewriting had to wait for WBY’s stay at Coole in May 1899. Now, as the editors of DC comment, ‘Te conditions [for composition] were ideal; Lady Gregory [. . .] would protect his health and his time,’ while ‘His theatre colleagues, Moore and Martyn, were near at hand, the former ready to give the practical advice that proved invaluable in the inauguration of the Irish Literary Teatre’ (DC, 225). Tere seems little doubt that WBY was spurred on at this point by thoughts of TSW as a potential stage-play, which would also constitute a poetic work for publication. Te recent success (and accompanying public controversy) of Te Countess Cathleen in Dublin gave WBY reason to attend to news that in London there were plans to establish the Stage Society, which would ‘serve as an Experimental Teatre’. Writing to Clement Shorter from Coole on 27 May 1899, WBY announced his work to ‘fnish’ the play (CL 2, 418): As a result of the success of ‘Te Irish Literary Teatre’ I have a chance of getting ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ done in London in Autumn and am therefore setting to work to fnish it. I told you about it I think. It is a rather wild little play about the length of ‘Te Land of Heart’s Desire’, which acted rather less than 25 minutes, and probably the best verse I have written. Do you think a play of this length is too long for a magazine, American or English? I should want to get it published before it was acted if possible.

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It would appear from this that WBY had relatively quick completion in mind, and this may be owing in part to detailed conversations about the play which had taken place with various friends including AG and GM over the past couple of years. Word of the play was passed to the Daily Express in Dublin, which reported on 10 Jun. that it was to be produced as a curtain-raiser in London that autumn, and that ‘Mr. Yeats thinks it the best thing he has written’ (quoted in CL 2, 438). Te pace of work was maintained over the coming weeks: on 21 Jun. WBY reported that the play ‘is going on far better than when I lef it aside a couple of years ago’ (to Dora Sigerson Shorter, CL 2, 425), and on 12 Jul. the poet wrote to SMY about how “Te Shadowy Waters’ is not fnished, but is going on well’ (CL 2, 433). As the summer went on, further reports confrmed both WBY’s dedication to the work in hand (‘I am deep in a long poem, which I dare not interrupt’, he wrote to John Lane on 3 Aug. (CL 2 435)), and his confdence in its quality (writing to JBY on 11 Aug., ‘it [TSW] is going very well [. . .] in some ways the best long poem I have done [. . .] more intense and more original’ (CL 2, 437)). Plans for publication began to take shape in Aug., and WBY’s sights were set on the North American Review (NAR), to whom he had by now (and lucratively) sold an essay, ‘Te Literary Movement in Ireland’ (publ. Dec. 1899; CW 9, 459–470). Te magazine had a London ofce, and the editor, William D. Fitts, who had already asked the poet whether he might be able to provide some verse, was in England that summer. WBY’s letter to Fitts of 19 Aug., ofering him TSW, anticipated completion of the piece in Sept. or Oct. (CW 2, 439–440): I am at work on a dramatic poem, ‘Te Shadowy Waters’, which has to be done by September, if I am to get it on the stage in London, which I believe I can do this autumn. I cannot stop from this poem long enough to do you any poem of sufcient importance for me to send you for the generous terms you ofer. I am a very slow writer. I have never done more than fve or six good lines in a day, and not ofen that, and a poem of thirty or forty would take a couple of weeks probably. I suggest in my letter to New York that ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ may not be too long for ‘Te North American Review’. It will be about 700 lines when fnished. I have written about 400 lines. I don’t think it will be a popular poem, but I think it may be a good deal noticed for it is very wild and passionate. It is lyrical in feeling, and will contain a certain number of actual lyrics. It is what people call Maeterlinckean, though certainly it owes nothing to him. Te subject is old Irish, and it is of course in one act. I am anxious to impress on you that I do not think it will have many popular qualities, but I think it is my best poem of any length. It is quite unlike anything I have done. If you cared for it you could have it some time in October. If it is acted it will I think be so in November. Since the poem as eventually published is 431 lines long, it appears that the bulk of actual composition (though not, of course, detailed revision) had in fact been done by this point. What the projected 300 extra lines might have contained is not clear, and it seems unlikely that these would have been made up entirely of lyrics (in the event,

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no lyrics at all featured in the play). When WBY informed George Russell about the work at the end of Aug., he approached the subject by way of symbolism, of Russell’s vision of the ‘white fool’, and the god Aengus: ‘I may be getting the whole story,’ WBY wrote, ‘of the relations of man and woman, in symbol, – all that makes the subject of ‘Te Shadowy Waters’’ (CL 2, 443). Yet even the appearance of Aengus would prove insufcient to allay pressing anxieties about the literary interference of GM. Russell’s enthusiasm for the whole project of revision was very limited; and in Sep. 1899, on learning of some of GM’s proposed amendments to the plot, he told WBY how ‘I swore at Moore when I heard it [. . .] I would like to strangle him’. GM’s intervention, it should be said, was made with WBY’s full consent, certainly during the summer of 1899. Ridding the play fnally of its hawk-headed Fomorians was both logical and necessary in order to create a potential script for the stage; and it seems likely that WBY wanted to make this radical exclusion more than just his own decision. One of GM’s retrospective glimpses of the re-composition discussions at Coole identifes in WBY a willingness to turn away from ‘human sympathies’ (as instanced by his forthright rejection of new dramatic work by Martyn), and links this with the new shape for TSW (GM, Ave (1911), 282–283): Yesterevening, when we wandered about the lake, talking of Te Shadowy Waters, trying to free it from the occult sciences that had grown about it, Fomorians beaked and unbeaked, and magic harps and Druid spells, I did not perceive that the difculties into which the story had wandered could be attributed to a lack of human sympathy. But Yeats’s treatment of Edward [Martyn] proved it to me. [. . .] To write a play our human and artistic sympathies must be very evenly balanced, and I remembered that amongst my suggestions for the reconstruction of Te Shadowy Waters, the one that Yeats refused most resolutely was that the woman should refuse to accompany the metaphysical pirate to the ultimate North, but return somewhat difdently, ashamed of herself, to the sailors who were drinking yellow ale. ‘Yeats has refected himself in the pirate,’ I said. ‘All he cares for is a piece of literature.’ Much of the 1899 work on TSW took place at Coole: there was an interruption in Sep., when WBY tailed MG in Belfast and in Dublin, but by Oct. he was back in the care of AG, and busily perfecting the play. Te arrival of a playscript from Fiona Macleod, Te Immortal Hour, revealed that William Sharp was already taking material and ideas wholesale from WBY, including elements of TSW: presumably, this helped stifen general resolve at Coole. Also in Oct., Russell had been appraised of the ongoing work, and continued to feel instinctively hostile to it, not least on account of the involvement of GM. Russell told AG that he was ‘sorry to hear that Moore has brought his inartistic soul to bear on the Shadowy Waters and that Willie is again altering’; his intention was to visit Coole and intervene in person: ‘I will strangle Moore if necessary’ (12 Aug. 1899, Berg collection, NYPL). GM and Russell did meet in Dublin at this time, though any entreaties (up to and including attempted strangulation) were in vain, and the collaboration in Co. Galway continued. Replying in early Nov. to a letter from Russell calling GM ‘the fend

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who has suggested alterations’, WBY defended the changes that were now being efected (CL 2, 463–464): I think you are wrong about ‘Te Shadowy Waters’. Te picture was more impressive in its old form and I regret the loss of the Fomor but the poetry is richer and more various in the new, and it is getting written more easily. Te new form will act much better. Moore does not much like my ideas of the proper way of speaking verse; but he is wrong and I want to do a little play which can be acted and half chanted and so help the return of bigger poetical plays to the stage. Tis is really a magical revolution for the magical word is the chanted word. Te new ‘Shadowy Waters’ could be acted on two big tables in a drawing room; not that this will please you who don’t much like acting at all I think. As the year came to a close, WBY was back in London, and racing against a deadline for the revised work. On 21 Dec. the poet told AG how he had ‘been trying to get my poem fnished for next Saturday and will almost succeed’, since ‘I am about twenty or thirty lines from the end’: he observed that ‘Te thing grows wilder and fner as it goes on, I think’, and his confdence increased further by the next day, as he announced that ‘I have just got to the end of ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ and two days’ revision here and there will have it ready for the ‘North American Review’’ (CL 2, 479). However, on 19 Jan. 1900, Russell was urging WBY to ‘Please publish ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ at once, before any more changes are suggested by the changing Tatuas’ (Denson, 35). Te real reason for delay at this point was not in fact anything to do with Tattwas Tarot card symbolism, but the death of WBY’s mother on 3 Jan., which set back the poet’s practical plans for having a fnished TS ready for NAR. Nevertheless, WBY was able to contact G.G. Leveson-Gower (the NAR’s European editor) on 8 Jan., apologizing for not having given him the poem on 5 Jan. as agreed, and explaining this by ‘an unexpected family trouble’, and letting him know that the typed copy would be delivered on 9 Jan. A copy of the TS was with the New York editor of NAR, William Fitts, by the middle of Mar., and TSW was published in the magazine’s May edition. Sources. Te action of TSW, and to a great extent its characters, do not have any specifc sources in Irish or other legend; at the same time, these are intended by WBY to sit comfortably alongside Irish mythical narratives, and to be understood in relation to such stories, especially as they are related in the works of AG. In a note attached to a later version of the play in CWVP08, WBY recalled the work leading up to his 1900 version, placing the main emphasis on the signifcance of the god Aengus and his companion Edain (vol. 2, 254): I took the Aengus and Edain of Te Shadowy Waters from poor translations of the various Aengus stories, which, new translated by Lady Gregory, make up so much of what is beautiful in both her books. Tey had, however, so completely become a part of my own thought that in 1897, when I was still working on an early version of Te Shadowy Waters, I saw one night with my bodily eyes, as it seemed, two beautiful persons, who would, I believe, have answered to

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their names. Te plot of the play itself has, however, no defnite old story for its foundation, but was woven to a very great extent out of certain visionary experiences. Te clear hint here is that the work emerged largely from personal sources, or at least from an ultimately personal system of symbolism. WBY had been more forthcoming privately, when he wrote to Florence Farr in Jul. 1905 (CL 4, 135): ‘Te play as it was [i.e. TSW (1900)], came into existence afer years of strained emotion, of living upon tip-toe, and is only right in its highest moments – the logic and circumstances are all wrong.’ In his creative dealings with Aengus, WBY was indeed partly motivated by the ‘bad translations’ of Irish material in which he had encountered this fgure (including perhaps the twelfh-century Aislinge Oenguso, the Dream-Vision of Aengus, in the Book of Leinster, frst translated by E. Müller in Revue Celtique 3 (1876), 347–350, and paraphrased by J. Rhys in Celtic Heathendom (1888) 169–171), but also (and increasingly) by the development of Aengus as a character in AG’s ongoing project of re-casting and re-telling the old myths. In the later 1890s, Aengus was still in the process of being promoted to an Irish love-god who, whether as a lover himself or as the sponsor of other lovers, could fnd a place both in WBY’s poetic imagination and in the poet’s personal life. TSW is the frst of the large-scale projects (thought through and ofen written at Coole) which makes Aengus an important tutelary deity for the poet’s own romantic fxation on MG: afer the play, the long poems ‘Baile and Aillinn’ (1901) and ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ (1902) both make use of Aengus, and both rely on a degree of consonance between the god’s help with and the poet’s success in love; both, also, have moments of convergence with TSW itself. Te ‘certain visionary experiences’ that fed into TSW were those vouchsafed to WBY, sometimes along with George Russell, at Coole, and they were taken by the poet to involve Aengus in one form or another. TSW and Axël. Te long play Axël by the French writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam (1838–1889) was published in 1890, and quickly gained a reputation in France and beyond as a work of great Symbolist ambition, as well as one with associations of decadence. Te work held a powerful attraction for WBY, who endeavoured (very unusually for him) to understand it in the original French. In Feb. 1894, WBY attended a performance of the play in Paris, accompanied by MG. Te plot of Axël, with its elements of Rosicrucianism and medievalism, resolving into the doomed afair of two death-bound lovers (Axël and Sara), plainly had numerous points of appeal for the poet. WBY himself gave an account of the play in an article about the Paris performance for Te Bookman in Apr. 1894 (CW 9, 236): In the play Sara, a woman of this strange Medusa-like type, comes to the castle of a Count Axël, who lives in the Black Forest studying magic with Janus, a wizard ascetic of the Rosy Cross. When she arrives he has already refused frst the life of the world, typifed by the advice of a certain ‘commander’ his cousin, the life of the spiritual intellect labouring in the world but not of it, as symbolised by the teaching and practice of the adept Janus; and she herself has refused the religious life as symbolized by the veil of the nun. In a last great scene they

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meet in a vault full of treasure – the glory of the world – and avow their mutual love. He frst tries to kill her because the knowledge that she is in the world will never let him rest. She throws herself upon his neck and cries, ‘Do not kill me; what were the use? I am unforgettable. Tink what you refuse. All the favour of other women were not worth my cruelties. I am the most mournful of virgins. I think that I can remember having made angels fall. Alas, fowers and children have died in my shadow. Give way to my love. I will teach you marvellous words which will intoxicate like the wine of the East. . . . I know the secrets of infnite joys, of delicious cries, of pleasures beyond all hope . . ., to veil you with my hair, where you will breathe the spirit of dead roses’. Te marvellous scene prolongs itself from wonder to wonder till in the height of his joyous love Axël remembers that his dream must die in the light of the common world, and pronounces the condemnation of all life, of all pleasure, of all hope. Te lovers resolve to die. Tey drink poison, and so complete the fourfold renunciation – of the cloister, of the active life of the world, of the labouring life of the intellect, of the passionate life of love. Te infnite is alone worth attaining, and the infnite is the possession of the dead. Such appears to be the moral. Seldom has the utmost pessimism found a more magnifcent expression. Several years before TSW started to come into coherent form as a work, it is clear that WBY was fnding in Axël and Sara the models for what Forgael and Dectora would eventually become. Te French play is in itself already deeply indebted to other doomed lovers – not least, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde – so WBY was well aware that in appropriating de l’Isle Adam’s work for TSW he was in efect simply continuing the deep (and in some ways repetitive) allusiveness of Axël itself. Te initial act of appropriation, however, is less creative than it is personal on WBY’s part: that the poet in 1894 saw himself as Axël and MG as Sara is as obvious as it is (somewhat naively) wishful. It is likely that WBY discovered in Axël a way of fguring the kind of consummation between lovers which would go beyond the merely sexual, and ofer a transcendental reward for renunciation and abstinence. On a number of counts, this fails to ft the facts of the case in the poet’s relationship with MG; but it does, on the other hand, demonstrate an artistic resolution for a romantic fxation with regard to which WBY could only at this stage realistically take a view of ‘the utmost pessimism’. Te characters of Forgael and Dectora gave WBY plenty of trouble as his play evolved through the stages of composition (and this trouble did not come to an end with the 1900 version), but Axël certainly permitted the poet to fx his two lovers in their symbolic identities. As Lloyd Parks puts it, ‘Like his counterpoint Axel, Forgael refuses love at frst and accepts it later, but only in the guise of an ‘eternal union’’, while ‘Like Sara, Dectora frst defends the worldly notion of love and then yields to Forgael’s idea of a supernatural emotion’ (‘Te Infuence of Villiers de l’Isle Adam on W.B. Yeats’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 6/3–4 (Spring-Summer 1978), 269). In the 1890s, WBY repeatedly alluded to Axël, and was apt to return to the text and its author frequently thereafer: in many ways, the French play outlasted the immediate romantic obsessions in the light of which WBY had frst encountered it, and became for

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him a signal instance of the aristocratic renunciation of the world of commonness and mere appearance. One line which he ofen quoted, ‘Vivre? Les serviteurs feront ça pour nous’ [Living? Our servants will do that for us’] became so common a Yeatsian watchword that it is easily taken as belonging to the poet himself. Yet there is comparatively little sign of this aristocratic metaphysical anarchism in the 1900 TSW, where WBY’s focus is more steadily upon a consummation of sexual love which is also its transcendence. Additionally, it should be remembered that there is a very signifcant diference between de l’Isle Adam’s Sara and WBY’s Dectora: while Sara (however laboriously) does fall in love with Axël, Dectora is made to love Forgael by means of his enchantment, and Aengus’ magical harp. Dectora does not so much renounce the world, as have her memories of it magically wiped. Obviously WBY was aware of the troubling complications posed by this situation; just as obviously, de l’Isle Adam supplied few hints of how those complications might ever be resolved. In this respect, the 1900 TSW is still a story in the process of further development. But it is as well to remember that the plot of TSW hinges on the forcible co-option of a woman to the apocalyptic/sexual fantasies of a more powerful man: in this respect, WBY’s concentration of the much longer drawn-out Axël makes violent gender dynamics much more immediate and difcult. In the frst fush of enthusiasm for the French play, in Nov. 1894, WBY recommended that a novelist make ‘your men salient, marked, dominant’, rather than ‘refned, distinguished, sympathetic’ in order to ‘treble the solidity of your work’, citing de l’Isle Adam as a creative authority: but this was advice given to Olivia Shakespear which, given the imminent sexual relationship between himself and that novelist, seems something less than disinterested (CL 1, 415). If TSW eloquently records WBY’s debt to de l’Isle Adam, it also suggests the largerscale limits to that debt in the poet’s ongoing creative development. Arthur Symons – who is very likely to have been the poet’s (much-needed) guide in his early attempts to read the text – gave some sense of the limits of Axël’s scope (Fortnightly Review, Aug. 1899): In the sense in which that word is ordinarily used, Villiers has no pathos. Tis is enough to explain why he can never, in the phrase he would have disliked so greatly, ‘touch the popular heart.’ ‘A chacun son infni’ [to each his own infnite] he has said; and, in the avidity of his search for the infnite, he has no mercy for the blind weakness which goes stumbling over the earth, without so much as knowing that the sun and stars are overhead. [. . .] It is certain that the destiny of the greater part of the human race is either infnitely pathetic or infnitely ridiculous. Under which aspect, then, shall that destiny and those obscure fractions of humanity be considered? Villiers was too sincere an idealist, too absolute in his idealism, to hesitate. ‘As for living,’ he cries, in that splendid phrase of Axël, ‘our servants will do that for us!’ Symons manages here to suggest something of the limitations of TSW. For WBY, Axël became in time in part an object of nostalgia, rather than a creatively enabling text, and he could write about it confdently as an illustration of his own – ever more completely

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written-up – past life. In 1924, in a preface to an English translation of Axël, WBY quoted passages of his own 1894 report in Te Bookman, but set this in the perspective of selfmythologizing literary history (CW 6, 156): It [Axël] did not move me because I thought it a great masterpiece, but because it seemed part of a religious rite, the ceremony perhaps of some secret Order wherein my generation had been initiated. Even those strange sentences so much in the manner of my time – ‘as to living, our servants will do that for us’; ‘O to veil you with my hair where you will breathe the spirit of dead roses’ – did not seem so important as the symbols: the forest castle, the treasure, the lamp that had burned before Solomon [. . .] I can see how those symbols became a part of me, and for years to come dominated my imagination [. . .] Is it only because I opened the book for the frst time when I had the vivid senses of youth that I must see that tower room always, and hear always that thunder? Publication history. WBY’s initial publication of TSW was in NAR, and this was a relatively lucrative journal: the poet had received £40 for ‘Te Literary Movement in Ireland’, and he had been promised £20 for a normal-length poem (see letter to JBY, 11 Aug. 1899, CL 2, 436). WBY had no short poems available in the summer of 1899, but clearly expected a larger sum for the substantial TSW, which he ofered to the journal at this time (in Jan. 1900, however, the poet informed its European editor that ‘I made no arrangement with Mr. Fitts [the New York editor] about the price’); in fact, the magazine was able to ofer ‘up to £75 and in exceptional cases more’ in 1899, so it is possible that WBY in the event did quite well fnancially (see CL 2, 488). By the time NAR had appeared in May 1900, WBY was involved in negotiations with Macmillan to publish his past and future work, including TSW; but these came to nothing, afer two powerfully negative readers’ reports. Te poet himself suspected this would happen: ‘I doubt if they will really come to the point, for they have asked to see ‘Shadowy Waters’, and that they will dislike’ (letter to AG, 1 May 1900, CL 2, 520). Another publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, was already in play for taking on WBY’s back catalogue (though, in the event, they ended up with only TSW), and the poet told AG on 5 Jun. that TSW ‘certainly should come out in the autumn’ (CL 2, 537). A.P. Watt began to act as WBY’s literary agent in Jun., and the poet told Hodder and Stoughton on 1 Aug. that they would have TSW ‘by early autumn’ (CL 2, 557: this may imply that further revision was by now envisaged). An agreement with Hodder and Stoughton for TSW was signed on 16 Oct. (see CL 2, 577–580, where this is reproduced in full), and the book was published on 22 Dec. WBY retained the American rights to the book, and Watt succeeded in placing it with Dodd, Mead and Co. in the US on what WBY called ‘good terms’ (to AG, 8 Jan. 1901, CL 3, 11); the American book was published (with text identical to the Hodder and Stoughton version) in Apr. 1901 – ‘It is much nicer than the English edition’, the poet remarked (to William Stevens, 1 May 1901, CL 3, 64). Te volume was not republished on either side of the Atlantic, and remaining copies of the English edition were purchased by WBY on behalf of his new publisher, A.H. Bullen, in 1904. An almost completely revised version of TSW was to appear in Bullen’s frst WBY publication,

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15

P99–05, in 1906 (edited separately in the present volume). Te 1900 TSW thereafer vanished from view for all but book collectors, until it was included in VE (where variants from the text of NAR were also recorded in full). Reception. TSW had been much anticipated, not least by those closest to its poet. On 2 Jan. 1900, JBY wrote in relief to AG that the work ‘is perfectly fresh and genuine – fruit in good season’ (Murphy, 215), and on publication of the Hodder and Stoughton edition he told his son how he was ‘reading ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ with great enthusiasm’ (20 Dec. 1900, Denson, 39). In Dec. 1900, MG wrote to the poet of how TSW ‘is beautiful – more beautiful even than I remembered it’, telling him that ‘I read it last night, I read it this morning, when instead I ought to have been working’, and she summed up her enthusiasm with ‘It is perhaps the most beautiful thing you have ever written, and yet while I write this I feel that it is treason to the Secret Rose and to the other poems’ (G-YL, 138). George Russell, who had never been well-disposed to the idea of any revision of TSW, and had been alarmed and exasperated by GM’s involvement (see Date and circumstances of composition), was perhaps inevitably disappointed by the fnished work of 1900. WBY knew of his friend’s doubts about the revised poem, but Russell’s letter of congratulation on the appearance of TSW kept these somewhere between its lines (Dec. 1900, LTWBY 1, 75): Tanks for the Shadowy Waters, a most beautiful poem, which should have been printed faintly on dim twilight coloured paper and bound in skins with golden symbolism of stars and sybils and Druidic emblems. I feel that a nineteenth century person in this hideous world ought not to read it until he has cast aside his modern clothes and put on an ancient robe, and found out somewhere an old hall in a castle hung round with mementos of a thousand years ago to read it in. But in notes of his conversation made by George Roberts (of the Irish National Teatre Society and the Dublin publishers Maunsel and Co.) in Jan. 1901, Russell was sweepingly negative (Houghton Library, Harvard; quoted in DC, 288–289): I do not like Te Shadowy Waters in the published version as much as some of his earlier work. It was much better in the frst version which was written several years ago. [. . .] Since the frst version several have been written, each succeeding version showing a more highly wrought art, but expressing less efectively the idea, until now it has become a sort of decorating pattern poem, bearing the same relation to a living poem as [one of] Burne Jones’s pictures, with drapery placed in position merely for efect and fowers stuck up where the decorative scheme needed them without considering whether things could grow there or not, does to a picture of passion and imagining such as [G.F.] Watts paints. Yeats has no philosophical basis for his poetry. Except an arbitrary system which he has from the ‘Rosicrucian Cult’ which is obscure and unsatisfactory and has an arbitrary system of symbols only to be understood by initiates. Te gods to Yeats are merely symbols, which he frequently uses in

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a merely fanciful way [. . .] He is too fond of putting a blue ribbon round the necks of the gods. In Te Shadowy Waters he has introduced a languor into the life of the gods which is the atmosphere of a London drawing room at the end of the season. Russell’s views, however, were not widely shared by the reviewers. Even before its publication in book form, TSW had attracted the admiring attention of one London critical drawing-room, in Te Academy, 26 May 1900: Te current North American Review contains a dramatic poem by Mr. W.B. Yeats, on a theme drawn from Irish legend. Mr. Yeats is one of the few who handle such legends, not as mere exotics, but in a spirit truly and natively kindred to their own. [. . .] But this simple tale Mr. Yeats infuses with all that magic of vaporous dream which is his peculiar and sole secret among living poets. Yet the expression which produces this efect is as pellucid as rain-drops. [. . .] It is evident that Mr. Yeats retains his full gif – if, indeed, we have yet seen all that is in its possible development. By now, familiarity with WBY’s work could be taken for granted by writers on poetry, and with TSW’s English publication a common observation was that the new work ofered more of an already much-enjoyed poetic product. For Te Outlook (22 Dec. 1900), the new book, ‘Beautiful right through’, was ‘A sort of mystical drama, full, of course, of Mr. Yeats’. Readers of Te Athenaeum, 12 Jan. 1901, were reassured that ‘Tose who have felt the fascination of Mr. Yeats’s work will not need to be told that of this theme he creates a poem of shimmering beauty’; at the same time, there was the gentle warning that ‘like all strongly individual poetry, it demands an acceptance of the writer’s mood; and there are moods and minds to which ‘Te Shadowy Waters,’ with its deliberate rejection of love, the human thing, for love the wraith, may well appear bloodless and phantasmal.’ Some immediate reception found TSW altogether too lacking in substance – a reviewer in Te Scotsman (20 Dec. 1900), who was possibly sufering from between-meals hunger at the time, took this to the extreme of a laboured comparison of the play to fancy but insubstantial haute cuisine, and managed to compare TSW unfavourably to a ‘good thick ham sandwich’: ‘What one gets is the caress of elusive imagery, the liquidation of sofly fowing verse [. . .] But the vision, sprung of a mist of beauty, fades into a mist of beauty.’ In Te Outlook (12 Jan. 1901), a reviewer’s determination to condescend to WBY was undermined by a certain amount of admiration for the poem: In the absence of that overwhelming inspiration which has been vouchsafed neither to him nor to his English contemporaries, Mr. Yeats does wonderfully. Indeed, ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ is, perhaps, the next best thing to a great poem. Tat is to say, it is a piece of metrical embroidery. It might have been written by one looking steadfastly on a lily. Tere are no drops or lapses in it, no fallings away from grace, no bad or halting workmanship. It is brief, truly, but it begins, goes on, and ends beautifully. [. . .] ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ does not matter a rap

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17

as drama. It does not matter a rap as Celticism, and it has nothing to do with Irish Nationalism. As pretty English, however, it has not been surpassed by any of the young poets of our time, and it will be read and re-read by all lovers of pleasant and carefully wrought English verse. Te Manchester Guardian (4 Mar. 1901), on the other hand, found TSW to be much more substantial fare, announcing the work in a headline as ‘A Great Poem’, and hailing it as ‘both a profound allegory and a beautiful human story’; the reviewer felt more at ease with WBY’s ‘mysticism’ here than in the recently published Te Wind Among the Reeds: ‘Much of his recent lyrical poetry, lovely as it was, seemed to be overlaid with another mysticism, accidental, conventional, and curious, dependent for its intellectual sanction upon this or that cabalistic tradition and almost narrowed to a whimsical esotericism; in ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ he is returned to a larger expression of supernatural allurement.’ For all this, a roundup of the year’s new poetry in Te Academy, 7 Dec. 1901, reported that ‘Shadowy, dreamlike, and unsubstantial, this poem could appeal only to the few’. Such a view was evidently itself not uncommon, and in Te Nineteenth Century and Afer (Mar. 1902), Stephen Gwynn observed how ‘Poetry has grown esoteric, and the beautiful verse which Mr. Yeats writes in his most recent play, Te Shadowy Waters, would be unintelligible to an average audience, and pushes its avoidance of rhetoric and of the obvious rhythm to a point at which it is apt to seem, to the normal person, either incoherent or unmelodious.’ Gwynn made these observations as a convinced admirer of the work: writing about ‘Te Celtic Inspiration’ in Te Spectator (2 Mar. 1901), he had hailed it as ‘by far the best which Mr. Yeats has produced,’ possessing ‘the most exquisite beauty alike in style and thought, which neither in style nor in thought owns kinship with any English creation’. Gwynn’s ringing declaration that ‘Tere are no purple patches, the whole poem, through its six or seven hundred lines, is all rich in beauty as a gorgeous tapestry’ is perhaps just a little the less resonant for his conviction that the work was several hundred lines longer than it actually is. Unbeknownst to WBY, one international reader would prove in coming years to be important to the poet’s career. Tis was JQ, who recalled his frst encounter with TSW in a letter to WBY of 3 Apr. 1903: [TSW] is, I have sometimes thought, the most perfect thing you have ever done in poetry. I remember very well the Sunday morning in May two years ago when on my way to the country I stopped at a newsstand to buy a Sunday paper and picked up a copy of Te North American Review containing Shadowy Waters and took it to the country with me, and the great pleasure I had in reading it lying in the grass under the shade of a great tree out in the woods. It will be a hard job to stage it well, but if it is done right it will be a beautiful thing. But American reactions afer the publication there of TSW did include complaint: calling WBY ‘An Irish Symbolist’, New York’s Te Independent (22 Aug. 1901) recorded how ‘By virtue of some incomprehensible mythical machinery [TSW] foats between wind and water in a blur of symbolic moonlight, tantalizing and elusive’, and demanded ‘While

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there is a single man or woman of fesh and blood lef in Ireland is it not preposterous that an Irish poet, anxious for the regeneration of his literature, should waste his pains trying to warm over such broth as this?’ In Te Dial (1 Oct. 1901) TSW was said to be ‘dramatic in form, but woven of a dream-tissue so impalpable that ordinary words are well-nigh powerless to convey the impression that it leaves upon the mental vision of a reader,’ and as a result ‘its fner qualities elude both analysis and exhibition’. But other American reactions were warmer: for the Current Encyclopedia in Chicago (Jul.-Dec. 1901), ‘Mr. Yeats has contrived to write a poem of no great length in heroic measure and dramatic form, wherein no Christian thought is permitted to intrude itself upon an interpretation of Irish paganry and superstition [. . .] Te beauty of the work is great and so forms a worthy addition to Mr. Yeats’ readily remarkable contributions to the spirit of our English poesy.’ A more informed, and more ambitious, estimate of the work was attempted in Te Harvard Monthly (Oct. 1901): Te Shadowy Waters is beyond doubt Mr. Yeats’ maturest work. [. . .] Te poem is to a certain extent symbolic, and the streams that Forgael is seeking represent a poetic ideal, striven for in a materialistic world, where human weakness permits the ideal to be won but rarely, and never to be held. [. . .] It is perhaps not too much to say that Te Wanderings of Oisin represents Mr. Yeats’ early or purely poetic ideal, and Te Shadowy Waters that ideal tempered by experience. Te frst poem was a lyric of youth – the second a drama, which though in another world from actual life, strikes a distinct note of human limitation. A discussion of WBY’s career in Te Bookman (New York), Dec. 1903 remarked that ‘Te height of this attainment, up to the present time, is undoubtedly his dramatic poem, ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ [. . .] a voicing of the divine discontent that interferes with accomplishment and serene temper: a groping afer the eternal verities merely because of the heart-breaking and transitory conditions of earthly life’. By 1905, in the throes of wholesale revision of TSW, WBY himself remembered this earlier version in terms suggesting autobiography: ‘Te play as it was came into existence afer years of strained emotion, of living upon tip-toe, and is only right in its highest moments – the logic and circumstances are all wrong’ (to Florence Farr, 19 Jul. 1905, CL 4, 134). Critical interpretation. Te poem’s subsequent revision for P99–05 and afer efectively blocked twentieth-century critical discussion of the 1900 version. Tis was despite the early advocacy of the 1900 text, ‘a dramatic poem of exquisite if highly exotic beauty’, by F. Reid in his 1915 study of WBY (Reid, 113–114): If the success of a work of art depend upon the perfection with which the artist has realized and made concrete a mood, Te Shadowy Waters must be admitted to be fawless. It is impossible that anything could be more flled with atmosphere. It has a heavy, delicious, drowsy beauty, like a thing dreamed in a weariness of life, or in some not quite natural sleep. Te fresh woodland charm, which was what made Te Land of Heart’s Desire so attractive, is altogether gone. Te Shadowy Waters is the last autumnal echo of Mr. Yeats’s great period, the decade

THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

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from 1890 to 1900. It is purely as a poem that it must be judged. It might be made beautiful upon the stage by actors with beautiful voices, who were content to think only of the music of the lines they were speaking, but it could never be made dramatic. Less than in any other of the plays is there even an attempt at characterization. Forgael and Dectora are spirits wandering lonely as stars in the black void of space. If they were human beings the whole conception of this enchanted love would strike us as immoral and odious, essentially ignoble. Yet, in one sense, they are real, have a meaning and a life. Only this life is wholly diferent from that of the fgures in more realistic drama. It is a life that fows through them from the mind of their creator, like music from a violin: they are but the mirrors in which we read diferent aspects of that mind. Tey are like the moon, shining with a borrowed radiance; and yet it might be pleaded that they are, strictly speaking, neither remote nor inhuman, because they embody each a human emotion, and express it in words of a very moving loveliness. Te pleading for human love, the love of the woman shuddering back from the icy rapture of the longing for an impossible perfection – the desire of the artist and the saint – that is the subject; and there is nothing in the play but these two almost disembodied loves. Reid’s identifcation of the poem as the culmination (and also the fnal waning) of WBY’s ‘great period’ may help to identify the reasons why the poet himself was content to let it fade from general view. Despite the occasional grumble – Cecil French, for example, wrote to WBY in 1922 of how ‘Had I the wealth I should like to issue a reprint of it [TSW 1900], and have lawsuits and quarrels with you’ (quoted Hone, 168) – the poem in its frst published form was largely forgotten. Although Louis MacNeice in 1941 observed that WBY’s ‘nostalgia for another world, for a dream-world which is all knowledge and no action, reached its culmination in Te Shadowy Waters, published in 1900’ (MacNeice, 74), it is quite possible that he had not actually read the early version to which he refers. Te one major piece of modern criticism that places the 1900 TSW in the foreground is that by H. Bloom in 1970. Bloom expresses an absolute preference for still earlier versions of the poem (which he cites from DC), but maintains that ‘Te dramatic poem of 1900 has more nearly the right blend of savagery and control than the early, unfnished version, or the later, too-fnished versions’ (Bloom, 137). Te reading ofered by Bloom is conducted in terms of symbolism and WBY’s debts to Shelley, within a broadly biographical frame of the poet’s frustrated love for MG. Comparing the poem with the sexually overheated agendas of Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and ‘Epispychidion’, Bloom claims that ‘Te torment of Te Shadowy Waters [.  .  .] is not so much Yeats’s bafed longing for Maud Gonne as it is his recognition [. . .] that he is cursed with the temperament of the antithetical quester [. . .] Tere is no sexual love-making between Forgael and Dectora [. . .] love and the means of love have drawn even further apart, and the world of Te Shadowy Waters cannot admit even a momentary sexual fulflment’ (Bloom, 139). Some of the other major interpretations of this poem (such as those of G. Bornstein and R. Ellmann) address themselves in large part to the version of 1906 and afer: these are discussed in the present volume in the prefatory matter to that work.

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WBY’s dramatic poem of 1900 is also a short book in its own right, and may be considered as such in any critical appreciation. In many ways, it represents a transposition (and perhaps a simplifcation) of the lyric poems of Te Wind Among the Reeds into dramatic form. Although TSW presents itself very much as a drama to be read rather than one to be staged and seen, its at least nominally dramatic medium obliges WBY to make concrete in character and action certain themes, symbolism, and ideas which are far more complex and suggestive when employed in, and woven through, the lyric pieces of a volume such as Te Wind Among the Reeds. It is a little ironic that WBY arrives at comparative simplicity in the action of TSW afer years of hard work in de-complicating the play’s setting, structure, and action; but the fnished text of 1900 is essentially simple and economical in narrative outline. It is of course true that the meaning of WBY’s story presents a number of difculties, and that the nature of its symbolism gives it not so much a sense of depth to be plumbed as one of an abyss into which the unwary might very well vanish. Undoubtedly, WBY builds in a complex network of interconnecting symbols to which he is careful not to afx any explicit meaning, so that the symbols seem efectively to be addressing one another rather than any potential audience. Here, a work of lyric poetry such as Te Wind Among the Reeds has the advantage over a dramatic poem, for the work that is staged (even in a reader’s mind) is always to some extent tethered by the demands of character and action in its single narrative. Te work’s two main characters, Forgael and Dectora, are certain to carry (for WBY) multiple layers of meaning; at the same time, they are also – and primarily – subjects for more literal dramatic understanding. Te narrative itself is as simple in outline as it is perplexing in signifcance, and the resultant feeling of discordance is probably one of the main components of the entire work’s aesthetic impact. It seems likely that for WBY himself the meaning of the play’s action had a strongly personal bearing; though in pursuing this, a critic will not come any closer to accounting for the efect and degree of success of TSW as a whole. Nevertheless, it is useful to remember that this element of personal content in the play was what gave it a fundamental instability, and doomed the overall conception of the artwork to years upon years of ofen quite radical revision. For R. Ellmann, the play’s aesthetic problems stemmed from profound uncertainties in WBY’s own mind about his relationship with MG (Ellmann, Man and the Masks, 131): Te difculty of fnishing the play, which was not published until 1900, was the difculty of knowing what he [WBY] meant. He wanted his beloved in the fesh, but felt that a love so overpowering and noble as his must have some lofier goal. For this reason he had worked with her upon the Irish order, seeking to attain with her the inner reality and to make their minds one, and hoping vaguely and vainly that their bodies would become one in the process. Villiers de l’Isle Adam, handling a similar problem, had solved it by having his lovers kill themselves rather than spoil by consummation their perfect passion. Yeats hedged by sending of Forgael and Dectora on a ship which might lead to death but would probably bear them, clasped in one another’s arms, to the world where appearances were true.

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Tere is plainly a degree of identifcation on the poet’s part with Forgael, and just as obviously a level on which Dectora is to be identifed with MG: but the events which give impetus to this were not settled matters in WBY’s life, and were instead contingent and unpredictable things. Try as he might, the poet was unable to force his life to imitate art; and it may be telling that the plot of TSW, when it gratefully receives from Villiers De L’Isle Adam the motif of death as the ultimate sublimation of erotic desire, delivers to WBY an imagined ending to his long-unworkable love for MG. But in mundane reality both WBY and MG lived on; their mutual involvement achieved no state of simplifcation, one way or another; and TSW was to be subject to further levels of re-imagining and complication. What comes to a conclusion in 1900 is in fact far more provisional than WBY’s best art can disguise. If WBY intends his Dectora to be some kind of projection or distillation of MG, she is a fgure whose individuality must be sacrifced to that of the questing hero, Forgael; and their love – achieved through dubious (if supernaturally abetted) means – turns out to be a renunciation of human society altogether. It is of course hard to imagine the real MG sailing of into the endless mists of social obscurity with WBY for her sole companion – but this may indeed be the very imaginative diffculty with which WBY, as a poet, was trying to grapple: for it was an eventuality so unlikely as to be, in efect, unimaginable. Tis could well be the point in the (ever-changing) conception of TSW at which hermetic symbolism – more specifcally, the symbolism drawn from his knowledge of nineteenth-century ritual magic – comes to WBY as something of a creative relief. Here, Forgael and Dectora are (so to speak) liberated from autobiographical signifcance by WBY’s hermeticism. Tey may represent man and woman in the abstract, or diferent aspects of the soul; they may be fgures for Death and Life, or for the reason and the will, and their union may symbolically predict a metaphysical apocalypse known only to initiates in mystery cults – whether Rosicrucian, those of the GD, or that of WBY’s stilldeveloping envisaged Celtic Order. None of these subterranean meanings, it should be said, can carry very much weight in any critical reading and evaluation of the work itself. Like much of WBY’s hermetic symbolism in the 1890s, they are best understood as enabling devices or props for a poetic imagination at work to produce not the umpteenth iteration of an archetype (however profound in intention) but original literary achievement. TSW (1900) is a work with its considerable debts on show (see e.g. TSW and Axël above), but it is nevertheless a poem of great originality. In large part, this is owing not to its symbolism, but to the daring of its dramatic conception and the confdent innovation of its poetic style. Although the text possesses distinctly limited potential as a stage-play (which WBY always suspected, and which he was probably unsurprised to have confrmed), it is a remarkably efective exercise in the compression of imagined events in such a way as to enable complex and intense expression to hold the poetic foreground. It is a short work, but almost everything it contains is at a high pitch of imaginative adventure: Forgael is not so much a character in search of transcendence as one who has already transcended the bounds of the narrative reality he partially inhabits; Aibric, his loyal friend, perceives this but must not follow; and Dectora, who is dragged violently from the world of events, chooses eventually to join Forgael is a state of transcendence which is also one in close proximity to death. Or rather, the matter of Dectora’s choice is something which

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the action renders obscure. For she loves Forgael only once she has forgotten the events of the life from which she came, and that forgetting is achieved by the supernatural means of Forgael’s harp. Does Dectora know entirely what she is doing? WBY arranges the poem so that there can be no clear answer. Also, it may not be at all certain that the two lovers drif of into death at the end: the play’s last line invokes those eagles who, in one running motif in the supernatural imagery, will snatch faithful lovers away from death at the last moment. Te combination of this radical undecidability of meaning with such compression in narrative working makes for a powerful and original poetic efect. It is the quality of the verse itself which creates probably the work’s most substantial impact. Here, WBY is working at a level of complete assurance with both rhythm and diction, and he maintains impressively a balance between possible speech and highly charged poetic apprehension. As a result, the characteristic feature of this poem’s most intense passages is not lyrical elaboration and elevation but clarity of statement and precisely measured verbal repetition within changing cadences. What WBY is being clear about is a series of (quite possibly intractable) complications; but the verse is in no way hamstrung by this fact. WBY’s blank verse is capable of many modulations, and it would be hard to detect a single mechanical-sounding line in the whole poem. Here, the positive reception by many of the work’s early readers of what they found a new kind of music in the poetic line should not be discounted: it is the sound of TSW which is, in many respects, its most original feature. F. Reid’s enthusiasm was, in this respect anyway, a detailed one (Reid, 116–117): Mr. Yeats has been accused of breaking the laws of blank verse, of ignoring accent, of writing lines that ‘won’t scan.’ To my ear, reading the verse naturally, according to the sense, there are few unmusical lines, while as a whole it is exquisitely melodious. Te large proportion of monosyllabic endings and of ‘stopped endings,’ endings that reach a natural pause at the close of the line, is remarkable. Te norm of the ten-syllable iambic line is never too frequently departed from; the inversions of stress, which occur not only in the frst foot, but also, though rarely, in each of the other feet, invariably justify themselves by the beauty of their efect. Do not blame me; I often lie awake. . . . A voice singing on a May Eve like this. . . . So black, bitter, blinding, and sudden a storm. . . . For are not they, likewise, children of God. . . . Let Him that made mankind, the angels and devils . . . Tis last twelve-syllable line, with the fourth and ffh foot amphibrachic, is daring enough; and certainly there are one or two lines into which it seems impossible, without distorting them, to get a blank-verse rhythm. Seven odours, | seven murmurs, | seven woods. . . . It is obvious that there can be only one way of reading this: yet the sound, in its place, bringing with it a kind of full pause, is delightfully right.

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Manuscript history. A great deal of MS material survives as a record of repeated rewritings of TSW between the 1896 version (never fnalized for publication) and the frst published version. Tese are transcribed in full in DC. In the notes to the present edition, some alternative readings are provided from NLI 30467, part of which is transcribed in DC as fragment ‘NLO’, wr. late 1899 (MS): this is the latest extant MS material before frst publication. Copy-text: TSW 1900. The Shadowy Waters Forgael Aibric Dectora Sailors Te deck of a galley. Te steering-oar, which comes through the bulwark, is to the lef hand. One looks along the deck toward the high forecastle, which is partly hidden by a great square sail. Te sail is drawn in toward the stern at the lef side, and is high enough above the deck at the right side to show a little of the deck beyond and of the forecastle. Tree rows of hounds, the frst dark, the second red, and the third white with red ears, make a conventional pattern upon the sail. Te sea is hidden in mist, and there is no light except where the moon makes a brightness in the mist. Forgael is sleeping upon skins a few yards forward of the steering-oar. He has a silver lily embroidered over his breast. A small harp lies beside him. Aibric and two sailors stand about the steering-oar. One of the sailors is steering. The helmsman His face has never gladdened since he came Out of that island where the fool of the wood Played on his harp.

2. the fool of the wood] Tis fgure could have a number of Irish sources, from the mythic king Sweeney to WBY’s own version of the mad (and harp-playing) King Goll, but a specifc reference may not be intended. Tere may also be a Shakespearean resonance with Jacques’s speech in As You Like It II vii 12 f., ‘A fool, a fool, I met a fool i’ th’ forest’. A more private, and more esoteric, dimension is that of ‘the white fool’, the Amadán, of Irish folklore: George Russell had a vision of this fgure during his stay with WBY at Coole in the summer of 1899, and both men agreed that there

was a close connection between the white fool and the god Aengus. WBY was aware of the interest in this fgure from the poet Nora Hopper, whose story ‘Daluan’ (Ballads in Prose (1894)) he had read and admired. In ‘Te Irish National Teatre’ (Te Bookman Aug. 1895), WBY mentioned Hopper’s story as one by which ‘I have been haunted all winter’ (CW 9, 274), and he singled it out for praise again in an article for the Dublin Daily Express on 24 Sep. 1898, calling Daluan at this stage (following a cue in the story itself) ‘a kind of Irish Pan’: ‘One does not know [.  .  .] why he dies

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The other sailor

5

And I would be as sad But that the wind changed; for I followed him And heard the music in the wind, and saw A red hound running from a silver arrow. I drew my sword to fing it in a pool, – I have forgotten wherefore. The helmsman The red hound Was Forgael’s courage that the music killed.

on November Eve, or why the men cry over him ‘Daluan is dead’ [. . .] and the women, ‘Da Mort is king,’ for ‘Daluan’ is but Monday and ‘Da Mort’ is but Tuesday’ (CW 6, 116–117). Hopper was unable to unperplex WBY on this subject, telling him ‘I don’t know where I got Daluan from: as the type of Fairydom passing and yet never past he has been always on my mind: and always Da Mort has been his successor, though I knew these two to be mere Monday and Tuesday’ (letter to WBY, 4 Oct. 1898, Beinecke Library, Yale University). Hopper was not done with the subject, and her poem ‘Te Fairy Fool’ appeared a few pages on from WBY’s ‘Te Literary Movement in Ireland’ in NAR in Dec. 1899: this very minor piece tilts towards a sub-Yeatsian whimsy (‘If I’m the Faery fool, Dalua – | Ay me! the Faery fool! | How do I know what the rushes say, | Sighing and shuddering all the day | Over their shadowy pool?’). William Sharp, as Fiona Macleod, made the story ‘Dalua’ the opening piece in his Te Dominion of Dreams (1899). In the note he provided for TSW in NAR, WBY spoke of ‘Te fool’ who ‘is that fool who is ‘maybe the wisest of all’ among the people of Faery, as a witch-doctor in Clare told me; and I hold him to be the messenger or representative of Aengus, the god of love and holy frenzy.’

of the] o’the NAR. WBY’s revision helps camoufage his possible Shakespearean echo (see above). 5. music in the wind] Music [blowing del.] in the wind MS. Although he did not start with ‘music in the wind’, it is possible that WBY had seen this before, in both the title of and a recurring phrase in a poem by William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life (1866), ‘Sweet Music in the Wind’. Also perhaps cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘Beauty’, 13–16: ‘She couches on the coral wave, | And garlandeth the sea; | Or weaves a music in the wind | Which murmurs from the lea’. 6.] A red hound with an arrow in his heart del. MS. Tis hound appears to derive from the allegorical ‘hound with one red ear’ of e.g. ‘He Mourns for the Change that has Come upon Him and his Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World’ (1897), 2, or ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ (1895) I, 141, (1889) I, 178. Te hound seen by Forgael is red all over, however, and not the hunter but the hunted: an instant symbolic interpretation is ofered by the helmsman in 8–9. It is possible WBY remembers here an aristocratic beast from Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 107, where the king ‘Called to his foot his ferce red hound’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

10

25

The other sailor How many moons have died from the full moon When something that was bearded like a goat Walked on the waters and bid Forgael seek His heart’s desire where the world dwindles out? The helmsman Nine moons. The other sailor And from the harping of the fool?

15

The helmsman Three moons. The other sailor It were best to kill him, and choose out Another leader, and turn home again. The helmsman I had killed him long ago, but that the fool Gave him his harp. The other sailor Now that he is asleep, He cannot wake the god that hides in it. (The two sailors go nearer to Forgael and half draw their swords.)

20

Aibric And whom will you make leader? Who will make A path among these waves and weigh the wind? Not I, nor Maine there, nor Duach’s son.

11. something that was bearded like a goat] something, half a lamb and half a goat, NAR. 22. Maine] Disyllabic, sounding the fnal e. Although some Irish sources feature not one but as many as seven characters with the name Maine, all of them associated with Queen Meadhbh (Maeve) of Connaught, here the name could simply be an Irish one, without any necessary royal connection, or

perhaps a Maine, one of the seven sons of Meadhbh. Placing a Maine on board Forgael’s pirate ship may suggest WBY’s familiarity with the Irish Togail Bruidne Da Derga (Te Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel) in the Ulster cycle of myths (the basis of Samuel Ferguson’s Conary (1880)), where all seven Maines in exile plunder the coasts of Britain and Ireland. WBY would refer to the Maines

26

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Be patient yet a while; for this ninth moon, Being the moon of birth, may end our doubt. (Forgael rises. Te two sailors hurry past him, and disappear beyond the sail. Forgael takes the steering-oar.)

30

Forgael So these would have killed Forgael while asleep Because a god has made him wise with dreams; And you, my Aibric, who have been a King And spoken in the Council, and heard tales That druids write on yew and apple wood, Are doubtful like these pullers of the oar!

35

Aibric I doubt your wisdom, but do not doubt my love. Had I not gold and silver, and enough Of pasture-land and plough-land among the hills? And when you came, the North under your sails, And praised your war among the endless seas,

25

again (this time, at Queen Meadhbh’s court, in ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ (1902). Duach’s son] One Celtair, the son of Duach, was a legendary prince in Co. Down; a sixthcentury Duach was a queen of Tara. 23–24. this ninth moon, | Being the moon of birth] Cp. Tennyson, Ballads and Other Poems (1880), ‘Te Two Greetings’, II, I, 7–9: ‘Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep, | With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun | Down yon dark sea’. 29.] Tese writing-tablets of wood carry a romantic origin, so that the ‘tales’ here are probably those of lovers: WBY explores this in ‘Baile and Aillinn’ (1901), where the yew and the apple trees are over the lovers Baile and Aillinn’s graves (187–190, 195–197): And poets found, old writers say, A yew-tree where his body lay; But a wild apple hid the grass

With its sweet blossom where hers was [. . .] Tey wrote on tablets of thin board, Made of the apple and the yew, All the love stories that they knew. 31–35.] Although I doubt your wisdom, do not doubt Te greatness of my love. Did I not rule A fruitful land under the Aibhlin hills? And when you came to scorn our little wars And praise a war among the endless seas, NAR. 35. among the endless seas] WBY’s use of ‘among’ here is (unlike ‘endless seas’) eyecatchingly unusual. Its lone precedent is in Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘On Visiting a Haunt of Coleridge’s’, 33: ‘throned among the seas of ice’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

27

Did I not follow with a score of ships? And now they are all gone, I follow still. Forgael But would turn home again. Aibric

40

45

No man had doubts When we rowed north, singing above the oars, And harried Alban towns, and overthrew The women-slingers on the Narrow Bridge, And passed the Outer Hebrides, and took Armlets of gold or shields with golden nails From hilly Lochlann; but our sail has passed Even the wandering islands of the gods, And hears the roar of the streams where, druids say, Time and the world and all things dwindle out.

40. Alban] Te Gaelic term for Scotland, ‘Alba’, is given an adjectival feel by WBY here, though AG uses ‘Alban’ as the proper noun in CM. ‘Alba’ for Scotland is used widely by e.g. Samuel Ferguson and Aubrey De Vere. 41. women-slingers] NAR’s unhyphenated ‘women slingers’ is preferable, insofar as it minimizes the unwanted suggestion that women were being slung from the bridge. Te inhabitants of Scathach’s island in the Ulster cycle (see below) include a number of warlike women. the Narrow Bridge] Scathia’s Isle MS. Te location intended here is probably the Isle of Skye. In the Ulster Cycle, Cuchulain learns the arts of war from a warrior-woman called Scathach (WBY’s ‘Sathia’ in MS). In order to meet this tutor, Cuchulain has to cross a perilous narrow bridge, as retold by AG in CM, 35: And this is the way the bridge was: the two ends of it were low, and the middle was high, and whenever any one would leap on it, the frst time it would narrow till it

was as narrow as the hair of a man’s head, and the second time it would shorten till it was as short as an inch, and the third time it would get slippery till it was as slippery as an eel of the river, and the fourth time it would rise up on high against you till it was as tall as the mast of a ship. 42. Outer] Northern NAR. 44. hilly Lochlann] Tis could be either Scandanavia (and in particular Norway), or the northern Scottish islands: in Irish sources, the word can refer to both, as well as to the Vikings from the north more generally. In the eleventh-century Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions of Ireland) Lochlann is the place from which the Fomorians emerge. WBY could have met the term in Samuel Ferguson’s Conary and, more recently, in J. Todhunter’s Tree Irish Bardic Tales (1896). 46. the roar of the streams] Te phrase is strongly evocative of J. Macpherson’s Ossian, e.g. Te Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), ‘Temora’ (p. 117), where ‘the enemies of Erin’ are ‘like the roar of streams in the land’, and

28

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Forgael Do you remember, Aibric, how you bore A captive woman from the Narrow Bridge, And, though you loved her, gave her up to me? Aibric I thought she loved you, and I thought her love Would overcome your sorrow and your dreams. But you grew weary of her. Forgael

55

60

65

When I hold A woman in my arms, she sinks away As though the waters had fowed up between; And yet, there is a love that the gods give, When Aengus and his Edaine wake from sleep And gaze on one another through our eyes, And turn brief longing and deceiving hope And bodily tenderness to the soft fre That shall burn time when times have ebbed away. The fool foretold me I would fnd this love Among those streams, or on their cloudy edge. Aibric No man nor woman has loved otherwise Than in brief longing and deceiving hope And bodily tenderness; and he who longs

‘Cath-Loda’ (p. 297), ‘I hear no distant roar of streams’. 49. from the Narrow Bridge] out of Scathia’s isle MS. 57. Aengus and his Edaine] Te story of Aengus and Edaine derives from the Old Irish Torcmarc Etaine (Te Wooing of Etain). For AG’s retelling of the story of the lovers, see note to 296–309. 60. sof fre] Te phrase is not unknown, but there may be an echo here of Tomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘She sung of love’, 2–4: ‘Te rosy rays of evening fell | As

if to feed with their sof fre | Te soul within that trembling shell’ and Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, 467–469: ‘since thy lip | Met mine frst, long years past, since thine eye kindled | With sof fre under mine’. WBY returns to this phrase (and to Aengus) in 1902, in ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’, 135–136: ‘two lovers came out of the air |With bodies made out of sof fre’. 63. or on their cloudy edge] [or where their roar begins del.] or on their shadowy edge MS. 64–74.] Tis passage prompted a breathlessly enthusiastic reviewer in Te Manchester

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70

75

80

29

For happier love but fnds unhappiness, And falls among the dreams the drowsy gods Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh. Forgael, seek out content, where other men Have found delight, in the resounding oars, In day out-living battle, on the breast Of some mild woman, or in children’s ways. Forgael The fool that came out of the wintry wood Taught me wise music, and gave me this old harp; And were all dreams, it would not weigh in the hand. Aibric It was a fool that gave it, and may be Out of mere wantonness to lure a sail Among the waters that no pilot knows. Forgael I have good pilots, Aibric. When men die They are changed and as grey birds fy out to sea,

Guardian (4 Mar. 1901) to declare that ‘the words [. . .] are as moving as the complaint of [Tennyson’s] Tithonus [.  .  .] Tis is large, transparent, and inevitable, with something of the marmorean quality of a chorus from Sophocles’. 67.] [For other ^happier^ love del. MS] [than this fnds misery del.] [^but fnds unhappiness^ del.] MS. 69. burnished mirror] To burnish here is (OED 1a.) ‘To make (metal) shining by friction; to furbish; to polish (a surface) by rubbing’. Burnished mirrors are very rare in poetry, but perhaps cp. an early work by Wordsworth, ‘An Evening Walk’, 124–125: ‘And now the whole

wide lake in deep repose | Is hushed, and like a burnished mirror glows’. 70. ivory hands] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Te Life and Death of Jason (1867), IV, 425 ‘Her ivory hands, with wrist set close to wrist’. 81–88.] Tese birds, the souls of the dead in fight, form an important element in the poem’s symbolic economy. Forgael may be understood here to be taking his bearings from the dead: it is they who set his course. Tey are grey, and this puts them between the white of Aengus’s accompanying birds, and the black raven by which Dectora’s mortal origins are symbolized (see note on 98–103).

30

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THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

And I have heard them call from wind to wind How all that die are borne about the world In the cold streams, and wake to their desire, It may be, before the winds of birth have waked; Upon clear nights they leave the upper air And fy among the foam.

90

A sailor (Running from the forecastle) Thrust down the helm, For I have seen a ship hid in the fog. Look! there she lies under a fapping sail.

95

Forgael (to Aibric) Give me the helm: call hither those who lie Upon the rowers’ benches underneath, And bid them hide in shadow of the sail, Or crowd behind the bulwark, that we seem A trading galley in her helmsman’s eyes. (Aibric goes toward the forecastle.)

100

It may be now that I can go my way And no man kill me; for some wind has blown A galley from the Lochlann seas; her fag Is folding and unfolding, and in its folds Her raven futters. Rob him of his food Or be his food, I follow the grey wings, And need no more of life till the white wings Of Aengus’ birds gleam in their apple boughs.

83, 219. from wind to wind] Cp. J. Macpherson, Te Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), ‘Temora’ Book VI, p. 187: ‘Ofen may the voice of future times meet Cathmor in the air; when he strides from wind to wind, or folds himself in the wing of a storm’. 84.] How they will whirl three times about the world MS. 98. Lochlann] Lochair MS.

98–103.] It is signifcant that Dectora has arrived under the sign of a black bird: this raven symbolizes the fully mortal society which Forgael – following the grey birds that are the dead – is busy abandoning. Te white birds of Aengus are both fully immortal and identifed with the spirit of love (see note to 233–235).

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31

(Two sailors come creeping along the right bulwark.)

105

The foremost of the two sailors It were better to pass by, because the gods Make galleys out of wind that change to wind When one has leapt on board. The hindermost of the two sailors No, for I have hope Forgael may fnd his heart’s desire on board And turn his galley about and bring me home. (Two more sailors come creeping along the right bulwark.)

110

115

The foremost of the two sailors I swore but yesterday if the Red God Would end this peaceful life that rots the bones, None should escape my sword: I would send all To mind his cows and swine by the Red Lake. The hindermost of the two sailors He has heard me and not you. Nine days ago I promised him that none should escape my sword But women and jugglers and players on the harp.

109, 112. the Red God .  .  . the Red Lake] Te sailor’s reference to a divinity is, in context, likely to have a meaning in specifcally Celtic myth. It may be, however, that WBY’s memory here touches upon the Greek god of war, Ares who – especially once in his Roman guise as the god Mars – attracts the epithet ‘red’ (in modern verse, he had featured as ‘the red God’ in Tennyson’s Tiresias and Other Poems (1885), ‘Tiresias’, 153). If WBY has a Celtic reference in mind, this is likely to be one connected with ‘the Red Lake’. It is probable that the location here is WBY’s English rendering of the Irish name for Lough Derg (the red lough), though there are two Lough Dergs

that could be intended: Lough Derg in Co. Donegal, and Lough Derg on the Shannon, with shores on Co. Clare, Co. Galway and Co. Tipperary. In each case, the Irish dearg (red) is part of the name (and each Lough has its own mythic explanations for this, featuring gory incidents that stain the water). Lough Derg on the Shannon may be the likelier of the two, if only because it is linked to a mythic fgure who may be the sailor’s ‘Red God’ in these lines. One of the tribes of the sidhe was thought to have a stronghold by this Lough, headed by a son of the Dagda, Bodhbh Derg: as recounted by P.W. Joyce (Te Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1910), 182), ‘Sidh Buidhbh, with

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The foremost of the two sailors He has heard me because I promised all.

120

125

130

(There are sailors now along the whole bulwark and sailors in the shadow of the sail.) Forgael Bend lower lest your battle-axes glimmer. The tide narrows between, and one old man Nods by the helm, and nearer to the sail A woman lies among embroideries. Near by, but in the shadow of the sail, A boy and girl hold one another’s hands; Their hair mingles on some stringed instrument, And a string murmurs as though Time were dead Or a god hid them under the shadow of wings. Beyond the sail a man with a red crown Leans on his elbows, gazing at the sea. When you are aboard the Lochlann galley, lash Bulwark to bulwark, and square her sail by ours. Now rush upon her and fnd out what prey Best pleases you. (The sailors climb over the bulwarks beyond the sail. Forgael is left alone.) A voice on the other ship Armed men have come upon us. Another voice Wake all below.

Bodhbh Derg for its king, was on the shore of Lough Derg, somewhere near Portumna’. Having the sailor refer to Bodhbh Derg as a god is something of a stretch (he is the son, or sometimes the brother, of a fgure somewhere between a king and a god), and there seems to be no particular reason why, even if granted divine status, he should be helping pirates go about their business. 117. glimmer] gleam MS shine MS. 119. nearer to the sail] [in the middle del.] [near him on the del.] nearer to the deck MS.

125.] MS ends with this line. the shadow of wings] Cp. W. Blake, Milton Book II, Pl. 30, 24–25: ‘Give us a habitation and a place | In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings’, and Vala, or Te Four Zoas, ‘Night the Fourth’, 258–259: ‘We perish and shall not be found unless thou grant a place | In which we may be hidden under the shadow of wings’. 126–127.] Not in NAR.

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33

A more distant voice Why have you broken our sleep? The frst voice Armed men have come upon us. O! I am slain! (There is a sound of fghting.)

135

140

Forgael A grey bird has fown by. He has fown upward. He hovers above the mast and waits his kind; When all gather they will fy upon their way. I shall fnd out if I have lost my way Among these misty waters. Two! Now four! Now four together! I shall hear their words If I go nearer to the windward side, For there are sudden voices in my ears. (He goes to the right bulwark.)

145

Two hover there together, and one says, ‘How light we are now we are changed to birds!’ And the other answers, ‘Maybe we shall fnd Our hearts’ desire now that we are so light.’ And then one asks another how he died, And says, ‘A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.’ And now they all wheel suddenly and fy To the other side and higher in the air. (He crosses over to the other bulwark.)

150

They are still waiting; and now the laggard comes, And she cries out, ‘I have fed to my beloved In the waste air. I will wander by his side

137. my] the NAR. 141. sudden voices] Cp. J. Keats, Endymion (1818), II, 501–502: ‘Ten there was a hum | Of sudden voices’. 150–151.] Tey are still waiting; and a laggard comes, | And crying, ‘I have fed to my beloved NAR.

152. the waste air] Cp. Shelley, Te Revolt of Islam II, 201–202: ‘some radiant cloud of morning dew, | Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue’; also perhaps cp. Lionel Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower (1885), 193–195: ‘I have felt at these | Rare vision-hours a spirit lily-souled | Float through the waste air-spaces’.

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Among the windy meadows of the dawn.’ They have fown away together. We are nearly A quarter of the heavens from our right way. (He goes to the steering-oar. Two sailors come from the other ship dragging a long rope, which they fasten to the mast.) One of the sailors But will it hold while we are emptying her? The other sailor While the wind is light. Forgael

160

The oar can hardly move her, And I must lose more time because these fools Believe that gold and women taken in war Are better than the woods where no love fades From its frst sighs and laughter, before the sleep, Whose shadow is the sleep that comes with love, Ends all things. (More sailors have come from the other ship. One of them carries a crown of gold and of rubies. One of them leads Dectora, who has a rose embroidered over her breast.) An old sailor I have slain the Lochlann king.

165

Forgael You have done well, because my bows are turned Towards a country where there are no kings. A sailor (Laying the crown at Forgael’s feet)

153. meadows of the dawn] Te phrase is John Todhunter’s: see e.g. his Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘Hymn for a May Morning’, 21: ‘Fresh from the lucid meadows of the dawn’, and ‘A Vision of Death’, 524: ‘Over the misty meadows of the dawn’. 155–168.] Forgael. I linger while the birds are on the wing,

Because the unambitious that hate the gods Believe that gold and women taken in war Are better than the woods where no love fades From its frst sights and laughter before the sleep, Whose shadow is the sleep that comes with love, Ends Time and Change.

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35

I have brought his crown. The old sailor And I have brought his queen. I would have spared her handmaid, but she caught This blade out of my hand and died of a sudden.

170

Another sailor She ofers great rewards if we turn east And bring her to her kingdom and her people. Forgael My way is west. She seems both young and shapely; Give her to Aibric, if he will. I wait For an immortal woman, as I think. (He goes nearer to Dectora, gazing at her.)

175

The old sailor I left her living, thinking that I had found Your heart’s desire and the end of all our trouble; But now I will kill her. (Forgael motions him away.) Forgael

180

All comes to an end. The harvest’s in; the granary doors are shut; The topmost blossom on the boughs of Time Has blossomed, and I grow as old as Time, For I have all his garden wisdom. O speak! I await your words as the blind grass awaits

A Sailor.

We bring you this great queen. I spared her handmaid, too: but half way hither She caught this blade out of my belt and died. NAR. 177–182.]

Te harvest’s in; the granary doors are shut; And I am old as Time, because I know All that Time knows. Speak to me, Queen. O speak! I wait your words as the dead wait the living. NAR.

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The falling blossoms, and the dead the living.

185

190

Dectora I will swear by sun and moon to pardon all And to give wealth of oxen and sheep to all; And to give you besides a hundred shields, A hundred swords, a hundred drinking-bowls. A sailor Cover your ears; for once we had moored our galley Beside a Lochlann wharf, and though she had sworn By sun and moon and a hundred gods as well, She would weave a net to take us. Another sailor She might keep faith: The gods hold watch about the words of a queen. Forgael Have the winds blown you among these empty waters? A sailor She will answer now like any waiting woman Because these waters make all women one.

195

Dectora I and that mighty king a sudden blow And evil fortune have overthrown sailed hither Because I had hoped to come, as dreams foretold, Where gods are brooding in a mountainous place

183, 188–189, 229. by sun and moon] For this form of oath, cp. T.D. Sullivan, Blanaid (1891), ‘Te Siege’, 93: “I swear the pact,’ Cuchullin said, ‘by sun and moon and wind’’. 183–197.] Dectora. If you would serve me, as your word and voice Have bid me hope, sail to the Lochlann shore And bring me to my people. I promised these

So much of wealth as may beft their rank; I promise you a hundred drinking bowls, A hundred shields of brass, a hundred swords, A hundred oxen and a hundred sheep, And more, if you will war against the Danes In Southern Lochlann. Forgael.

I would not obey Any that lived, and I have brought my galley

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200

37

That murmurs with holy woods, and win their help To conquer among the countries of the north. I have found nothing but these empty waters: I have turned homewards. Forgael

205

210

215

In the eyes of the gods, War-laden galleys, and armies on white roads, And unforgotten names, and the cold stars That have built all are dust on a moth’s wing. These are their lures, but they have set their hearts On tears and laughter; they have lured you hither And lured me hither, that you might be my love. Aengus looks on you when I look: he awaits Till his Edaine, no longer a golden fy Among the winds, looks under your pale eyelids. Dectora (To the sailors) Is it your will that I, who am a queen Among the queens, and chose the mightiest Of the twelve kings of the world to be my king, Become a stranger’s leman; and that you, Who might have focks and herds and many thralls, Be pullers of the oar until you die? A sailor She bids us follow her. Another sailor I have grown weary Of following Forgael’s dream from wind to wind.

Where I had heard no feet but the gods’ came. Dectora. I have come hither because I hoped to come Where gods are brooding [. . .] NAR. 210. no longer a golden fy] no more a silver fy NAR. For the reference, see note to 296–309.

213–214.] And have been wooed by the twelve kings of the earth, NAR. 216. thralls] OED thrall 1.a., ‘One who is in bondage to a lord or master; a villein, serf, bondman, slave’ is classed as archaic and historical by the later nineteenth century. 219. from wind to wind] See note to 83.

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THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

Another sailor Give me a hundred sheep. Another sailor Give me a house Well sheltered from the winds, and fruitful felds, And a strong galley. Dectora I give you all as much. Another sailor And will you swear never to be avenged For those among your people that are dead?

225

Dectora I swear it, though I gladly would lie down With one you have killed and die; for when I left My foster-mother’s garden in the south I ceased to be a woman, being a queen. Another sailor And will you swear it by the sun and moon?

230

Dectora I swear it. Another sailor Let every man draw out his sword. Gather about him, that the gods may not know The hand that wounds him, because the gods are his friends. (Forgael has taken the harp in his hands and is leaning against the bulwark. The sailors draw their swords, and come toward him. Forgael plays slowly and faintly.)

231–235.] And gather round him, that no god may know Te hand that wounds. (Forgael has taken the harp in his hands and is leaning against the bulwark. Te sailors draw their swords, and come toward him. Forgael plays slowly and faintly.)

A Sailor.

A white bird beats his wings Against my face and eyes. Another Sailor. Mine too are beaten. Another Sailor. I am half blinded, too.

NAR.

THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

39

A sailor A white bird beats his wings upon my face. Another sailor A white bird has torn me with his silver claws. 235

Another sailor I am blind and deaf because of the white wings. Another sailor I am afraid of the harp. Another sailor O! wings on wings! Dectora He has thrown a druid dream upon the air. Strike quickly; it will fade out when you strike. A sailor I am afraid of his low-laughing harp. (Forgael changes the air.) Dectora (Looking over the bulwark in a half dream)

240

I shall be home now in a little while, Hearing the harpers play, the pine-wood crackle, The handmaids laugh and whisper in the door. A sailor Who said we had a skin of yellow ale? Another sailor I said the ale was brown.

245

Another sailor (Who has gone into the other ship) I have found the ale, I had thrown it down behind this coil of rope.

233–235.] Te emphasis on the whiteness of these birds intensifes their identifcation with the god Aengus, whose iconography for WBY included white birds as ‘kisses’ that

encircle him. At the level of more personal poetic symbolism, WBY associated white birds especially with his early love for MG: see ‘Te White Birds’ (1891).

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Another sailor Forgael can die to-morrow. Come to the ale. Another sailor Come to the ale; for he can die to-morrow. (They go on to the other ship.) Aibric (Who lingers, looking at Dectora) She will say something in a little while, And I shall laugh with joy. A voice on the other ship 250

Come hither, Aibric, And tell me a love-story while I drink. Aibric Ah, well! they are calling me – they are calling me. (He goes forward and into the other ship.) Forgael How little and reedy a sound awakes a god To cry his folding cry! (He changes the air again; Dectora leans against the bulwark as if very sleepy, and gradually sinks down on the deck.) Dectora (As if in sleep) No, no, be silent, For I am certain somebody is dead.

255

260

Forgael She has begun forgetting. When she wakes, The years that have gone over her from the hour When she dreamt frst of love, shall ficker out And that dream only shine before her feet. I grew as old as Time, and she grows young As the ageless birds of Aengus, or the birds

253–255.] Dectora. (As if in sleep) Tere is some man Tat I would bid my people put to death. I think he lives in Lochlann. No, not there;

Among the Hebrides. Forgael.

When she awakens, NAR. 257–258.] And leave her dreaming. When I looked on her, NAR.

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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.

265

270

(He changes the air.) Her eyelids tremble and the white foam fades; The stars would hurl their crowns among the foam Were they but lifted up. Dectora (Slowly waking) The red hound is fed. Why did you say that I have followed him For these nine years? O arrow upon arrow! My eyes are troubled by the silver arrows; Ah, they have pierced his heart! (She wakes.)

275

280

285

I have slept long; I fought twelve battles dressed in golden armour. I have forgot it all. How soon dreams fade! I will drink out of the stream. The stream is gone: Before I dropped asleep, a kingfsher Shook the pale apple-blossom over it; And now the waves are crying in my ears, And a cold wind is blowing in my hair. Forgael (Going over to her) A hound that had lain hid in the red rushes Breathed out a druid vapour, and crumbled away The grass and the blue shadow on the stream And the pale blossom; but I woke instead The winds and waters to be your home for ever; And overturned the demon with a sound I had woven of the sleep that is in pools Among great trees, and in the wings of owls, And under lovers’ eyelids. (He kneels and holds the harp toward her.)

290

Bend your head And lean your lips devoutly to this harp, For he who gave it called it Aengus’ harp And said it was mightier than the sun and moon, Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars. (She takes the harp in her hands and kisses it.)

41

42

THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

Dectora O, Aengus of the herds, watch over me! I sat beside my foster-mother, and now I am caught in woven nets of enchantment. Look! I have wet this braid of hair with tears while asleep. 295

Forgael (Standing upright again) He watches over none but faithful lovers. Edaine came out of Midher’s hill, and lay Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,

296–309.] WBY extracted these lines and used them as a prefatory poem for ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ in P99–05, and all subsequent collections. Te mythological material derives ultimately from the Old Irish Torcmarc Etaine (Te Wooing of Etain). Midher was a chiefain of the Tuatha de Danaan, who loved Edain. Tis earned Edain the jealousy of Midher’s wife, Fuamach, which continues once the god Aengus has taken Edain for himself. AG’s version of this is close to what WBY is using as his material here (GFM, 88–89): Afer a while Midhir took Etain Echraide to be his wife. And there was great jealousy on Fuamach, the wife he had before, when she saw the love that Midhir gave to Etain, and she called to the Druid, Bresal Etarlaim to help her, and he put spells on Etain the way Fuamach was able to drive her away. And when she was driven out of Bri Leith, Angus Og, son of the Dagda, took her into his keeping; and when Midhir asked her back, he would not give her up, but he brought her about with him to every place he went. And wherever they rested, he made a sunny house for her, and put sweet-smelling fowers in it, and he made invisible walls about it, that no one could see through and that could not be seen. But when news came to Fuamach that Etain was so well cared for by Angus,

anger and jealousy came on her again, and she searched her mind for a way to destroy Etain altogether. And it is what she did, she persuaded Midhir and Angus to go out and meet one another and to make peace, for there had been a quarrel between them ever since the time Etain was sent away. And when Angus was away from Brugh na Boinn, Fuamach went and found Etain there, in her sunny house. And she turned her with Druid spells into a fy, and then she sent a blast of wind into the house, that swept her away through the window. 296. Midher’s hill] WBY’s phrasing is close to that of AG in GFM, suggesting that he may be drawing on her ongoing work for that project: ‘Midhir took a hill for himself [. . .] Ten the girl turned back to Midhir’s hill’ (GFM, 88). 297. his tower of glass] Although Aengus’s construction with ‘invisible walls [. . .] that no one could see through’ is in WBY’s mind here, this phrase is itself one with resonances in Irish myth. Te glass tower is present in Henri D’Arbois de Jubainville’s account (following the Latin source in Nennius) of the Milesian invasion of Ireland. In R. Best’s translation of 1903, Te Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, (67): Ten came three sons of Mile from Spain, with thirty ships, each ship

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300

305

43

Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds And druid moons, and murmuring of boughs, And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite Awake unsleeping fres; and wove seven strings, Sweet with all music, out of his long hair, Because her hands had been made wild by love; When Midher’s wife had changed her to a fy

containing thirty men and as many women. Tey remained in Ireland for the space of a year, then they perceived in the midst of the sea a tower of glass, and on the tower they saw what were like to be men, quasi homines. Tey called out to them, but never got any answer. For a year they were preparing to attack the tower, then they set out with all their ships and all their women folk, saving one ship that foundered, and the thirty men and thirty women that were on board her. But when they landed on the shore that surrounded the tower, the sea rose up over them, and they perished in the waves. From the thirty men and thirty women of the ship that was

wrecked are descended the present inhabitants of Ireland. Tis story was used by William Larminie for the poem ‘Te Tower of Glass’ in his Glanlua and Other Poems (1889).

298. odour-laden winds] Cp. C.G. Rossetti, New Poems (1896), ‘Te Dead City’, 150: ‘the odour-laden air’. 301. chrysolite] OED 1, ‘A name formerly given to several diferent gems of a green colour, such as zircon, tourmaline, topaz, and apatite [. . .] Its colour varies from pale yellowish-green (the precious stone) to dark bottle-green.’ WBY may be remembering Shakespeare’s Othello V ii 175–176: ‘another world | Of one entire and perfect chrysolite’. 305.] And when one changed her to a silver fy, NAR.

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He made a harp with druid apple wood That she among her winds might know he wept; And from that hour he has watched over none But faithful lovers. Dectora (Half rising) 310

Something glitters there – There – there – by the oar. Forgael The crown of a far country.

315

320

Dectora That crown was in my dreams – no, no – in a rhyme. I know you now, beseeching hands and eyes, I have been waiting you. A moment since My foster-mother sang in an old rhyme That my true-love would come in a ship of pearl Under a silken sail and silver yard, And bring me where the children of Aengus wind In happy dances, under a windy moon; But these waste waters and wind-beaten sails Are wiser witchcraft, for our peace awakes In one another’s arms.

309–312.] Dectora. (Half rising) Whither have you come, Beseeching hands and more beseeching eyes? NAR. 312. beseeching hands] Perhaps cp. Byron, Te Giaour (1813), 1299: ‘And beckons with beseeching hands’.

316. yard] OED 5., ‘A wooden (or steel) spar, comparatively long and slender, slung at its centre from, and forward of, a mast and serving to support and extend a square sail which is bent to it.’ 318. a windy moon] Perhaps cp. R.W. Buchanan, Te City of Dream (1888), VII, 275: ‘Te windy moon was rising’, and A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), ‘A Dark Month’, 703: ‘Cloud and windy moon’.

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(He has taken her in his arms.) Forgael Aengus has seen His well-beloved through a mortal’s eyes; And she, no longer blown among the winds, Is laughing through a mortal’s eyes.

325

Dectora (Peering out over the waters) O look! A red-eared hound follows a hornless deer. There! There! They have gone quickly, for already The cloudy waters and the glimmering winds Have covered them. Forgael Where did they vanish away? Dectora Where the moon makes a cloudy light in the mist.

330

335

Forgael (Going to the steering-oar) The pale hound and the deer wander for ever Among the winds and waters; and when they pass The mountain of the gods, the unappeasable gods Cover their faces with their hair and weep. They lure us to the streams where the world ends. Dectora All dies among those streams. Forgael The fool has made These messengers to lure men to his peace, Where true-love wanders among the holy woods.

340

Dectora What were true-love among the rush of his streams? The gods weave nets, and take us in their nets, And none knows wherefore; but the heart’s desire Is this poor body that reddens and grows pale. (She goes toward him.) Forgael The fool, who has made the wisdom that men write Upon thin boards of yew and apple wood,

45

46 345

350

355

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And all the wisdom that old images, Made of dim gold, rave out in secret tombs, Has told me that the undying send their eagles To snatch alive out of the streams all lovers That have gone thither to look for the loud streams, Folding their hearts’ desire to their glad hearts. Dectora The love I know is hidden in these hands That I would mix with yours, and in this hair That I would shed like twilight over you. Forgael The love of all under the light of the sun Is but brief longing, and deceiving hope, And bodily tenderness; but love is made Imperishable fre under the boughs

344.] And all that prophesying images NAR. 344–345. old images, | Made of dim gold] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Byzantine Mosaics at Ravenna’, 1: ‘Traced on dim gold, in azure vaults enshrined’. 346–347.] Tese eagles are possibly the muchaltered remnants of the ‘Seabar’ in early versions of TSW, who were bird-headed, destructive creatures, referred to in the 1896 TSW as ‘the Aquiline race’ (261). Now, the eagles are the saviours of doomed lovers, and WBY will work them into the fnal image of the play (see note to 431). 348. the loud streams] Perhaps cp. Wordsworth, Te Excursion (1814), IV, 1173–1175: ‘Te little rills, and waters numberless, | Inaudible by daylight, blend their notes | With the loud streams’. 349. their glad hearts] Hearts are very ofen glad in nineteenth-century poetry; nevertheless, WBY may recollect this phrase from a religious poem by Aubrey De Vere, Poetical

Works (1884), ‘Hymns from St. Gertrude’, 38: ‘From their glad hearts resounding that new Song’. 356. imperishable fre] Although the adjective here does survive in later revisions of the verse-play in a diferent context (1906 version, 580), WBY’s removal of the phrase afer 1900 placed it at the disposal of William Sharp, in a (heavily Yeatsian) poem for the second edition of his From Te Hills of Dream (1910), ‘Te Rose of the Night’, and its ecstatic fnal line, ‘Kiss me, Imperishable Fire, dark Rose, O Rose of my Desire!’. Sharp’s explanatory rubric to his enraptured lyric is plainly indebted to the otherworldly excitements of TSW: ‘Tere is an old mystical legend that when a soul among the dead woos a soul among the living, so that both may be reborn as one, the sign is a dark rose, or a rose of fame, in the heart of the night.’

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47

Of chrysoberyl and beryl and chrysolite, And chrysoprase and ruby and sardonyx.

360

Dectora Where are these boughs? Where are the holy woods That can change love to imperishable fre? O! I would break this net the gods have woven Of voices and of dreams. O heart, be still! O! why is love so crazy that it longs To drown in its own image? Forgael

365

Even that sleep That comes with love, comes murmuring of an hour When earth and heaven have been folded up And languors that awake in mingling hands And mingling hair fall from the fery boughs, To lead us to the streams where the world ends.

357–358.] Chrysoberyl can be a kind of beryl (which is ofen pale green) with a yellow tinge (OED a.) or ‘a yellowish green gem’ (OED b.); chrysolite (see note to 301) is also a green-coloured gemstone; chrysoprase, which is ‘an apple-green variety of chalcedony (OED b.), is also ‘the ancient name of a golden-green precious stone, now generally believed to have been a variety of the beryl, or to have included that among other stones of similar appearance’ (OED a.): it was, the OED defnition continues, ‘one of the stones to which in the Middle Ages was attributed the faculty of shining in the dark’. Sardonyx is (OED) ‘A variety of onyx or stratifed chalcedony having white layers alternating with one or more strata of sard [yellow or reddish orange]’. Tese precious stones lef George Russell unmoved: ‘Yeats may intend ‘chrysoberyl’ and ‘beryl’ etc. as symbols for self sacrifce and heroism – but they are only

symbols to him because someone has said they are’ (see Reception in headnote). In the Saturday Review (29 Dec. 1900), the whole speech 352–358 was singled out as ‘one of the most beautiful and imaginative passages’ in the play: ‘Is there a word or cadence in these lines which could not have been used equally well in prose, or in conversation; and yet, can it be denied that these lines are exquisite verse, moving fnely to their own music?’ 369. where the world ends] Te motif here is repeated at 416–417. WBY’s phrase stuck in the memory of Eva Gore-Booth, who entitled a poem ‘Te Well Where the World Ends’, and whose ‘Tree Consolations in Illness’ concluded with (30–31):‘the bright petals of the Mystic Rose | Tat grows where the world ends’ (Poems (1929)). Behind WBY’s phrase, as well as Gore-Booth’s, is the title of W. Morris’s fantasy novel, Te Well at the World’s End (1896).

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(Aibric and some of the sailors come from the other ship over the bulwark beyond the sail, and gather in the dimness beyond the sail.) 370

A sailor They are always quarrelling. Aibric Give me your swords. A sailor Eocha and Maine are always quarrelling. Another sailor Ale sets them quarrelling. Aibric Give me your swords. A sailor We will not quarrel, now that all is well, And we go home. Another sailor

375

Come, Aibric; end your tale Of golden-armed Iolan and the queen That lives among the woods of the dark hounds.

370–374.] Aibric. Give me your swords. A Sailor. Tey are always quarrelling. Another Sailor. It is the brown ale does it. AIbric. Give me your swords.

NAR.

371. Eocha and Maine] WBY deploys two Irish names here probably without any particular referential intent; but Eocha in Irish myth is Eochaidh, the son of a king of Munster

whose elopement is brought to an end when the spring by which he has stopped is fooded, and becomes Lough Neagh (Loch n-Echach, the Lough of Eochaidh); another Eochaigh is also reported as one of the four sons of Diarmuid and Grainne in AG’s GFM (398); Maine is the name carried by a number of the sons of queen Meadhbh of Connacht. 375. Iolan] Aolan NAR. ‘Golden-armed Iollan’ is a prince in the Old Irish Eactra cloinne rig na n-Ioruaide (Adventures of the Children of the King of Norway): Douglas Hyde’s translation of this text was published in 1899. For details of this, see note to TSW (1906 version), 421.

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Another sailor And tell how Mananan sacked Murias Under the waves, and took a thousand women When the dark hounds were loosed. Another sailor Come to the ale. (They go into the other ship.) 380

385

Dectora (Going toward the sail) I have begun remembering my dreams. I have commanded men in dreams. Beloved, We will go call these sailors, and escape The nets the gods have woven and our own hearts, And, hurrying homeward, fall upon some land And rule together under a canopy. Forgael All that know love among the winds of the world Have found it like the froth upon the ale.

390

Dectora We will fnd out valleys and woods and meadows To wander in; you have loved many women, It may be, and have grown weary of love. But I am new to love.

377–379.] Tis is WBY’s frst poetic reference to Murias, one of the four cities from which the Tuatha De Danaan had come to Ireland. In the Lebor Gabala Erenn (Book of the Invasions of Ireland), the earliest recension of which was made in the eleventh century, these cities are listed, and Murias (or Muirias) is the place of origin for the cauldron of the Dagda. Te mythological fgure Manannan MacLir is associated with the Tuatha De Danaan, and always carries strong associations with the Irish Sea (WBY had mentioned him in poetry before, in both versions of ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’). However, Manannan’s supposed sacking of

Murias is not mentioned in either the Lebor Gabala Erenn or elsewhere, and it is possible that it is here at least partly an invention of WBY’s. Manannan’s association with the sea, and the name of Murias (Irish muir, sea), may provide the poet with sufcient impetus for these lines. (Later, William Sharp would elaborate greatly on Murias as a sea-city (or an undersea one): see notes to ‘Baile and Aillinn’, 161–163.) 390. weary of love] Perhaps cp. Tomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘My Pretty Rose-Tree’, 1–3: ‘Being weary of love | I few to the grove, | And chose me a tree of the fairest’.

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Forgael Go among these That have known love among the winds of the world And tell its story over their brown ale.

395

400

Dectora (Going a little nearer to the sail) Love was not made for darkness and the winds That blow when heaven and earth are withering, For love is kind and happy. O come with me! Look on this body and this heavy hair; A stream has told me they are beautiful. The gods hate happiness, and weave their nets Out of their hatred. Forgael My beloved, farewell. Seek Aibric on the Lochlann galley, and tell him That Forgael has followed the grey birds alone, And bid him to your country. Dectora

405

I should wander Hither and thither and say at the high noon How many hours to daybreak, because love Has made my feet unsteady, and blinded me. Forgael I think that there is love in Aibric’s eyes. I know he will obey you; and if your eyes Should look upon his eyes with love, in the end

392. the winds of the world] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Anactoria’, 216–217: ‘When all the winds of the world for pure delight | Close lips that quiver’. 397. heavy hair] Cp. Katharine Tynan, Shamrocks (1887), ‘Te Pursuit of Diarmuid and

Grainne’, 127–128: ‘Her heavy hair was on the ground | And o’er his hands and feet’. 403–406.] I should wander | Amid the darkness, now that all my stars | Have fallen and my sun and moon gone out. NAR. 409. in the] unto the NAR.

THE SHADOWY WATERS (1900)

410

51

That would be happiest. He is a king Among high mountains, and the mountain robbers Have called him mighty. Dectora I will follow you Living or dying. Forgael Bid Aibric to your country, Or go beside him to his mountain wars.

415

Dectora I will follow you. Forgael I will have none of you. My love shakes out her hair upon the streams Where the world ends, or runs from wind to wind And eddy to eddy. Masters of our dreams,

410–412.] Tat would be happiest, for there is none | So worthy among men. NAR. 412–431.] NAR has a more compressed ending to the play: Dectora I follow you, Whether among the cold winds of the dead, Or among winds that move in the meadows and woods. I have cut the cords that held this galley to ours.

She is already fading, as though the gods Had woven her of wind. (She throws herself at Forgael’s feet.) Life withers out. I hide you with my hair, that we may gaze Upon this world no longer. (Te harp begins to murmur of itself.) Forgael

Te harp cries out. It has begun to cry out to the eagles.

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Why have you cloven me with a mortal love? Pity these weeping eyes! Dectora (Going over to him and taking the crown from before his feet) I will follow you. I have cut the rope that bound this galley to ours, And while she fades and life withers away, I crown you with this crown.

425

430

(She kneels beside him and puts her arms about him.) Bend lower, O king, O fower of the branch, O bird among the leaves, O silver fsh that my two hands have taken Out of a running stream, O morning star Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn Upon the misty border of the wood, – Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair, For we will gaze upon this world no longer. (The harp begins to murmur of itself.) Forgael The harp-strings have begun to cry out to the eagles.

419. a mortal love] Cp Keats, Endymion (1818), I, 525–526: ‘With so deadly gasp | No man e’er panted for a mortal love’. 425.] Cp. WBY’s ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), 8: ‘And caught a little silver trout’ (see notes on this poem’s fsh in vol. 2 of present edition). 426–427. star | Trembling] Perhaps cp. Samuel Lover, Te Hall Porter (1858), ‘I think of thee’, 13–16: ‘Ten, if some trembling star | Beaming I see | Brighter than others far! – | I think of thee’. 429.] Te unloosening of a woman’s hair to cover the face and body of a male lover was a recurring motif in the poems of WBY’s Te Wind Among the Reeds (1899): its earliest use by the poet was in ‘Te Heart of the Woman’ (1894), 7–8: ‘Te shadowy blossom of my hair | Will hide us from the bitter storm’. Ultimately, WBY may derive the motif from A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series

(1866), ‘Before Parting’, 10–12: ‘To make your tears fall where your sof hair lay | All blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise | Over my face and eyes’. In the 1896 TS version of TSW, Dectira addresses the ‘Children of Dana’ as those who ‘shake your hair out on the tide’ (275). However, the major infuence here (which should also be considered an allusion) is Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axël (1889), and a line of the hero’s lover Sara in the fnal act, before both lovers die in search of the infnite: ‘Te voiler de mes cheveux ou tu respirerais l’esprit des roses mortes!’[O to veil you with my hair where you will breathe the spirit of dead roses!’]. 431.] Tis fnal line refers back to 346–349 earlier, where ‘the undying send their eagles | To snatch alive out of the streams all lovers | Tat have gone thither to look for the loud streams, | Folding their hearts’ desire to their glad hearts’.

187

THE WITHERING OF THE B OUGHS Date of composition. Te poem was being written in the summer of 1900, and AG’s diary for 1 Aug. records that ‘W. has fnished his lyric, on the withering of the boughs’ (AGD92– 02, 276). Te Berg MS (see Textual and publication history) is signed by WBY, with the date ‘July [13 del.] 30 1900’. When the poem was begun is less easy to say: before his summer trip, WBY wrote to AG from London on 6 Jun. telling her that ‘I have written out in prose the substance for some lyrics’ (CL 2, 539), and it is likely that the beginnings of this poem (and also perhaps ‘Under the Moon’) are being referred to here. Te germ of an idea for the poem comes probably from Jul. 1899 and WBY’s excursions with AG in Co. Galway in search of folklore. Using the Gregory family hunting lodge Chevy Chase as their base, AG and WBY interviewed numerous inhabitants of the Galway/ Clare mountainous area, where AG’s ‘Mrs. Finnegan’ was to be encountered (see Sources and background). It was a year until composition of the poem followed from the snippet of folklore gathered on that trip, and it was at Coole that WBY turned his prose sketch into a poem. Sources and background. One partial source for the material here comes from an earlier poem by WBY himself: ‘A Dream of Other Lives’ (1891), which had survived until the page-proof stage of CK before being omitted from that volume. Tis opens with a line that infuences WBY’s frst stanza: ‘Te cries of the curlew and peewit, the honey-pale orb of the moon’ (see notes to 2 and 5). Te decision to return to this material connects the poem with earlier love poetry written by WBY for MG, but the relation between WBY’s governing conceit of the withering of trees and the ‘telling’ of ‘dreams’, and his own romantic travails is not immediately apparent. Te conceit itself comes to the poet by way of AG, and the poem’s location is largely in the environs of the Gregory estate (see note to 6). AG added to her journal record of WBY’s completion of the poem the information that ‘At Chevy a woman had said to me, ‘If you tell your dream to the trees, fasting, they will all wither’’ (SY, 384). In VBWI, AG records the views of ‘Mrs. Finnegan’ (vol. 1, 189): Dreams, we should not pay too much attention to, and we should judge them well, that is, if a dream is bad or good, we should say ‘It’s a good dream’; and we should never tell a dream to anyone fasting: and it’s said if you tell your dream to a tree fasting, it will wither up.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-4

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In the Preface he wrote for AG’s book in 1914, WBY added other circumstantial details to this anecdote (CW 5, 53): In Lady Gregory’s stories there is a man who heard the newly dropped lambs of faery crying in November, and much to show a topsy-turveydom of seasons, our spring being their autumn, our winter their summer, and Mary Battle, my Uncle George Pollexfen’s old servant, was accustomed to say that no dream had a true meaning afer the rise of the sap; and Lady Gregory learned somewhere on Slieve Ochte that if one told one’s dreams to the trees fasting the trees would wither. Closer to the time of composition, WBY referred to these matters in his article ‘Te Fool of Faery’ in Te Kensington (Jun. 1901), repr. as ‘Te Queen and the Fool’ in the 1902 edn. of Te Celtic Twilight (M, 77): Tere is a war between the living and the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. Tey will have it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of the earth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their wisdom when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make the trees wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery in November, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes. In 1903, WBY’s play Te Hour-Glass began with the Wise Man considering a mysterious formulation of the reversal of seasons (VP, 578): Where is that passage I am to explain to my pupils to-day? Here it is, and the book says that it was written by a beggar on the walls of Babylon: “Tere are two living countries, the one visible and the one invisible; and when it is winter with us it is summer in that country; and when the November winds are up among us it is lambing-time there.” I wish that my pupils had asked me to explain any other passage, for this is a hard passage. It may be signifcant that the trees wither in response to dreams told whilst fasting, though less in the folkloric sense that AG and WBY understand than in relation to the experiences of rural people over the past ffy years in the West of Ireland. Here, in the 1840s, ‘fasting’ was hardly a matter of choice; and it is possible that it is this recent historical trauma which fnds its way into those stories told to the visiting researchers from Coole in the cottages on Slieve Echtge in 1899. In work written at Coole over the next couple of years, WBY was to return ofen to motifs of hunger and, in the play Te King’s Treshold (wr. 1903) he would make the deliberate fasting of Seanchan the poet in front of the castle of King Guaire (at Gort, the town not far from Slieve Echtge) his plot’s main theme. Te play also features the Mayor of Kinvara, a small village on Galway Bay which was much reduced by the Irish famine, and was formerly a part of the Gregory estate. Tis poem precedes the composition of WBY’s play, but it is possible to see the

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play as a working-through in dramatic form of the full conditions of ‘withering’ here: a blight brought on by ‘fasting’, where the psychic world within the physical world causes an apparently unnatural state of decay. Te poem’s speaker must be presumed to be himself ‘fasting’: WBY probably understands this in emotional terms in 1900, as his own famishing with desire for MG (and cp. the retrospective self-description of his ‘Te Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1938), 16: ‘I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride’). Te location of all this in the Slieve Echtge region, however, becomes over the next three years more charged with both mythic and historical starvation, in ‘fasting’ that had distinct nineteenth-century resonances for AG’s and WBY’s folklore informants. ‘Echtge of streams’. Sliebh Echtge, in modern usage Slieve Aughty, refers to a range of mountains along the Co. Galway/ Co. Clare border. AG and WBY were here on a folklore gathering trip in the summer of 1899 (see Date of composition). In her autobiography, AG wrote of her lodge ‘in a fold of Slieve Echtge, where wild deer ran in the woods’ (SY, 7), and the deer in the woods feature in WBY’s play Te King’s Treshold, where Seanchan is ofered ‘Venison from Slieve Echtge | Fattened with poor men’s crops’ (1903 version, VP, 278; Te King’s Treshold and On Baile’s Strand (1904), 33). During his 1899 trip, WBY wrote an account of the lodge and its surroundings to SMY (CL 2, 431–432): Lady Gregory and her niece and myself are in a little shooting lodge in the hills. It is on a hill surrounded on every side by a great wood full of deer. Deer’s heads look down at me from the walls while I write and there is a gentle hum, from where a swarm of wild bees have made a nest in the wainscot under one of the windows. Tey come in and out through the open window and being wild bees are gentle and do not sting anybody. Tey are not used enough to people to be afraid and angry. Tere is a faint smell of their honey everywhere. (An association between the 1899 stay and the pervasive smell of honey might have played a part in WBY’s return to the phrase ‘honey-pale’ in 5.) An account of the area by Robert S. Rait, an Oxford historian who was Tutor to Robert Gregory at Magdalen, and AG’s guest at Coole towards the end of 1901, ofers a contemporary account of the Slieve Echtge surroundings (Te Story of an Irish Property (1908), 2): Te lake [Lough Cutra] and its islands are rich in beauty of water and woodland and rock. Over them rise the Slieve Echtge mountains. Tey are gradual and regular in outline, and rise to no great height, but the sof evening light upon them has been the inspiration of poets. On the other side stretches a country of marsh and woodland and feld and homestead. [. . .] Bogs have been formed by the rapid growth of peat-producing mosses, and they have been drained; forests have disappeared and been replanted; land has arisen from under the surface of the lakes. Yet the country is really the same as when these men, whose very tombs are to us a mystery, drew the breath of life, and loved and sinned and died; and if one of them could revisit the scenes of those long lost years, he would still know it for his home. Te ancient poet would again rejoice in ‘delightful Echtge’, and in the lake and its islands.

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Slieve Echtge was an Irish-speaking area (though sparsely populated), and WBY’s decision not to present it as ‘Aughty’ does perhaps refect a willingness to incorporate Irish place-names whose pronunciation would not be immediately apparent to an Englishspeaking audience. In the MS, there is one instance of a cancelled ‘Och-’ for the frst syllable; WBY writes the form ‘Ochte’ in a MS draf of Te King’s Treshold (typed up by AG as ‘Echtge’) and in his 1914 Preface to VBWI (see Sources and background) WBY prints ‘Slieve Ochte’; nevertheless, ‘Echtge’ is the form he usually adopts. Te name itself derives from that of a queen among the Tuatha De Danaan named Echtge, to whom the mountain-range between Clare and Galway, from Loughrea to Lough Derg, was given as her dowry. WBY’s epithet, ‘of streams’, may refect a knowledge of the sources on Sliebh Echtge of the Owendalulagh river. In P.W. Joyce’s Te Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1910), a version of the associated story is given (vol. 1, 248–249): [. . .] the Dinnsenchus gives a legend about the name of the river Owendalulagh, which rises on the slope of Slieve Aughty, and fows into Lough Cooter near Gort in Galway. Tis legend states, that when Echtghe a Dedannan lady, married Fergus Lusca, cup-bearer to the king of Connaught, she brought with her two cows, remarkable for their milk-bearing fruitfulness, which were put to graze on the banks of this stream; and from this circumstance it was called Abhainn-da-loilgheach, the river of the two milch cows. According to the same authority [the Book of Leinster], Slieve Aughty took its name from this lady – Sliabh-Echtghe, Echtghe’s mountain. Describing the view from Coole, John Masefeld wrote how ‘In the distance are low, strange, rocky, beautiful hills,’ and remembered how ‘He [WBY] told me that one of these hills was Slieve Echtge, mentioned in an ancient Irish poem: “Te stag upon Slieve Echtge hears the howling of the wolves”’ (Some Memories of W.B. Yeats (1940), 18). Reception and critical interpretation. Tis poem was among the ‘two or three things for which to give thanks’ in H.C. Beeching’s review of P99–05 for Te Bookman (Nov. 1906): this ended by quoting the second stanza as something ‘which no one could have written but Mr. Yeats himself ’. It was one of only four poems by WBY included in John Cooke’s Dublin Book of Irish Verse (1909), but was not otherwise specifcally celebrated in its early years. For F. Reid in 1915, the poem was one that, in a ‘transitional’ volume (ISW) belonged ‘more to the period of Te Wind Among the Reeds’ (Reid, 236): this view is not entirely wrong, and in modern criticism R. Foster has mentioned how the piece ‘echoed a ninetyish dreaminess’ (Foster 1, 301). Early appreciation included the poem’s being set as one of four WBY pieces by the composer Peter Warlock (1894–1930) in his song-cycle Te Curlew (1920–1922); in more purely literary terms, John Masefeld considered this WBY’s ‘most beautiful poem’ (Some Memories of W.B. Yeats (1940), 18). Te poem’s meaning has caused some diference of opinion amongst critics interested in biographical resonances. E. Engelberg saw it as an exploration of how ‘Dreaming of the past is not always useful,’ noting how in these verses ‘the reality cannot stand the memory’ (Engelberg, 228). For H. Adams, the poem seems ‘a regression that develops naturally out of [WBY’s] expression of the utter loss of his heart in ‘Never Give All the Heart’’ – even while noting that the latter poem was written some time aferwards (Adams, 83).

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Just as oddly, D. Holdeman fnds the poem poorly ftted to its context in ISW, as though reluctant to acknowledge its early date of composition among the poems of that volume, regretting that ‘Although [its] descriptions of impossible dreams fuelling dissatisfaction with the natural world repeat one of the volume’s primary motifs, it centres on a symbolic landscape rather than on a dramatic situation, and its imagery and rhythms recall the manner of Te Wind Among the Reeds’: Holdeman speculates that ‘Given time, Yeats might have excluded it from [ISW] and written another dramatic lyric to take its place’ (Holdeman, 209). Not having the beneft of such advice, WBY in fact kept the poem in both ISW and his poetic corpus without any substantial revision. N. Grene has observed that the poem’s refrain ‘implies a necessarily inverse relationship between the natural and fairy worlds,’ since ‘the inhuman perfection of Faeryland is at once alluring and sinister, and dreams of its otherness incapacitate the dreamers from a more ordinary enjoyment of human existence’ (Grene, 57–58). It is perhaps relevant to remember the broadly biographical situation of this poem, as the frst substantial lyric to have been fnished by WBY for some time. In particular, it is the frst of his lyrics in which there is an opportunity to digest the confrmation which WBY had received from MG at the end of 1898 concerning her life as a mistress and mother in France. A reading by R. Greaves places emphasis on this, seeing in its attraction to the world of faery, in which lovers are permanently united by magical means, ‘a longing that, at some level of consciousness, the poet wants to escape’: ‘It is as if the desire manifested in the dream that calls into existence an otherness which could satisfy what the world is not sufcient to satisfy, is itself a cause of the wasting of the temporal world’ (Greaves, 59). It would be unwise to read this poem as a strongly autobiographical piece, however: for example, it seems unlikely that WBY would think of MG’s words (in 1898, or at any time) as ‘merry and tender and pitiful’ (3), while the paired king and queen being ‘happy and hopeless’ (20) scarcely measures up to either WBY’s solitary predicament or a state of mind towards which he was in the habit of aspiring. Even so, the poem does at least build from the actual state of WBY’s relationship with MG towards what were for him more productive artistic preoccupations. Tese were taking further shape and substance not in the London and Paris of WBY’s 1890s, with MG as the presiding spirit, but at Coole Park, where AG was an altogether diferent – yet much more enabling – practical, cultural, and folkloric/artistic guide. Te locale of AG’s estate, then, is neither accidental nor a matter of mere ornament. In some ways, this poem is laying the groundwork for narratives which WBY would begin in coming years, such as ‘Baile and Aillinn’, while also presenting in concentrated form the Irish mythological motifs, and especially the lives of ‘the Danaan kind’ (12), in which his long-standing interest was now to reach some new kinds of fruition. Of course, WBY could only understand this as a hope or an instinct at the time when the poem was composed; but its actual fruition, which was both poetic and dramatic, was not in the event to be achieved without AG’s signifcant support. It may be that the lyric ofers AG a miniature collection of things ‘I know’, in the way of a creative sharing; and AG was herself at this time working ever more seriously with (e.g.) the Irish sources that formed her CM, partly in response to her own initial interest in the work of WBY. Te poem’s landscape, the witches and the fairies, and the romantic motif of Aengus Og, are all components of what was to prove an important creative mixture for WBY in his literary work, and which was generally begun and ofen

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fnished at Coole, over the coming years. Against this summary-cum-presentation, WBY places the mysterious and haunting refrain of his poem, in which the mythic landscape and its magical meanings are combined with a frst-person confession. Te poem’s main autobiographical burden, then, is designedly hard of access – for readers, for AG, and even to a telling degree for WBY himself – and it is presented partly as a mystery, one no more instantly comprehensible through its repetitions in the poem, but at the same time all the more resonant and insistent for these moments of formal recurrence. Between the things that ‘I know’, and ‘my dreams’, the poem stakes out an area where landscape, myth, and magic remain challenged by a personal unfulfllment that is particularly WBY’s own, unfnished business. Te deepest challenge is that posed in the poem’s eventual title, and the word ‘Withering’: WBY, with AG as his primary witness, and his reading public as witnesses afer that, uses the lyric to search for a way of letting apparent wasting and decay fgure as a point of growth. In that sense, the poem might well be read as both loosely programmatic and optimistic. Textual and publication history. Two items in the Berg Collection, NYPL, both deriving from Coole Park, are the only pre-publication witnesses to the text of this poem. Te frst is a MS in WBY’s hand, carrying the whole poem in fair copy, though with some corrections (MS); the second is a TS, probably from AG’s typewriter, with hol. additions and corrections (TS). Both are reproduced and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 46–49. Te poem was sent from Coole by WBY to John Lane, the editor of Te Speaker, on 13 Aug., and it was published in the issue of 25 Aug. (S). In his brief note to Lane, WBY reminded him that he had once asked the poet for some verse for the magazine Te Anglo-Saxon, ‘but I had little or nothing when you wrote’: ‘I have now done some more verse and send you ‘Echtge of Streams’ on [sic] the hope you may fnd it suitable’. WBY closed his short note with ‘I think you should give me £5 for it’ (CL 2, 559–560). Presumably, Lane agreed. Te poem was included in ISW, and in all subsequent collected editions in WBY’s lifetime. Copy-text: P49. I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds: ‘Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will, I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,

Title] No title MS, TS. Echtge of Streams S. 1. the birds] her birds MS. 2. peewit] the peewit MS [the del.] peewit TS. peewit call and curlew cry] Tese two birds had been heard together in WBY’s poetry before. Te peewit (common name of the lapwing, Vanellus vanellus), and the curlew (Numenius arquata), largely a winter bird

around much of the Irish coast, but present year-round in parts of the West (and in particular on the Burren), both feature at the opening of ‘A Dream of Other Lives’, composed nine years earlier: ‘Te cries of the curlew and peewit’. Te curlew, which is present also at the beginning of WBY’s ‘He Reproves the Curlew’ (1896), was a signifcant bird in the poet’s imagination: later, in ‘Paudeen’

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For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.’ The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill, And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams. No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

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I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,

(1913) 4–5: ‘a curlew cried and in the luminous wind | A curlew answered’, while at the end of the play Te Dreaming of the Bones (1919), ‘My heart ran wild when it heard | Te curlew cry before dawn’ (CW 2, 316). In the secret world of WBY’s magical rites, too, the curlew had been given a role: in the later 1890s, when WBY was working over scripts for the rituals of his projected Celtic Mystical Order, in the initiation routine for its ‘Cauldron’ grade the participant called ‘Te Guide’ was to ask: ‘What is that sound now, farther out on the waters?’ and ‘Te Teacher’ was to respond: ‘It is the searching sorrowful cry of the curlew’. In the play Where Tere is Nothing (1902), WBY’s hero Paul Ruttledge includes the curlew among the symbols of immanent apocalypse (CW 2, 666): God will accomplish his last judgment, frst in one man’s mind and then in another. He is always planning last judgments. And yet it takes a long time, and that is why he laments in the wind and in the reeds and in the cries of the curlews. 5. the honey-pale moon] Again (see note to 2) WBY draws on the opening line of ‘A Dream of Other Lives’, ‘Te cries of the curlew and peewit, the honey-pale orb of the moon’. ‘Honey-pale’ was the poet’s own coinage; but WBY may have arrived at it originally by way of the more conventional ‘pale orb’ for the moon, and e.g. S.T. Coleridge, Poems on Various Subjects (1796), ‘Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon’ (1788), 5: ‘when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud’. Returning to his 1891 line here, WBY is not doing so for the frst time: in a late 1890s draf of Te Shadowy Waters,

he calls the moon ‘the honey-pale murderess of the stars’ (DC, 200). lay] hung MS, TS, S. 6, 22. Echtge of streams] See headnote. 7–8, 15–16, 23–24] Tese lines are marked for italic in MS and TS, and they are italicized in S, but not in any printings of the poem from ISW-LP31; they are back in italics for CP33 and the copy-text. 8, 16, 24] Te efect of this line is well caught by R. Ellmann as an example of how in WBY ‘Images of substance are always on the verge of nothingness, narrowly balanced’ (Identity, xxii). 9. paths] path S. 10. their spindles of wool] Spindles are items sometimes associated with witchcraf, especially in Scottish tradition; but for WBY, the wool itself is just as likely to carry this connotation. In his 1914 essay, ‘Witches and Wizards and Irish Folk-Lore’, WBY reminded his readers that ‘One of Lady Gregory’s storytellers considered a fock of wool one of the worst shapes that a spirit could take’ (CW 5, 82), and AG had indeed mentioned at the start of VBWI that the Sidhe ‘appear as men or women wearing clothes of many colours, of today or of some old forgotten fashion, or they are seen as bird or beast, or as a barrel or a fock of wool’ (vol. 1, iii). Te material in AG’s work, gathered mainly from the Slieve Echtge locality, included the account by ‘A girl of the Feeneys’ of how ‘Old Tom Staford was led astray there by something like a fock of wool that went rolling before him, and he had no power to turn but should follow it’ (vol. 2, 34), and ‘J. Creevy’’s story (vol. 2, 122): ‘One night on the Kiltartan road I saw a fock of

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And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake; I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams. No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

wool by the road side, and I gave a kick at it and it didn’t move, and then another kick and it didn’t move. So it can have been no natural thing.’ WBY had drawn earlier on these accounts in recording that the Sidhe can ‘become ‘very small and go into one another, so that all you see might be a sort of a light bundle’; or become ‘like a clutch of hens,’ or become like ‘a fock of wool by the road’’ (‘Te Tribes of Danu’ (Te New Review Nov. 1897), CW 9, 356). Tis motif of the ‘fock of wool’ (‘fock’ is OED n. 2, 1: ‘A lock, tuf, or particle (of wool, cotton, etc.)’) is very probably what puts wool on witches’ spindles here. 11.] Although ‘secret smile’ is not entirely unusual as a phrase (see e.g. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), Te Lord of the Isles, VI viii, 13–14: ‘Kind Isabel, with a secret smile, | Saw and forgave the maiden’s wile’), this line may owe something to a stanza by Oscar Wilde, in which watery depths and a semi-erotic ‘secret smile’ are combined (Poems (1881), ‘Charmides’, 157–162): On the green bank he lay, and let one hand Dip in the cool dark eddies listlessly, And soon the breath of morning came and fanned His hot fushed cheeks, or lifed wantonly Te tangled curls from of his forehead, while He on the running water gazed with strange and secret smile. depths] deeps MS, TS, S. 12.] And I know of the islands [^isles^ del. TS ] where the Danaan kind MS, TS; I know of the isles where the Danaan kind S; And of apple islands where the Danaan kind ISW. Te fnal form of the line is reached in P99–05.

a dim moon drifs] Perhaps cp. Oscar Wilde, Poems (1881), ‘Te Burden of Itys’, 329: ‘A white moon drifs across a shimmering sky’. 13.] Will wander dancing when light grows cool MS; [Will wander dancing del.] wind and unwind their dances when ^the^ light grows cool TS. 17–18.] WBY alludes in these lines to the story of Aengus Og, and the Aislinge Óenguso (Te Dream-Vision of Aengus) from the twelfhcentury Book of Leinster. In this source, 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 fnds the girl, Caer Iborméith, but cannot be with her until he too takes shape as a swan; this happens, and the pair fy away together back to his seat at the Boyne, where they live as man and wife. Although WBY was aware of this as narrative material through its paraphrase by John Rhys, in Celtic Heathendom (1888), 169–171, and possibly also in the translation by E. Müller in Revue Celtique 3 (1876), 347–350, he would have been familiar with the version of the Aislinge included in AG’s CM (1902) well before its publication. In Ch. 8 of CM, AG gives her version of the story of this swan-transformation (147): So when the time came, Angus Og went to the loch, and he saw the three times ffy white birds there, with their silver chains about their necks. And Angus stood in a man’s shape at the edge of the loch, and he called to the girl: ‘Come and speak with me, O Caer!’ ‘Who is calling me?’ said Caer. ‘Angus calls you,’ he said, ‘and if you come, I swear by my word, I will not hinder you from going into the

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I know of the sleepy country, where swans fy round Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fy. A king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by; I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams. No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.

loch again.’ ‘I will come,’ she said. So she came to him, and he laid his two hands on her, and then, to hold to his word, he took the shape of a swan on himself, and they went into the loch together, and they went around it three times. And then they spread their wings and rose up from the loch, and went in that shape till they were at Brugh na Boinne. And as they were going, the music they made was so sweet that all the people that heard it fell asleep for three days and three nights. WBY’s ‘golden chains’ alters the ‘silver chains’ of AG, Rhys, and the Book of Leinster – though this does have one fash of gold in ‘their silvery chains and golden caps around their heads’ (Müller, 349–350); but the reference to ‘the sleepy country’ is explained by

the Aengus narrative’s account of the efects of the music (in Rhys, ‘they made such enchanting music that it plunged everybody in a deep sleep, which lasted three days and three nights’ (171)). 17. I know] [And del.] I know MS. 19. are wandering] wander MS [wander del.] are wandering TS. 20.] Has made them so happy, and hopeless, so deaf, and so blind S. 21. all the years have] Time has MS [time has del.] all the years have TS. 22.] I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams MS; I know and the curlew on Echtge’s streams corr. to And the curlew and peewit [know del] on Echtge’s streams TS; And the curlew and peewit know on Echtge of streams, S.

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UNDER THE MOON Date and circumstances of composition. At least one version of this poem was composed by 8 Sep. 1900: AG’s journal for 7 Sep. mentions that WBY ‘all but got the last 4 lines of his new lyric’ on that day, and the next entry (for 8 Sep.) reads ‘Lyric fnished – begins ‘I have no happiness dreaming of Brycelinde’’ (AGD92–02, 279). Finished it may have been, but the poem was nevertheless somewhat neglected in the months that followed, and a letter from WBY (who was preparing to depart for Ireland) to AG of 7 May 1901 shows that he was in possession of a copy prepared by her that he saw was imperfect: ‘I have just noticed,’ he writes in a postscript, ‘that there is something missing in the poem that begins ‘with a woman’s name’’(CL 3, 68): I suppose that what you have sent is a copy. Would you mind looking at what you have copied from and see what line comes afer ‘long lived ones’? It ought to rhyme with ‘heart’. Once he was in Ireland (he was on the way to Sligo at this point, rather than Coole), WBY was presumably able to assemble in full the poem he had completed the previous summer (see Textual history). Te piece was sent by WBY to Te Speaker by 1 Jun. 1901 (WBY to AG, CL 3, 77). Context and critical interpretation. Tis poem brings to a new intensity of concentration WBY’s dwelling on myth and femininity. Unlike his narrative poems (both those already written and those still to come) it arranges as many female fgures as possible in its twenty lines to serve as emblems of sorrowful love – too many of them, fnally, ‘to be borne’ by the sufering frst-person voice of the poem. In this respect, its parade of ladies is a kind of concentrated reiteration of the romantic/mythic selection of fgures made in Tennyson’s ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (1833). Instead of Tennyson’s classical, Biblical, and historical cast, WBY choses a series of women and quasi-divinities from Irish, Welsh, and English legend. Unusually, Arthurian material is very much to the fore. WBY had largely avoided this in the past, partly no doubt on account of its being relatively hackneyed by his time as narrative material for poetry. Although Arthurian matter had served English nationalistic purposes in the nineteenth century, WBY was well aware that this was in its essence as Celtic as any Welsh or Irish myth. In ‘Tree Irish Poets’, Te Irish Homestead Dec. 1897 (CW 9, 368), the poet wrote about this: ‘Te legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, which had so great an infuence on the whole of Europe in the twelfh century, and so great a part in the foundation of chivalry, were Celtic legends, and some say Irish legends transformed by Welsh and Breton story-tellers.’ Contact with

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-5

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AG added depth and breadth, as WBY acknowledged in his Postscript of 1902 to ‘Te Celtic Element in Literature’ (CW 4, 138): ‘I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had fnished her book of legends, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, a book to set beside the Morte d’Arthur and the Mabinogion.’ A crucial contextual element in all of this is the link between such ‘legends’ and the love of women. WBY’s hero in the 1902 version of his abandoned fction Te Speckled Bird, Michael Hearne, frst is enchanted in boyhood by the Mabinogion, and is subsequently absorbed in a copy of Malory given to him by his father (SB, 8–9): At last he found a book that altogether delighted him, for it was full of just such stories, but told them with much more detail than the country people. It was an edition of the Mabinogion which his father had bought mainly for its large margins and fne print and for those engravings of knights and ladies which have as much romance as seemed admirable to a generation that had learned from Sir Walter Scott to understand the picturesqueness, the bodily energy, the sudden transformations of the life of the Middle Ages, while too sceptical and too sectarian to understand its magic and its mysticism. John Hearne had never read the book, but when Michael told him of it he bought him a Morte d’Arthur, which he had read, and talked to him one night by the sea of the coming of these tales into the Middle Ages and of the poets and painters who had made them almost as important in our time. He said, ‘Tey are a part of the holy church of romance, which should be to you and me all that the holy church of theology is to our servants.’ And he spoke of the gradual fading of theology and belief in the supernatural, and a gradual awakening of joy and liberty as men talked when the poems of Swinburne and the discoveries of Darwin were in the air. Michael, in whose nerves the emotions of a very diferent generation were already beginning to stir, listened a little indignantly, and thought not indeed of devil or angel, God or saint, but of Merlin under the stone. His imagination, which had even more than a child’s prepossession with woods and waters and imaginative circumstances, found all it desired in these books, with their delight in armour and in raiment and in household things learned by the story-tellers in the courts of princes, and in giants and wizards and grotesque persons learned by the story-tellers from a broken race that still remembered the reveries of ancient herdsmen among woods and waters. It was long before the later book, with its more passionate tales, became more important to him than the older book and when it did, its world took the ancient form and colour he read in that older book. What delighted him most in the newer book was the story of the Grail and the stories of Merlin and of Morgan le Fay and the wizard that changed a troop of horses into grey stones. Tristram and Iseult or Guinevere and Lancelot were as yet but images, in a world where all were

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images, and the images that pleased him the most were those that expressed by some extravagance an energy or a magnifcence or a mystery not in the sober images of life. Tere is a strong tinge of autobiography here, but it is important to register the fact that in ‘Under the Moon’ many such ‘images’ are things of which ‘I take no pleasure in dreaming’ (1). If the poem’s context is largely that of love and great women in Celtic myth, it is also true that this context is something which the poem’s speaking voice fnds – however glamorous or alluring – insufcient to its personal (and unspoken) romantic needs. In some ways, the literary/mythic paraphernalia of WBY’s imaginative past is being questioned here: as E. Engelberg observes, ‘Dreaming of a past is not always useful; indeed, it can be useless because it is painful’ (Engelberg, 228). A sense of WBY’s negativity on the subject is conveyed by M. Sidnell when he writes how ‘the poet’s disappointment in love is the particular reason given, or intimated, for the changed attitude to myth, but that disappointment is also represented as the symptom rather than the cause of a poetic failure’ (Sidnell, 72). H. Adams goes so far as to assert that WBY here ‘calls in question his earlier use of myth and legend’ (Adams, 85), while for E. Larrissy, for whom also the poem is one in which WBY ‘recounts his weariness with old legends of the happy Otherworld or unhappy love’, the fnal image of the moon ‘connects [WBY’s] own unhappiness and thwarted desire with a metaphor for art that is empty and shell-like because too hungry’ (Larrissy, 106). Te poem, which attracted little if any attention from critics in WBY’s lifetime, has elicited some modern biographical speculation. D. Toomey fnds that the poem’s ‘tenor [. . .] is of rejection of a corpus of mythology and symbolism which had [in 1900] become falsifed and robbed of consolatory power’, and she sees the piece as marked by ‘listless obliqueness’, but also as ‘covertly confessional’, noting that the ‘third moon’ of the original lines 17–18 corresponds to the moon being in its third quarter when, in Dec. 1898, MG unburdened herself of her secrets to WBY, leaving him in a long-lasting state of shock (Toomey, 15). R. Greaves builds on this insight to observe how ‘Te dream on which so much earlier poetry [of WBY’s] was founded is no longer bearable,’ since ‘Te woman who had been identifed with the supernatural women to whom this poem refers had revealed herself, in what she told Yeats on that night in 1898, to be incontestably fesh and blood’ (Greaves, 58). Tese are convincing insights, but they do not quite exhaust or explain the poem’s involved references and resonances. MG is certainly an unmentioned presence here, but she is being associated with women who are tragic as well as beautiful and dangerous – ‘whose beauty was folded in dismay’ (19). In biographical terms, WBY’s continuing shock in relation to MG is a state in which he is sorry for her as much as he is for himself. In all this, AG is the presiding healer and enabler: the poem was assembled at Coole, and its references to Irish myth are to things shared with AG as creative material, as well as to more obscure Irish mythic references that turn out to be from a recent book, almost certainly in the house at the time, written by a member of the Coole Park circle, Douglas Hyde (see notes to 9–10 and 13). It seems fair to think in terms of ‘Under

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the Moon’ getting traction on, or distance from, the mutual sorrows of WBY and MG by means of a new literary, social, and cultural milieu, in which the reassembly and the relating of ancient stories is a centrally important activity: the burden ‘not to be borne’ is thus, also, a burden being (at least in part) cast of here. Formally, the slow movement of WBY’s alexandrines may recall a number of poems in Te Wind Among the Reeds: with its abba rhymed quatrains, it seems to be following in the tracks of poems such as ‘Te Unappeasable Host’, or ‘He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’, where three (visually fused) abba alexandrine stanzas conclude the poetic business. ‘Under the Moon’’s frst sixteen lines might sit comfortably beside these poems in a formal sense, as well as stylistically; but its last quatrain – set apart visibly from the rest by a break – is also the place where WBY goes further than the kinds of refection to which this form had taken him in the past, discovering in the process a symbolic and mythic insufciency about which there is nothing to say, other than that it cannot be borne. Te decision to end the poem by reaching a point where further exploration or symbolic expression simply fails marks a new point of lyric development for WBY, and for the frst-person voice in his verse. Textual history. Four TS copies (Berg Collection, NYPL) with holograph alterations are the earliest surviving states of the poem. All four (TS1–4) come from the typewriter of AG, and some of the alterations are in her hand (presumably from WBY’s dictation). One, probably the earliest, is repr. in Cornell ISWGH, 80–83 (TS1). It appears, though, that the poem’s textual fate hung in the balance between 1900 and 1901, and the TSS are the fruits of AG’s labours of preservation and (to some extent) reconstruction. In May 1901, AG sent the poet at his request a copy of the poem, though she was aware that something was missing (see note to 7–8), and this seems to have been a copy which WBY himself had previously seen and corrected at Coole: ‘I enclose a copy of the poem I have – corrected by you, but evidently a line missing. I don’t think there was an MS copy, I remember your dictating it from fragments of paper in your diferent pockets’ (NYPL, quoted CL 3, 68). Te solitary fragment of 7–8 in the Berg collection in WBY’s hand may be one of those ‘pieces of paper’ or (more likely) the poet’s own reconstruction of the missing material. Te poem was frst published in Te Speaker, 5 Jun. 1901 (S), and next appeared in ISW: some proofs for this are in NLI, and show alterations by WBY (Proofs), but a set of page-proofs for this Dun Emer publication were bound and presented to AG by WBY, and are held in the Berg Collection (AG Proofs). WBY retained the poem in all his collected editions afer ISW.

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Copy-text: P49. I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde, Title.] Te poem had no title when frst typed up, though the eventual title is entered above and beneath the body of the text in pencil, probably by WBY, in TS1. ‘Under the Moon’ was not a new title for WBY, but one that had lain unused for more than six years. In 1894, it was his intention to call the projected Poems with Unwin (eventually P95) Under the Moon, and the publishers issued an advance notice that autumn announcing the title (quoted CL 1, 411): ‘Old writers were of opinion that the moon governed by her infuence peasants, sailors, fshermen, and all obscure persons; and as the symbols of Mr. Yeats’s poetry are taken almost wholly from the traditions and manners of the Connaught peasantry, he has selected the title ‘Under the Moon’ for his forthcoming book’. Also in 1894, the phrase was used in WBY’s play Te Land of Heart’s Desire, where the Child speaks about an ‘eagle-cock’ as ‘the oldest thing under the moon’ (CW 2, 77). In 1904, WBY reused the phrase (which was by now the title of his published poem) in his Preface to AG’s GFM (CW 6, 132): ‘Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream, that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs that are still sung in country-places?’ Te personal signifcance of the moon itself is alluded to in WBY’s dedicatory preface for AG of his play Where Tere Is Nothing (1903): remembering the mid-1890s, he writes of how ‘a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the moon’ (8). 1.] I fnd no happiness in shady Brycelinde S. happiness in dreaming] happiness ^in [hol.]^ dreaming MS addition to TS1. Brycelinde] Te forest of Brocéliande in Brittany is frst mentioned by the Norman poet Wace, in his Roman de Rou (c.1160). Its location is probably that of the Forest of Paimport, about 30 km south-west of Rennes.

Although the name has numerous spellings in medieval French, Breton, and English, none of these approximates to the unusual spelling adopted here by WBY. In modern English poetry, the forest’s familiarity came primarily from Arthurian literature and from Tennyson, but it had been mentioned ofen before this in the nineteenth century. In the Notes to Joseph Ritson’s edition of Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802), there is an account of Merlin ‘afer being enchanted by his mistress’, who ‘found himself, when he awoke, in the strongest tower in the world, to whit, in the forest of Broceliande, where he was never able to depart, though she continued to visit him both day and night at her pleasure’ (vol. 3, 248). In 1831, Tomas Price in the Cambrian Quarterly Magazine and Celtic Repertory noted that ‘Tere [in Brittany] was the enchanted forest of Brocéliande, inhabited by fairies, where the celebrated Merlin was held imprisoned by the misdirected power of his own incantations [.  .  .] Te wood of Brocéliande, it is true, though still in existence, no longer displays those waving honours which distinguished it in the days of Merlin’ (‘A Tour Trough Brittany’, vol. 3 No. 9 (Jan. 1831), 9). Tennyson’s ‘Merlin and Vivien’ begins ‘in the wild woods of Broceliande’ (2), a forest in Brittany near St. Malo. In M. Arnold’s ‘Tristram and Iseult’, the same place is written ‘Broce-liande’ (722), and it is mentioned (as ‘Broceliande’) three times (IV, 337, IX, 224, 299) in A. Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). WBY’s spelling is likely to approximate to how the poet remembered the name: it is not found before this, and any subsequent uses of the name in this form derive from his poem. Does he, however, intend this (correctly) as the name of a forest and not (incorrectly) as a person? In his 7 May 1901 letter to AG, WBY refers to this poem as the one ‘that begins ‘with a woman’s name’’ (see Date and circumstances of composition). Perhaps the inverted commas here

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Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle, Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while;

are quoting something said by AG, but if so they are not ofering any correction. Te version of this opening line for S makes it much clearer that ‘Brycelinde’ is a place and not a personal name (for such a lady would hardly be referred to as ‘shady’). Tat version did not survive into later printed versions of the line, and a potential ambiguity over place or person was able to return. Possibly WBY recognized this ambiguity as being not entirely harmful to his intended efect. 2. Nor] Or TS1–4, S; Or corr. to Nor Proofs. Avalon] Tis is the familiar form of Sir Tomas Malory’s ‘Avilion’ in his Morte d’Arthur, where King Arthur is taken at his death in Book 21, Ch. 5: ‘I will into the vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound.’ Tis otherworldly realm (which is also, however, a more worldly location for courtly jousting at the Castle Perilous in Book 7) would have been known to WBY (and most of his own readers) from Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’, and its ‘island-valley of Avilion’ (260–264): Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. Alfred Nutt had made a connection between the Arthurian Avalon and the Irish Tuatha De Danaan (Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (1888), 191): ‘Te dividing water is that across which lies Tir-na n-Og, the Irish Avalon [. . .] In Celtic lore the earliest trace of this realm is found, as is the earliest trace of Grail and sword, in connection with the Tuatha De Danaan, that race of dispossessed immortals which lives on in the hollow hill sides, and is ever ready to aid and cherish the Irish mythic heroes.’ grass-green] Tis very common poetic compound, which is found in medieval

literature and border ballads such as Tomas the Rhymer, was reduced by the attentions of many nineteenth-century poets operating in faux-medieval mode to the status of hackneyed poetic diction. WBY (perhaps unwisely) braves the dangers of this in keeping with the general air of the medievalism which is both his medium and subject here. In his late poem, ‘Te Statesman’s Holiday’ (1938), WBY used the compound again (and again in relation to Avalon) as a refrain: ‘Tall dames go walking in grass-green Avalon’. hollow] Te word is unexpected, where ‘island’ might be more usual for this location. Possibly WBY takes the hint here of Tennyson’s ‘island-valley’ to introduce ‘hollow’ (OED 2: ‘A depression on the earth’s surface; a place or tract below the general level or surrounded by heights; a valley, a basin’). In the process, a further Tennysonian echo – little to the apparent purpose – may be sounded, now of the frst line of Maud (1855): ‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood’. It is possible that Nutt’s ‘hollow hill sides’ housing the Tuatha De Danaan (see above) also exercises some subliminal infuence here. 2–3.] In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur Book 12, Sir Lancelot sufers a ft of madness and is wounded by a boar; he recovers health and sanity afer application of the Sangraal, and is rescued by the Lady Elaine. Te knight is bewildered: ‘Oh Lord Jesu, how came I here? For God’s sake, my lord, let me wit how I came here?’ Elaine replies (Ch. 5): ‘Sir [. . .] into this country ye came like a mad man clean out of your wit. And here have ye been kept as a fool, and no creature here knew what ye were, until by fortune a maiden of mine brought me unto you, where as ye lay sleeping by a well, and anon, as I verily beheld you, I knew you.’ It is afer this that Elaine takes Lancelot to ‘Joyous Isle’ (Ch. 6): ‘And then afer this king Pelles with ten knights, and dame Elaine and twenty ladies, rode unto the castle of Bliant,

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Nor Uladh, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind; Nor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart: Land-under-Wave, where out of the moon’s light and the sun’s Seven old sisters wind the threads of the long-lived ones,

that stood in an island enclosed in iron, with a fair water, deep and large. And when they were there Sir Launcelot let call it the Joyous Isle, and there was he called none otherwise but Le Chevaler Mal Fet, the knight that hath trespassed.’ WBY changes the order of these events, brining ‘one’ (presumably Elaine) to Joyous Isle while Lancelot is there still in his ‘crazed’ condition: there is no source for this, and the poet is either misremembering Malory or making a deliberate change to the story. 4. Or Ulad [before del. when hol.] Naoise had [died or Connor sinned del. thrown a sail upon the wind hol.] Nor] Or TS1–4, S; Or corr. to Nor Proofs. thrown] hung S. Uladh] Te Irish kingdom of Ulster. WBY uses the Irish form here; when AG uses this spelling, she also translates it into the more familiar English, in e.g. CM, 43: ‘It was at Emain Macha, that was sometimes called Macha of the Spears, Conchubar, the High King, had the Eachrais Uladh, the Assembly House of Ulster, and it was there he had his chief palace’. Naoise] In the Old Irish Ulster cycle of stories, Naoise is a young man who eloped with Deirdre, who was already betrothed to King Conchubar. He sailed with her to Scotland, but the afair ended unhappily when later the lovers sought the protection of Fergus MacRoy in the Ulster capital of Emain Macha: there, Conchubar treacherously slew Naoise, along with Naoise’s brothers. 5.] Or lands that seem[ed del.] too dim to burden the heart, TS1; Or lands that had seemed too cloudlike to burden the heart, TS2; Or lands that had seemed too cloudlike to burden the [mind del.] heart, TS3; Or lands that seemed too old to be burdens on the heart, S; rev. to Nor lands that seem too dim to burden the heart, Proofs.

6–7.] ‘Land-under-wave’ is a literal rendering of the Irish Tir fa Tonn, one of various otherworldly locations accessible only to especially favoured individuals. AG uses the same version of the Irish in Ch. 3 of her GFM. In Old Celtic Romances (1879), P.W. Joyce wrote how ‘Te Gaelic tales abound in allusions to a beautiful country situated under the sea – an enchanted land sunk at some remote time, and still held under spell’: ‘In some romantic writings,’ he went on, ‘it is called Tir-fa-tonn, the land beneath the wave: and occasionally one or more of the heroes fnd their way to it, and meet with many strange adventures’ (309). Te activity WBY describes as going on in this realm is the weaving of threads: this may suggest (especially in connection with ‘the long-lived ones’) the classical idea of the Fates, or Moirai, who weave the threads of an individual’s life. In ancient myth, however, there are usually three of these weaving fgures, and not nine; and WBY could very well have more familiar kinds of weaving in mind here. In lines from the ISW and 1904 versions of the play On Baile’s Strand (cut from subsequent versions), WBY has Cuchulain ofer a cloak of the sea-god Manannan as a gif: ‘Nine Queens | Of the Land-under-Wave had woven it | Out of the feeces of the sea’. 7–8.] Line 8 is not present in TS1–3; TS3 has a break afer line 7. In a hol. MS fragment (Berg), WBY writes: ‘Long lived ones | Land of the Tower, when Aengus has thrown the gates apart’. Te line was still missing in Proofs, but inserted there in hol. by WBY. Aengus is the Danaan fgure associated by WBY habitually with love, and presented by him ofen as the Irish god of love. ‘Young Aengus in his tower of glass’ features in the 1900 TSW, 297 (see note). WBY’s ‘Land-of-the-Tower’ is probably his own coinage (to match ‘Land-underWave’): it may refer to the tower of glass, or perhaps (as R. Finneran suggests (CW 1, 643))

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Land-of-the-Tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart, And Wood-of-Wonders, where one kills an ox at dawn, To fnd it when night falls laid on a golden bier. Therein are many queens like Branwen and Guinevere; And Niamh and Laban and Fand, who could change to an otter or fawn,

be a somewhat casual reference to the Tower of the Fomorian king Conaan, known from the eighth-century writer Nennius, and associated with Tory Island in Co. Donegal; on the other hand, the various Conaan stories have no connection with Aengus. WBY’s reference to Aengus and gates being thrown apart is obscure. It is probably worth remembering that, in searching for a lost line here, the poet was keen to fnd a rhyme with ‘heart’ (see Date and circumstances of composition). ‘Trown’, too, is a deliberate repetition of the verb in 4, and so in part supplied for WBY by that line. 8. where] when S. 9–10.] WBY takes this incident and location from Douglas Hyde’s translation, Giolla an Fhiugha: Te Adventures of the Children of the King of Norway (1899). In this Old Irish adventure, the protagonist Cod kills an ox in the Forest of Wonders. Later, on his way back through the Forest, he has a strange encounter (131): It was then Cod beheld a very fair bevy of women coming towards him, and a highheaded, sensible queen at the head of that band, and a golden bier [borne] by four, out before her. And that lady came up to Cod in this guise, and said; ‘Wondrous youth,’ said she, ‘it was seldom that there was ever a guest before thee in the Forest of Wonders, and all that thou desirest of the noble jewels of the forest do thou bear away with thee; only leave the forest to-night.’ ‘By the oath which I make to God,’ said Cod, ‘I would not accept all the gold of the universe and not remain in the Forest of Wonders, in spite of all that are in it.’ ‘Son of the King of Norway,’ said the lady, ‘there is the ox for thee which thou

woundedst a little time back, which we have in the bier.’ In using this incident, WBY deliberately omits Cod’s immediate destruction of the magical gif: ‘When Cod heard that, he drew his sword and fell to smiting the bier, until he made small shattered fragments of it; and the women departed from him.’ WBY’s ‘one kills’ risks a stylistic infelicity: if the poet intends here an impersonal ‘one’ [i.e. ‘whenever you kill . . .’], this would damagingly neglect the fact that killing an ox at dawn is not exactly something ‘one’ is in the habit of doing. In fact, the sense of ‘one’ is much more likely to be along the lines of ‘anyone who’. 11. Branwen] In the Mabinogion, Branwen is a Welsh princess, who is married of unhappily to the King of Ireland; afer much HibernoWelsh violence, she eventually returns to Wales, to die tragically there of her sorrow. Guinevere] In Arthurian literature, Guinevere is the queen of King Arthur, and the beloved of Sir Lancelot: it is especially Malory’s rendition of the character to which WBY is probably alluding here, as the subject of devoted and ultimately hopeless love. 12. And Niamh and Laban and Fand] And Niam and Laban and Fand TS1; And Fand and Niam and Laban TS2–3, S; rev. to And Niam, and Laban, and Laban Proofs. Niamh] PW06 and afer. Niam TS1–P99–05. Niamh is already familiar to WBY’s readers as a major character in Te Wanderings of Oisin (1889, 1895): she is the daughter of the King of Tir-na-nOg, the Land of the Young. Laban and Fand] Laban is WBY’s version of the Irish Lí Ban (‘fairest of women’): she was the sister of Fand, who was wife of the god Manannan, and the lover of Cuchulain in the Ulster cycle.

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And the wood-woman, whose lover was changed to a blue-eyed hawk; And whether I go in my dreams by woodland, or dun, or shore, Or on the unpeopled waves with kings to pull at the oar, I hear the harp-string praise them, or hear their mournful talk. Because of something told under the famished horn Of the hunter’s moon, that hung between the night and the day,

fawn] At Coole on 3 Sep. 1900, AG recorded in her diary that ‘Yeats rowed me across the lake and we had tea at Inchy – He wandered, getting lines for his new lyric, of fair women, and was pleased, because, as a rhyme for dawn, I reminded him that Niam had appeared to Usheen as a fawn’ (AGD92–02, 278–279). 13.] Drawing again on Hyde’s Adventures of the Children of the King of Norway, WBY refers here to ‘Grian Gnuis-sholais [Bright-faced Sun], daughter of the King of the Forest of Wonders’ (117). Tis princess tells the protagonist, Cod, of how her lover was transformed by the daughter of the King of Greece (119–121): And this is how that man was: the daughter of the king of Greece had given him a desperate stream of afection, and she came unknown to him that night in the shape of his own hound. And he took me and his hound with him aboard his bark, and gave its prow to the sea and its stern to land, and he sails straight away until he came to his own country. And, afer his landing on the morrow, she had her enchantment ready, namely, whatever was the frst living creature that would meet us, that she would put Ciabhán Whiteknee in the form of that creature. And the frst thing that met us was a blue-eyed hawk. And as soon as we beheld the hawk, Ciabhán White-knee rose up away from us in the form of another hawk, until he rose out of our presence, of an aerial fight, in the company of the other hawk, so that he is in this plight ever since. And he comes into yonder tree which

you see there, every day, and he and I be looking at one another; and he rises up again away from me in the company of the other hawks, once the middle of the day comes. 14. dun] OED 3: ‘A type of small fort or fortifed dwelling used in the Scottish Highlands and Ireland from the latter part of the 1st millennium  BC to the early Middle Ages, typically consisting of 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.’ 16. harp-string] harpstring TS1; harpstrings TS2, TS3; harp strings S; harpstring ISW. 17–18.] Because of a [word del. story hol.] I heard under the thin horn | Of the third moon that hung between the night and ^the [hol.]^ day TS1; Because of something I heard of under the thin horn | Of the third moon, that hung between the night and the day, S. In AG Proofs WBY experimented with various changes to these lines. Te proof version reads: ‘Because of a story I heard under the thin horn | Of the third moon, that hung between the night and the day’, and in pencil against the lines WBY suggests ‘transpose’, indicating that they can be placed afer lines 19–20, and redrafs 17 [When del.] For I remember when I heard under the horn. 17. famished] LP22 and afer; thin TS1–SP21. 18. hunter’s moon] LP22. Te reading of S and TS1–3, ‘third moon’, was retained from ISW until SP21. ‘Hunter’s moon’ is written by WBY into a family copy of PSS, but also into a family copy of SP21, so the change is most likely to have been made on SP21, then copied

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To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay, Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.

back into a copy of the earlier PSS. A hunter’s moon is the frst full moon afer the autumnal equinox (usually in Oct.), which can appear pink or red. Tis evocation of a full moon sits uneasily with the ‘famished horn’ of 17: for R. Greaves (58), WBY’s revision makes for an ‘apparently nonsensical’ situation. As Greaves notes, the reading of versions to 1921 is more coherent, and may well be much more particular in reference: when MG told the poet of the truth about her years as the

mistress of Lucien Millevoye, on 8 Dec. 1898, the moon was in its third quarter, and WBY made notes on the astrological situation that day (see Toomey, 36). 20. a burden not to be borne] Cp. verses in W. Morris’s prose romance Te Roots of the Mountains (1889), Ch. 30: ‘And these were the stone of stumbling, and the burden not to be borne, | When the battle-blast fell on us, and our day was over-worn’ (300).

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[‘I WALKED AMONG THE SEVEN WOODS OF COOLE’] Date of composition. Composed in Sep. 1900. WBY frst supplies this as a date in TSW (1900), and there is no evidence to suggest anything more exact. Te poem ‘Under the Moon’ was completed on 8 Sep., and for the rest of that month WBY was at Coole with AG, working intermittently with GM on plans for their collaborative play Diarmuid and Grania. It was probably during these weeks that this poem (intended for the forthcoming volume publication of TSW in Dec.) was composed. In her diary for 20 Nov., AG records that in the proofs for TSW (with which she was helping WBY) there is room for a dedication: ‘Shadowy Waters has a blank page, wants a dedication, so is to be dedicated to me afer all’ (AGD92–02, 290). Tere is a dedicatory page (p. 5) which bears AG’s name in the printed edition, but the dedicatory poem in fact occupies pp. 7–9, so was clearly a part of the original concept of the book when sent by WBY to the publishers. AG’s diary note for 19 Nov. 1900, that she had written to Te Speaker on behalf of WBY (AGD92–02, 290), probably means that she sent the poem to the magazine for him then; but it is very likely to have been dispatched for TSW to Unwin already by this time. Te woods of Coole Demesne, and the Gregory family. Returning from time spent abroad with the East India Company (of which he had become a director) in 1768, Robert Gregory (1727–1810), the son of a prominent Galway city merchant, bought around 600 acres of land in Co. Galway, just to the north of the town of Gort in the barony of Kiltartan. Gregory’s great wealth from his East India Company involvement had already enabled him to purchase country estates in Kent and Essex, but he took a particular interest in his Galway lands. In A Tour in Ireland (1780), Arthur Young reported a visit of 1776: September 4th, to Kiltartan, the seat of Robert Gregory, Esq., who is engaged in pursuits which, if well imitated, will improve the face of the country not a little. He has built a large house with numerous ofces, and taken 5 or 600 acres of land into his own hands, which I found him improving with great spirit. Walling was his frst object, of which he has executed many miles in the most perfect manner [. . .] Mr. Gregory has a very noble nursery, from which he is making plantations, which will soon be a great ornament to the country. Te estate passed to Gregory’s third son, William Gregory (1762–1840), a friend of Sir Robert Peel; he held high ofce in the British administration until he was forced out of DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-6

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post in 1830 on account of his virulent opposition to Roman Catholic emancipation. Te estate passed his son Robert (d. 1847), and from him to Sir William Henry Gregory (1817–1892). Sir William was M.P. for the city of Dublin, and a successful politician, but his passion for gambling brought him into crippling debt, and afer losing his seat in 1847, he steadily depleted the family fortune until in 1853 almost two-thirds of the estate was sold, with more land put to lease. Gregory’s career recovered (he became M.P. for County Galway, and from 1871–1877 was Governor of Ceylon), somewhat restoring his prosperity; from 1877 onwards he resided at Coole, with frequent trips abroad. In 1880, Gregory (at the age of 68) married the 28 year-old Isabella Augusta Persse of neighbouring Roxborough, Co. Galway. AG took an active role in management of the estate afer she was widowed in 1892, and by the time WBY became a visitor to Coole she was an authoritative source of information for her guest about the woods and the estate. AG ofen refers to the upkeep of the Coole woods in her private writings, and a very useful compendium of these references, along with informed commentary, is found in N. O’Carroll, ‘Cultivation of Trees at Coole Park: Extracts from Lady Gregory’s Dairies and Journals’, Irish Forestry vol. 68, 1/2 (2011), 55–73. Context and critical interpretation. WBY’s primary object in this poem is the celebration of the woods of Coole Park, and by implication the creatively restorative properties of an estate which AG had placed at his holiday disposal; but a poetic interest in woods, and in their connection to poetic inspiration, was not new for the writer. From his teenage years, WBY had associated wooded places with creative privacy (see e.g. one of his earliest surviving poems, ‘Child’s Play’ (1882–1883), set in the grounds of Howth Castle; the woods and waters in the verse-play Te Island of Statues (1884–1885); or ‘Sleuth Wood’ [Slish Wood] by the edge of Lough Gill in Co. Sligo, which is part of the setting for ‘Te Stolen Child’, (1886)). Coole Park ofered WBY a space in which his imagination could be free to work, with the actual composition and revision of verse and dramatic prose taking place in AG’s welcoming house. In addition, Coole’s woods gave the poet access to some of the working people of Co. Galway, in whose traditions and stories he had a powerful interest. In Dec. 1901, WBY wrote a short article that appeared in Te Speaker, 18 Jan. 1902, as ‘New Chapters of the Celtic Twilight I: Enchanted Woods’ (repr. in a later version as ‘Enchanted Woods’, M, 40–42). Tis includes a number of supernatural stories told by workers in and near the woods of Coole Park, and allows WBY to refect on the proximity between natural and supernatural in these locations (cp. the thought in lines 27–40 of the poem): Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might fnd somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me. [. . .] If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will fnd it better to sit at home by the fre and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the fnest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that

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they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them. Tey live out their passionate lives not far of, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate. Long afer this poem, WBY continued to dwell on the metaphysical signifcance of the woods at Coole, and in Te Trembling of the Veil (1922) he speculated on how ‘the woods at Coole [. . .] are so much more knitted to my thought that when I am dead they will have, I am persuaded, my longest visit’ (CW 3, 283). An account by the poet of ‘dreams that difered from ordinary dreams in seeming to take place amid brilliant light’ leads to a recollection of ‘1897 and 1898’ when ‘the frst dreams came’ (CW 3, 284): I was crossing a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down upon me. I said, ‘Tat is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he surrenders his will to the will of God.’ I felt an extreme surprise, for my whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient Ireland, I was marking in red ink, upon a large map, every sacred mountain. Te next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, ‘Te love of God is infnite for every human soul because every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same need in God.’ Te poem, which is an extended act of dedication to AG, assumes a certain amount of sympathy with such speculations. Although the many years between this account and the poem need to be allowed for, it seems that WBY had from early on connected the Coole woods with mystical refections that went beyond simply the stories of supernatural encounters which he and AG had collected in the area. Moments of imagined proximity between WBY and ‘the devout Christian’ are not ofen very convincing, but there is a sense in which this poem aspires towards a confession of faith – faith in what WBY calls ‘Eden’ – that accepts a version of the ‘surrender of the will’. Tere is, also, an aspect of the poem which celebrates the seven woods as a place where the supernatural – like the folklore that is its living record – has not quite vanished from the earth. D. Harris has written of the poem’s ‘epic catalogue’ in 1–16 as ‘no picturesque indulgence,’ but a form of ‘sympathetic magic’ (Harris, 15). WBY certainly did little to discourage such thoughts: the American writer, Cornelius Weygandt, who had met WBY at Coole in the summer of 1903, recorded the gist of his conversation with the poet there which turns on the themes (and perhaps the words) of the poem (Lipincott’s Monthly Magazine, Apr. 1904, repr. Mikhail 1, 18): Mr. Yeats had never himself seen “Te Other People” in the Woods of Coole, he said, but many of the neighbouring peasants had. Tat the country people had a thorough conviction of the reality of the visions that appeared to them he believed, and he could not believe that some visions they spoke of were

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imaginings. [. . .] Strange visions had come to him, he said, afer walking in these woods, visions of ‘immortal, mild, proud shadows,’ but always as dreams, and not as objective realities. At times, however, he had seen visions in waking dreams, and he felt the border of the unseen so near that no man should say that no man had crossed it. It is not necessarily wrong to take WBY at his word on these things – though it is also useful to bear in mind that this is very much his public word. S. Hewitt notes how ‘the spiritual ‘beings’ of the wood infltrate the poet’s dreams,’ and credits ‘the liminality of the phenomenal and non-phenomenal domains’ in the poem; he goes on to note how ‘this is conceived by Yeats as peculiarly Irish, primitive, and original,’ ‘Te fuid, Celtic view of nature [. . .] recreated in the sacred space of both the poem and the woods’ (‘Yeats’s Reenchanted Nature’, International Yeats Studies 2/2 (May 2018), 16). WBY gave a copy of the poem as a gif to William Stevens (a family friend, and editor of Te Leisure Hour) in Dec. 1900, and Stevens wrote in thanks (12 Dec.) of how he found it ‘delicious, as shadowy as the woods and as musical as the leaves, and delicate as their traceries, with a subtle charm which overfows the words’ (quoted, CL 2, 600). In a review of TSW in Te Athenaeum (12 Jan. 1901), the poem was quoted in full: ‘Tere is nothing in [TSW] more beautiful than the prologue, which, like all Mr. Yeats’s prologues, is personal, a confession of literary faith’. Te reviewer for Te Academy (26 Jan. 1901), having complained that TSW ‘is all rather inhuman’, recorded how ‘We turn back almost with relief to the comparative daylight of [WBY’s] preface, though that, too, is full of enchantment’: ‘Mr. Yeats may be inhuman and pale-blooded, but when he writes like this he has the magic almost to draw us with him into faery’. Quoting lines 27–40, Te Manchester Guardian (4 Mar. 1901) praised the lines as ‘the highest reach’ of TSW (which was being hailed in the piece as ‘a great poem’ and ‘one of the rare dramatic masterpieces written in English verse during the last two centuries at least’), concluding that ‘It is little enough to say that no living poet could surpass in pure poetical charm and accomplishment such a passage as this’. A long quotation from the poem dominated the short notice of TSW in Te Monthly Review (Apr. 1901) as proof that WBY ‘is destined to be a great fgure in a great age of poetry’. A more private aspect of this poem’s success was AG’s evident warmth of feeling for it, and she had WBY source copies of TSW for some time afer its publication, wishing to give them to her guests at Coole as mementos of their stay. In her VBWI (1920), AG quotes lines 11–15, with a short anecdotal commentary (vol. 2, 29–30): I have heard many stories of people led astray in these [woods] by invisible power, though I myself, although born at midnight, have lived many hours of many years in their shades and shelters, and as the saying is have ‘Never seen anything worse than myself.’ Last May a friend staying with us [George Bernard Shaw] had gone out early in the afernoon, and had not come back by eight o’clock dinner-time. As half-hours passed we grew anxious and sent out messengers riding and on foot, searching with lanterns here and there in the woods and on Inchy marsh, towards which he had been seen going. It was not

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till long afer the fall of darkness that he returned, tired out with so many hours of wandering, and with no better explanation than ‘Yeats talks of the seven woods of Coole, but I say there are seventy times seven.’ It was in dim Inchy and the wicked wood it borders he had gone astray; and many said that was natural, for they have a bad name, and May is a month of danger. Yet some unbelievers carry their credulity so far as to believe that the creator of Father Keegan’s dreams [in Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island] may himself have dreamed the whole adventure. An important axis on which the poem turns is that of privacy and sociability. Te verses themselves are overtly sociable, in that they make an ofering of TSW to AG (and do this in the public context of a published volume), while also playing host to a throng of ‘eyes’ and ‘voices’ in the woods and seeing the woods, ranging from the squirrels of Kyle-na-no to the semi-legendary wise woman, Biddy Early (see note to 15). It is in the nature of all these woods to ‘hide’ things – whether those are the wild creatures living there, or the poet who can conceal himself in their creatively stimulating depths. Dimness is crucial to WBY’s efect – as N. Grene has said, these woods ‘tend to be dim almost by defnition’, and ‘Light is dying out as the verse proceeds, and the dimness of the remaining woods refects the fading sublunary world of the ‘immortal, mild, proud shadows’ that will be the subject of the following long poem’ (Grene, 90–91). But the quasi-religious supernaturalism which the voice of the poem approaches – albeit in the form of questions – is also one that concerns hidden things: ‘Is Eden far away, or do you hide | From human thought’ (30–31). Te poet’s privacy, then, is a state where deeper levels of privacy can be intimated in the Coole Park demesne: what is hidden in Eden is partially glimpsed there, in the voice of a poet who is himself conscious of being hidden from the world’s gaze in a protected, private environment. Tat there are seven of these woods suits WBY’s need for magically resonant numbering (in fact, he may be stretching things somewhat in order to arrive at the fgure of seven, for Inchy was not amongst the distinct managed woodland areas, was known more for its marsh, and was furthest away from the house). For all this, the poem displays an awareness of the regard of a larger public, and is meticulous about performing its obligations as a poem of dedication. Te artwork which ‘I have woven’ (21), TSW, concerns protagonists (Forgael and Dectora, here named) who depart altogether from society; its dedication is to a patron who, just as she occupies a place at the centre of the series of woods that may be portals to the supernatural, is also at the hub of a social network of writers, scholars, and dramatists, and potentially a portal to literary fame. Te fact that the poem was attached to TSW in various collected versions of WBY’s poems has probably in the longer run been to its disadvantage, as far as critics’ attention is concerned: it is, in a way, easily missed (especially when placed in a ‘Narrative and Dramatic’ category at the far end of editions modelled on the arrangement of CP33). Apart from other considerations, the poem is a bravura demonstration of WBY’s mastery of verse movement and pitch – more polished, perhaps, than anything in TSW itself. Te poem is written in a hieratic blank verse which was for Oliver St. John Gogarty ‘the most mellifuous blank verse in modern poetry’ (‘In Defence of Staying Put’, Vogue 15 Jan.

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1943). Beyond its technical mastery, this is an important poem for WBY’s embarkation to the twentieth century. Coole Park and its seven woods are insisted upon by WBY as poetically germinal sites where the Irish cultural past and future are now to be creatively fused, and readied for fresh growth. Tere are many respects in which the poem, though dedicatory and specifc in nature, is also a work of WBY’s own artistic self-examination and dedication. Its privacies, like its long invocation of a deep creative privacy, are things being put on display, and announced to a watching and listening world. Textual history. Tere is no surviving MS material. Te poem was frst publ. in Te Speaker, 1 Dec. 1900 (S), and next, in the same month, in Te Shadowy Waters (TSW). WBY retained the poem in its place before the verse play in subsequent collected volumes. Copy-text: P49. I walked among the seven woods of Coole: Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn; Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no,

Title.] Introduction to a Dramatic Poem, S. Untitled in TSW. Text.] No italics, S. 2. Shan-walla] Shanwalla S. Tis wooded area (whose name from the Irish Sean bhalla means ‘the old wall’, or ‘the old homestead’) begins a short distance from the walled garden at Coole (the ‘willow-bordered pond’ lies just behind the garden’s western wall). McGarry (80) relates the testimony of the son of one of AG’s Irish language teachers that this was where an original avenue ran leading to Coole House, eventually replaced by the two avenues constructed by the Gregory family. With this in mind, the informant assumed that its name must be derived not from sean bhalla, but from sean bealach, the old road. WBY himself says that the name Shan-walla is ‘from some old village that was before the wood’ (‘Enchanted Woods’, frst publ. Jan. 1902, M 41). N. Grene observes that the name as written by WBY ‘allows for an assonance and alliteration – ‘willow-bordered’, ‘wild duck’, ‘winter dawn’ – demanding no knowledge of the meaning of the name’ (90). In 1915, AG published her

play Shanwalla, the title here being in fact the name of a racehorse. 3. winter dawn] Perhaps cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘Te Passing of Arthur’, 442: ‘Te stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn’ and T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches and Songs (1869), ‘Birds of Winter’, 15: ‘While o’er the world fushed the white winter dawn’. 4. Shady Kyle-dortha] Te closest of the woods to the house at Coole (just to the north) is Kyle-dortha (Caoile-dorcha, the dark wood). Te Coole river runs through the trees, and the wood is home to colonies of bats. sunnier Kyle-na-no] Kyle-na-gno S, TSW, P99–05–LP31. A little to the east of KyleDortha, and north of the walled garden, Kyle-na-no (Caoile-na-cno, wood of the nuts/ hazels) is the haunt of squirrels (cp. WBY’s ‘To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no’ (1912)). Te socalled ‘Rich Acre’ at the edge of this wood was planted by Sir William Gregory in the 1850s, and contained numerous species of conifer. In the text, the spelling Kyle-na-no’ replaced ‘Kyle-na-gno’ in CP33; before then, WBY had kept the more obviously Irish form: his change in orthography may have been an efort to reduce the risk of mispronunciation.

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Where many hundred squirrels are as happy As though they had been hidden by green boughs Where old age cannot fnd them; Pairc-na-lee, Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths; Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fing Their sudden fragrances on the green air; Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk;

5. many hundred squirrels] Te happiness of the squirrels in Kyle-na-no, pleasing as this was for WBY, was not perhaps quite so welcome for Coole’s proprietor: in her autobiography, AG recounts sharing a joke with the poet about her supposed faults (SY, 138): ‘‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and when you frst came here in your youth you said that I had but one fault: that was my enmity towards squirrels.’’ In fact, squirrels were something of a menace in the management of the woods at Coole, and much trouble was taken to prevent them stripping the bark from trees. WBY was inclined to see the Coole squirrels as more exemplary than pestilential, and his poem ‘An Appointment’ (Aug. 1907) makes ‘the proud, wayward squirrel’ (3) an instance of independence, resilience, and ingenuity. 7. Pairc-na-lee] Pairc-na-lea S, TSW-LP31. Lying just to the south of the house, this wood stretches parallel to Pairc-na-tarav for roughly half a kilometre. Te name is transliterated from the Irish, and means ‘Field of the Calf ’. 9, 11, 13. Dim] WBY’s deliberate repetition of this adjective is important to the efect sought, which is one of advancing darkness. Dim woods were a commonplace of poetic diction, and WBY would have known W. Scott’s Te Bridal of Triermain (1813), III v, 7–8: ‘My Muse, then – seldom will she wake | Save by dim wood and silent lake’. Te efect itself of a repeated ‘dim’ is not altogether original: cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), CXXI, 3–4:

‘Tou seest all things ever dim | And dimmer, and a glory done’ – this itself echoing Wordsworth, ‘Peter Bell: A Tale’ (1819), 161: ‘Te path grows dim, and dimmer still’. 9. Pairc-na-carraig] Tis wood to the north east of the site of the house borders Coole Lough. Te Irish from which the name is derived means ‘Te Field of the Rock’ (or ‘Te Field of the Stones’). 9–10.] In a letter to SMY of 12 Jul. 1899, WBY wrote of his surroundings at ‘Chevy Chase’, AG’s hunting lodge, telling his sister how ‘there is a gentle hum, from where a swarm of wild bees have made a nest in the wainscot under one of the windows’, and how ‘Tey come in and out through the open window and being wild bees are gentle and do not sting any body’: these bees, ‘not used enough to people to be afraid and angry’, to the poet’s senses produced ‘a faint smell of their honey everywhere’ (CL 2, 432–433). 10. green air] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Poems (1850), ‘Hector in the Garden’, 36: ‘A side-shadow of green air’. 11. Pairc-na-tarav] Tis wooded area stretches east for over half a kilometre from the site of the house at Coole, before becoming Inchy Wood. Te name is a transliteration from the Irish, and means ‘Field of the Bull’. 12, 27.] proud] proud, S. 12. proud shadows walk] Perhaps cp. Tomas Aird, Poetical Works (1878), ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, IV, 27–28: ‘As in pale Hades, ’midst dimvisioned things, | Stalk the proud shadows of forgotten kings’.

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Dim Inchy wood, that hides badger and fox And marten-cat, and borders that old wood Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood: Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.

13. Inchy wood] Tis wood is the furthest from the house at Coole, beginning about 800m. to the south-west, and running adjacent to Coole Lough towards Garrylands. It was not managed and planted woodland, as were the other six woods in AG’s tenure, and so was ofen ‘dim’ for the walker from its height of growth. Te name, sometimes recorded as ‘Incha’, may derive from the Irish for ‘tidal island’, inis taoide (as suggested by W. Gould and D. Toomey in M, 254), or from ‘wood of the water meadows’, coil na nInsi (as suggested in Jefares, 440 and R. Finneran, CW 1, 699). 14. marten-cat] martin cat S, TSW, PW06 vol. 2 (1907). Te marten cat is (OED 2.a.) ‘Any animal of the mustelid genus  Martes, which comprises furry, bushy-tailed mammals found in forests’, though the term itself is obsolete  and, according to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, ‘Te marten-cat is nearly extinct’. AG recalled seeing one at Coole, and wrote how ‘One day hearing that a marten cat had been taken alive in a trap [.  .  .] I went out to see it [. . .] and well remember its eyes of green fre’ (quoted M, 255). WBY’s ‘Enchanted Woods’ mentions ‘the martin cats, who have always been in the woods’, but goes on to record that this is ‘a rare creature nowadays’ (M, 40). 14–15. borders that old wood . . . the wicked wood] Inchy wood runs on the south east into Garrylands wood, not included by WBY among his seven Coole woods. It is this area to which WBY probably refers in his ‘Enchanted Woods’ article (in its version in Te Speaker): ‘there is one wood where there are many little twisted paths whereon people lose their way, and it is thought to be full of wicked spirits’.

In VBWI, AG records the general local anxiety attaching to this location, quoting one source (vol. 2, 261): ‘But I’m noways afeared of anything and I give you my word I’d walk in the dead of night in the nut-wood or any other place – except only the cross beyond Inchy, I’d sooner not go by there.’ 15. Wise Biddy Early] A Co. Clare woman, Biddy Early lived from 1798 to 1874 (she was known by her mother’s surname, but was born Bridget Ellen Connors, and was four times married). As a purveyor of herbal cures and wide-ranging advice on health and prosperity to the locals of Co. Clare and beyond, Biddy Early became a well-known ‘wise woman’ in the West of Ireland, and was thought to have been in regular communication with fairy powers. In 1865, she was taken to court in Ennis, accused under the Witchcraf Act of the sixteenth century; but the case failed for lack of evidence from witnesses. Tere are only scanty records of Biddy Early in her lifetime, though the Limerick Chronicle of 29 Jul. 1869 described her as ‘an old woman’ having the reputation ‘among the peasantry of a witch or sorceress, who could cure all kinds of diseases’. A poet who had met her, Michael Hogan, described Biddy Early as ‘a very wise woman’ who ‘buried four husbands’: ‘Te people held an emphatic belief in her power, and numberless are the stories told about the wonderful cures she performed’ (Lays and Legends of Tomond (1880), 267). AG and WBY were deeply interested in the career of Biddy Early, and in the many anecdotes relating to her and her various cures; a compendium of stories relating to her was begun by the pair from

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I had not eyes like those enchanted eyes, Yet dreamed that beings happier than men Moved round me in the shadows, and at night My dreams were cloven by voices and by fres; And the images I have woven in this story Of Forgael and Dectora and the empty waters Moved round me in the voices and the fres, And more I may not write of, for they that cleave The waters of sleep can make a chattering tongue Heavy like stone, their wisdom being half silence. How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?

as early as 1897, and WBY’s frst published account of her came in his essay ‘Ireland Bewitched’ in Te Contemporary Review, Sep. 1899 (CW 9, 447): Of all who have had this gif [of cures] in recent years in the south-west of Ireland, the most famous was Biddy Early, who had most other fairy gifs likewise. She is dead some twenty years, but her cottage is pointed out in Feakle in Clare [.  .  .] My friend [AG] went to Feakle for me a while back, and found it full of memories of Biddy Early’s greatness. Nobody there denies her power, but some of the better of think her power unholy [.  .  .] She is believed to have journeyed all over the country with the fairies, and she seems to have frst seen and thrown her enchantment on one of the men she married, when on one of these journeys. Biddy Early was believed to have been as far as the environs of Coole, and WBY reports one witness on how ‘She told me she slept in Ballylee Mill last night, and that there was a cure for all things in the world between the two wheels there’ (CW 2, 455); in another piece, ‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye’, frst printed in Te Dome (Oct. 1899), WBY again describes Ballylee – the place which was much later to become his property, as Toor Ballylee (repr. M, 14):

Tere is the old square castle, Baile-laoi, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little mill with an old miller, and old ash trees throwing green shadows upon a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, “Tere is a cure for all evil between the two mill wheels of Baile-laoi,” and to fnd out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running waters or some other herb. 17. those enchanted eyes] According to Oliver St. John Gogarty, ‘Te enchanted eyes were those of the mystic poet, George Russell, who wrote under the penname AE’ (‘In Defence of Staying Put’, Vogue, 15 Jan. 1943). Russell had certainly experienced visions in WBY’s company while a guest at Coole, but Gogarty’s confdent identifcation of him here is somewhat more defnite than anything the poem seems to intend. 24–26.] James Joyce entered these lines in his commonplace book begun in 1903 (NLI 36 639/02). 24. they] them S, TSW. 26^27.] Verse-paragraph break TSW.

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I only know that all we know comes from you, And that you come from Eden on fying feet. Is Eden far away, or do you hide From human thought, as hares and mice and coneys That run before the reaping-hook and lie In the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods And winds and ponds cover more quiet woods, More shining winds, more star-glimmering ponds? Is Eden out of time and out of space? And do you gather about us when pale light

29. fying feet] A commonplace, and somewhat hackneyed in nineteenth-century poetry. Cp. E. Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Sea Voices’, 21: ‘White wings upon the wind and fying feet’, or Katharine Tynan, Shamrocks (1887), ‘Dreaming’, 3: ‘With fying feet, and heart that beat apace’. 30, 36. Eden] WBY’s location of the garden of Eden in a mythic/metaphysical space in these lines, rather than any kind of traditionally religious one, accords with his observations about Blake’s inspiration in 1893, in the Introduction to Poems of William Blake (CW 6, 80): ‘In later life he [Blake] called the seeing of visions being in Eden; and in his system Eden came again when the old theology passed away’. In his Preface (1903) to AG’s GFM, WBY allowed himself a measure of visionary speculation about Eden (CW 6, 128): I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird, and it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by nothing more important than an unfagging fancy; and heroes who can make a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives. Tey have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise, for it is at all times the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people of Eden.

WBY’s later poem ‘Te Happy Townland’ (1903) may develop the speculations about Eden contained in the lines prefaced to TSW, and the poet later refers to ‘Te Happy Townland’ (in 1908) as ‘that song about Eden’ (CL 5, 121). Writing his unpublished ‘Autobiography’ in 1916–1917, WBY recalled one dream of ‘marvellous illuminated pages’, ‘but when I tried to read the text all would vanish or but a sentence remain’; one remembered fragment was ‘Te rivers of Eden are in the midst of our rivers’ (Mem, 127). 31. coneys] rabbits, either ‘as hunted .  .  . for food’ (OED 2.a) or adult rabbits (OED 2.b). 33. woods] woods, S. 35^36.] Verse-paragraph break TSW. 35.] Tough praising all of 27–35, the contemporary critic William Archer (Poets of the Younger Generation (1902), 556) wrote of how ‘I wish I could feel certain that [it] was corrupt,’ then adding that ‘Unfortunately it is quite possible that Mr. Yeats wrote it, and thought it was blank verse.’ Straining for the witticism, Archer continued: ‘when one fnds a halting line in this poet’s work, there is always the consolation that he may very likely emend it in the next edition’. WBY never made the slightest amendment of this metrically deliberate (and uncorrupted) line. 36.] Perhaps cp. E.A. Poe, Te Raven and other Poems (1845), ‘Dream-Land’, 7–8: ‘From a weird clime that lieth, sublime | Out of Space, out of Time’.

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Shining on water and fallen among leaves, And winds blowing from fowers, and whirr of feathers And the green quiet, have uplifted the heart? I have made this poem for you, that men may read it Before they read of Forgael and Dectora, As men in the old times, before the harps began, Poured out wine for the high invisible ones. September 1900

40^41.] No break S. 43. harps] harp Plays for an Irish Teatre (1911).

September 1900] Tis date was frst appended in TSW, and was retained thereafer.

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BAILE AND AILLINN Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was begun (and possibly frst conceived) by WBY during his stay at Coole Park in the summer of 1901. Te poet arrived to stay with AG in late Jun., and it is likely that he was able to read parts of CM, which she was then in the process of completing. Tis either gave WBY the idea, or confrmed him in the intention, of composing a series of narrative Irish mythological poems. In a letter (probably from Jun.) George Russell, telling WBY that he was ‘delighted to hear that you are writing verse again,’ remarked that ‘Te story of the Baile is a little fantastic but I am sure you will make a beautiful thing out of it’ (LTWBY 1, 97). Writing to JBY on 12 Jul., the poet informed his father of his developing plans (CL 3, 87): I am writing narrative poems of the Irish heroic age, the frst things of the kind I have done since I wrote ‘Te Wanderings of Usheen’. Tey will make a series I have intended to write ever since I was 20. I have shrunk from beginning them until my blank verse seemed sufciently varied. It is extremely likely that composition of the poem had begun by this stage, though WBY’s remark makes it possible that the earliest stages were in blank verse rather than the eventual rhymed tetrameter couplets. Just over a week later, WBY wrote from Coole to Robert Bridges, and it is clear by now that the poem was taking its more familiar shape (20 Jul. 1901, CL 3, 91): I am writing a half lyrical half narrative poem on two old Irish lovers, Baile, Honey Mouth and one Alyinn – to write the names as they are spoken. I then go on to other stories of the same epoch. I have in fact begun what I have always meant to be the chief work of my life – Te giving life not to a single story but to a whole world of little stories, some not indeed very little, to a romantic region, a sort of enchanted wood. Te old Irish poets wove life into life thereby giving to the wildest and strangest romance, the solidity and vitality of the Comédie Humaine and all this romance was knitted into the scenery of the country. ‘Here at this very spot the faery woman gave so and so the cup of magic mead. Not there by the hillock but there by the Rock’ and so on. Tis work has not been possible to me hitherto, partly because my verse was not plastic enough and partly for lack of a good translation. But now my friend Lady Gregory has made the most lovely translation putting the old prose and verse not into the pedantic ‘hedge school master’ style of her predecessors, but into a musical caressing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-7

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English, which never goes very far from the idioms of the country people she knows so well. Progress was fast, and on 25 Jul. WBY wrote to ECY that ‘I am getting towards the end of a longish poem – longish for me, 60 or 70 lines on an Irish legendary subject’ (CL 3, 94). Tere is a suggestion here that the ‘narrative’ element of the poem might have been composed before what the poet later called the ‘lyric’ interpolations were supplied: though even then, the number of lines is smaller than those carrying the main story in the fnished poem. By 9 Aug., WBY could tell George Russell that ‘I have written a large part of a longish poem on Baile, the sweet spoken, and Aillinn’ (CL 3, 104), but this was in fact the entire poem, since the Berg MS copy in WBY’s hand (see Textual and publication history) carries the poet’s signature with the date ‘August 9th | 1901’. On 11 Aug., WBY wrote to T. Sturge Moore of how ‘I am doing all the chief stories of the frst heroic age in Ireland in a series of poems,’ and reported that ‘I have just fnished a half narrative half lyrical poem of about 200 lines, which is I think good’ (CL 3, 105). A version sufciently complete to be sent abroad was dispatched to Lafcadio Hearn, acknowledged in a letter from him to WBY of 24 Sep. 1901: the editors of CL believe this to have been sent by WBY in Aug. (CL 3, 101). Sources. Te ultimate source of WBY’s story is in the medieval Book of Leinster, and several versions of this narrative material were available to the poet. Te frst translation into English was by Eugene O’Curry, in Lectures on Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861), 472–473. Tis was followed by Kuno Meyer’s version, in Revue Celtique vol. 13 (1870), 224–225. WBY’s immediate sources are likely to be AG’s CM, which was being composed in the summer of 1901, and perhaps Douglas Hyde’s Te Story of Early Gaelic Literature (1894). Hyde introduces the story as ‘one so curious that I shall give it in extenso’, and cites his source as O’Curry, from whom Hyde carries over many verbal elements of his translation; and it is likely that WBY also had access to O’Curry’s translation (see notes on 8 and 17 below). Some paragraphs directly from O’Curry were included in Patrick Kennedy, Te Bardic Stories of Ireland (1871), 32–33, as ‘Baille and Aillinn’ (though here events are given in a somewhat brisk paraphrase). Hyde gives the narrative’s title as ‘Te Story of Baile Mac Buain, the Sweet Spoken’ (Hyde, 7–10): Buain’s only son was Baile. He was specially beloved by Aillinn, the daughter of Lewy Farriga, – but some say she was the daughter of Owen, son of Dathi – and he was specially beloved not of her only, but of every one who ever heard or saw him, on account of his delightful stories. Now Baile and Aillinn made an appointment to meet at Rosnaree, on the banks of the Boyne in Bregia. And he came from Emania, in the north, to meet her, passing over Slieve Fuad and Muirtheimhne to Tráigh mBaile [Dundalk], and here he and his troops unyoked their chariots, sent their horses out to pasture, and gave themselves up to pleasure and happiness. And while they were there they saw a horrible spectral personage coming towards them from the south. Vehement was his step and his rapid progress. Te way he sped over the earth might be compared to the darting of a hawk

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down a clif or to wind from of the green sea, and his lef was towards the land [i.e., he came from the south along the shore]. ‘Go meet him,’ said Baile, ‘and ask him where he goes, or whence he comes, or what is the cause of his haste.’ ‘From Mount Leinster I come, and I go back now to the north, to the mouth of the river Bann; and I have no news but of the daughter of Lewy, son of Fergus, who had fallen in love with Baile mac Buain, and was coming to meet him. But the youths of Leinster overtook her, and she died from being forcibly detained, as Druids and fair prophets had prophesied, for they foretold that they would never meet in life, but that they would meet afer death and not part for ever. Tere is my news.’ And he darted away from them like a blast of wind over the green sea, and they were not able to detain him. When Baile heard this he fell dead without life, and his tomb and his rath were raised, and his stone set up, and his funeral games were performed by the Ultonians. And a yew grew up through his grave, and the form and shape of Baile’s head was visible on the top of it. – Whence the place is called Baile’s Strand [now Dundalk]. Aferwards the same man went to the south to where the maiden Aillinn was, and went into her greenaun or sunny chamber. ‘Whence comes the man whom we do not know?’ said the maiden. ‘From the northern half of Erin, from the mouth of the Bann I come, and I go past this to Mount Leinster.’ ‘You have news?’ said the maiden. ‘I have no news worth mentioning now, only I saw the Ultonians performing the funeral games and digging the rath, and setting up the stone, and writing the name of Baile mac Buain, the royal heir of Ulster, by the side of the Strand of Baile, who died while on his way to meet a sweetheart and a beloved woman to whom he had given afection, for it was not fated for them to meet in life, or for one of them to see the other living.’ And he darted out afer telling the evil news. And Aillinn fell dead, without life, and her tomb was raised, etc. And an apple tree grew through her grave and became a great tree at the end of seven years, and the shape of Aillinn’s head was upon its top. Now at the end of seven years, poets and prophets and visioners cut down the yew which was over the grave of Baile, and they made a poet’s tablet of it, and they wrote the visions and the espousals and the loves and the courtships of Ulster in it. Te apple tree which grew over the grave of Aillinn was also cut down and in like manner the courtships of Leinster were written in it. Tere came a November Eve long aferwards, and a festival was made to celebrate it by Art, the son of Conn [of the Hundred Battles, High King of Ireland] and the professors of every science came to that feast, as was their custom, and they brought their tablets with them. And these tablets also came there, and Art saw them, and when he saw them he asked for them; and the two tablets were brought, and he held them in his hands face to face. Suddenly the one tablet of

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them sprang upon the other, and they became united the same as a woodbine round a twig, and it was not possible to separate them. And they were preserved like every other jewel in the treasury at Tara, until it was burned by Dunlang, son of Enna, at the time that he burnt the princesses at Tara, as has been said, The apple tree of noble Aillinn The yew of Baile – small inheritance – Though they are introduced onto poems Unlearned people do not understand them. And Ailbhe, daughter of Cormac, grandson of Conn [of the Hundred Battles] said too, What I liken Lumluine to Is the yew of Baile’s rath, What I liken the other to Is to the apple-tree of Aillinn. O’Curry’s version of the story also provided raw material for T.D. Sullivan’s treatment, ‘Ailleen and Baille’, in his Blanaid: And Other Irish Historical and Legendary Poems from the Gaelic (1891). By the time WBY was composing his version, AG had either fnished or was welladvanced upon her account of Baile and Aillinn, which appeared in her CM (1902), 305–305 (see note to 5 below). Working from the same materials as Hyde, AG gives the narrative as follows, having mentioned ‘the Strand of Baile, son of Buan’ (CM, 305–306): Tis, now, is the story of Baile that was buried at that strand. He was of the race of Rudraige, and although he had but little land belonging to him, he was the heir of Ulster, and every one that saw him loved him, both man and woman, because he was so sweet-spoken; and they called him Baile of the HoneyMouth. And the one that loved him best was Aillinn, daughter of Lugaidh, the King of Leinster’s son. And one time she herself and Baile settled to meet one another near Dundealgan, beside the sea. Baile was the frst to set out, and he came from Emain Macha, over Slieve Fuad, over Muirthemne, to the strand where they were to meet; and he stopped there, and his chariots were unyoked, and his horses were let out to graze. And while he and his people were waiting there they saw a strange, wild-looking man, coming towards them from the South, as fast as a hawk that darts from a clif or as the wind that blows from of the green sea. ‘Go and meet him,’ said Baile to his people, ‘and ask him news of where he is going and where he comes from, and what is the reason of his haste.’ So they asked news of him, and he said: ‘I am going back now to Tuagh Inbhir, from Slieve Suidhe Laighen, and this is all the news I have, that Ailinn daughter of Lugaidh, was on her way to meet Baile, son of Buan, that she loved. And the young men of Leinster overtook her, and kept her back from going to him, and

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she died of the heartbreak there and then. For it was foretold by Druids that were friendly to them that they would not come together in their lifetime, but that afer their death they would meet, and be happy for ever afer.’ And with that he lef them, and was gone again like a blast of wind, and they were not able to hinder him. And when Baile heard that news, his life went out from him, and he fell dead there on the strand. And at that time the young girl Aillinn was in her sunny parlour to the south, for she had not set out yet. And the same strange man came in to her, and she asked him where he came from. ‘I come from the North,’ he said, ‘from Tuagh Inver, and I am going past this place to Slieve Suidhe Laighen. And all the news I have,’ he said, ‘is that I saw the men of Ulster gathered together on the strand near Dundealgan, and they raising a stone, and writing on it the name of Baile, son of Buan, that died there when he was on his way to meet the woman he had given his life to; for it was not meant for them ever to reach one another alive, or that one of them should see the other alive.’ And when he had said that he vanished away, and as to Aillinn, her life went from her, and she died the same way that Baile had died. And an apple-tree grew out of her grave, and a yew-tree out of Baile’s grave. WBY is primarily indebted to AG’s version, but is also probably aware of Hyde’s account in composing the poem. However, ‘Baile and Aillinn’ introduces to this story an element which is wholly absent from all versions of the Irish source: the god Aengus. AG’s ‘strange, wild-looking man’ and Hyde’s ‘horrible spectral personage’ are given by WBY frst as ‘an old man’ with the characteristics of a wanderer from Te Celtic Twilight, and then, more dramatically, he is transformed into Aengus – the same Aengus who is mentioned in the poem’s headnote, as ‘Aengus, the Master of Love’. Tis narrative intervention is hardly intended as a forgery of Irish source materials, but rather as a full-scale creative intervention on WBY’s part. Te reason for this intervention is almost certainly WBY’s increasing willingness to centre imagery and mythic motifs on Aengus as a love-deity of Ireland, which he had explored most recently in TSW. Critical reception and interpretation. In late Jun. 1902, anticipating the poem’s frst appearance, George Russell told WBY that he was ‘delighted to hear you are writing verse again,’ adding that ‘Te story of the Baile [sic] is a little fantastic but I am sure you will make a beautiful thing out of it’ (LTWBY 1, 97). JBY was probably referring to the newly published ‘Baile and Aillinn’ when he wrote in a postscript to a letter of 20 Jul. 1902 how ‘I like your poem better and better’ (LTWBY, 99). In 1903, reading ISW, JBY was more expansive in his praise of the poem (quoted Hone, 187): It will delight your friends and bafe your enemies and turn them into friends. I should say it will at once become popular. It is so absolutely lucid and so simple – here I touch on an angry controversy; simple art is not for simple people but for deep revolving people. Yet great art is simple – It is where a great artist knows his own mind and says it, his words, how easy to read, how easy to remember – a

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child is attentive to their meaning and their charm – yet only here and there is there anyone to know the true sense. Afer the poem’s appearance in P99–05, T. Sturge Moore reported to WBY that he was ‘deeply in love’ with it: ‘Te tone of voice is exquisite and the rhythm and rhyme exquisitely suited to it’ (quoted Hone, 211: but see also note to 176 below). H.C. Beeching, reviewing P99–05 in Te Bookman (Nov. 1906) mentioned this poem among the ‘two or three things for which to give thanks’, as ‘a tale from the Book of Leinster told in William Morris’s manner, with charming interludes of music made by the rushes and curlews’. But the poem’s structure was more than just that of a story with ‘charming interludes’, and in 1915 F. Reid wrote about WBY’s ‘method of weaving together two distinct poems, one very personal, the other a narrative poem,’ fnding it not ‘a happy one,’ since ‘It really weakens the grip of both, and I cannot see what compensating advantage is gained’ (Reid, 240). In 1941, Louis MacNeice dismissed the poem (along with ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’) as ‘fat, faded, two dimensional’: the ‘rather insipid’ poem ‘is chiefy interesting for its personal interpolations on the old theme that history repeats itself in love; Yeats’s own passion is thus drawn up into mythology’ (MacNeice, 93). Uncharitable as his judgement is, MacNeice nevertheless grasps clearly a central theme of the poem: if ‘history repeats itself in love’, there are all sorts of ongoing creative consequences for WBY’s understanding of his own life in 1901 and afer. Te division of tasks between ‘narrative’ and ‘lyric’ has continued to attract comment: for H. Adams ‘Te poet steps away from the story from time to time to comment generally on it,’ and ‘the tone of these speeches is suddenly far more mature’: ‘Baile and Aillinn are imagined as together in the familiar world of passion beyond morality, but that world and their story are treated more or less as fctions [. . .] the poet’s commentary expresses the real’ (Adams, 77–78). M. Sidnell, too, writes of how ‘the mythological story is interrupted by personal interjections about the speaker’s emotional agitation and his own lost love, the poet himself being conceived as the minstrel reciting the narrative’ (Sidnell, 28). With more subtlety, E. Larrissy comments on how the narrator ‘occasionally is moved to general discourse in italicised passages, which themselves serve to distance the poem and ofer it as artifce’, with the result that ‘We are somehow incited both by the failure and by the spirit of the mundane world [. . .] Te processes of nature tend to seek and fnd fulflment in eternal images which are at a remove from the natural’ (Larrissy, 87–88). R. Greaves feels that the italicized passages serve to maintain ‘the presence of the poet,’ and to prevent ‘the reader’s complete absorption into the narrative level of the poem’; in exploring the links between the story and its lyrical refections, he observes that ‘it is something within the natural world that recalls the story to its narrator, something natural for all that it might seem disembodied: the cry of the curlew and the sound of the wind in the rushes’ (Greaves, 35–36). It is likely that the poem’s modern critical history – which, even in specialist studies of WBY, is scanty – shows the efects of this work’s position in a ‘Narrative and Dramatic’ section in the fnal pages of CP33, and aferwards CP50 (along with some later edited collected editions, including e.g. CW 1). Whatever purely commercial advantages WBY might have seen in this arrangement when discussing the matter with his British

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publisher Harold Macmillan in the early 1930s, one inevitable efect was that this poem (along with ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’) was removed from the other poems of ISW, thus obscuring its numerous connections with these, which contribute both to its and their overall efect. (One obvious case is that of the god Aengus and his quasi-magical sponsorship of lovers.) Tere is disadvantage for the poem in that it is in some danger by reason of its position of never being much read, and it is at least arguable that it possesses enough inherent artistic merit to mean that it has been thereby rather mis- (and under-) valued over the years by WBY’s readers. In fact, the poem is a work of innovative energy, and it suggests for WBY some creative ways past the kind of poetry most distinctively represented by the 1900 TSW, to whose main themes and dominant images it remains indebted. As critics repeatedly note, there is an element of give-and-take between the narrative itself and the italicized passages in which a kind of lyrical commentary or refection is voiced. Tis latter element allows WBY a frst-person voice that can speak not so much about as out of the story which is being told: it is autobiographical, perhaps – certainly, it is indebted to the life and experiences of the poet – but it is also intended as in some respects exemplary: the frst-person plural is as important as the singular. Unlike AG in her version of the narrative, WBY refers at the end to the tablets from yew- and apple-wood, made from trees over the two lovers’ graves, which become the places for the inscription of love-stories by poets. In that respect, the fates of Baile and Aillinn are not just the subjects for narrative, but also the mediums on which stories like theirs are inscribed. Te oddness of the story itself should not be forgotten. Neither lover has ever actually seen the other, but each dies nevertheless of heartbreak at the news of the other’s demise. Te main point of pathos is (as AG puts it) that ‘it was foretold by Druids that were friendly to them that they would not come together in their lifetime, but that afer their death they would meet, and be happy for ever afer’ (see Sources). Efectively, this shifs the story’s focus from the living world to somewhere else – and this is the realm where Aengus grants happiness to lovers. If Aengus is a benign deity in the world of ‘them that are no more alive’ (207), he is a force for lethal mischief in the living world. In one dimension, he is a fgure of elaborate beauty; in the other, one of ugliness and deceit. Tis duality is central to WBY’s design in the poem, for it is mirrored by another doubleness of aspect, in the passages of ‘lyrical’ commentary. Here, the world in which ‘we’ live, and where we love the likes of ‘Kate or Nan’ (92), is charged and challenged by another world that is accessible through story and imagination, but which also seems to food the whole of the natural landscape. Tis other world is Aengus’s kingdom of high romantic love, where Deirdre and Naoise (like Baile and Aillinn) are the lodestars for all lovers who are merely mortal. It is not until the very end of the poem, afer the conclusion of the narrative itself, that WBY allows the ‘lyrical’ voice to speak consistently in the frst person singular (only in line 99 had this happened, in an aside that hints at personal meaning in the Deirdre and Naoise story, but stops before it can give anything away). In lines 198–207, a voice saying ‘I’ can address the ‘Beloved’, apparently advising her to turn away from thoughts of tragic lovers – including the pair who have been the subjects of this very poem – and embrace the impulse of love in the mortal world. It is a curious and in some ways a disorienting

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ending, seemingly enjoining action quite without regard to the meanings of what has come before. Te poem’s last verb, ‘to wive’, is of course at the heart of things, and is disarmingly frank (for it is the man, not the woman, who can want ‘to wive’ – and see note to 206). Here, if anywhere, it is undoubtedly tempting to read WBY and MG into the poem – yet not, interestingly, as parallels to the lovers of the story, but as a potential couple who can fulfl their romantic destiny only by thinking of other things. It is a complex conclusion, and possibly a mixed message; but it is not false to WBY’s subtlety of approach and design in the poem as a whole. Textual and publication history. Ten pages of a handwritten copy by WBY are in the Berg Collection, NYPL (MS). Tese are reproduced and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 20–39. Te MS is best described as a fair copy in ink, which carries a few corrections by WBY, also in ink: it is a record of the poem’s initial stage of completion, rather than one of the early phase of its composition. WBY told AG that Henry Newbolt ‘has my Baile and Aillinn’ poem and I think means to use it’ around 14 Dec. 1901 (CL 3, 136): the poem was frst published in Newbolt’s Te Monthly Review for Jul. 1902 (MR). It next appeared in ISW, and was included in all WBY’s collected editions thereafer. Copy-text: P49. ARGUMENT. Baile and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to be happy in his own land among the dead, told to each a story of the other’s death, so that their hearts were broken and they died.

Title.] In MR, WBY provides on the frst page (running over to the second page) a note to the title: It is better, I think, to explain at once some of the allusions to mythological people and things, instead of breaking up the reader’s attention with a series of footnotes. What the ‘long wars for the White Horn and the Brown Bull’ were, and who ‘Deirdre the harper’s daughter’ was, and why Cuchullain was called ‘the Hound of Ulad,’ I shall not explain. Te reader will fnd all that he need know about them, and about the story of Baile and Aillinn itself, in Lady Gregory’s ‘Cuchullain of Muirthemne,’ the most important book that has come out of Ireland in my time. ‘Te great Plain’ is the Land of the Dead and of the Happy; it is called also ‘Te Land of the Living Heart,’ and many

beautiful names besides. And Findrias and Falias and Gorias and Murias were the four mysterious cities whence the Tautha De Danaan, the divine race, came to Ireland, cities of learning out of sight of the world, where they found their four talismans, the spear, the stone, the cauldron, and the sword. Te birds that futter over the head of Aengus are four birds that he made out of his kisses; and when Baile and Aillinn take the shape of swans linked with a golden chain, they take the shape that other enchanted lovers took before them in the old stories. Midhir was a king of the Sidhe, or people of faery, and Etain his wife, when driven away by a jealous woman, took refuge once upon a time with Aengus in a house of glass, and there I have imagined her weaving harp-strings out of Aengus’ hair. I have brought the harp-strings into “Te Shadowy Waters,”

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I hardly hear the curlew cry, Nor the grey rush when the wind is high, Before my thoughts begin to run On the heir of Uladh, Buan’s son, Baile, who had the honey mouth; And that mild woman of the south,

where I interpret the myth in my own way. – W.B.Y. Argument.] In draf of this note on a single sheet of Coole Park stationery (Berg Collection, NYPL), WBY deletes a clause between ‘Master of Love’ and ‘wishing them’: ‘came in disguise to frst one and then another’ (see Cornell ISWGH, 19). 1–12.] Tese lines are marked for italic in MS, and printed as such in MR, then printed in red without italics in both the Dun Emer and the 1903 American Macmillan versions of ITSW; in PW06, where other such passages in red are given in italics, these lines remain in roman; in P99–05 and CWVP08 they are in italics again, as they are in PSS and all collected editions thereafer. In the ‘Aeolus’ section of Ulysses (1922), James Joyce has the character Buck Mulligan (thought to be modelled partly on WBY’s friend Oliver St John Gogarty) deliver a bawdy parody of these lines: I hardly hear the purlieu cry Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by Before my thoughts begin to run On F. M’Curdy Atkinson, Te same that had the wooden leg And that flibustering fllibeg Tat never dared to slake his drouth, Magee that had the chinless mouth. Being afraid to marry on earth Tey masturbated for all they were worth. 1.] Perhaps cp. Jean Ingelow, Poems (1885), ‘Preludes to a Penny Reading’, 394: ‘Mark no more the antlered stag, hear the curlew cry’. 4, 73. Uladh] Te Irish kingdom of Ulster. Uladh MS; Ulad (all printed texts until CP50: the correction adopted in the present edition was made on the ‘Second Proof ’ for

the projected Macmillan Edition De Luxe of WBY’s work in summer 1932, NLI 30, 262). 4.] On Uladh’s heir del. On the heir of Uladh MS. 4. Buan’s son] Baile is (in Hyde’s version) Baile Mac Buain, Baile the son of Buan: the name Buan means ‘the enduring’. 5. the honey mouth] Tis phrase, answering to the ‘sweet-tongued’ and ‘sweet spoken’ of the translations, is employed by AG (who probably provided it to WBY), CM (1903), ‘they called him Baile of the Honey-Mouth’. A slightly diferent application of the phrase was to be found in Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘Molly Astore: Irish Song’, 35–36: ‘But one kiss from her honey mouth | Would make me whole again!’ Tis feminine and erotic use for the phrase was repeated in a poem by ‘Fiona Macleod’ (known by WBY to be William Sharp) published not long afer the completion of ‘Baile and Aillinn’, but not seen by WBY himself before its publication. In Macleod’s American-published From the Hills of Dream (1901), a revised and expanded version of the frst edition of 1896, a fve-page dedicatory epistle to WBY is followed by the poem ‘White-Hands’, with its frequent appeals to a beloved ‘Honey-Mouth’, such as ‘O, come to me, Honey-Mouth, bend to me, HoneyMouth, give me thy kiss’ (6). All of this is very far removed from WBY’s understanding of the term as one denoting eloquence, but it is unlikely that he had sight of Macleod’s poem before Nov., since Sharp only sent him a copy of the book on 31 Oct. 1901. WBY will of course have seen the poem when he received the book; but it did not prompt him to any revision of this epithet for Baile.

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Aillinn, who was King Lugaidh’s heir. Their love was never drowned in care Of this or that thing, nor grew cold Because their bodies had grown old. Being forbid to marry on earth, They blossomed to immortal mirth. About the time when Christ was born, When the long wars for the White Horn And the Brown Bull had not yet come, Young Baile Honey-Mouth, whom some Called rather Baile Little-Land, Rode out of Emain with a band Of harpers and young men; and they Imagined, as they struck the way To many-pastured Muirthemne,

7. Lugaidh’s] Lugadh’s MS; Lugaid’s (all printed texts until CP50: for date of correction see note to 4. above). WBY does not adopt Hyde’s spelling, ‘Lewy’ (see Sources above), and uses AG’s spelling; O’Curry calls Aillinn ‘daughter of Lughaidh’. Te name itself is common in Irish mythic history. 9. nor] or MR. 10.] Because they had changed or had grown old del. MS. 11. marry] clip MS. 12.] Blossomed to an immortal mirth MS. 14. the long wars for] the wars over MS. 14–15.] WBY’s note about these wars for MR (see above) is forthright in its announcement that ‘I shall not explain’ about them, referring readers to AG’s CM instead. Te narrative from the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge (Te Cattle-Raid of Cooley) is incorporated in CM, where Ch. 11 is entitled ‘Te War for the Bull of Cuailgne’, and there are frequent references to ‘the Brown Bull of Cuailgne’. In Aug. 1901, during composition of this poem, WBY delivered a lecture on ‘Ireland and the Arts’, published that month in Te United Irishman and subsequently in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), in which he urged Irish writers to master old Irish history and legends: ‘Whether they choose for the

subject the carrying of of the brown Bull or the coming of Patrick, or the political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much into it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek crafsmen’ (CW 4, 152). In the following year, WBY made the same CM-derived reference in ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’, 49–50: see note to these lines in the poem for AG’s telling of the events. 16. Young] Tat del. Young MS. 17. Little-Land] Tis epithet comes to WBY not from Douglas Hyde (who translates the Irish as ‘small inheritance’: see Sources) but from Eugene O’Curry, who uses it in his translation of a poem by Aibhe, daughter of Cormac Mac Airt, in the Book of Leinster: in O’Curry’s version, Baile is ‘Balie of little land’ (Lectures on Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861), 477). WBY quoted O’Curry’s version in his note to AG’s CM, 351. 21. many-pastured] Coincidentally, WBY’s epithet had been hit upon by Alfred Austin a few years before: cp. his Te Human Tragedy (1891), IV, 1030: ‘many-pastured leas’. Muirthemne is the seat of Cuchulain (in Co. Louth), and forms part of the title in AG’s CM.

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That all things fell out happily, And there, for all that fools had said, Baile and Aillinn would be wed. 25

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They found an old man running there: He had ragged long grass-coloured hair; He had knees that stuck out of his hose; He had puddle-water in his shoes; He had half a cloak to keep him dry, Although he had a squirrel’s eye. O wandering birds and rushy beds, You put such folly in our heads With all this crying in the wind, No common love is to our mind, And our poor Kate or Nan is less Than any whose unhappiness Awoke the harp-strings long ago. Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child’s laughter, a woman’s kiss. Who was it put so great a scorn In the grey reeds that night and morn Are trodden and broken by the herds, And in the light bodies of birds The north wind tumbles to and fro And pinches among hail and snow? That runner said: ‘I am from the south; I run to Baile Honey-Mouth, To tell him how the girl Aillinn Rode from the country of her kin,

26. ragged long grass-coloured] ragged, [grey del.] grass-yellow MS; ragged, long grassyellow MR, ISW. 28.] Cp. the description of ‘O’Donnell’s Kern’ in S.H. O’Grady, Silva Gadelica (1892), 312: ‘the puddle-water plashing in his brogues’. 31–46.] Tese lines are underlined in MS and duly set in italic for MR, and are printed in red without italics in both Dun Emer and Macmillan versions of ISW; they are set in

italic for P99–06, PW06 and all collected editions thereafer. 39. all this life can] SP29 and afer; all life has to MR; all life had to MS, ISW-LP31. 42. the grey reeds] Reeds are very seldom described as ‘grey’; and here perhaps cp. W. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876) III, 79: ‘woeful faces but as grey reeds in the wind’. 50. country of her] wide home of del. country of her MS.

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And old and young men rode with her: For all that country had been astir If anybody half as fair Had chosen a husband anywhere But where it could see her every day. When they had ridden a little way An old man caught the horse’s head With: “You must home again, and wed With somebody in your own land.” A young man cried and kissed her hand, “O lady, wed with one of us”; And when no face grew piteous For any gentle thing she spake, She fell and died of the heart-break.’ Because a lover’s heart’s worn out, Being tumbled and blown about By its own blind imagining, And will believe that anything That is bad enough to be true, is true, Baile’s heart was broken in two; And he, being laid upon green boughs, Was carried to the goodly house Where the Hound of Uladh sat before The brazen pillars of his door, His face bowed low to weep the end Of the harper’s daughter and her friend.

59. own] old del. own MS. 64. of the heart-break] for her heart del. of the heart break MS. WBY’s phrase is carried over directly from AG’s CM: see Sources. 65. heart’s] heart is MS. 67. By its own blind] [On del ] By its own [being del.] blind MS. 69.] If it be but bad enough is true MS. WBY’s revision to this shows a deliberate turn towards a much less strictly metrical tetrameter, which necessitates a speech-rhythm rather than a regular stress pattern. Cp. lines 66 and 67, where a conversational stress pattern is also established in counterpoint to any set iambic tetrameter pattern.

71. he, being] when they had del. he being MS. upon] him on del. upon MS. 73. the Hound of Uladh] great Cuchullin del. the Hound of Uladh MS. Tis was one of the titles of Cuchulain, in commemoration one of his boyhood deeds, when he slew a ferocious guard-dog of the smith Culann. 75–76.] Te reference is to the tragic story of Deirdre and Naoise: Deirdre was the daughter of King Conchubar’s chief bard or storyteller, Fedlimid Mac Daill, and in the story – adapted by WBY and by other writers in the Coole circle – she and her beloved, Naoise, eventually fall victim to Conchubar’s possessive jealousy.

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For although years had passed away He always wept them on that day, For on that day they had been betrayed; And now that Honey-Mouth is laid Under a cairn of sleepy stone Before his eyes, he has tears for none, Although he is carrying stone, but two For whom the cairn’s but heaped anew. We hold, because our memory is So full of that thing and of this, That out of sight is out of mind. But the grey rush under the wind And the grey bird with crooked bill Have such long memories that they still Remember Deirdre and her man; And when we walk with Kate or Nan About the windy water-side, Our hearts can hear the voices chide. How could we be so soon content, Who know the way that Naoise went? And they have news of Deirdre’s eyes, Who being lovely was so wise – Ah! wise, my heart knows well how wise. Now had that old gaunt crafty one, Gathering his cloak about him, run

81. sleepy stone] Tis highly unusual phrase is to be found in a poem by Leigh Hunt, Poetical Works (1819), ‘Te Nymphs’, II, 163–164: ‘dripping eaves | Dropping on the sleepy stone’. However, it is likely that WBY here simply inverts the more common phrase ‘stony sleep’, which was certainly known to him from W. Blake, Te Book of Urizen II, 10: ‘laid in a stony sleep | Unorganiz’d, rent from Eternity’ and IV, 1: ‘In stony sleep ages roll’d over him’; it is possible, too, that he had met the phrase in Byron, Don Juan (1823) VI, st. 68: ‘a breathless, hushed, and stony sleep’. At all events, it is ‘stony sleep’ which suggests itself to WBY at

the climax of ‘Te Second Coming’ (1919), 19: ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep’. 84. cairn’s but] cairn is MS. 85–99.] Tese lines are underlined in MS and duly set in italic for MR, and are printed in red without italics in both Dun Emer and Macmillan versions of ISW; they are set in italic for P99–06, PW06 and all collected editions thereafer. 90. that they] they can MS. 98. Who] Ah del. Who MS. 100–101.] But [now del. had] that old [grey del. gaunt] crafy one | ^Gathering his cloak about him^ | Who had a squirrel’s eye had run MS.

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Where Aillinn rode with waiting-maids, Who amid leafy lights and shades Dreamed of the hands that would unlace Their bodices in some dim place When they had come to the marriage-bed; And harpers, pacing with high head As though their music were enough To make the savage heart of love Grow gentle without sorrowing, Imagining and pondering Heaven knows what calamity; ‘Another’s hurried of,’ cried he, ‘From heat and cold and wind and wave; They have heaped the stones above his grave In Muirthemne, and over it In changeless Ogham letters writ –

103. Who] Where MS. leafy lights] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘May Sunshine’, 107: ‘a tenderer leafy light’, and T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches and Songs (1889), ‘Fancy’s Frolic’, II, 4–5: ‘the sun | Was wavering rays of leafy light’. WBY’s plural repeats what was something of a speciality of the prolifc Irwin, and was hitherto unique to him: cp. his Songs and Romances (1878), ‘An Artist’s Glimpse of a Fete Champetre’, 165–166: ‘while slid | Te leafy lights with whispering grace’, ‘Song’, 6: ‘Trough leafy lights on our homeward way’, and Versicles (1883), ‘An Antique Dream’, I v 4: ‘slips of the leafy lights wavering mellow’. 107–114.] LP22 and afer. And harpers pondering with bowed head A music that had thought enough Of the ebb of all things to make love Grow gentle without sorrowings; And leather-coated men with slings Who peered about on every side; And amid leafy light he cried, “He [Baile del. He MS] is well out of wind and wave, MS, MR-SP21.

114.] Perhaps cp. W. Cowper, Te Task (1785), III, 554: ‘Heat and cold, and wind and steam’; but the date of this revision (made for LP22) argues strongly against anything other than a coincidental echo here. 115.] Uladh’s young men have heaped a grave del. MS. 117.] Ogham letters] Ogham (a disyllabic word) is the method of runic writing for inscriptions in Irish and British antiquity; in 1794, the antiquarian R.J. Sullivan identifed it as ‘the sacred character of the Druids’. WBY had mentioned ‘Ogham letters’ in his 1895 version of ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ (II, 128). Samuel Ferguson’s Te Cromlech at Howth (1864), repr. as ‘Aideen’s Grave’ in Legends of the Western Gael (1881), remarks how ‘from circling year to year | Te Ogham-lettered stone is seen’ (85–86), and Aubrey De Vere refers in his poems several times to ‘Ogham characters’, e.g. Poetical Works (1884), ‘Te Children of Lir’, II, 448–449: ‘Interred them at that sacred altar’s base, | And graved their names in Ogham characters’.

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Baile, that was of Rury’s seed. But the gods long ago decreed No waiting-maid should ever spread Baile and Aillin’s marriage-bed, For they should clip and clip again Where wild bees hive on the Great Plain. Therefore it is but little news That put this hurry in my shoes.’ Then seeing that he scarce had spoke Before her love-worn heart had broke, He ran and laughed until he came To that high hill the herdsmen name The Hill Seat of Laighen, because Some god or king had made the laws That held the land together there, In old times among the clouds of the air. That old man climbed; the day grew dim; Two swans came fying up to him,

118.] Set in italic for MR, and printed in red without italics in both Dun Emer and Macmillan versions of ISW; in italic for P99–05, PW06 and all collected editions thereafer. WBY’s ‘Rury’ is AG’s ‘Rudraige’ in CM (see Sources): this is Rudraige mac Sithrigi, the legendary founder of the line of kings in Uladh known as the Clanna Rudraige. 119.] [For long ago the gods del.] But the gods long ago MS. 120. should] would del. should MS. 122. should] would del. should MS. 123. hive] Te verb is unusual (OED 4.a. and b. intrans.), ‘To enter the hive, take to the hive, as bees’ and ‘To live together as bees in the hive’; there may be a recollection here of Shakespeare, Te Merchant of Venice II v 47: ‘Drones hive not with me’. Te slight oddness of this verb, and its Shakespearean provenance, are matched by the verb ‘wive’ at the end of the poem (206). the Great Plain] Tis otherworldly pastoral landscape is Magh Meall (Mor), the lovely (great) plain, a legendary destination in the

Old Irish echtrae (adventure narratives) and medieval voyages. 126–127.] Not in MS, MR-SP21. 128.] And hurrying to the south he came MS, MR-SP21. 130. Te Hill Seat of Laighen] Tis translates AG’s Slieve Suidhe Laighen (see Sources): Laighen refers not to an individual, however, but more generally to a people, the Lagin or Laighin, who were supposed to have migrated to ancient Ireland from Gaul, and to have settled in Leinster. 134. Tat old man climbed] And as he climbed MS. 135–136.] Tis image of the two swans clearly derives from the Irish narrative concerning Aengus, which AG (amongst others) was also in the process of telling at this time. In an Irish aisling narrative found in the Book of Leinster, the Aislinge Óenguso (Te DreamVision of Aengus), 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

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Linked by a gold chain each to each, And with low murmuring laughing speech Alighted on the windy grass. They knew him: his changed body was Tall, proud and ruddy, and light wings Were hovering over the harp-strings That Edain, Midhir’s wife, had wove In the hid place, being crazed by love. What shall I call them? fsh that swim, Scale rubbing scale where light is dim By a broad water-lily leaf; Or mice in the one wheaten sheaf Forgotten at the threshing-place; Or birds lost in the one clear space Of morning light in a dim sky; Or, it may be, the eyelids of one eye, Or the door-pillars of one house, Or two sweet blossoming apple-boughs That have one shadow on the ground; Or the two strings that made one sound Where that wise harper’s fnger ran. For this young girl and this young man Have happiness without an end, Because they have made so good a friend.

other year on a lake in Munster. He fnds the girl, Caer Iborméith, but cannot be with her until he too takes shape as a swan; this happens, and the pair fy away together back to his seat at the Boyne, where they live as man and wife. Te story does not quite correspond with WBY’s motif here, for the two swans apparently come to Aengus, whereas in the Irish source Aengus is himself one of the birds. In AG’s version (Ch. 8 of CM), the swans have silver rather than golden chains, while Caer has numerous company, ‘three times ffy white birds there, with their silver chains about their necks’ (147). WBY had used the image before, in ‘Te Withering of the Boughs’ (also written at Coole, in Jul. 1900), 17–18: ‘I know of the sleepy country, where swans fy round | Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fy’.

138. windy grass] Cp. Christina Rossetti, New Poems (1896), 8: ‘Did she deem windy grass more good than these?’ 141–143.] WBY had already dwelt on this aspect of the Aengus and Edain story in the 1900 TSW, in a passage which was to be repurposed in 1906 as the poem ‘Te Harp of Aengus’. Te harp and its construction are his own additions to the traditional material (see notes to TSW (1900) 296–310 and ‘Te Harp of Aengus’). 142. Edain] Etain MR-SP29. 149. in the one] in one MR. 154. have] make del. have MS. 156. fnger] fngers MR. 159. have made so] have ^made^ so MS. a friend] Aengus, as a deity of lovers. 159^160.] Verse-paragraph break here in all texts except MR.

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They know all wonders, for they pass The towery gates of Gorias, And Findrias and Falias,

161–163.] Te four cities mentioned here – Gorias, Findrias, Falias, and Murias – have no historical location, but are the places associated with the origins of the Tuatha De Danaan before the tribe arrived on Irish shores. Te earliest mention of these cities is in the eleventh-century Lebor Gabála Érenn (Te Book of Invasions of Ireland), and they feature in Geofrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Érinn (History of Ireland). WBY refers to these mythic places in the context of his own longstanding work on the construction of a Celtic Mystical Order, since the cites are supposedly the original locations of the four ‘talismans’ of the Tuatha De Danaan which were to be signifcant in the Order’s rituals (see below). On 15 Aug. 1900, MG wrote to WBY (then resident at Coole) asking, ‘Will you when you write send me the name of the four cities and the four Druids of the Tuatha de Danaan’, and claiming that ‘I want them for some work I am trying to do’ (G-YL, 133). MG’s ‘work’ was presumably that towards the Celtic Mysteries, where WBY persevered in collaboration with her for a number of years. Tese lines are the only place where WBY incorporates the talisman-cities in his poetry; but two other poets did make use of the same material, both of them with connections to the Celtic Mystical Order project. William Sharp (both as himself and as Fiona Macleod) started work on poems about this subject just afer WBY’s composition of ‘Baile and Aillinn’, and in a postscript to his letter to Fiona Macleod of c.23 Nov. 1901 WBY says how ‘I like your verses on Murias and like them the better perhaps because of the curious coincidence that I did in summer verses about lovers wandering ‘in long forgotten Murias’’ (CL 3, 125). Macleod’s poems were published as ‘Te Dirge of the Four Cities’ in the second edition

of From the Hills of Dream (1907) (see also note on 163 below); in a preface to these, the author quoted from a supposed source called ‘Te Little Book of the Great Enchantment’: Tere are four cities that no mortal eye has seen but that the soul knows; these are Gorias, that is in the east; and Finias, that is in the south; and Murias, that is in the west; and Falias, that is in the north. And the symbol of Falias is the stone of death, which is crowned with pale fre. And the symbol of Gorias is the dividing sword. And the symbol of Finias is a spear. And the symbol of Murias is a hollow that is flled with water and fading light. Te source in question is largely that of Sharp/ Macleod’s imagination; but it is very possible that this, or something like this, had been shared with WBY in the years before 1901, when Sharp was involved in the poet’s researches towards new rituals for his Irish Order. At the beginning of AG’s GFM (1904), an account is given of the De Danaan cities, along with information on talismanic items that suggests conversations with WBY on the subject (GFM, 1): It was from the north they came; and in the place they came from they had four cities, where they fought their battle for learning: great Falias, and shining Gorias, and Finias, and rich Murias that lay to the south. And in those cities they had four wise men to teach their young men skill and knowledge and perfect wisdom: Senias in Murias; and Arias, the fair-haired poet, in Finias; and Urias of the noble nature in Gorias. And they brought from these four cities their four treasures: a Stone of Virtue from Falias, that was called the Lia Fail, the Stone of

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And long-forgotten Murias, Among the giant kings whose hoard, Cauldron and spear and stone and sword, Was robbed before earth gave the wheat; Wandering from broken street to street They come where some huge watcher is, And tremble with their love and kiss.

Destiny; and from Gorias they brought a Sword; and from Finias a Spear of Victory; and from Murias the fourth treasure, the Cauldron that no company ever went away from unsatisfed. Some decades later, a work by a second poet, George Russell (who had also been involved in WBY’s ritual-planning from the mid-1890s onwards), was the last gasp of this mythology; in AE’s Te House of the Titans (1934), the title-poem recalls how ‘the builders reared | Murias, Gorias, Findias and Falias, | Tat were like living creatures, and towered and glowed | And changed with the imagination’ (171–174). 161.] [On quiet feet through del.] Te Towery gates of Gorias MS. 163. Murias] In From the Hills of Dream (1901), Fiona Macleod makes a whole poem from this name, and her ‘Requiem’ – owing more than a little to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Te City Beneath the Sea’ – has fve stanzas that play variations on a single theme (st. 3): In the sunken city of Murias, Deep, deep beneath the sea Te Image sits and hears Time break Te heart I gave to thee And thou to me, In the city of Murias. 165.] Tese items are the special talismans of the Tuatha De Danaan in the system of ritual for a projected Celtic Mystical Order, which WBY had been labouring over since 1895, and which had still not come to completion. In the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the items are associated with the four legendary cities, and the text is quoted by Geofrey Keating (Foras

feasa ar Érinn trans. Dermod O’Connor (1723)): At length these strolling Necromancers sailed From Norway, and landed on the Northern Shore Of Scotland; but perfdiously conveyed Four Monuments of choice Antiquity From the four Cities given them by the Danes; From Falias the Stone of Destiny From Gorias they brought the well tried Sword Of Luighaidh, from Finias a Spear, From Murias a Cauldron. 166. earth gave the wheat] the earth gave wheat MS. 168. some huge watcher] Te reference – if reference it is – is an obscure one. It may be that WBY has Aengus in mind here, though the indefniteness of ‘some’ weighs against this; and ‘watcher’ sounds like a guard, albeit one of giant size. Does he keep watch to ensure the security of the lovers from outside threats, or is he watching the lovers as they ‘tremble with their love and kiss’? In all likelihood, WBY does not intend any ambiguity here; yet it is present. 169. tremble with their love] Tese palpitating lovers were partially anticipated by A. Swinburne (who – more radically – comes up with amorously trembling eyeballs), in A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (1884), ‘Afer a Reading’, 9: ‘the sweetest of all things that eyes may rejoice in and tremble with love as they gaze’.

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They know undying things, for they Wander where earth withers away, Though nothing troubles the great streams But light from the pale stars, and gleams From the holy orchards, where there is none But fruit that is of precious stone, Or apples of the sun and moon. What were our praise to them? They eat

169^170.] Verse-paragraph break here in all texts except SP21. 170. undying things] Perhaps cp. Byron, Heaven and Earth: A Mystery (1821) I ii 8: ‘Te eternal beauty of undying things’, and Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), Sonnet VI, 12: ‘Commuting hourly with undying things’. 172. great] salt MS. 176.] Tis line recalls (and is almost certainly intended to recall) WBY’s ‘Te Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), 23–24: ‘Te silver apples of the moon, | Te golden apples of the sun’. Te connection between the lovers here and the god Aengus makes the allusion pertinent; but there is also probably an element of poetic ‘branding’ at work, by which WBY situates his narrative in relation to (an already popular) formulation of erotic quest with which his name was associated. One contemporary reader who was unimpressed by this was T. Sturge Moore who, despite his being ‘deeply in love’ with the poem (see Critical reception above), wrote to WBY afer Oct. 1906 to protest that ‘I could wish you could invent something a little more worthy than your ‘Orchard’ to come before your ‘Glass Boat’ [. . .] I think ‘fruit of precious stone’ and ‘apples of the sun and moon’ the most loathsome upholstery that was ever invented to cushion poetry with, and would prefer plain wood’ (Moore, 10). 177–178.] WBY immediately follows one selfallusion with another, subtler one: here, to his poem of 1892, ‘I never have seen Maid Quiet’, where the titular fgure, ‘Nodding her russet hood’ (2) seems (Red Riding Hood-like) to be wandering in a forest. Te poem was revised

(1897–1898) to become in Te Wind Among the Reeds ‘Hanrahan Laments Because of his Wanderings’, but it was to be revised again for CWVP08, reverting to ‘Maid Quiet’ as its title. Te personifcation in itself goes far back in WBY’s work, to the 1887 poem ‘She Who Dwelt Amongst the Sycamores: A Fancy’, with its ‘lone Lady Quietness’ (13). In a poem composed a year afer ‘Baile and Aillinn’, ‘In the Seven Woods’ (Aug. 1902), WBY alludes to the present lines: ‘I know that Quiet | Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart’ (10–11). ‘Wild heart’ as a phrase may come to WBY from the title-poem of John Todhunter’s Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), II, 545–546: ‘He held her arms – felt her wild heart | Beat against his’, and Katharine Tynan’s Shamrocks (1887), ‘Te Pursuit of Diarmid and Grainne’ II, 61–62: ‘And she held both her hands to still the beat | Of her wild heart, lest any hearken it’. However, WBY is here imagining the lovers ‘eating’ Quiet’s heart: this may mean no more that they exist in a state of constant silence, but if so its fgurative expression fails – perhaps deliberately – to shake of a literal sense of eating something (especially with ‘like daily meat’ coming in the next line). Te fgurative expression ‘to eat one’s heart out’ dates from the earlier nineteenth century, and generally carries connotations of envy: WBY’s phrase is so far removed from this that the very distance seems part of the poetic efect. What Baile and Aillinn ‘eat’ may be the heart of a personifed ‘Quiet’, but it is felt to be something closer to an actual fruit, given the ‘apples of the sun and moon’ of 176;

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Quiet’s wild heart, like daily meat; Who when night thickens are afoat On dappled skins in a glass boat, Far out under a windless sky; While over them birds of Aengus fy, And over the tiller and the prow, And waving white wings to and fro Awaken wanderings of light air To stir their coverlet and their hair. And poets found, old writers say, A yew-tree where his body lay; But a wild apple hid the grass With its sweet blossom where hers was; And being in good heart, because A better time had come again After the deaths of many men, And that long fghting at the ford, They wrote on tablets of thin board, Made of the apple and the yew, All the love stories that they knew.

in this sense, there may even be a suggestion here of the lovers as a sinless version of Adam and Eve. 178. meat] Te word is used in one of OED’s ‘senses relating to food generally’, e.g. 1.a. ‘solid food, as opposed to drink’, 2. ‘an article of food’, or 3. ‘a meal, a feast’. 179–181.] WBY may be remembering here in the medieval Imram Maile Duin, Te Voyage of Mael Duin, where those in a boat can see straight down through it, and through the sea, to a world underneath. 179. night thickens] Cp. Shakespeare, Macbeth, III ii 57–58: ‘Light thickens, and the crow | Makes wing to th’ rooky wood’. WBY’s alteration of ‘Light’ to ‘night’ is scarcely enough to prevent a possible allusion here: the lovers are being presented as the very opposites of Shakespeare’s ‘butcher and his fend-like queen’ (cp. perhaps the implied substitution of an unfallen for a fallen Eden in 177–178 above).

181. windless sky] Cp. Shelley, ‘Rosalind and Helen’, 1106: ‘Climbing in circles the windless sky’. 185–186.] Perhaps cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘Tristram and Iseult’, I, 342–343: ‘the air | Scarcely moves the coverlet’. 188^189] But a wild apple where hers was del. MS. 194.] WBY alludes to the battle at a ford that continued for days on end between Cuchulain and Ferdiad, the Ulster hero’s foster-brother, who was defending Connacht against him: Ferdiad is fnally defeated. Te story is told in full in AG’s CM Ch. 11, ‘Te war for the Bull of Cuailgne’. 195–196.] Cp. WBY’s TSW (1900), 28–29: ‘tales | Tat druids write on yew and apple wood’. WBY here supplies material that draws not on AG but O’Curry and Hyde, though he does not provide as much of the narrative as they do (see Sources).

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Let rush and bird cry out their fll Of the harper’s daughter if they will, Beloved, I am not afraid of her. She is not wiser nor lovelier, And you are more high of heart than she, For all her wanderings over-sea; But I’d have bird and rush forget Those other two; for never yet Has lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive.

198–207.] Tese lines are underlined in MS and duly set in italic for MR, and are printed in red without italics in both Dun Emer and Macmillan versions of ISW; they are set in italic for P99–06, PW06 and all collected editions thereafer. 198.] Let the grey rush and crooked bill del. Let grey rush cry and crooked bill del. MS. 199. the harper’s daughter] Deirdre (see note to 75–76). 201. She] Who del. She MS. 202. And] While del. And MS. high of heart] Cp. Byron, Te Siege of Corinth (1816), 98–99: ‘and high of heart |

As any Chief that ever stood’ and Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Te Striving of Saint Patrick on Mount Cruchan’, 5–6: ‘Te island race, in feud of clan with clan | Barbaric, gracious else and high of heart’. 204. I’d] I would MS, MR. 206. wive] WBY’s rhyming verb, with its intransitive meaning, is according to OED ‘somewhat archaic’ (1.a). Te word occurs in Shakespeare, and perhaps cp. Twelfh Night V i 450: ‘But when I came alas to wive’, Te Taming of the Shrew I ii 56: ‘Happily to wive and thrive, as best I may’ and I ii 66: ‘to wive it wealthily in Padua’.

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FROM THE PLAY OF CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN Date of composition. WBY probably composed these lines in Sep.-Oct. 1901 while collaborating with AG on Cathleen Ni Houlihan (at that stage, still tentatively entitled ‘Te Poor Old Woman’). It is possible the lines were added to the play by WBY later than this, but not much later: AG’s prose draf (from Sep.-Oct. 1901) clearly indicates ’2 verses’ of ‘Fair haired Donagh’ at the relevant point (NYPL Berg Collection), and it is likely she requested these from WBY while he was on hand in Coole: it is possible, too, that they had already been written at the time AG composed the prose draf. Te lines are present in the prompt-copy used for the play’s frst production in Apr. 1902. Dramatic context, and circumstances of composition. In Cathleen Ni Houlihan, much of which came from AG’s hand, but whose scenario was largely WBY’s, these lines are sung by the ‘Old Woman’ who has appeared in the cottage belonging to the Killane family, at Killala Bay in 1798. Preparations for a wedding are well underway, and the bride with her dowry is about to be received, when the Old Woman appears. She directs herself principally to the young bridegroom, Michael, whom she will ask to join her as a soldier in her cause, having revealed herself to be the personifcation of Ireland itself. Michael has just remarked to the Old Woman on the noise of cheering that is coming from the direction of Killala, and she replies (text from Samhain, Oct. 1902): Old Woman. – I thought I heard the noise I used to hear when my friends came to visit me. (She begins singing half to herself). [Stanza 1 follows] Michael (Coming from the door). – What is it you are singing, ma’am? Old Woman. – Singing I am about a man I knew one time, yellowhaired Donough, that was hanged in Galway. (She goes on singing much louder) – [Stanzas 2 and 3 follow] Michael. – What was it brought him to his death? Old Woman. – He died for love of me; many a man has died for love of me.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-8

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In the Dublin production of 2 Apr. 1902, MG played the part of the Old Woman. Textual history. No MS of the lines survives, but they are included in the promptcopy for the frst production of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in Apr. 1902 (NLI 10950) (Prompt-copy). Tese lines were frst printed at the time of the play’s frst production, as part of WBY’s short article about Cathleen ni Houlihan under the title of ‘Mr Yeats’s New Play’, in Arthur Grifth’s newspaper Te United Irishman for 5 Apr. 1902 (UI). Tey next appeared as part of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in Samhain (Oct., 1902). A.H. Bullen published the play as a volume (Cathleen Ni Hoolihan) in 1902, and the play was included by WBY (along with Te Hour Glass and Te Pot of Broth) in the second volume of his Plays for an Irish Teatre (1904), and in all collected editions of his dramatic work thereafer. However, the lines here were employed as a poem in their own right for ISW at proof stage. Two of the Dun Emer sheets survive: the frst (NLI 30073) has lines 5–12 only (Proof 1), while the second (NLI 30246) contains all of lines 1–12 (Proof 2): at the bottom of Proof 1, WBY has written, ‘frst verse lef out | see copy’. In the event, the piece was not included in ISW, and it was never again placed by WBY amongst his poems. In later printings of the play, WBY included changes to punctuation (and there was one verbal change to the ISW proof text (see 5 below)), but it is these lines’ brief existence as a separate poem (albeit an abortive one) which provides the copy text for the present edition. Source. In his UI piece, WBY writes of these lines as ‘stanzas that were suggested to me by some old Gaelic folk-song’ (CW 10, 82). WBY’s material is drawn from an Irish song, ‘Donncha [or Donnchadha] Ba´n’ ‘Fair-haired Donough’. Tis piece was probably composed in Connaught at the end of the eighteenth century, and may perhaps be associated with the 1798 rebellion. WBY’s knowledge is most likely to come directly from AG, who had the ballad in mind when drafing the play along with him (see Date of composition). It is possible that AG herself was aware of the poem through Douglas Hyde. In 1902, AG discussed this song, quoting it in its entirety in her own prose version (she was to recast this into verse the following year, in her Poets and Dreamers). AG’s prose, however, is probably the material from which WBY worked. Te account by AG as frst published (‘West Irish Folk Ballads’, Te Monthly Review Oct. 1902) is given here: In this simple lament, the type of a great many, only the frst name of the young man it was made for is given. It is likely the people of his own place know still to what family he belonged, but I have only heard he was ‘some Connaught man that was hanged in Galway,’ and it is made clear it was for some political crime he was hanged, by the suggestion that if he had been tried nearer his own home ‘in the place he had a right to be,’ the issue would have been diferent, and by the allusion to ‘the Galls,’ the English. It was bound fast here you saw him and you wondered to see him, our fair-haired Donough, and he afer being condemned. Tere was a little white cap on him in place of a hat, and a hempen rope in place of a neckcloth.

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I am afer walking here all through the night, like a young lamb in a great fock of sheep; my breast open, my hair loosened out; and how did I fnd my brother but stretched out before me! Te frst place I cried my fll was at the top of the lake; the second place was at the foot of the gallows; the third place was at the head of your dead body, among the Galls, and my own head as if cut in two. If you were with me in the place you had a right to be, down in Sligo or down in Ballinrobe, it is the gallows would be broken, it is the rope would be cut; and fair-haired Donough going home by the path. O fair-haired Donough, it is not the gallows was ftting for you, but to be going to the barn, to be threshing out the straw; to be turning the plough to the right hand and to the lef; to be putting the red side of the soil uppermost. O fair-haired Donough, O dear brother! It is well I know who it was took you away from me; drinking from the cup, putting a light to the pipe, and walking in the dew in the cover of the night. O Michael Malley, O scourge of misfortune! My brother was no calf of a vagabond cow, but a well-shaped boy on a height or a hillside, to knock a low pleasant sound out of a hurling stick. And fair-haired Donough, is not that the pity, you that would carry well a spur or a boot; I would put clothes in the fashion on you from cloth that would be lasting; I would send you out like a gentleman’s son. O Michael Malley, may your sons never be in one another’s company; may your daughters never ask a marriage portion of you; the two ends of the table are empty, the house is flled, and fair-haired Donough, my brother, is stretched out. Tere is a marriage portion coming home for Donough; but it is not cattle nor sheep nor horses, but tobacco and pipes and white candles, and it will not be begrudged to them that will use it. Te idea of the ‘marriage portion,’ the provision for the wake, being brought home for the dead boy, gives this lament a touch of extreme pathos. Given the writing of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in Co. Galway, by the locally born AG and the Sligo-reared WBY, the poem’s pointed contrast between Sligo and Galway may be secretly to both writers’ purposes. AG’s versifed rendition (which is repr. in full in Finneran, 186–187) was hailed as ‘One of the most heart-breaking poems we have ever read’ in a rev. of AG, Poets and Dreamers, Te Speaker 13 Jun., 1903, and WBY quoted ten stanzas in his own notice of the book for Te New Liberal Review (Mar. 1903), though he dropped these in the essay as published in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), ‘Te Galway Plains’ (CW 4, 156–158). WBY’s shortened version of the poem for Cathleen Ni Houlihan has attracted little critical attention.

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Copy-text: Proof 2. I will go cry with the woman For yellow-haired Donough is dead; With a hempen rope for a neckcloth And a white cloth on his head. 5

10

I have come to cry with you woman, My hair is unwound and unbound; I remember him ploughing his feld, Turning up the red side of the ground; And building his barn on the hill With the good mortared stone; O! we’d have pulled down the gallows Had it happened in Enniscrone!

In the text of UI, all the even-numbered lines are indented. 3. hempen rope] hempen-rope UI. 5. I have come] I am come Prompt copy, UI, Samhain; I come Proof 1 I ^have^ come Proof 2. In published versions of the play, WBY repeated the reading of Prompt copy, ‘I am come’: but had the lines appeared in ISW, the reading would evidently have been that given in the present text. 6. unwound and unbound] unbound and unwound UI. 10. good mortared] good-mortared UI. mortared stone] Possibly cp. George Macdonald, Poetical Works (1893),’ Te Haunted

House’, 124: ‘Nailed sticks and mortared stones’. 11. O!] Oh, UI. 12. in Enniscrone!] in Enniscrone. Prompt copy; at Enniscrone. UI. Enniscrone is a small village on the Co. Sligo coast. WBY’s decision to end his poem with this reference (his source mentions Sligo in this connection, but also Ballinrobe in Co. Mayo) brings the material within his own distinctive creative geography. Besides ofering a difcult prospect for a rhyme, Ballinrobe had the additional disadvantage of being the nearest town to Moore Hall, GM’s ancestral seat.

192

[‘DO NOT MAKE A GREAT KEENING’] Date of composition. Cathleen Ni Houlihan was largely composed in Sep. and Oct. 1901, in collaboration with AG while WBY was at Coole. Tese lines come almost at the end of the play, but it is difcult to speculate on when exactly they might have been composed: though it is possible they come from the late stages of the collaboration, when WBY was asked to provide a suitably formal lament for the fnal minutes of the action, it is also conceivable that they were part of the scenario from which WBY, leaning heavily upon AG’s ideas, began to work. Context. Tese lines from the play Cathleen Ni Houlihan appeared in Te United Irishman on 5 Apr. 1902 (UI). Tis was as part of an item entitled ‘Mr. Yeats’s New Play’, written by WBY, which also carried the lines that were later to become ‘Yellow Haired Donough’. Publication followed directly the frst performance of the play in Dublin on 2 Apr., so WBY’s appearance in the pages of Arthur Grifth’s newspaper (which had been by no means his natural ally in the matter of critical reception of the plays of the Irish Literary Teatre) was presumably for the author something of a fresh start with Nationalist theatrical opinion. Accordingly, WBY’s Irish Nationalist bona fdes were on prominent display here. Dramatic context. At the close of the play, the Old Woman who has visited the house of the Killane family is revealed as a personifcation of Ireland herself, and she leads a young bridegroom, Michael Killane, out of the house towards Killala Bay and the French forces who are landed and waiting there. Beginning with the assertion that ‘My subject is Ireland and its struggle for independence,’ WBY explains the situation in his UI piece (CW 10, 82): Into this household comes Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself, and the bridegroom leaves his bride, and all the hopes come to nothing. It is the perpetual struggle of the cause of Ireland and every other ideal cause against private hopes and dreams, against all that we mean when we say the world. I have put into the mouth of Kathleen Ni Houlihan verses about those who have died or are about to die for her, and these verses are the key of the rest. MG played the role of Cathleen in the frst production, and was photographed delivering these parting lines, with right arm upraised and her gaze fxed sternly on Ireland’s independent future. Textual history. Two sheets of paper amongst the MS materials for Cathleen Ni Houlihan carry WBY’s early attempts at these lines: these are in the collections of Emory DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-9

[‘DO NOT MAKE A GREAT KEENING’]

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University, and are reproduced with transcription in the Cornell Collaborative One-Act Plays, 1901–1903 ed. J. Pethica, 56–59. A transcription is given here, somewhat simplifed and with editorial punctuation supplied for clarity: Do not have a great wake for them [Who are about to die del.] Who are to die upon the morrow, And not gather many horsemen With white scarfs to mourn for them, Or scatter a ^great^ deal of money. [Let the dew and the wind and the rain del.] [They have no need of hired mourners del.] [There is no need to hire mourners del.] There is no need to spend on food and drink To bring strangers to mourn over them, For all the people shall be prayers. It is not clear that these lines are as yet being heard by WBY as verse. However, the next stage of the MS draf moves decisively towards verse, and is close to the eventual text of the lines: Do not ^make^ a great keening [At the burying that shall be to-morrow del.] [Do not spread food to call strangers del.] [At del.] When the graves [that shall be del.] have been dug to-morrow, Do not call the white-scarfed riders To the burying that shall be to-morrow, Do not spread food to call strangers To the wakes that shall be to-morrow, Do not give money for prayers For the dead that shall be to-morrow. [over page] They shall be remembered for ever, They are alive for ever, They shall be speak[ing] for ever, The people shall hear them for ever. Te status of these verses as a separate poem rests on relatively slender foundations. Unlike ‘Yellow Haired Donough’ (also taken from Cathleen Ni Houlihan), which WBY considered including as a poem in ISW, the lines in this case were always destined to remain as part of the published play. Teir appearance in UI was not really the publication of a separate poem, but as illustrative material (along with ‘Yellow Haired Donough’) for a short piece by WBY promoting the play. Further, two lines of verse are omitted in UI (see note to 7–8), with an eye to the sensitivities of the paper’s readership. Nevertheless, WBY did provide for these verses to appear in his UI piece, where they are

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set out as a poem: they therefore existed as a poem outside the published drama from Apr. 1901 until the publication of the play in Samhain in Oct. 1902, and accordingly they have been included in the present edition. Te logical copy-text is UI, but it would be an obvious error to exclude 7–8 in order to preserve the integrity of the copy-text: these are provided here from the prompt-copy for the Apr. 1902 performance (NLI 10950 (3)). (Tey are not subject to any verbal changes in Samhain or the many subsequent editions of the play.) Copy-text: UI, supplemented with Samhain Oct. 1902 (lines 7–8). Do not make a great keening When the graves have been dug to-morrow; Do not call the white-scarfed riders To the buryings that shall be to-morrow. 5

10

Do not spread food to call strangers To the wakes that shall be to-morrow; Do not give money for prayers For the dead that shall die to-morrow. They shall be remembered for ever; They shall be alive for ever; They shall be speaking for ever; The people shall hear them for ever.

3. white scarfed riders] Te wearing of white scarves to funerals was a custom known in the West of Ireland: cp. John Francis O’Donnell, Poems (1891), ‘An Irish deathbed in Canada’, 13–16: I see the funerals going, And hear the sorrowful keen Of the friends and the white-scarfed neighbours Who bear the cofn between. O’Donnell (1837–1874) was an Irish journalist who worked largely in London: he was

associated with the Fenian movement and John O’Leary. 7–8.] Tese lines are omitted in UI: this may be an editorial excision, but it may equally well be one taken by WBY. Afer considerable controversy in Dublin over Te Countess Kathleen, when some orthodox Roman Catholic sensibilities were irritated (not without help from UI and Grifth), this reference to the payment for prayers – by which WBY may intend people who are hired in order to pray – coming from a Protestant was fraught with risk.

193

THE BLOOD BOND Date of composition, and publication history. Te play Diarmuid and Graine, which WBY and GM wrote in collaboration, was performed by the Irish Literary Teatre on 21 Oct. 1901. Work on composition began on 17 Oct. 1899, and continued sporadically through 1900 and 1901. Te lines that constitute ‘Te Blood Bond’ were composed by WBY at a point when a considerable bulk of composition of the play had already taken place, probably at Coole in late summer 1901. Dramatic context. Te two speakers, Finn and Diarmuid (‘Diarmid’ in copy-text only) have been estranged ever since Diarmuid took Graine away from Finn on the day of her arranged marriage to him; Diarmuid, who had been one of Finn’s principal Fenian chiefains, thus broke the oath made to his king, and had been pursued by Finn, in search of revenge, for some years. Now, however, in the face of threats to Ireland from abroad, a reconciliation between Finn and Diarmuid is strategically necessary, and Grania has helped to bring the two together. To cement this supposed reconciliation, a formal ceremony is required, and is performed in front of the Fenians (Act II, CW 2, 505): Usheen: It is not enough for Finn and Diarmuid to drink together; they must be bound together by the blood bond. Tey must be made brothers before the gods. Tey must be bound together. Caoelte: Yes, yes, one of you there by the door – you Finmole – cut a sod of grass with your sword. Tey must be bound together. Diarmuid: [As he comes down the stage, he draws his sword]. Finn, draw blood out of your hand as I draw blood out of mine. [Finn pricks his hand with his dagger and goes towards Diarmuid and lets blood from his hand drop into Diarmuid’s cup. Diarmuid lets the blood from his hand drop into the cup also. He gives the cup to Finn]. Speak the holy words, Finn. At this point, the lines of the poem are used for the ritual binding of the two enemies. (Finn swears in bad faith, and goes on the break this bond: Diarmuid will die in Act II, with Finn refusing to come to his aid afer Diarmuid is gored by a ferocious wild boar.) Textual history. Tese lines frst appear in TS material for Diarmuid and Graine: there are three TSS, the earliest in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (TS1), the next in NLI (TS2), and the last in order of composition in the Berg Collection, NYPL (TS3): all three are transcribed in Cornell DG. Emory University’s Woodruf Library holds a sheet folded to make four pages, with WBY’s hol. version of these lines and ‘Spinning Song’ (MS): a note at the top by the poet saying ‘Hope these are legible, WBY’ may very well indicate that this was the MS sent to Jack Yeats for A Broad Sheet, where the poem was published on 1 Jan. 1902. It seems likely that MS postdates the play’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-10

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performance. A Broad Sheet was a large-format publication, which appeared monthly from Jan. 1902 to Dec. 1903 from the London publishing house of Elkin Mathews, under the editorship of Jack Yeats. Te illustrations were ofen by Jack Yeats himself, and were hand-coloured. In this frst issue, the top third of the page is occupied by an illustration by Pamela Colman Smith, with the lines by WBY underneath it. Among the proof sheets for the Dun Emer ISW are two pieces of what was a single proof sheet (NLI 30247, NLI 30246), which together contain a text of the poem (Proof); each is struck through by hand, and marked with a deletion symbol by WBY. Te poem did not appear in ISW, and was never republished by WBY. A version did appear posthumously, as part of Diarmuid and Graine, in Te Dublin Magazine (Apr.–Jun. 1951). Inclusion in and removal from ISW. In the preparation of ISW for Dun Emer, WBY was initially concerned that he did not have enough poetry to hand: it is probably in the light of this that his thoughts of including ‘Te Blood Bond’ should be viewed. Similarly, once the poet knew he had available a long new poem, ‘Te Happy Townland’ (originally ‘Te Rider from the North’), he was in a position to drop weaker material from the projected slim volume. D. Holdeman adopts broadly this explanation, though he also sees the poem as having a meaningful place in WBY’s initial design for the book, as its fnal lyric piece, as ‘a credible – though in some ways surprising – conclusion,’ since ‘Anyone familiar with the play would likely associate [the poem] with an empty, powerless ritual, and so might see it not as completing but rather as undermining or ironizing the movement toward unity’ (Holdeman, 89–90). Tis may be to read too much into an inclusion that never, afer all, took place. Copy-text: Proof. FINN This sod has bound us Like brother to brother, Like son to father.

Title] Tus in Proof. ‘Te Blood Bond, from ‘Grania,’ by George Moore and W.B. Yeats’ A Broad Sheet (this comes afer the lines and not before them, so is more in the nature of a reference than a title). No title MS. 1. sod] bond TS1, TS2, TS3, Dublin Magazine. WBY clearly makes the change to ‘sod’ in MS, which is followed by A Broad Sheet, and subsequently Proof. Te character Finmole has just been instructed by Caoelte to cut a sod of grass with his sword, so the change

is a coherent one (though a subsequent stage direction in the TS (and subsequently Te Dublin Magazine) would have to have been altered if this reading ever been introduced into a version of the play for publication, since the sod of grass is there handed through the window afer the completion of the bond ritual). R. Finneran debates the relative merits of both readings, but without knowledge of Proof, coming down nevertheless on the side of ‘sod’, which he adopts as the text in CW 1 (Finneran, 146).

THE BLOOD BOND

5

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Let him who breaks it Be driven from the threshold Of God-kind and Man-kind. DIARMID

10

Let the sea bear witness, Let the wind bear witness, Let the earth bear witness, Let the fre bear witness, Let the dew bear witness, Let the stars bear witness! FINN

15

Six that are deathless, Six holy creatures, Have witnessed the binding.

5. threshold] threshold ^s^ TS1; thresholds TS2, TS3, MS. Te singular ‘threshold’ is frst found in A Broad Sheet; the plural (which is more correct, since ‘God-kind’ and ‘man-kind’ presumably keep separate establishments) is entered in pencil to TS1, and uncorrected in TS2 and TS3; it is also present in MS (though incorrectly omitted in the Cornell ISWGH transcription), and it was perhaps easily missed by Jack Yeats or Elkin Mathews in setting the Broad Sheet text, assuming they were making use of MS for the purpose. However, the singular form is adopted in Proof, and is uncorrected there (where WBY’s sole intervention is the

wholesale deletion of the poem). It is likely that Proof was set directly from a copy of A Broad Sheet, thus preserving what might have been an earlier setting error in giving ‘threshold’ for the previous ‘thresholds’. Even so, this likelihood – or combination of likelihoods – is not sufcient to justify an emendation of the copy-text. 6. Man-kind] man-kind TS1, TS2, TS3, MS, A Broad Sheet. 12. witness!] A Broad Sheet and copy-text; witness. TS1, TS2, TS3; witness – MS. 15.] Let them witness the binding. TS1, changed by hand to Have witnessed the binding. binding] [braiding del.] binding MS.

194

SPINNING SONG Date and circumstances of composition. Te lines for this song were last-minute additions to WBY’s play Diarmuid and Graine, which he had written in close (and sometimes fraught) collaboration with GM over the period 1899–1901. Te frst production of the play took place in Dublin in Oct. 1901, with the Irish Literary Teatre. Some music was always envisaged, but words for songs came very late in the day. In a letter to WBY of 27 Jul., GM discussed the need for music which ‘would exalt the end of the play,’ and ‘carry it one degree higher than words could carry it,’ reminding him that ‘Tere are always moments when one art has to seek assistance from another art’. At this stage, though, GM did not know who could write the music: ‘I might ask Augusta Holmes to do it when I am in Paris, there are many others who will be glad to do it’ (LTWBY 1, 85). It was not until Aug. that a new composer was found, but this was something of a coup, since the composer was Edward Elgar, who started work on a horn-call sequence and a funeral march on 28 Sep. 1901. Elgar was asked additionally for a setting of some words by WBY, to be sung in Act 1, and these were sent to him by GM on 9 Oct. Te play itself was in rehearsal at this point, so it is likely that WBY was persuaded by GM of the need for a lyric to be sung by Laban, played by Lucy Franklein (whose acting was such that an increased musical role for her seemed advantageous). GM’s later account is characteristically vivid, and suggests composition by WBY at high speed (Salve (1912), 107–108): [WBY] ‘I see that Benson says that the lady who is going to play Laban has a beautiful voice, and he suggests that you might write to Elgar, asking him if he would contribute a song to the frst act.’ ‘Te more music we get from Elgar the better. Now, Yeats, if you’ll go home and write some verses and let me go on with the rehearsal, we’ll send them to Elgar tonight.’ Yeats said he would see what he could do, and, to my surprise, brought back that afernoon a very pretty unrhymed lyric, nothing, however, to do with the play. It was sent to Elgar, who sent back a very beautiful melody by return of post, and both went away to Benson and were forgotten until I went to the Gaiety Teatre with Yeats to a rehearsal of our play. Te lady that played Laban sang the lyric very well, but Schubert’s Ave Maria could not have been more out of place; as for the acting – Benson was right, the lady was not a tragic actress; even if she had been she could not have acted the part, so much was her appearance against her.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-11

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Te lines were certainly completed ahead of the play’s opening on 21 Oct. 1901 – though perhaps not very far ahead. Elgar’s full orchestral setting, along with the two instrumental pieces, was published by Novello in 1902 as his Op. 42: he also published in the same year ‘Spinning Song’ in a setting for voice and piano. Dramatic context. Te play Diarmuid and Graine was never published by either WBY or GM, and was for a long time considered lost. However, the version of the play that did eventually emerge in Te Dublin Magazine, deriving from a TS belonging to GM (and subsequently the basis for the text in VPl. and CW 2) did not include the lines of ‘Spinning Song’. Its place in the frst performance can be inferred from WBY’s TS copy, where it is entered by hand in Act One (see Textual history): here, Graine takes from Laban cups of ale that are laced with a sleeping drug, by which means which the Fianna will be immobilized while Graine and Diarmuid elope: Laban. Here are two fagons that I have made sleepy – but no – I will make a spell over them. Do all that I bid you Pour sleep in the ale horns That all that have drunk them May sleep as on pillows Till cock crow at morning. Give them this ale and they will sleep till cockcrow. [Here WBY inserts MS2 version of ‘Spinning Song’ by hand in the TS.] Te fve lines of verse already spoken by Laban in the script were to be expanded into a song, with ‘Spinning Song’ the result. However, there had in fact been earlier attempts at this. In an earlier TS (Berg, transcribed in Cornell DG, 139), Laban has six lines rather than the later fve: By fre and wave and wind Do all things to my mind Pour sleep in cup and horn That every sleepy head Sleep as upon a bed Till the cock crow in the morn. (Earlier still, the ffh line here had been ‘Lie low as on its bed’.) Abandoned version of Laban’s lines. Two pages of TS (Berg) carry what may be WBY’s frst attempt at fnding lines for Laban at the pouring out of the enchanted ale. It is likely that these were in place until the decision was taken to have Elgar set a short song: here, Laban merely ‘half murmurs half sings’. Te TS pages seem to have passed through GM’s hands, since lines 5–14 are deleted by him. It would be misleading to regard the verses of these pages as an early version of ‘Spinning Song’ – they are not that, but rather are what ‘Spinning Song’ was written to replace. Nevertheless, they are given here as relevant background to the poem. A transcription is in Cornell DG, 1011–1012.

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While Grania is pouring out the enchanted ale in the frst act Laban steals up the stage watching her all the while, and while watching her Laban half murmurs half sings: – The Fianna are drinking The enchanted ale, And Diarmuid will carry Grania away. A fountain is fowing In the deeps of the sea, And no man’s bonds Can stay the waters Of the life-giving fountain, Of the fountain that brings The nuts of the hazel, Of the fountain whose waters Cast the nuts of the hazel On the shores of the world. Now Cormac has drunken And he nods in his chair, His wisdom is drowned In the ale, in the ale, And the white head is nodding . . . The ale works well. Now Grania is flling Finn’s ale-cup with ale. (Finn lifts up the cup) He has drunken and lost her For seven long years, The others are holding Their ale-cups for ale. Now Goll has drunken. All soon will be sleeping And the lovers will fy Through woods and through mountain And Finn’s sword shall never Cut the thread I am weaving The long, long thread That a Boar’s tusk shall break. (She takes a thread from her distaf) Finn will pursue them Year after year,

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This is their thread, The thread of my distaf. (She goes out) Textual history. In the TS copy of the play belonging to WBY, which was used by him in preparation for the frst performance, a hol. addition contains the lines of the poem, with a mark of insertion at the relevant point (see Dramatic context). Te TS is in the Berg Collection, NYPL, and is repr. and transcribed in the Cornell DG, 864–865 (MS1). A copy of Samhain – the frst number of this theatrical publication, which appeared just ahead of the frst production of the play, around 15 Oct. 1901 – contains numerous sketches of the play in performance, and of its audience, by Jack Yeats. Tere are illustrations and caricatures also by George Russell and Alice Milligan. A number of people have autographed this copy, including AG, Edward Dowden, and John O’Leary, but there is no autograph from WBY. As well as this, a text of ‘Spinning Song’ is entered in hol. (MS2): this is in a clear, legible hand that seems unlikely to belong to WBY (and resembles Jack Yeats’s). Te lines have ‘W.B. Yeats’ underneath, but this is in the same hand, and is a record of authorship rather than a signature. Te annotated copy of Samhain is also held in the Berg Collection; MS2 is repr. and transcribed in Cornell DG, 1018–1019. Te poem appeared in A Broad Sheet, publ. on 1 Jan 1902, and accompanied by a small illustration by Jack Yeats of an old woman spinning, and another (probably his also) of the sun, the moon, and the elements. (A drawing by Jack Yeats of Lucy Franklein as Laban is in a separate notebook of the artist’s in the Berg Collection: this is reproduced in Cornell DG, 1074, and entitled there ‘Te Spinner’.) Edward Elgar set the words to music, and this was published in Jul. 1902 by Novello as Tere Are Seven Tat Pull Te Tread: Song in Act I ‘Grania and Diarmid’. Elgar’s setting as published contains a number of variants: some of these are plainly matters of musical decision (e.g. line 5), but others may derive from a MS sent to the composer in Oct. 1901, and are therefore recorded as variants (Elgar). ‘Spinning Song’ was never republished by WBY. Copy-text: A Broad Sheet. There are seven that pull the thread. One lives under the waves,

1. seven that pull the thread] In Act 1 of Diarmuid and Grania, the frst mention of these spinners comes from the Boy (CW 2, 560): ‘I have heard that there are women who live seven hundred years in the woods, spinning the threads of the long lived people of the woods, and then seven hundred years spinning for men’.

2.] [Tere is one where the winds are del.] Tere is one lives under the waves MS1; [One lives del.] ^Tere is one that is^ under the wave[s del.] MS2. (Tis deletion of the last letter of ‘waves’ is the only feature of the changes in MS2 that looks plausibly like an authorial one; but WBY has the plural in both MS1 and A Broad Sheet, which avoids

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And one where the winds are wove, And one in the old gray house Where the dew is made before dawn; One lives in the house of the sun, And one in the house of the moon, And one lives under the boughs Of the golden apple tree; And one spinner is lost. Holiest, holiest seven, Put all your power on the thread I have spun in the house this night!

too close a relation to ‘wove’ in 3.) Tere is one under the waves, Elgar. 3. And one] Tere is one Elgar. 4. And one] Tere is one Elgar. the old gray house] Perhaps cp. the sentimental nostalgia of John K. Casey, A Wreath of Shamrocks (1866), ‘By the Sea’, 9: ‘An old gray house beside the sea’. 5. Where the dew is made] Where the dew, where the dew is made Elgar. 6.] Tis line is altered, slightly confusingly, in MS2: the writer begins with the word ‘One’, crosses this out, and starts the line again with ‘And’, continuing to produce ‘And in the house of the sun’. Over the cancelled false start of ‘One’, the writer then places ‘And’, deletes the existing ‘And’, afer which a caret inserts ‘one lives’: ‘lives’ is in turn deleted.

Te line fnally must be read as ‘And one in the house of the sun’ – but the omission of the verb ‘lives’ is problematic, a syntactic loss not made good in the lines that follow. Tese corrections seem more characteristic of mistakes made and put (almost) right by someone copying the text, rather than compositional changes. the house of the sun] Cp. Sir Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Red Branch (1897), ‘Deirdre’s Farewell to Alba (From the Irish)’, 1: ‘Fairwell to Fair Alba, high house of the Sun’. 8. lives] lies Elgar. 11. Holiest, holiest] Holiest, holiest, holiest MS2 (again, this may be a mistake in copying rather than an authorial variant). 12. power on] might del. power in MS1. 13.] Tat I’ve spun in the house tonight. Elgar.

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THE FOLLY OF BEING COMFORTED Date and circumstances of composition. WBY wrote to AG on 22 Dec. 1901, informing her that ‘I have written a new lyric – quite a good one’ (CL 3, 138), and (as the editors of CL 3 suggest) this is likely to refer to the present poem. Te poet’s letter to AG of 22 Dec. makes no mention of MG, but WBY was in personal contact with her around the time of composition. MG passed through London in Dec. on her way to Dublin, and according to a police report (quoted by the editors of G-YL) on 23 Dec. she was ‘seen of at Euston Station by a man of Teatrical appearance and glasses, presumably W.B. Yeats of London’ (G-YL, 146). Textual and publication history. A fair copy MS in WBY’s hand with corrections may or may not pre-date the poem’s frst publication: this is reproduced with transcription in Cornell ISWGH, 44–45 (MS). Te poem is written in blue ink on a single sheet of good quality paper, with two corrections in ink and one more substantial correction entered in pencil by WBY (see note on 3). Tis MS is now held in the Special Collections of University College Dublin (Joseph Hassett Collection). Te poem was frst published in Te Speaker 11 Jan. 1902 (S), and then in ISW; it was next included in P99–05, and in all subsequent collected editions. WBY made substantial revisions to lines 5–7 frst in LP22 and again in SP29 (see notes). Like other such revisions, these occasioned some measure of protest from readers, and a letter from WBY to Cecil French (5 Jan. 1923) confesses that ‘I do not know if you are right or wrong about ‘Folly of Being Comforted’: someone else has also objected to the change which was as you say under the slaughter’ (InteLex, 4251). Reception and critical discussion. H.C. Beeching in Te Bookman for Nov. 1906, classed the poem (along with ‘Never Give All the Heart’) as one of WBY’s ‘poems of moods,’ warning that ‘though excellently written’ these were ‘not moods which the wise world cares long to entertain’. Te same pair of poems, however, had impressed T. Sturge Moore mightily, and he wrote to WBY in 1906 to say they were ‘the best of their kind ever written’ (Moore, 10). A reviewer for Te Athenaeum (15 Dec. 1906) grouped the piece with ‘Adam’s Curse’ as one of the ‘exquisite little poems . . . whence it would almost seem that Mr. Yeats is a victim to the law whereby even a literary movement requires its martyrs’. In 1940, T.S. Eliot also put the poem alongside ‘Adam’s Curse’, calling it a ‘very lovely poem’, where ‘something is coming through, and in beginning to speak as a particular man he is beginning to speak for man’ (Complete Prose, vol. 6, 81). For J. Hone, the poem was to be classed among what he called a ‘middle-aged group’ of items in ISW ‘in which [WBY] gave personal expression to early experience,’ though these were ‘of a kind very DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-12

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diferent from those in Te Wind Among the Reeds’: ‘Now he is more pointed, epigrammatic and colloquial’ (Hone, 188). A.N. Jefares read the sonnet biographically, as one in which ‘the strain of [WBY’s] hopeless passion vibrates through the poem in answer to the note of realism with which it opens’ (Jefares, 128). WBY voiced some of his own thoughts on the poem when he included it in a BBC reading of his ‘Poems About Women’ on 10 Apr. 1932. Here, he described it as ‘more dramatic, more personal’ [than the preceding piece, ‘His Phoenix’] because ‘a defnite man is speaking’: ‘it was written when I was old enough to know what I felt, to stand outside myself as it were, and look at myself ’. Te state of afairs prevailing before this point is explained by WBY in the refection that ‘When we are young we do not know what we feel, we cannot stand outside ourselves and look at ourselves, we live in dreams and express ourselves through a kind of mythology, or at any rate I so lived and so expressed myself ’. (See W. Gould, ‘W.B. Yeats’s ‘Poems about Women: A Broadcast’’, Toomey, 391–392). In modern critical discussion, H. Bloom continued to set the poem alongside ‘Adam’s Curse’, judging that it shows, at a period of WBY’s work where little was wholly successful, ‘some success in an against-the-grain mode’. Noting that ‘To the heart, the autumnal beauty of Maud Gonne is more Promethean for its antithetical defance of mere natural decay,’ Bloom nevertheless concluded that ‘Not only [WBY’s] spirit, but his imagination and sense of possible sublimity, are too limited by this mode,’ and ‘the poignant lyric ends with an outcry that belies itself, for the heart will know the folly of comfort whether the beloved turns her head or not’ (Bloom, 164). In more recent treatments, the poem has ofen become the site of a competition between WBY’s head and his heart; this takes for granted a good deal of biographical resonance. E. Cullingford reads the poem as primarily WBY’s ‘rejection of the assumption’ that ‘a woman’s worth is coterminous with her beauty’; here ‘the older woman inspires a devotion unlinked to the fawless skin and auburn hair of the young beauty,’ and this turning away from the conventions of a Petrarchan sonnet is a sign that WBY’s ‘insecure masculinity prevented him from employing the sexually cynical poetics of the carpe diem mode’ (Cullingford, 23–24). It is not clear either that ‘insecure masculinity’ can be this closely afxed to a poetic trope, or that it is obviously something to be reasonably attributed to WBY on the sole basis of his failing to employ that trope here. Nevertheless, critics have not been slow to move beyond what this poem says, and into questions of how best to evaluate the beauty belonging to the actual MG of whom it speaks (though the sonnet in fact makes no such requirement of a reader). D. Holdeman’s contention that ‘the beloved’s new beauty is charged with political as well as sexual potency’ may be a little in excess of the poem’s evidence, but it is plausible to say that WBY ‘refuses both to abstract her inner beauty from her physical being, and to be content with the division between his own heart and head’ (Holdeman, 74). M. Howes goes further, and claims that the poem ‘praises, but also gently satirizes, the ideal of an inexhaustible passion,’ doubting the fnality of views ascribed by WBY to the ‘heart’, and seeing irony in the fnal couplet: ‘to “know the folly of being comforted” also means to “know” comfort in the sense of being comforted, even though it is folly – and, indeed, if she turned her head, he would see her ageing face’ (Howes and Kelly, 7). Tis presupposes

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much – surely too much – about the face of a woman in her mid-thirties; and it assumes too readily WBY’s attitude towards her face, ‘ageing’ or otherwise. Yet many critical readings attribute to the poem far more in the way of the beloved’s advancing years than it really warrants. For R. Greaves, ‘Te particular comfort that is ofered is one that twists the knife of the knowledge that the beloved has aged and will die (and reopens the wound of how the realization of the mortality, the humanity, of his beloved has been forced on the poet)’ (Greaves, 47). Te difculty of accounting for the various possible resonances of WBY’s fnal couplet is partly that of separating what H. Adams calls ‘the reason’ and ‘the heart’ once the ‘division’ between them breaks down: ‘It just isn’t that simple, and an important part of the poem is the attribution of deep feeling to the reasoning self, as if the passion were so powerful that even the reason is captured by it’ (Adams, 81). For G. Bornstein, the poem that ‘grew out of yet another attempt by Augusta Gregory to wean him [WBY] out of his famous addiction to Maud Gonne’ ‘shows a marked gain in energy and vigour from the pre-1900 poetry’: ‘Te poem clearly situates itself in the real and contemporary world of men and women rather than the mythic or archaic realms of his earlier verse. Te down-to-earth diction supports that, while the enjambed lines help move it closer to actual speech’ (‘W.B. Yeats’s Poetry of Ageing’, Sewanee Review 120/1 (Winter 2012), 50–51). Discussion of this poem’s form might seem all the more necessary when one considers that it is WBY’s frst attempt at the sonnet since some poems of his juvenilia. In early printings, the poem formed a single fourteen-line block and, despite its being constructed entirely of rhyming couplets, was still instantly recognisable as an exercise in the sonnet form. Te only substantial modern criticism along formal lines comes from H. Vendler, who writes that WBY ‘constructs, to mimic conversation, an architectonic structure that is neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean, dividing the poem into two sixains and a couplet’. However (Vendler, 158): Te debate here does not take place within the lover himself, but rather between the persuading friend and the rebutting lover. Te lover has never been persuaded at all: ‘But heart there is no comfort, not a grain.’ Given the absence of an internal quarrel, a division of the heart itself into warring factions, ‘Te Folly of Being Comforted,’ for all its fourteen lines, lacks the antithetical perspectives of a true sonnet. At this point, although Yeats remains attracted to the brevity and concision of the quatorzain, he is not yet willing to face and reproduce emotional contradictions within the speaker that the multiple parts of a sonnet exist to make formally evident. Vendler’s tests for a sonnet here are perhaps too strict, and if applied thus would debar more poems than just this of WBY’s from attaining the status of a ‘true sonnet’. Although its rhyme-scheme obviously means that the poem is neither a Petrarchan nor a Shakespearean sonnet as usually understood, the epigrammatic energy and concision of the fnal couplet at least establishes a line of formal afnity with the Shakespearean form and its characteristic closing efect. In a kind of abolition of so much of what has been

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argued in the rest of the poem, WBY’s fnal couplet records the very same emotional temperature against which ‘One that is ever kind’ has been – kindly enough – advising. Te sonnet could well be read, therefore, as deeply traditional, and even Shakespearean, in its tendency: arguments against love are given their full rhetorical weight, but are refuted by the diferent eloquence of love itself, in a ‘heart’ that cannot be argued into changing. Te poem was set as a song by Ivor Gurney, and the setting publ. in his Second Volume of Ten Songs (1938); it ofen features in performances of Gurney’s vocal music.

Title] In his unpublished ‘Autobiography’ of 1916–1917, WBY’s account of his initial approaches to intimacy with Olivia Shakespear, and of what he mistakenly had assumed to be her sexual promiscuity (something he aligned with her cousin Lionel Johnson’s alcoholism), asked the rhetorical question, ‘What is there lef but sanctity, or some satisfying afection, or mere dissipation? – ‘Folly the comforter,’ some Elizabethan had called it’ (Mem, 85). Efort has been spent in searching for this ‘Elizabethan’ source (without any convincing success), but in fact WBY encountered the phrase in a poem by Arthur Symons. Tis was ‘Mundi Victima’, which frst appeared in Te Savoy in 1896, and subsequently in Symons’s Amoris Victima (1897). WBY mentioned the piece in his review of this volume in Te Bookman (Apr. 1897), calling it ‘a poem in heroic couplets divided into eleven sections of irregular length’ (CW 9, 332). Te poem is a long one; but WBY will have read far enough into it to fnd ‘Folly the Comforter’ (XI, 23–32): Yet, if it might but save my soul from her, O come to me, Folly the Comforter, Fling those wild arms around me, take my hand, And lead me back to that once longed-for land, Where it is always midnight, and the light Of many tapers has burnt out the night, And swif life fnds no moment set apart

For rest, and the seclusion of the heart, And the return of any yesterday. Come to me, Folly, now, take me away [. . .] It seems doubtful whether ‘some Elizabethan’ is even in question; for if ‘Folly the Comforter’ is an infuence on WBY’s title, the real source is almost certainly Symons. More interesting is the fact that the later ‘Autobiography’ uses this phrase in the context of Olivia Shakespear and (more generally) of the ‘decadents’ of the 1890s: while MG seems very likely to be the poem’s ‘well-belovèd’, it is possible that Olivia is not completely out of the poet’s mind. Neither woman, in fact, seems all that good a candidate for the poem’s grey hairs and facial wrinkles: MG was 35 years of age in Dec. 1901, and Olivia Shakespear would not be 37 for another three months (see note on 2–3). 1. One that is ever kind] Critics have generally taken this to be a reference to AG. Tis may well be so, but there is no corroborating evidence; and the identity of the ‘kind’ speaker is in any case not relevant to the business of the poem. ‘Ever kind’ is not entirely uncomplicated: it may be without reservation, and an assertion of habitual kindness; it may, at another extreme, be heavily ironic, and in pointed contrast to the observations in 2–3; or it may conceal some degree of reservation in ‘ever’, according the word a sense of ‘usually’, so that this potentially unkind remark

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Copy-text: P49. One that is ever kind said yesterday: ‘Your well-belovèd’s hair has threads of grey, And little shadows come about her eyes; is an exception to the rule. Te little phrase did also have a literary resonance for WBY: writing to AG on 12 Dec. 1900, he recounted Althea Gyles’s sorrow for Oscar Wilde: ‘She said, ‘he was so kind, nobody ever lived who was so kind’. As she said it I thought of Homer’s description of the captive women ‘weeping in seeming for Patroclus yet each weeping for her own sorrow because he was ever kind’’ (CL 2, 603). (WBY’s memory of Homer here relies to the prose translation of Iliad 19 by A. Lang, W. Leaf and E. Myers (1883), 395.) 2. threads of grey] a thread of grey S. Perhaps cp. C.G. Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), ‘Goblin Market’, 540: ‘Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey’. 2–3.] Although the observation in these lines is made by ‘One that is ever kind’, it may seem to be slightly on the wrong side of charitable in its intent: any kindness, evidently, is directed towards the speaker rather than his ‘well-belovèd’. Identifying MG as the object of these remarks, D. Toomey comments that ‘the concern with her deterioration was premature’ (Toomey, 16). 3.] And there are little creases about her eyes S; [And there are crows feet round del.] ^And little shadows come [about del]^ about her eyes MS. In this case, there seems to be a case for supposing MS later than the published version in S, and this may be true also of line 13 (see note). Te tactful diction of ‘little creases’ in S is more tactful still in the ‘little shadows’ of ISW and afer (for which, perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘At Eleusis’, 78–79 [of Persephone]: ‘red fowers | Made their sharp little shadows on her sides’). But ‘crow’s feet’, WBY’s rejected thought, is altogether more frank (OED 1., ‘the small wrinkles formed by age or anxiety round the outer corner of the eye’), and for the efect cp. e.g. F.W. Orde,

Confessions of a Poet (1894), ‘Home Sickness’, 55–56: ‘Te crow’s feet and the wrinkle | Which decline to be concealed’. If MS is prior to the S text, then ‘crow’s feet’ was WBY’s frst (albeit rejected) thought; if it is later than S, the thought comes frst as a correction to the gentility of S, and is then quickly subsumed by more genteel diction again. Whenever ‘crow’s feet’ was rejected, the reading seems to have had some kind of limited currency: in Jun. 1904, H.W. Nevinson attended the opening of Hugh Lane’s Irish paintings exhibition at the Guildhall in Dublin, and evidently witnessed a conversational performance from a fellow attendee who ‘talked Ireland well’. Tis was Maurice Joy, a part-time journalist and a writer of verse, whose relations with WBY (his near-contemporary) had always been strained. Joy spoke of the present poem, citing ‘little crowsfeet’ as an early reading: ‘You must alter that or people’ll think it’s Lady Gregory’, said Maud Gonne. ‘Tat was the frst time I knew she was human’, said Yeats. (See R. Schuchard, ‘An Attendant Lord: H.W. Nevinson’s Friendship with W.B. Yeats’, YA 7, 110.) Although much of this should probably be put down to Joy’s malicious feelings towards WBY, and has the feel of a long-rehearsed (but not necessarily true) anecdote, the story relies on the ‘crow’s feet’ variant reading which the MS shows to have been – at one stage – the text of the poem. Tis is certainly not information which Joy could have had at frst hand; but it does suggest strongly that the reading was known in WBY’s circle, and was remembered there. When MS was frst written out as a fair copy, the line containing this reading was in ink; subsequently, it was altered by WBY in pencil to produce the fnal ISW version. It is possible that the fair copy, or others very like it, circulated before the correction was made.

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Time can but make it easier to be wise Though now it seem impossible, and so All that you need is patience.’ Heart cries, ‘No, I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. Time can but make her beauty over again: Because of that great nobleness of hers

Tis story of Joy’s has had considerable staying power, and in R. Foster’s account, WBY in the line ‘described the decay of [MG’s] physical beauty’: ‘He had originally written of ‘crowsfeet’ around her eyes, but she objected on the disingenuous grounds that readers would assume he meant AG’ (Foster 1, 301). On a more general level, and more importantly in terms of literary efect, D. Toomey notes how with this detail ‘the abandonment of courtly idealisation is striking’ (Toomey, 16). 4, 8. Time can but make] With the construction here, cp. Byron, ‘Stanzas: Could love for ever’ (1819), 84–85: ‘Time can but cloy love | And use destroy love’. 4. easier to be wise] An echo here of Tomas Parnell, Poems on Several Occasions (1722), ‘An Elegy, to an Old Beauty’, though probably a coincidence, is nevertheless an apt one: ‘But Beauty gone, ’tis easier to be wise’ (41). 5–6.] SP29, CP33. Tough now it is hard, till trouble is at an end; | And so be [wise del.] patient, wise and patient friend.’ MS; Tough now it’s hard, till trouble is at an end; | And so be patient; be wise and patient, friend.’ S, ISW-SP21. In LP22–26 and LP 31 the lines are: Patience is all that you have need of.’ No, In the page-proofs for SP29 (NLI 30009), WBY at one point tries ‘I answered ‘No’’, before cancelling this in favour of ‘Heart cries, ‘No’’. Tis bout of revision perplexed T. Sturge Moore, who in an essay of afer 1929 (not published in his lifetime) charted the various changes, deploring their turn towards ‘the

words, neither true, nor kind, attributed [. . .] to the ever kind friend,’ who ‘seems to have changed character, but, of course the poet is merely recollecting what was said yesterday, and wishes to make the words hurt him more that those actually used could.’ Moore concludes that ‘Te new couplet is the least musical in the poem, and I prefer the more credible report of the friend’s kind words, in spite of their possibly too facile melody, though I may be the richer for having read both.’ See T. Sturge Moore, “Do We or Do We Not, Know It?’: an Unpublished Essay on W.B. Yeats’, YA 4, 149. 7.] SP29, CP33. But heart there is no comfort, not a grain; MS, S-LP26. 8.] Perhaps cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘Woman: Te Light of Home’, II, 619–622 [on Petrarch and Laura]: Adorner of the human race! Great Nature’s rival, who could trace Her features with such perfect skill Tat Time can but remould them still. E. Cullingford (23) sees this line as a rejection of more conventional sonnet-poetry rhetoric, since it ‘challenges Shakespeare’s basic premise, which is that nothing but art or procreation can withstand the depredations of ‘Devouring Time’’ [in Shakespeare, Sonnet 19: ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paw’]. 9. that great nobleness] Perhaps cp. W.H. Davies, Songs of a Wayfarer (1869), ‘Te Dark Veil’, 9–10 [of Nature]: ‘he who looks upon her with an eye | Clear in the faith of her great nobleness’. hers] hers; MS, S-PSS, SP21.

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The fre that stirs about her, when she stirs, Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways When all the wild summer was in her gaze.’ O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head, You’d know the folly of being comforted.

11. but more] but [the del.] more MS. 12^13.] No break in any texts until SP29. 13. O heart! O heart!] O heart O heart S-ISW. Tis doubling of a very common poetic address to the heart is unusual, but not unprecedented: partly, cp. E.B. Barrett, Te Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), ‘Te Seraphim’, I, 266: ‘O heart – O heart of man!’ T. Brown, for whom ISW ‘is a book of the body’ hears in this an instance of the volume’s recurrent motif of hearts beating: ‘Te efect is to make the repeated beats in the poem’s fnal couplet seem much more than an exploitation of an all-too familiar trope’ (Brown, 148).

if she’d but] if she ^’d^ but turn[ed del.] MS; if she would but turn S. 14. you’d know] you would know MS, S. H. Adams points to the signifcance of the verb here: ‘in that moment the heart would know, not just feel, that the friend’s comfort was for nothing’ (Adams, 81). comforted] WBY’s fnal rhyme is designedly muted: against the strong stress (and end-stopping) of ‘head’, the last syllable of ‘comforted’, which does not carry any signifcant stress of its own, creates an aurally downbeat ending. In the process, the idea of being comforted becomes weaker than ‘her head’ which, turned or not, is something more than just an idea.

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THE PLAYERS ASK FOR A BLESSING ON THE PSALTERIES AND ON THEMSELVES Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was composed specifcally for a recital event, featuring Florence Farr and WBY, to demonstrate and promote the chanting of lyric poetry to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, the psaltery. Tis took place in London at Cliford’s Inn Hall (on Fleet Street) on 10 Jun. 1902, and the poem was composed very shortly beforehand. In a letter to Arnold Dolmetsch, 3 Jun. 1902, WBY wrote that ‘I am writing a ‘Prayer to the Seven Archangels to bless the Seven Notes,’’ and explained that ‘Tis prayer is to be spoken frst by two voices and then by one voice, then the other voice, and then two voices again’ (CL 3, 194–195). In a journal entry for 5 Jun. 1902, ‘Michael Field’ (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) recorded a dinner with T. Sturge Moore and WBY, where ‘Yeats reads a little prayer to the psaltery – a most charming poem – All the Archangels appear in it, with shoes of the seven metals’ (British Library). It is noteworthy here that the poem was evidently quite diferent only a few days before performance, still at that point featuring Archangels and metals; and no record survives to show that it was not indeed presented in this earlier form on 10 Jun. However, if the TS copy in the Berg collection was produced by AG (as is likely), it would appear that the poem was in substantially its fnal form by 16 Jun., when WBY wrote to AG enclosing ‘a copy of verses,’ which ‘are a prayer for blessings upon the Psaltery, and were spoken at my lecture the other night,’ adding that ‘I don’t think the last two or three lines are quite right yet’ (CL 3, 203). WBY and the psaltery. A psaltery is defned by OED as ‘An ancient or medieval stringed instrument with a sounding board or box, similar to the dulcimer but played by plucking the strings with the fngers or a plectrum. Also: a modern development or imitation of this.’ It is the ‘modern development’ of the instrument by Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) which is referred to in the title of the poem. At the beginning of Feb. 1902, WBY sent to the Monthly Review an essay, ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ (publ. May 1902), which explored the capacities of the psaltery as an accompaniment to the kind of verserecital style favoured by Florence Farr, with committed enthusiasm: ‘I, at any rate, from this out mean to write all my longer poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for the psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to my good resolutions’ (CW 4, 17). WBY wrote here also of how Dolmetsch ‘made us [WBY and Florence Farr] a beautiful DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-13

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instrument, half psaltery, half lyre, which contains, I understand, all the chromatic intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he taught us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes’ (CW 4, 14). Te Dolmetsch psaltery existed in prototype by Jul. 1901, and made its debut in public performance in Nov. 1901 in Florence Farr and Olivia Shakespear’s play Te Beloved of Hathor. By Feb. 1902, WBY and Farr were laying on private performances of chanting to the psaltery at Woburn Buildings, and enthusiasm rose towards the point of the recital that Jun. Te original psaltery, which had 26 strings made from steel and brass, was made from satinwood, with an inlaid rose design on the sound box, and ivory over the string bars. Tis was the most elaborate and costly example (Dolmetsch had spent £10 on materials): by Jun., at least two further (and less expensive) instruments were in Farr’s hands. Reaction to the public performance was mixed: Te Graphic for Jun. 14 complained that ‘Te recitation menace in private life is bad enough, but if we are likely to have poets with psalteries turned on unexpectedly to declaim their own poems another terror will be added to social life’. Te name of this instrument was strange enough to add to the general air of novelty as well as (it appears) to generate a degree of good-natured amusement. Ahead of the frst recital, Te Manchester Guardian noted that ‘the lecture (can such an announcement really be made gravely?) is to be given to start a fund for the making of psalteries . . . Magnifcent! With perhaps half-a-dozen people in England knowing what a psaltery is’ (23 May 1902). Afer the event (and with further such events in prospect), the ‘London Letter’ of Te New York Times found further witticisms to make (21 Jun. 1902): And what is a ‘psaltery’ of the species that Mr. Yeats intends to use? Has it anything to do with the Psalms of David, or is it some variety of fddle? Mr. Yeats’s entertainment ought to draw a large audience, and if in addition to speaking to musical notes, and illustrating his poems with a psaltery, he were to enliven the lecture by reading from a trapeze, he would still further increase the attractions of the show – if that is the proper name for his entertainment. ‘Psaltery’ caused merriment even in the pages of Te Nonconformist Musical Journal (Aug. 1902): ‘But the psaltery! I like that word. It reminds me, somehow, of the butler in a country house, who, when a guest asked him if there were a psalter about the place, promptly brought the salt-cellar.’ Condiments apart, the word’s association with the Psalms of David might have been compounded for WBY with the notion of the instrument on which the king played in J.C. Mangan’s Poems (1903), ‘Te Hundred-Leafed Rose’, 37: ‘Like David King on the psaltery playing’. In a very early poem, [‘When to its end o’er ripened July nears. . .’] (1884), the young WBY had used ‘psaltery’ to mean ‘psalter’ (147: and see note in vol. 1 of present edition), but this was little more than a happy coincidence of ignorance and metre. Much more esoterically, the twelfh-century theologian Joachim of Fiore was author of Psalterium Decem Cordarum (Te Psaltery of Ten Strings), and it is possible that WBY had come across this title. (WBY’s awareness of Joachim in the later 1890s had an impact on some of his short fction, and a full account of this and later infuences is to be found in W. Gould and M. Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel (2001), Ch. 9.) In 1902, WBY was certainly still interested in the mystical

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possibilities and symbolism of the instrument itself, which might in some ways be seen as a natural continuation of the work of Forgael’s and Aengus’s magical harp in TSW: it could be argued that the idea of the psaltery was for the poet a more potent thing than the musical and practical details of the instrument itself. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the experiments had a lasting efect on WBY’s own style of recitation. Although the programme of chanting and accompanied vocal experiment using the psaltery carried on for some time, and had particular infuence on WBY’s drama, the extent of its success and importance in his lyric poetry is open to debate. Te settings of several poems chanted by Farr continued to be printed at various points in WBY’s works, but apart from these, the most lasting legacy in WBY’s oeuvre is probably this poem. R. Schuchard, whose chapter ‘London Minstrels’ in his Te Last Minstrels provides a comprehensive and illuminating account of the psaltery experiments, calls this ‘one of [WBY’s] most puzzling poems for later readers,’ just as it – and perhaps its whole context of performances – was difcult for the poet’s contemporaries: ‘Most of Yeats’s friends were of course unaware of the magical and symbolical associations of the psaltery for him [. . .] but his poetic consecration of the psaltery in the poem made sacred for him the instrument that had gradually become the central symbol of his bardic, priestly art’ (Schuchard, 68). Textual history. Te earliest surviving text is a single sheet of TS in the Berg collection, NYPL (repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 84). Were it not for this TS (assuming it was a version produced by AG when WBY sent her a copy of the verses on 16 Jun.), the poem might have been lost entirely. Compiling ISW at the beginning of 1903, and looking for material to add weight to the slim lyric portion of the volume, WBY had to approach Florence Farr for a copy: she evidently provided this, but by 6 Jan. WBY was writing to AG, asking ‘Have you a copy of that poem which I wrote for three speakers [. . .] I wrote to Mrs. Emery for a copy and she sent me what I am afraid is her only one and I am afraid I have lost it’ (CL 3, 299). Proof-sheets for the Dun Emer ISW contain the poem, which appeared in that volume and subsequently in all collected editions by WBY. Copy-text: P49. Three Voices [together]. Hurry to bless the hands that play, The mouths that speak, the notes and strings, O masters of the glittering town! O! lay the shrilly trumpet down,

Title.] No title TS. 3. the glittering town] Although R. Ellmann thought this may be an ‘irreligious name’ for ‘some kind of existence which is changeless and immortal’ (Identity, 48), the poem’s genesis and frst occasion argue strongly for

Cliford’s Inn Hall, and London more generally, as the more mundane scene of the nightlife in question. 4. shrilly trumpet] ‘Shrilly’ is a poeticism for ‘shrill’. Cp. e.g. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Te Bridal of Triermain’, XIV, 3: ‘A shrilly trumpet shook the ground’.

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Though drunken with the fags that sway Over the ramparts and the towers, And with the waving of your wings. First Voice. Maybe they linger by the way. One gathers up his purple gown; One leans and mutters by the wall – He dreads the weight of mortal hours. Second Voice. O no, O no! they hurry down Like plovers that have heard the call.

15

Third Voice. O kinsmen of the Three in One, O kinsmen, bless the hands that play. The notes they waken shall live on When all this heavy history’s done; Our hands, our hands must ebb away.

5–6.] It is likely (especially if the ‘glittering town’ of line 3 is identifed with London) that these lines absorb the city landscape as it was during the preparations for the coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra, which was scheduled for Jun. 26 (though it did not in fact take place until Aug., owing to the King’s appendicitis in Jun.) 8.] Perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Marmion’ I, xxix, 5–6: ‘But I have solemn vows to pay, | And may not linger by the way’. 9. his purple gown] WBY was persuaded of purple’s utility as dramatic costume: when Florence Farr had played in Te Countess Cathleen in its Dublin production (8 May 1899), she had found the specifed clothes ‘trying’: ‘You see Yeats had insisted on my wearing mauve – a most trying colour – [. . .] and over that a great common purple cloak’ (Charles Ricketts, Diary (British Library), quoted in Schuchard, 49).

14–15.] Possibly this reference to ‘the Tree in One’, which clearly aligns these ‘kinsmen’ with Christian religious worship, is a remnant of the presence of the ‘Seven Archangels’ in WBY’s initial conception for the poem (see Date and circumstances of composition). 17. this heavy history] What this ‘history’ may be is obscure (though it may perhaps nod again towards the Jun. 1902 coronation); the phrase itself, however, has a Shakespearean ring: cp. e.g the last line of Othello (V ii 435): ‘Tis heavy act with heavy heart relate’. 18, 20. ebb away] Te phrase is in this context arrestingly unusual. It is worth remembering that what it means – essentially, ‘pass away’ – was the keynote of WBY’s conclusion to his letter to Te Academy, publ. on 7 Jun., 1902, in response to Arthur Symons’s criticisms of ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’: ‘No art can pass away for ever, till the human nature it once delighted has passed away, and that can hardly be until Michael’s trumpet’ (CL 3, 197).

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20

Three Voices [together]. The proud and careless notes live on, But bless our hands that ebb away.

19–20.] WBY later inscribed these lines in the copy of R16 given to T. Sturge Moore (University of London Library). Around 1929, WBY may well have been behind a commission from Cuala industries for designs featuring these lines from the artist Brigid O’Brien

Ganley. Two of these were executed as embroideries by Lily Yeats, featuring in each case three fgures wielding stringed instruments, including an upside-down Dolmetsch psaltery (now in Burns collection, Boston College).

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THE ARROW Date of composition. Te poem was probably begun in Aug. 1902: what looks like a frst draf (see Text and publication history) is on the same piece of paper used for ‘In the Seven Woods’, which was dated in print by WBY as Aug. 1902. Te poet was staying at Coole that month; but how far the poem progressed from its frst draf during the summer is not known: ISW was not published until the following Aug., though WBY was correcting proofs by 9 Jan. 1903 (see CL 3, 300). Title and circumstances of composition. Te arrow shot by a naked fgure into the night sky had been a potent private symbol for WBY since his ‘vision of the archer’ episode at Tillyra in Aug. 1896. Te poet thought of this as a ‘vision of Diana,’ who was ‘the chief source of my inspiration’ and was to be associated with ‘lunar’ forces: ‘a marvellous naked woman shooting an arrow at a star’ (for the fullest account of this vision and its long-running creative consequences, see CL 2, 658–662). An allusion to the archer came in Althea Gyles’s cover design for the A.H. Bullen edition of WBY’s new version of Te Celtic Twilight (1902), where a crescent moon is pierced by three arrows. Undoubtedly, there is a level of occult mystical meaning intended here: Annie Horniman in 1904 wrote to Sarah Purser about how ‘Mr Yeats and I would be the only people who would understand this – the forces of the Path of Sagittarius entering the Sephira Jesod,’ while adding more earthily that ‘To the ordinary person it would mean – a midnight bolt to avoid paying the rent’ (quoted in CL 3, 647). Te arrow-shooting motif, whose full private and occult signifcance was known only to WBY and a very few close associates, was something that struck MG when she received her copy of Te Celtic Twilight in the summer of 1902, and in Aug. she wrote thanking the poet for the gif, and asking him, ‘Where did you get the symbol of the three arrows [?], Russell was telling me about it’ (G-YL, 156). Te timing of this letter is very close to the composition of the poem, as well as that of the poem ‘In the Seven Woods’, with its fnal lines on the ‘Great Archer, | Who but awaits His hour to shoot’ (12–13). WBY also used the title Te Arrow for the publication associated with the Irish Literary Teatre which began in 1906. Form and rhyme. Tere is nothing unusual in WBY’s producing a love-lyric of eight lines, since this had been a common shape for his poems (especially those to MG) in the 1890s. However, the form of this poem is distinctive, in that it is made from four couplets that each use a feminine rhyme. Te frst and fnal rhymed couplets are a sentence each; the middle four lines make a third sentence. WBY broke the poem into two quatrains for a time (see note on 4^5), but then returned it to its unifed eight-line appearance. Te use of feminine rhymes throughout – highly unusual for WBY – is not without some DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-14

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awkwardness of efect. Although H. Vendler considers this ‘not one of the better poems of In the Seven Woods’, she also sees it as an example of how for WBY ‘words difering from each other by only one letter (or two) held adjacent places on some great linguistic wheel’: ‘it tells us that Yeats made strong subliminal associations between bosom and blossom, no man and woman; that marrow is the place for a wounding thought – arrow.’ Vendler concludes that ‘Poetic thinking proceeds not only by propositions and images, as we sometimes think, but also by such lexical and phonemic slippages and linkages’ (Vendler, 109–110). Louis MacNeice, ofering a brisk assessment of the poem’s formal properties in 1941, saw things more simply: ‘Notice here the minor innovation in technique, especially the use of the of-rhyme, later a favourite trick of Yeats and especially useful for suggesting disillusionment or weariness’ (MacNeice, 93). Critical reception and interpretation. Te poem has generated little commentary, but E. Cullingford noted how it ‘radically transforms the poetic cliché of the lover transfxed by Cupid’s dart: the ‘arrow’ of the title, made out of a ‘wild’ thought, seems to be the woman’s weapon rather than the stock property of the love poet’ (Cullingford, 77). As H. Adams put this, ‘Playing his own Cupid, [WBY] has aimed his thought at her but has accidentally shot himself ’ (Adams, 80). It may be, however, that Cupid’s arrow (which most readers would easily detect in the poem) is for WBY much less signifcant than the private and highly esoteric association of the arrow shot by a goddess towards a star in the Tillyra vision of Aug. 1896 (see Title and circumstances of composition). At all events, another private association, with the poet’s feelings for MG, is certainly of deep signifcance to the poem (see esp. note to 4–6). Explanation of emotion is pointedly kept beyond this lyric’s remit, and the conclusion that ‘for a reason | I could weep’ (5–6) reveals nothing about what that ‘reason’ might be. Textual and publication history. An early draf (very probably the frst) is preserved on a single sheet of Coole stationery (now Berg Collection, NYPL), repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH 40–41, and given in full below, with some regularization of spelling and punctuation: [I spoke of [my beloved del.] about her and like a keen arrow del.] Once, when I [spoke of her del.] thought of you, like a keen arrow This [wild del.] sad thought [?of thoughts] went through my marrow There’s no man [alive can see del.] may look upon her, no man As when newly grown to a tall young woman Blossom pale she pulled over the pale blossom [One twilight del.] At the moth hour and hid it in her bosom. Her new beauty’s better yet for a reason I could weep that the old is out of season. Te same sheet, turned upside down, is used for an early draf of ‘In the Seven Woods’ (which, because it lacks an ending that presumably occupied another (now lost) page, may have been written later). Te next sign of the poem is a page of proof for ISW (NLI 30188), featuring this poem only (and thus prior to other proof states which have been preserved). Tis must have been set from a more advanced copy than the MS draf; and WBY makes revisions and corrections by hand to the printed text of the proof (Proof in

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notes; partly repr. in Wade, 145, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 42–43). Te poem appeared frst in print as part of ISW, and was retained by WBY in all collected editions thereafer. WBY revised the poem in 1909 (see notes on 4–6), and evidence of this is found in the Journal begun in 1908 (Boston College), as well as in annotated copies of CWVP08 and PSS (CWVP08 copy and PSS copy in notes). Copy-text: P49. I thought of your beauty, and this arrow, Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow. There’s no man may look upon her, no man, As when newly grown to be a woman,

1. I thought of your beauty] [All the livelong day del.] I thought of your beauty Proof. D. Holdeman sees this late change as signifcant of WBY’s desire to ‘unify’ ISW ‘afer seeing it in proof ’: he claims the revised line as ‘a distinctive syntactical signature’, ‘a frst person pronoun followed immediately by a verb’ which ‘also opens ‘In the Seven Woods,’ ‘Baile and Aillinn,’ and four of the volume’s remaining eight lyrics’ (Holdeman, 72). 2. a wild thought] Te adjective, deleted and replaced by ‘sad’ in the MS, may echo a somewhat less idealized moment of contemplation in R. Browning, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887), ‘With Francis Furini’, 591–593: ‘though I saw while she undressed | How fair she was – especially her breast – | Never had I a wild thought!’. my marrow] Te sense here is OED 1.d., ‘In extended or hyperbolical use [.  .  .] to signify the innermost part of a person’s being’, and the related phrase ‘to feel something in one’s marrow: to have a strong intuition or hunch about something’: OED 3.c., ‘Te seat of a person’s vitality and strength’. Also in 1901, Rudyard Kipling employed the term (Kim, Ch. 3): ‘Te marrow that makes a man’. In ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889 and 1895 versions), WBY employed the marrow and piercing metaphor for the efect of sound (III, 68): ‘piercing the marrow like fame’. In ISW, ‘marrow bones’ appears prominently in the poem two pages afer this, ‘Adam’s Curse’ (7). T. Brown, for

whom ISW is ‘a book of the body’, writes how in contrast to Te Wind Among Te Reeds ‘where the body was rendered ethereal and impalpable’ there is a new physicality where ‘the hair, lips and eyes’ of the beloved ‘have been replaced by a consciousness of the ‘marrow’ into which memory of the loved one’s beauty pierces’ (Brown, 148). R. Greaves adds that ‘Tere is also a sense of connection between the mental and the physical, the remembered and the bodily’ in this image (Greaves, 46). 4^5.] Stanza break PW06, CWVP08, PSS09. 4–6.] LP22 and afer, though the revision was probably made in 1909. In WBY’s Journal (Boston College), a brief entry dated 9 Nov. 1909 records (Mem., 236): ‘I want to rewrite ‘Te Arrow’, this second stanza’, and then gives a new version of lines 5–6 (see note). Te pre-revision version of these lines refers more explicitly to WBY’s early memory of MG in 1889. An association between MG and apple-blossom (and, consequently, with images of whiteness) was signifcant in much of WBY’s poetry of the 1890s. (Since the frst meeting actually took place at the end of Jan. 1889, apple-blossom seems unlikely to have been part of the indoor foral display: almond-blossom is more plausible.) In his 1916–1917 draf Autobiography, WBY quoted lines from this poem as part of his memory of MG and the blossom. By this point, the poet could express his judgement in hindsight that ‘We were seeking diferent

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Tall and noble but with face and bosom Delicate in colour as apple blossom. This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason I could weep that the old is out of season.

things: she, some memorable action for fnal consecration of her youth, and I, afer all, but to discover and communicate a state of being’ (Mem., 42): I spoke much of my spiritual philosophy. How important it all seemed to me; what would I not have given that she might think exactly right on all those great questions of the day? All is but faint to me beside a moment when she passed before a window, dressed in white, and rearranged a spray of fowers in a vase. Twelve years aferwards I put that impression into verse: (‘she pulled down the pale blossom’.) [. . .] I felt in the presence of a great generosity and courage, and of a mind without peace, and when she and all her singing birds had gone my melancholy was not the mere melancholy of love. It is worth noticing that WBY’s verse changes slightly the details of the situation, so that an indoor scene with a vase of fowers becomes an outdoors one, under a spray of blossom. (By the time of Te Trembling of the Veil (1921), the apple blossoms had moved indoors in WBY’s autobiographical account: ‘Her complexion was luminous, like that of apple-blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that frst day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window’ (CW 3, 120). Although the revised version of the lines was not published until 1922, it seems likely that WBY had made his revision as early as 1909; in addition to the initial MS (which in fact has the adjective ‘tall’, re-incorporated in 1909), the pre–1922 versions are as follows: As when newly grown to be a woman Blossom pale she pulled down the [full del.] ^pale^ blossom At the moth hour and hid it in her bosom Proofs.

As when newly grown to be a woman, Blossom pale, she pulled down the pale blossom At the moth hour and hid it in her bosom. ISW, PW06, CWVP08, PSS. 5–6.] corr. to Her complexion of the appleblossom | Te untroubled blossoming of her bosom CWVP08 copy. corr. to Tall and noble but with face and bosom | Delicate in colour as apple-blossom PSS copy. Tall and noble but with face and bosom | Delicate in colour as [the del.] apple blossom Journal entry 9 Nov. 1909, Mem., 236. 7. kinder] tender corr. to kinder Proof. D. Holdeman conjectures that WBY made this change in order to connect the poem verbally with ‘Te Folly of Being Comforted’ ‘afer seeing the two poems together in proof ’ (73). Te connection made with that poem’s ‘One that is ever kind’ (1) is likely not to be coincidental, though it should be noted that the proof itself (NLI 30188), marked ‘Revise’, carries only ‘Te Arrow’, and not ‘Te Folly of Being Comforted’, which was to appear immediately beneath it on the same page of ISW. Holdeman’s point, though, is valid: WBY might very well have decided on ‘kinder’ with the page-proximity of ‘One that is ever kind’ as a factor. In this case, MG and AG (who is the likely subject of ‘One that is ever kind’) are being brought into a closer relationship on the page than either of them ever had or sought in life. 8. out of season] Te phrase is of course common, and to be found in many poems; nevertheless, perhaps cp. a squib by William Allingham, Blackberries Picked from Many Bushes (1884): ‘Women, in and out of season, | Act on great men’s public lives: | Truly, now, the Turks have reason | In their management of wives!’

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RED HANRAHAN’S SONG AB OUT IRELAND Date of revision. Tis revision is probably from the frst half of 1902, though it may be earlier. WBY wrote to AG on 6 Jan. 1903 about plans for the Dun Emer ISW (CL 3, 298–299): ‘My sister’s book is merely a specially beautiful and expensive frst edition of certain of my best things’; with ‘the lyrics in my sister’s book,’ the letter went on, WBY intended to ‘put the Cathleen ni Hoolihan poem’. While there is a possibility that he is thinking of ‘Yellow Haired Donough’, a poem from the play that was briefy intended also for ISW, it is likely that WBY refers here to this revised version of the Hanrahan verses, which AG must have seen, possibly when WBY stayed at Coole through the busy summer of 1902. Earlier dates are also possible, but it is probable that WBY’s renewed interest in the verses was bound up with his interest in the fgure of Cathleen herself as the quasi-mythic focus of his and AG’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, written by autumn 1901 and frst performed, with MG in the title role, in Apr. 1902. Textual history. Te poem is a revision of verses which WBY had published before in two distinct textual forms, each in a short story (see Use in fction): the frst was written in 1894, and the second in 1896. Tese poems are edited separately in vol. 2 of the present edition, as [‘Veering, feeting, fckle, the winds of Knocknarea’] (1894 below) and [‘O tufed reeds, bend low . . .’] (1896 below). Tis poem is, then, a second revision of its original version: it appeared in print frst in the Apr. 1903 edition of A Broadsheet, issued by A.H. Bullen and with editorial input and illustrations by Jack Yeats (B). Te poem next appeared later that year in the Dun Emer ISW, and although no MS material towards this survives, some proof sheets for the volume are extant in NLI 13584 and 30247 (Proofs). Lines 1–5 were copied out in MS by WBY, signed and dated ‘Oct. 1904’ on a page removed from a copy of ISW, now in the Berg Collection, NYPL: it is possible these were done for AG (the poet was resident at Coole for the frst half of Oct. 1904), but for what purpose is unknown (Berg). Afer ISW, the poem remained in all collected editions. Source. In this its third and fnal iteration, the poem has moved furthest away from its ultimate source, a poem in Irish from the eighteenth century, composed by William Heffernan the Blind (Liam Dall Ó hIfearnáin). Efectively, all that is now lef is the refrainendings to the stanzas. When WBY frst approached this source, in 1894, he did so by way of translations by J.C. Mangan and Edward Walsh: these are reproduced in the editorial material for [‘Veering, feeting, fckle, the winds of Knocknarea’], in vol. 2 of the present edition.

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Use in fction. Verses on ‘Cathleen the daughter of Houlihan’ had always been part of WBY’s narrative about the poet who eventually became Red Hanrahan: frst, in ‘Kathleen-Ny-Hoolihan’ in Te National Observer, 4 Aug. 1894, then in its rewritten version, ‘Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan and Hanrahan the Red’ in Te Secret Rose (1897). Te poem’s 1903 revision (that in ISW) provided the text for the next rewriting of this story in the Dun Emer Stories of Red Hanrahan (1904), then subsequently in vol. 5 of CWVP08 and all later collections of the Hanrahan stories. In the story, Hanrahan is in the cottage of two women, Mary Gillis and Margaret Rooney, where he is performing songs for neighbours (M, 154–155): Tere were a good many people in the room that night, and two or three little lads that had crept in, and sat on the foor near the fre, and were too busy with the roasting of a potato in the ashes or some such thing to take much notice of him; but they remembered long aferwards when his name had gone up, the sound of his voice, and what way he had moved his hand, and the look of him as he sat on the edge of the bed, with his shadow falling on the whitewashed wall behind him, and as he moved going up as high as the thatch. And they knew then that they had looked upon a king of the poets of the Gael, and a maker of the dreams of men. However, the tone of the performance changes, and Hanrahan sings the verses of WBY’s ‘Song’: Of a sudden his singing stopped, and his eyes grew misty as if he was looking at some far thing. Mary Gillis was pouring whiskey into a mug that stood on a table beside him, and she lef of pouring and said, ‘Is it of leaving us you are thinking?’ Margaret Rooney heard what she said, and did not know why she said it, and she took the words too much in earnest and came over to him, and there was dread in her heart that she was going to lose so wonderful a poet and so good a comrade, and a man that was thought so much of, and that brought so many to her house. ‘You would not go away from us, my heart?’ she said, catching him by the hand. ‘It is not of that I am thinking,’ he said, ‘but of Ireland and the weight of grief that is on her.’ And he leaned his head against his hand, and began to sing these words, and the sound of his voice was like the wind in a lonely place. [poem follows here] While he was singing, his voice began to break, and tears came rolling down his cheeks, and Margaret Rooney put down her face into her hands and began to cry along with him. Ten a blind beggar by the fre shook his rags with a sob, and afer that there was no one of them all but cried tears down.

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Te poem’s close link to WBY’s fction (and to part of that fction which was soon to issue in re-publication) may begin in ISW as almost an element of advertising (and it was the family Dun Emer Press which would publish Stories of Red Hanrahan the year afer ISW’s publication). Hanrahan had already made an appearance in WBY’s Te Wind Among the Reeds (1899), and had by now become a distinctively Yeatsian creation, intended to link the pure lyrical impulse of poetry with the traditions and folk-beliefs of the West of Ireland, along with a deep underlying spirit of Irish national sentiment. By 1902, moreover, the Cathleen ni Houlihan of this wandering poet had become identifed – for WBY, and for a wider public too – with MG, who had taken on her part in AG and WBY’s recent stage success, Cathleen ni Houlihan. Whatever the sources in local history and tradition, WBY’s Hanrahan is an invented character rather than any antiquarian discovery. As time went by, WBY was ready to admit as much: in section II of ‘Te Tower’ (1925), he asserted that ‘I myself created Hanrahan’ (41), and he was also happy to acknowledge the help received in the process of this creation. Giving a public reading in Dublin in Jan. 1924, WBY included ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland’, and ofered some introductory remarks (reported in Te Irish Times, 26 Jan. 1924): He was amusing again, when he told how, with the co-operation of Dr. Hyde, who wrote a play in Irish, and Lady Gregory, who wrote one in English, he had created the ‘historical character’ of Hanrahan, a Gaelic poet of the 17th century, because he had felt the need to invent some such character who would sing or write certain poems in some perfectly ftting world for them. Tere were many people today who, as the result of the little plot he had made with Dr. Hyde and Lady Gregory, believed in Hanrahan as an historical character. Some of his Irish friends, Mr. Yeats added, used to be rather fond of ‘Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland,’ and told him it was his best – ‘which I don’t at all believe it to be’. Reception and critical interpretation. In a letter thanking him for a copy of ISW dated 9 Sep. 1903, MG reported to WBY that ‘we all love the song of Hanrahan the Red’, and the poem was later said to be her favourite amongst WBY’s works: this may be partly explained by its close link to Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which she had played the title role (G-YL, 175; and see Jefares, 79). In Jan. 1909, Te Edinburgh Review declared this poem ‘the fnest of [WBY’s] lyrics’, ‘in the frst rank of Irish art’, praising its ‘sense of an underlying spiritual fre’. WBY’s addition of ‘About Ireland’ to the poem’s title in PW06 helps highlight the verses as a voicing of nationalist sentiment, in keeping with its ultimate Irish source (see Sources). Tis was most strikingly recognized in 1916, when Padraic Colum and Edward J. O’Brien made the poem the Epilogue to their collection of poetry by the executed Tomas MacDonagh, Padraic Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett, and Sir Roger Casement in Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. In this book, which Colum announced as ‘poems by Combatants’, WBY was nevertheless numbered in the song, and Colum’s Introduction invokes the play of Cathleen Ni Houlihan for good measure (p. xxxiii): ‘An Irish man knows well how those who met their

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deaths will be regarded [. . .] ‘Tey shall be remembered for ever; they shall be speaking for ever; the people shall hear them for ever”. Te poem proved itself in this context to be indeed (as R. Foster has called it) ‘a paean of sacrifcial nationalism’ (Foster 1, 301). To some extent, though, this nationalistic element is a little behind the times in ISW, and may be more important as a link with MG than it is as a symbol of the poet’s current political commitment. It has been possible to see Cathleen here as an early stage in WBY’s political symbolism: T.R. Henn detected the poet’s ambition to employ mythology ‘as a force that will serve at once to stimulate and order Irish nationalism [. . .] At frst the symbol might be the sentimental image of Cathleen ni Houlihan’ (Henn, 131). Modern criticism has been less willing to read the symbolism here as a mere frst step in WBY’s development, and E. Cullingford has noted how the depiction of Cathleen ‘suggests the efusions of Irish Catholic Mariolatry’, remarking that ‘Yeats’s crossing of the aisling [Irish poetic dream-vision] with the Marian hymn is puritanical: the image of Cathleen stills the beating of worldly, passionate hearts’ (Cullingford, 66); she has taken this further, claiming that ‘By rendering masculine erotic abjection indistinguishable from religious and political devotion, [the poem] taps into a powerful psychological force feld in which masochism provides the major afective thrust’ (Howes and Kelly, 173). D. Holdeman’s reading of the poem as one about ‘how a passionate and patriotic love for Ireland transcends loss of courage (stanza 1), divisive ‘Angers’ (stanza 2), and impurities of body and blood (stanza 3)’ also allows for the close connection between WBY’s nominal (and dramatically self-distanced) subject and the romantic obsessions of his personal life with regard to MG: Holdeman concludes that ‘the poem envisions a passionate, transcending Ireland, purifed and united both politically and spiritually, an Ireland that is as much a state of mind as a nation’ (Holdeman, 78–79). It is certainly true that the poem celebrates Ireland by creating a powerful conjunction of place-name and myth; and getting this conjunction right had taken WBY a good eight years. Te long process of revision also of course embodied an increase in specifcally poetic skill on WBY’s part, and this produces a poem which in the end can convert, without afectation or forcing, a well-known Jacobite Irish poem of the eighteenth century into a concentrated revelation of a mythic Ireland whose leading myth is, in this case, intimately bound up with the romantic fxations of WBY himself. None of this would be possible without the advance in technical accomplishment. In 1958, reviewing VE, Louis MacNeice took the poem as an example of work from the 1890s which WBY ‘gradually improved’; MacNeice’s judgement here is unlikely to be rejected (London Magazine, 1 Dec. 1958): Torn trees breaking in two hit the reader harder than reeds bending low – let alone ‘low and low’ [. . .] Te verb ‘bundled’, unlike the verbs and adjectives in the earlier versions, is not only right but arresting. ‘Te yellow pool’ we can accept as a particular and therefore a real pool, unlike all those pluralities of winds, reeds, clouds, etc. Lastly, the rhythm of the third version is much better than in the other two.

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The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand, Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand; Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies, But we have hidden in our hearts the fame out of the eyes Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan. The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea, And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say. Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat; But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

Title.] PW06 and afer. No title B Te Song of Red Hanrahan ISW, P99–05. 1. Te old brown thorn-trees] Tis image would very shortly reappear as a simile in ‘Te Old Men Admiring Temselves in the Water’, 5 (the poem which directly follows this one in ISW). Cummen Strand] Cummann’s strand B; Cumman’s rev. to Cummen Proofs. Cummen Strand is the beach (and townland) west of Sligo, and on the south of Sligo harbour towards Strandhill. Te Irish name, Cuimín, means the small common. WBY retrieves this place-name from 1894, where it is in the frst line of the poem’s second stanza; it does not feature in 1896. 2. bitter black wind] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), VII, 16: ‘Tat black, bleak wind vexed all her spirit still’ and Lionel Johnson, Poetical Works (1915), ‘De Amicitia’ (1894), 126–127: ‘Along the Queen of Heaven’s high halls, | Black wind never yet blew’. Also perhaps cp. E. Stuart-Wortley, Travelling Sketches in Rhyme (1835), ‘Te Campo Santo at Pisa’, 326: ‘borne hence by Death’s black, bitter wind’. that blows from the lef hand] Tis formulation, carried over from 1896, is all that remains

of that version’s heavy emphasis on the colours of the winds (there, these are black, red, and grey winds: for the sources of this idea, see notes to 1896 in vol. 2 of the present edition). Tere was a strong association between the north (which is here the quarter of the Black Wind) and the lef-hand side: the Old Irish tuaid meant both ‘lef’ and ‘north’. 4. the fame] a fame Berg. 6–7.] WBY here revisits ‘the cairn of Maive’ in his previous version of the poem, though now giving Meadbh, the legendary queen of Connacht supposedly buried under a neolithic monument on the top of Knocknarea (overlooking Sligo town), a voice of her own, albeit one of fruitless protest. ‘Te stones’ are to be taken as those of the queen’s burial cairn. 7. thrown] throw rev. to thrown Proofs. Maeve] Maeva B. 8. abeat] Te word is very rare, but might have been encountered by WBY in Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘Balin and Balan’, 102: ‘scarce enough to keep his heart abeat’. 9. bent low and low] Te phrase occurs twice in 1896 (lines 1 and 9). Tis emphasis by reduplication (on the model of ‘by and by’) is not unprecedented: cp. e.g. George Meredith, Poems (1919), ‘Phantasy’ (1861), 89: ‘Tey dragged me low and low to the lake.’

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The yellow pool has overfowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare, For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air; Like heavy fooded waters our bodies and our blood; But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

11. high up on Clooth-na-Bare] WBY had written of ‘the grave of Clooth-na-Bare’ in ‘Te Hosting of the Sidhe’, and had expanded on this reference in one of his notes to Te Wind Among the Reeds (1899): ‘Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places’ (for WBY’s full note, see vol. 2 of present edition, p. 542). Te Old Woman of Beare (Cailleach na Bheara) is a much-mentioned character in Irish legend and folklore. While in ‘Te Hosting of the Sidhe’ WBY’s phrasing makes it clear that she is a person and not a place-name, here ‘Clooth na Bare’ is used as though it were the name of a mountain: the inference to be drawn is possibly that her grave has made her name that of the place itself. Following the 1899 note, the place in question is probably ‘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. However, WBY’s grasp of Irish, place-names, and legend was anything but steady – the shif from person to mountain in ‘Clooth-na-Bare’ shows as much. Tomas MacDonagh took the poet up on this (Literature in Ireland (1916), 51): Nothing is gained, surely, by that extraordinary perversion of the Irish name of the Old Woman of Beare, Cailleach na Beara. Te word clooth is not Irish; it has no meaning. Even for others than Irish scholars the right word would have served as well. John V. Kelleher, in his wide-ranging and unsparing ‘Yeats’s Use of Irish Materials’, TriQuarterly (1 Jan. 1965), noted that ‘It is interesting to fnd Yeats still playing with the name as late as 1903, for we may be sure that MacDonagh was by no means the frst to complain about it’ (117).

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THE OLD MEN ADMIRING THEMSELVES IN THE WATER Date of composition. Composition of this short poem was in mid-Aug. 1902. In his account of a visit to WBY at Coole Park, the University of Pennsylvania academic and critic Cornelius Weygandt recalled the poet reciting ‘the refrain of a song, such as ‘All that’s beautiful drifs away | Like the waters,’ that he had made the day before and could no more get out of his head than had it been an old tune’ (Lippincott’s Magazine Apr. 1904, Mikhail vol. 1, 17). Te visit had been arranged by WBY in a letter of 9 July 1902, and J. Kelly dates it to c. 15 Aug. (Kelly, 82). By 18 Nov. WBY’s agent, A.P. Watt, was able to ofer the poem to Te Pall Mall Magazine (CL 4, 997). Critical reception and interpretation. Having been identifed as ‘A piece of admirable simplicity’ in Country Life (5 Dec. 1908), the poem was celebrated by F. Reid in 1915 as one where ‘we seem to see the earlier style passing into the later’: ‘It opens with a little of the stifness of a Gregorian chant, but the short sixth line is a concession to the ear, and the singing quality of the last two lines rounds the whole thing of, bringing it to a melodic fnish’; ‘Te poem is remarkable,’ Reid continued, ‘for a certain grimness in its imagery [. . .] like a Durer etching’ (Reid, 236–237). A very minor critical squall blew up over the poem, again in the pages of Country Life, later in 1915. ‘Te language here shows a combination of simple directness with perfect melody’ said ‘R.St-J.M.’ in the issue of 13 Nov. 1915, quoting Reid’s approval, but he went on to compare the poem unfavourably with Rossetti’s ‘Blesssed Damozel’, Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and fnally Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘I think it impossible to read and compare them without recognising that great and fne as is the achievement [of WBY], it yet lacks the greatness of poetry which characterises this passage and a few others that belong to the perfect lyre.’ Correspondence in the magazine on 30 Nov. recorded a feeling that the bar here was being set rather too high, returning to Reid’s visual art comparison to clinch the point: ‘It is like comparing an etching with an oil-painting’. (Nevertheless, warned ‘C.M.’, ‘greatly as I admire Mr. Yeats, I think of him as a professional poet.’) But with this, attention to the poem waned, and it proved too modest an afair for most of the twentieth-century critical works on WBY. Amongst the few modern assessments, H. Adams notes that the word ‘Admiring’ in the title is ‘an ironic reference to the myth of Narcissus’: ‘the parallel, of course, is to the beauty that the poet’s love for the beloved once had or was thought to have had’ (Adams, 85). J. Ramazani also interprets the poem’s old men, more pithily, as ‘withered Narcissi fxated on images of themselves’ (Ramazani 4). Te extent to which DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-16

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the title is a functioning part of the poem is largely H. Vendler’s subject; for her ‘Tis cunning use of a title as a last word [‘waters’] is another instance of Yeats’s interest in the reformulation of genre: here, he turns what is formally the frst ‘word’, the title, into the last ‘word’, as he illustrates the persistence of physical vanity, even into old age’ (Vendler, 101). Te element of ‘vanity’ does indeed seem to be linked with narcissistic self-pity for WBY’s old men; at the same time, the poem may feel the infuence of another classically situated gathering of geriatrics. Despite D. Holdeman’s feeling that the old men ‘speak and look like a chorus from Aeschylus’ (Holdeman, 80), it may well be in fact the Trojans above their city’s Scaean gate in the Iliad that perch somewhere in this poem’s generic background. WBY would have known the passage in Chapman’s version: All grave old men, and souldiers they had bene, but for age Now left the warres; yet Counsellors they were exceeding sage. And as in well-growne woods, on trees, cold spinie Grasshoppers Sit chirping and send voices out that scarce can pierce our eares For softnesse and their weake faint sounds: so (talking on the towre) These Seniors of the people sate, who, when they saw the power Of beautie in the Queene ascend, even those cold-spirited Peeres, Those wise and almost witherd men, found this heate in their years That they were forc’t (though whispering) to say: ‘What man can blame The Greekes and Troyans to endure, for so admir’d a Dame, So many miseries, and so long? In her sweet countenance shine Lookes like the Goddesses’ [. . .] (Iliad 3.150–158, trans. G. Chapman (1611), III, 159–170) Homer’s old men are admiring not themselves but Helen of Troy: the situation ofers a suggestive reverse-image for WBY’s scenario, if indeed they are ‘admiring themselves’. At the same time, the ironic force of the poem’s title – and the work in the poem which, as Vendler says, the title has to do – can co-exist with a broader sense for and memory of ‘All that’s beautiful’: and here, Helen’s phantasmal presence might well carry some personal weight for WBY. Textual and publication history. Early drafs of the poem include four deriving from AG’s materials (all now in the Berg Collection, NYPL). One is on Coole Park stationery (MS2), and there are two drafs on single sheets (MS1, MS4). Another single sheet draf, NLI 21874, is also probably from Coole (MS3). Te poem was frst published in Te Pall Mall Magazine, Jan. 1903 (PMM), then in New York in Te Gael Sep. 1903 (G). WBY collected the poem for ISW in 1903, reprinting it in P99–05 and all collected editions thereafer. Early MS drafs. MS2, like MS3 and MS4, contains material approximating to the length of the fnished poem. MS1 contains four attempts at the poem, the third of which is largely deleted. MS4 is essentially the poem as later published, and it seems likely that some intermediate stage of composition (or perhaps more than one) between this and MS3 is now lost. MS1, MS2, and MS3 are transcribed here separately, with some editorial punctuation and regularization of spelling. Many words and lines are close to illegible

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(in MS1 especially), and the versions below difer a good deal from the transcriptions ofered in Cornell ISWGH 72–79, where photographs of the MS pages can also be consulted. (Cornell ISWGH orders the MSS diferently, with MS2 as the earliest draf.) MS1: They are not as beautiful as they were The old men under the thorn trees [Were saying del.] By the waters Say while they shake [ ?] [their hair?] Our grand days Were as beautiful as today [And ] We were not then as old as now O [?beauty] ebbs away Like the waters. ‘They’re not as beautiful as they were’ I heard the old men say [By the waters del.] [Nodding their heads under a thorn tree del.] By the waters [Shaking their heads their hands del.] Shaking their heads and then their hair Under the [?white thorn tree] By the waters [The old men say under the thorn trees How del.] Those men old old under the thorn trees, They [?said then] with their heads upon knees [And hands like the birds’ claw del.] [Then [illeg.] their hair del.] Hands hands like the birds’ claws [I heard an old old man under the thorn With his [?bald] head With his His head bowed down upon his knees del.] ‘They are now not as beaut[iful]as they were’ The old men are saying and then their hair These old men are saying We were once not as old as now When our granddaughters

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Came [?forth] from here where thorn trees grow By the still waters. MS2: O their beauty is not what it was, It already alters, Although today when we saw them pass Our heads were doubled upon our knees And ^our^ hands were gnarled like the [old del.] thorn trees, Our grand daughters [Had more beauty then del.] [[Were as beautiful as the day del.] [O Beauty alters del.] [O they del.] had a beauty that was like the day That already alters, For all beauty ebbs away Like the waters. MS3: ‘They are not as beautiful as they were’ I hear the old, old men say, Shaking their heads and their hair [Under the del.] Where the old thorn trees grow By the waters. ‘Yet who was as old as now [Our granddaughters del.] Oh when as old as now Our granddaughters Came [?bringing][?us?up] the day By the waters. O beauty ebbs away Like the waters.

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I heard the old, old men say, ‘Everything alters, And one by one we drop away.’ They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn-trees By the waters. I heard the old, old men say, ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters.’

Title] Te old men under the thorn trees del. MS1; Song of the old men MS2; no title MS3, MS4. 1. old, old men] Tere is nothing unusual in this phrase, but it happens to echo a verse of Ernest Dowson, the third stanza of whose poem ‘Moritura’ may exercise a subliminal infuence on WBY’s poem (Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899)): A song of an old, old man! His hairs are white and his gaze, Long bleared in his visage wan, With its weight of yesterdays, Joylessly He stands and mumbles and looks at me. It should be noticed, however, that WBY begins by working with the simpler ‘old men’, reduplicating the adjective only once in MS2, before adopting it in MS3 (see Early MS drafs): if Dowson’s verse here is an infuence, it is not what ofers WBY a starting point. 2, 6, 8] Lines indented PMM, G. 2–3.] Set in italics, without quotation marks PMM, G.

3.] Possibly cp. a line in a hymn by the Revd. William Gaskell (1805–1884) (the husband of Elizabeth Gaskell), ‘God of our fathers! to whose praise’, 5: ‘While, one by one, we pass away’. Tis line may also have caught the ear of the politician and writer T.D. Sullivan, whose Evergreen: A Volume of Irish Verses (1907) features the short poem ‘Salutation’ – though it is possible that Sullivan is in fact ofering an adaptation of WBY’s lines, an old man addressing the young for the purposes of general Irish Nationalist uplif: One by one we pass away, Who were busy in the fray, Ere you saw the light of day, My brave and true young men; But glad and proud are we, Ere we go to know and see Tat the hour of victory Is nigh for you, young men. 5. thorn-trees] No hyphen in any printing until CP33. 7. old, old] old MS4. 8. that’s] that is MS4.

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IN THE SEVEN WOODS Date of composition. Te poem’s stated month of composition, Aug. 1902, is corroborated by JQ’s later account of his frst visit to Coole (‘Lady Gregory and the Abbey Teater’, Outlook 16 Dec. 1911): One morning Lady Gregory, Dr. Hyde, and myself wandered through one of the beautiful old gardens. She named over the names of this, that, and the other fower until Hyde said that if she just wrote down the names there was matter for a sonnet ready for Yeats. Yeats was very happy there, and he had just fnished a poem on ‘Te Seven Woods of Coole,’ and he was so pleased with it that he kept murmuring it over and over again, and these lines from it have remained in my memory still: [quotes 1–5, 10–12] Although JQ confuses the title with the frst line of an earlier poem on Coole, his recollection ofers evidence for a date of composition. JQ had met WBY at the Feis in honour of the Galway poet Rafery, which was held on 31 Aug., and he spent that night with AG and her other guests at Coole. Since JQ lef on 1 Sep., his walk around the garden would have taken place that day; WBY’s ‘murmuring over and over’ suggests that the heat of composition was not far past, and the poems ‘just fnished’ were still very recent. Te poet was composing another piece, ‘Te Old Men Admiring Temselves in the Water’, when he was visited at Coole by Cornelius Weygandt around 15 Aug., but Weygandt also remembered WBY quoting some of the present poem on that occasion. It is likely that both poems were being worked on at the same time, and ‘In the Seven Woods’ would have been fnished by 31 Aug. Circumstances of composition: ‘Tara uprooted’. WBY’s decision to append the date ‘August, 1902’ to this poem, from its frst publication in ISW onwards, refects the importance of the circumstances in which it was composed. WBY was in residence at AG’s Coole Park during the summer of 1902, with a number of literary activities on his hands; but this was also a time when public events impinged pressingly on the poet’s time and his imagination. Tat summer, two such public issues converged: in the world of Irish nationalist politics, there was the reaction to the coronation of the new King, Edward VII; and in a literal and an almost absurdly diferent cultural feld (yet one not wholly unconnected from the major political one), there was the scandal of disputedly legal excavations being carried out in Co. Meath by religious enthusiasts who were looking for the Ark of the Covenant on the ancient site of Tara. Tese current afairs are brought DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-17

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together in lines 6–9 of the poem, as things which in the peace and quiet of Coole WBY has ‘forgot’: at the same time, they occupy the very centre of the poem. Despite the idyllic atmosphere conjured by the opening lines, that summer at Coole had not been an entirely quiet one. AG was much taken up with arrangements to mark the coming of age of her son Robert, and then with hosting a large number of guests through the next months. WBY arrived at Coole for his summer stay on 24 Jun., just in time for Robert Gregory’s coming of age celebrations, which took place on 28 Jun.: AG’s diary records ‘bonfres – torches – dinner and dance – presentations’ (AGD92–02, 312). Tese celebratory events echoed, in their way, the much more spectacular celebrations for the coronation in London (which was in fact originally planned for 26 Jun., and had to be postponed owing to the King’s illness): the magazine Hearth and Home reported how ‘Te tenantry assembled at the gates of the Coole Park domain, and presented an address with some valuable gifs of plate, etc. Te household also presented some handsome silver, which Mr. Gregory suitably acknowledged; the road from Gort Station being gay with bunting, the fags of all nations being included’ (24 Jul. 1902; quoted in CL 3, 214). Elsewhere in Ireland, the royal coronation was proving predictably contentious, with the celebratory decorations in Dublin streets being subject to some vociferous nationalist objection. In the felds of Co. Meath, meanwhile, there was little to celebrate. Te hill of Tara, where the Irish High Kings had held court, and which was connected in legend with the Tuatha De Danaan, had been for some time more than just a site of buried ancient history: it held the ‘grave of the Croppies’ from the rebellion of 1798, and more recently in 1843, it had been the venue for a large rally by Daniel O’Connell, which was suitably memorialized in a broadside ballad of the 1860s–1880s, ‘Te Tara Monster Meeting’ (‘Where is the heart that could not feel | Nor eye refuse a tear, | To see those murdered victims | For their country sleeping there’). Rich in ancient and modern nationalist associations as it was, the hill was also a focus of more romantic and mythic kinds of fantasy. In 1901, Helen Grierson ended an enraptured account of one visit by dreaming of future resurgences from Tara’s long-overgrown mounds (Te Irish Monthly, Jun. 1901, 330): Te Hill seems to lie, wrapt about in its memories and dreams, waiting! Does it wait, the Royal Hill, for the foot of an Ardrigh [High King] yet to come? Te legends tell that Finn and his chosen companions lie sleeping in their country’s earth, deep hidden, but awaiting their time. In her hour of sorest, deepest need, they are to rise and succour her. Will the old prophecy ever fnd a shadowy fulflment in the coming of one, wise, strong, and noble as the old champions? But the ancient kings had not been sleeping in peace lately. In the summer of 1899, excavations began on the hill (or at least on that part of it owned by Gustavus Villiers Briscoe, a local landlord) which were to continue sporadically for the next few seasons. Despite Briscoe’s protestations (as ‘lord of the soil’, he told Te Irish Times in Sep. 1899 that he was ‘quite determined to restore the exact formation of the ancient mound on which work began, so that its original appearance will be preserved and no trace of the excavating operations noticeable’), the digging was of an amateur, and archaeologically

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damaging kind. Te object of the excavators’ quest, furthermore, was a patently absurd one: they hoped to discover the lost Ark of the Covenant, which had supposedly been conveyed to Ireland from ancient Israel. Te culpable neo-Israelites in this enterprise came largely from just across the Irish Sea; they had numerous links also to Freemasonry, including to masons in Ireland. In a letter to Te New York Times of 20 Jul. 1902, William J. Balfe wrote of how ‘Tis vandalism is not being perpetrated by a body of ‘Irish enthusiasts,’ or by any other kind of an Irish body,’ but by ‘English would-be archaeologists, possessed by the mania that the Irish are the lost tribe of Israel, and that the proof will be furnished by the production of the Ark’: ‘Tis desecration of historic ground was begun and is being carried on against the protests of Irishmen’. A certain amount of protest was making itself felt in Westminster in the summer of 1902, and on 6 Aug. Te Irish Times reported that the Irish MP Sir Tomas Esmonde was to ‘ask the Chief Secretary to consider whether during the autumn sittings he ought not to promote a bill with the object of securing the nationalization of Tara’s Hill and its preservation from further injury’. On 21 Jun. WBY went to Ireland from London (where public celebrations following the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging and the end of the Boer War on 31 May were being augmented by the preparations for the forthcoming (but in the event postponed) coronation on 26 Jun.) He stayed initially with GM, and on 22 Jun. GM, Douglas Hyde, and WBY went in person to the site of Tara to investigate that season’s ongoing dig. Te three wrote to Te Times on 24 Jun. (publ. 27 Jun., CL 3, 208–209): We have just returned from a visit to the Hill of Tara, where we found that the work of destruction, abandoned a year or two ago, has begun again. Labourers are employed to dig through the mounds and ditches that mark the site of the ancient Royal duns and houses. We saw them digging and shovelling without any supervision, hopelessly mixing the diferent layers of earth and altering the contour of the hill. Tis is not being done through any antiquarian zeal, but, apparently, that the sect which believes the English to be descended from the Ten Tribes may fnd the ark of the Covenant. Once he had lef the seat of ancient Irish royalty, WBY went directly to Coole, in time for the Robert Gregory coming of age festivities. Prominent Irish nationalists, meanwhile, had not been silent on Tara: Arthur Grifth, though no archaeologist, had already praised Tara as ‘a living reminder of the former glory of an enslaved and half-debased nation’ (United Ireland, Mar. 1901), and in Jun. 1902 he declared that the British Israelites with their spades ‘are seeking the Ark of the Covenant to present it to King Edward VII’. Tis bringing together of the excavations and the imminent coronation was not lost on MG, taking her cue from Grifth, who wrote in the French magazine L’Eclair on 26 Jun. 1902 that the busily digging British Israelites at Tara were planning to donate the Ark which they hoped to discover there to the new King Edward VII. Nor was MG fnished with Tara: in Ireland the following month, in her role as President of the Inghinidhe na hÉireann [Daughters of Ireland], she organized a children’s trip to Tara for some three hundred young nationalists, complete with a picnic, a hurling match, and rousing

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speeches. In the course of this, MG and the rest found the large bonfre which G.V. Briscoe, the landlord, was preparing for the occasion of the upcoming coronation. MG set the bonfre alight there and then, with a last chorus of ‘A Nation Once Again’ as a ftting conclusion to the day-trip: ‘Te constabulary didn’t like it at all, and danced and jumped with rage – they added greatly to the fun’ MG reported, in a letter about the day’s work she sent to WBY shortly aferwards (G-YL, 156). Disagreements about ownership and excavation rights continued for some time, though in the end perhaps little real archaeological damage was done. (For a detailed account of the whole Tara afair and its background, see Mairéad Carew, Tara and the Ark of the Covenant (2003).) No Ark was ever forthcoming, and the British Israelites eventually returned whence they came. WBY was keen to afrm his own active protests when he spoke at London’s Irish Literary Society the next year: giving a vote of thanks to the MP James Bryce, who had addressed the Society on ‘Tara Hill’, WBY ‘described how the desecration of Tara had been carried on’: ‘He happened to be on the spot when men were engaged in removing soil, altogether indiferent as to whether there were any priceless treasures about to be unearthed’ (as reported in Te Observer, 1 Mar. 1903). Te entire sorry story of the amateur excavations on Tara, in which shortcomings in the protection of land containing ancient monuments had been publicly exposed, may have played a part in the insertion of provisions in the Irish Land Act of 1903 (Clause 14, ‘Reservation of Ancient Monuments’), where ‘any ancient monument which, in the opinion of the Land Commission, is a matter of public interest, by reason of the historic, tradition, or artistic interest attaching thereto, they [the Land Commission] may, with the consent of the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, by order declare that the property in the monument shall not pass to the purchaser, and make an order vesting the monument in those Commissioners.’ It is possible that WBY played some role in promoting this Clause, given his contacts through AG with John Shawe-Taylor, who devised and convened the Land Conference of Dec. 1902 that gave the Land Bill (under the sponsorship of George Wyndham) its impetus. A few days before the fnal passing of the Act, WBY announced in a letter to Te Freeman’s Journal that ‘Te Land Bill has not been given to us by English Royalty but won by the long labours of our own people’ (13 Jul. 1903, CL 3, 396). More than twenty years later, WBY allowed himself to remark, in supporting the insertion of a Section on ancient monuments in a Land Bill then before the Irish Senate, that ‘I had something to do with the insertion of a somewhat similar clause in the Land Act of 1903’ (Senate Speeches of W.B. Yeats ed. D.R. Pearce (1961), 56). Critical interpretation. Modern discussion of the poem broadly follows R. Foster’s sensible summary, that it ‘celebrated the peace of Coole and the restoration of a sense of proportion in escape from public agitation, with the threat of apocalypse introduced ironically at the end’ (Foster 1, 301). Tough not all readers have sensed the irony in the poem’s last lines, this is generally seen as a poem in which WBY adjusts an earlier mysticism to accord with the (agreeable) conditions of AG’s place of refuge from public clamour and demands. Another name for those demands, perhaps, is that of MG; but as N. Grene says, ‘the haven of the Seven Woods can only be temporary: at the end of his summer at Coole, the poet will have to go back to his misery over Maud Gonne and the modern vulgarities of Dublin and London’ (Grene, 92). Of course, the poem

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itself contains, rather than excludes, matters of contemporary controversy and unrest: as D. Albright remarks (with a little exaggeration), ‘Tis is the frst of Yeats’s poems in which the poet is obviously a man who reads the newspaper’ (Albright, 483). However, WBY’s step back from the fray in the summer of 1902 is also a step across both class and political boundaries, as well as perhaps a remove from the kinds of immediate commitment demanded by MG from him as part of the larger deal which any possible romantic connection with her would necessitate. Instead, AG’s presence as host, landowner, and artistic enabler is important: this entails a cultural nationalism some way removed from the urgent agitation of more radical actors such as MG; and the calculated rudeness of lines 6–9, which goes beyond and beneath the customary manners of Home Rule nationalism, is balanced by a celebration of inherited contentment and seclusion, where both art and (however ironically) supernatural transformation may be contemplated. In this sense, the poem is part of a long movement for WBY from the political margins of extremism to the cultural, and less politically militant, certainties of an Ireland rooted in myth and tradition, things themselves preserved and fostered by a leisured class. One aspect of the poem which merits attention is its formal nature: it is a sonnet, but not a sonnet carrying any recognisable rhyme-scheme – it is unrhymed, though with important elements of internal assonance and echo. H. Vendler calls this WBY’s ‘frst ‘real’ sonnet – that is, one which follows the Petrarchan and Shakespearean principle of volatility of feeling and tone’ (Vendler, 158); it is not clear, even so, that the poet himself would have recognized this principle as a sufcient condition for a poem’s being a sonnet. Te continuation of this argument is interesting (Vendler, 160): Yeats’s inner quarrel between his wish to preserve his aesthetic quiet among pigeons and bees and his reactive ideological bitterness – the disequilibrium that so disturbed his writing life – has been staged here as an inner sonnetquarrel between pastoral and apocalypse. [.  .  .] But despite the architectonic satisfactions [. . .] the poem is still evading, in its abandon [sic] of rhyme, the issue of rhymed sonnet-structures, and what such rhymed units can be made to mean for Yeats as he inherits them from Petrarch and Shakespeare and bends them to his own uses. Tis is properly cautious about the poem’s status as a ‘real’ sonnet, and it remains at least possible that WBY has a formal sense of writing a short blank verse meditation rather than something that is necessarily in the generic proximity of Petrarch or Shakespeare. For S. Reagan (Te Sonnet (2019)), however, this poem is ‘crucially important in the history of the sonnet in Ireland’, and it ‘shakes and roughens the sonnet form itself ’ (161): ‘Te iambic metre is repeatedly disrupted, as is any semblance of a coherent rhyme scheme [. . .] the sonnet veers wildly from any formal rhyme scheme’ (162). Reagan’s conclusion, that ‘With this unruly political sonnet, Yeats’s poetry is suddenly on ‘the streets’ anticipating the violent action that would hurl ‘the little streets upon the great’ in ‘No Second Troy’ just six years later’ (162) stakes a great deal critically on one wager of formal analysis, perhaps not with success. Textual and publication history. Tere are two pre-publication states of the text, both in the Berg Collection, NYPL: the frst (MS) is in WBY’s hand on a single sheet of paper,

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folded (the bottom half across the fold has a draf of ‘Te Arrow’); this breaks of afer line 9, and was presumably continued on another sheet, now lost. Te second (TS) is a typed version of the whole poem, with a number of corrections entered in WBY’s hand; it is likely to have been produced on AG’s typewriter at Coole. Both MS and TS are repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH 2–5. Proofs for ISW contain no signifcant variants; the poem was frst published in ISW, then in P99–05 and all subsequent collected editions. Copy-text: P49.

5

I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime-tree fowers; and put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile

Title.] No title MS, TS. 2–3. the garden bees | Hum in the lime-tree fowers] the [garden del.] ^hum of^ bees | Among the lime tree fowers MS; the [hum of del.] garden bees | [Among del.] ^hum in^ the limetree fowers TS. garden bees | Hum] Perhaps cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘An Every-Day Tale’, 89–90: ‘Where throstles, perched on orchard trees, | Sang to the hum of garden bees’. 2. faint thunder] WBY is almost certainly (and fortunately) unaware of this phrase in a poem published just a few years earlier: in F.W. Orde’s Matin Bells (1897), the poem ‘Te Laughter of the Lord’ has ‘the awful Laughter | Of the laughing of the Lord’ sounding ‘like faint thunder in my ear’ (45). More plausibly, cp. Coventry Patmore, Te Victories of Love (1862), I, xvii, 132–133: ‘Far thunder faint | Muttered its vast and vain complaint’. 4. and the old] and [the del.] old TS. the old bitterness] Perhaps cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), LXXXIV, 46–47:

‘wherefore wake | Te old bitterness again’. However, bitterness features in WBY’s accounts of the controversy over the excavations on the hill of Tara in the summer of 1902: the letter to Te Times to which he (with Douglas Hyde and George Moore) was a signatory ended with the warning that Tara’s ‘destruction will leave many bitter memories behind it’ (24 Jun., 1902, CL 3, 209), and in a letter of protest which he sent to Patrick Boylan, the lessee of part of the site, WBY concluded by warning that ‘it is only fair to draw your attention to the bitter feeling that is being aroused’ (Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland). 5. empty] empties MS empt[ydel.]^ies^ TS. empty the heart] WBY here brings to life the moribund diction of Katharine Tynan, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘A Tired Heart’, 33–34: ‘And I, heart-empty, poor, and sick, and bare, | Loved of no lover’. 5^6.] [Tat good things go to wrack del.] [Tat good things go but that commonness del.] [Tat commonness | Sits on the throne and cries about the streets del.] [I am content[ed] del.] MS.

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Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper fowers from post to post, Because it is alone of all things happy. I am contented, for I know that Quiet

6.] Tat Tara is uprooted and commonness MS; [Tat del.] Tara [is del.] uprooted, and ^new^ commonness TS. Tara uprooted] See Circumstances of composition. 6–7. new commonness | Upon the throne] Te coronation of King Edward VII took place on 9 Aug. 1902 (having been postponed from 26 Jun. on account of the King’s health). WBY’s reference is calculated to ofend Unionist (and many English) sensibilities. Te force of ‘new commonness’ is carefully calibrated, and the exact meaning is probably OED 5.b., ‘Meanness of character or intellect; want of excellence or distinction’; this defnition adds that the word is ‘A less condemnatory term than  vulgarity, in which the meanness becomes ofensive’. Nevertheless, the subliminal implication is that the Imperial royalty (Edward is ‘new’, but presumably replicates a ‘commonness’ belonging to Victoria) has no claim to the exceptional position it enjoys. Even WBY’s most supportive English backers had trouble stomaching such things: Annie Horniman wrote on 14 Mar. 1907 to A.H. Bullen (in connection with the projected CWVP08, for which she was ofering a large subsidy) about ‘that line in ‘In the Seven Woods’ to which you so strongly object’, telling him that ‘I dislike it as much as you do,’ but adding that ‘my objection to it would certainly carry no weight’ (CL 4, 642). WBY was copied in on this, but Horniman had already told the poet how she and Bullen ‘both feel alike as to the ‘taste’ of the line’ (3 Jul. 1907). 8. It hangs its paper fowers from [street del.] post to post | I am content to know MS. from post to post] Perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), Rokeby, VI, ix, 26: ‘From tower to tower, from post to post’.

9. alone of all things] Cp. William Morris, Te Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘January: Bellerophon at Argos’, 115: ‘When this alone of all things then seemed wise’ and 1456: ‘Alone of all things, mine own self to aid’. 10. Quiet] quiet corr. to Quiet TS. Tis personifcation is ofen associated in commentary with the title-fgure of the poem ‘Maid Quiet’, which appears in the section of collected editions containing the poems of Te Wind Among the Reeds. However, this title did not settle upon a version of that poem until it was published in CWVP08: when ISW was published, the piece in question was ‘Hanrahan Laments Because of his Wanderings’ (edited in vol. 2 of present edition), and here ‘Quiet’ did not appear at all, and ‘our Mother of Peace’ took her place instead. ‘Maid Quiet’ had featured in a poem of 1892 which was part of ‘Te Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’ in Te Secret Rose (1897) (edited in vol. 2 of present edition), and it was this which (with revisions) WBY returned to for ‘Maid Quiet’ in CWVP08 and afer. Te Quiet who ‘wanders laughing’ in the woods of Coole seems to be a diferent fgure, or at least one whose signifcance does not depend on any allusion to ‘Maid Quiet’. WBY’s personifcation here may be traced all the way back to his juvenilia, and the 1887 poem ‘She Who Dwelt Amongst the Sycamores: A Fancy’ with its ‘lone Lady Quietness’ (13). Lines by Samuel Ferguson which infuenced this early fgure may still carry some subliminal infuence here: cp. Ferguson, ‘Te Forester’s Complaint’, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), 1–4 (where ‘wild’ may trigger WBY’s ‘wild heart’): ‘Trough our wild wood-walks here | Sun-bright and shady, | Free as the forest deer, | Roams a lone lady’.

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Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,

11.] Within the poem, this eating of a heart balances with lines 4–5, where ‘unavailing outcries’ and ‘old bitterness’ are things that ‘empty the heart’: the draining of the speaker’s heart is contrasted now to the selffulflling and self-nourishing in the heart of ‘Quiet’. WBY alludes here to a poem he had written the previous summer, ‘Baile and Aillinn’, 177–178, where the lovers ‘eat | Quiet’s wild heart, like daily meat’. Here, however, it is Quiet who consumes her own heart: this develops the earlier image from that of Quiet providing sustenance to others to one of her ofering nourishment to herself, ‘paradoxically at once joyous, self-consuming, and self sustaining’ (Grene, 92). In print, in ISW and afer, ‘In the Seven Woods’ (and therefore this image of Quiet) precedes ‘Baile and Aillinn’, so that WBY initially ofers the idea of Quiet’s self-sufciently before giving an instance of the same Quiet’s sustaining power in the world of lovers. R. Ellmann remarked on Quiet’s ‘abandoned autophagy’ here, contrasting it with the ‘Maid Quiet’ fgure of 1892: ‘Te image has been rendered raw and barbaric instead of petrifed and civilized; it conveys a more original meaning; and the suggestion of a pagan ritual heralds a new emphasis in [WBY’s] art’ (Identity, 101). H. Vendler’s suggestion that this image is a ‘Hibernicized’ version of the moment in Dante’s Vita Nuova when the ‘Lord of Terrible Aspect’ ofers Beatrice the heart of her lover Dante to eat, and she then consumes it, in all likelihood identifes only a subliminal association here for WBY, rather than an allusion that is being put to artistic work (Vendler, 159). (Tis image and its source will, however, become important for various later poems by WBY, such as ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ and ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, but there with deliberately allusive force.) wild heart] Perhaps cp. the title-poem of John Todhunter’s Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), II, 545–546: ‘He held her arms – felt her wild heart | Beat against his’, and Katharine

Tynan’s Shamrocks (1887), ‘Te Pursuit of Diarmid and Grainne’ II, 61–62: ‘And she held both her hands to still the beat | Of her wild heart, lest any hearken it’ and ‘At Daybreak’, 10: ‘Down, thou wild heart’. But the phrase is unremarkable in itself, even though the efect in context here for WBY is strikingly unusual. 12. Among pigeons] Among [^the^ del.] pigeons TS. Great Archer] great archer corr. to Great Archer TS. It is probable that WBY uses this image with a memory of his vision of the archer at Tillyra in 1896 (see Title and circumstances of composition in notes to ‘Te Arrow’). Te female fgure in that vision has changed now to a male one. Commentators on the poem have identifed here the fgure of Sagittarius, who was originally the centaur who taught archery to Achilles. WBY’s contact with Sagittarius would have been primarily by way of astrology (where Sagittarius is one of the signs of the Zodiac), though he would also have been aware of his use in one of the GD rituals (Te Rite of the Pentagram and the Five Paths) where ‘Sagittarius, the Archer, is a bi-corporate sign, the Centaur, the Man and the Horse combined’: Also there is the vision of the fre fashing Courser of Light, or also a child borne alof upon the shoulders of the Celestial Steed, fery or clothed with gold, or naked and shooting from the bow, shafs of light, and standing on the shoulders of a horse [. . .] For thus wilt thou cleave upward by the Path of Sagittarius, through the Sixth Sephira into the Path of Teth [. . .] Terefore, by the straight and narrow Path of Sagittarius, let the Philosophus advance, like the arrow from the centre of Qesheth, the Bow. In the wake of the 1896 archer vision, WBY consulted the senior GD fgure William Wynn Westcott about its meaning, writing about this later in Te Trembling of the Veil (1922).

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Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee. August, 1902

Westcott interpreted the vision as one of the cabbalistic Tree of Life (CW 3, 282): Te Tree of Life is a geometrical fgure made up of ten circles or spheres called Sephiroth joined by straight lines. [.  .  .] Te Sephiroth Tiphareth, attributed to the sun, is joined to the Sephiroth Yesod, attributed to the moon, by a straight line called the path Samekh, and this line is attributed to the constellation Sagittarius. He would or could not tell me more [. . .] Tough WBY may have the GD ritual in mind, any specifcally magical meaning and function for ‘the Great Archer’ is not something the poem itself may be said to rely upon. R. Ellmann felt the Archer was depicted ‘almost playfully’ here, so that these lines ‘can be taken as forecasting merely a change in the weather; the Archer himself may be only Jupiter Pluvius about to send a thunder shower’ (Identity, 103). H. Vendler goes further, claiming that ‘when the Great Archer at last looses an arrow from his cloudy quiver, Tara will be restored and Ireland will become independent’ (Vendler, 160). Tis surely takes WBY beyond what even his most apocalyptic imagination could frame in 1902; but J. Allison, too, sees here ‘a portent of change or justice’, where ‘Te archer is a transcendent image of justice and a terrible spirit of the place’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 99–100). Besides all this, a reader might well feel the possible presence of the god Apollo, whose archery skills were central to his mythic iconography. R. Greaves notes that ‘Te bow is the favourite weapon of Apollo, the sun god,’ and detects ‘an air of expectancy of a new phase for the poet’ (Greaves, 62). In a 1923 note to the account in Te Stirring of the Bones, WBY quotes a textbook saying that ‘About the third century BC we fnd Apollo is closely linked with the constellation Sagitta’, and goes on to cite an entry on Sagittarius having for its symbol ‘an arrow shot into the unknown’, since it is ‘a sign of Initiation and Rebirth’ (CW 3, 487, quoting V.E. Robson, A Student’s Textbook of

Astrology (1922)). Te Archer as a harbinger of the artistically new may possibly refect the very early stages of WBY’s reading of Nietzsche, and a consequent transfer of ambitions from the ‘Dionysian’ to the ‘Apollonian’; but at the time of composition the poet’s knowledge of this philosopher was little more than an interest (soon to be fed and amplifed by the gif of volumes from JQ, to which WBY responded enthusiastically in the autumn). One literary parallel is so obscure as to be almost certainly a coincidence – though WBY’s reading ventured into so many dark corners that such certainty cannot be complete. In a little-known work of 1603, Tomas Winter translated part of the sixteenth-century Huguenot poet Guillaume Du Bartas’s Semaines, as Te Second Day of the First Weeke of the most Excellent, Learned and Diuine Poet, William, Lord Bartas. Here, a description of the rainbow adapts Apollo to natural observation in ways that anticipate WBY’s lines (837–849): But when the Sun begins himselfe to shrowd In Tetis bed, and on some aduerse clowd, Vnable any longer to containe His watrie humour, shootes his beames amaine; Ten doth he shadow his resplendent face Vpon that cloude, and variously doth trace Te bending of that partie-coloured bow, Whose sight doth glad our faces here below. For th’aduerse cloude, which doth the arrowes take Of this great archer, instantly doth make Tat on the neighbour cloude they backe rebound, And doth with  Titans  golden beames compound His various colours. 13. His] his corr. to His TS. 14. Pairc-na-lee] One of Coole’s seven woods. Lying just to the south of the house, its name is transliterated from the Irish, and means ‘Field of the Calf ’.

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THE OLD AGE OF QUEEN MAEVE Date of composition. Probably composed in later summer 1902. In a letter to WBY of Aug. 1902 (saying that ‘I want you very much to meet a young fellow named Joyce [. . .] an extremely clever boy who belongs to your clan more than mine’), George Russell replied to what had evidently been recent news from the poet with ‘I am glad to hear you are working on a poem about Maeve’ (Denson, 43). WBY had been in residence at Coole since 24 Jun., but had been busy for all of Jul. with his plays Te Hour Glass and Te Pot of Broth. Although planning of the poem is likely to have begun with WBY’s arrival at Coole, it is possible that work on the new narrative was only just beginning in Aug., when the poet announced it to Russell. Sources. Te Irish narrative upon which WBY builds is the tale (possibly as old in origin as the eighth century) contained in the medieval Book of Leinster, the Aislinge Óenguso (Te Dream-Vision of Aengus). However, the resultant poem constructs on this foundation a story and treatment that are in signifcant respects original rather than traditional. It is possible that WBY had access to the short summary of this Irish source contained in H. d’Arbois de Jubainville’s Le cycle mythologique irlandais (1884), though the text was not available in English translation until 1903. WBY might have read the frst translation of the Irish narrative into English, by E. Müller in the Revue Celtique 3 (1876), 347–350, and he certainly knew the version as given and discussed in John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (1888). Here Aengus, who has been sickening as a result of not being able to locate the young woman whom he has seen in a vision and for whom he pines, is shown the lady by his father, the Dagda, aided by Bodb Derg (170): [Bodb] came with the news to the Dagda and took the Mac Óc [Aengus] to see if he could recognize the lady. Te Mac Óc did so the moment he descried her, among her thrice ffy maiden companions. Tese, we are told, were joined two and two together by silver chains, and their mistress towered head and shoulders above the rest. Her name was Caerabar, or more shortly Caer, daughter of Etal Anubal, of the fairy settlement of Uaman in the land of Connaught. She wore a silver collar round her neck and a chain of burnished gold. Aengus was grieved that he had not the power to take her away; so he returned home, and the Dagda was advised to seek the aid of Ailill and Medb, the king and queen of the western kingdom. But Caer’s father declining to answer the summons that he should appear before them, an attack was made on his residence, when he himself was taken and brought before Ailill and Medb. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-18

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Although he knew Rhys’s redaction, and probably had access at Coole to Müller’s translation, WBY had closest knowledge of the story as retold by AG in CM, 145–146: So they set out together till they came to the sea, and there they saw three times ffy young girls, and the one they were looking for among them; and she was far beyond them all. And there was a silver chain between every two of them, but about her own neck there was a necklace of shining gold. And Bodb said: ‘Do you see that woman you were looking for?’ ‘I see her, indeed,’ said Angus. ‘But tell me who she is, and what her name is.’ ‘Her name is Caer Ormaith, daughter of Ethal Anbual, from Sidhe Uaman, in the province of Connaught. But you cannot bring her away with you this time,’ said Bodb. Ten Angus went to visit his father, the Dagda, and his mother, Boann, at Brugh na Boinne; and Bodb went with him, and they told how they had seen the girl, and they had heard her own name, and her father’s name. ‘What had we best do now?’ said the Dagda. ‘Te best thing for you to do,’ said Bodb, ‘is to go to Ailell and Maeve, for it is in their district she lives, and you had best ask their help.’ So the Dagda set out until he came into the province of Connaught, and sixty chariots with him; and Ailell and Maeve made a great feast for him. And afer they had been feasting and drinking for the length of a week, Ailell asked the reason of their journey. And the Dagda said: ‘It is by reason of a young girl in your district, for my son has sickness upon him on account of her, and I am come to ask if you will give her to him.’ ‘Who is she?’ said Ailell. ‘She is Caer Ormaith, daughter of Ethal Anbual.’ ‘We have no power over her that we could give her to him,’ said Ailell and Maeve. ‘Te best thing for you to do,’ said the Dagda, ‘would be to call her father here to you.’ So Ailell sent his steward to Ethal Anbual, and he said: ‘I am come to bid you to go and speak with Ailell and with Maeve.’ ‘I will not go,’ he said; ‘I will not give my daughter to the son of the Dagda.’ So the steward went back and told this to Ailell. ‘He will not come,’ he said, ‘and he knows the reason you want him for.’ In all versions, the Irish source takes a route from this point which is markedly diferent from that of WBY’s story. In this respect, the poet was deliberately pursuing an original narrative, rather than anything related to his source material. ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ is, then, to be understood as an original variation on an Irish source; it is the frst instance, on a large scale at any rate, of WBY attempting to write Irish myth for himself. Queen Maeve, and MG. Te legendary Queen of Connaught, Maeve (as spelled by WBY, AG, and others: Irish spellings include Medb, Medbh, and Meadhbh) is a central fgure in the Ulster Cycle of stories, notably in those making up the Táin Bo Cuailnge (Te Cattle-Raid of Cooley). Among her numerous husbands was Ailill [mac Mata], to whom she bore seven sons, each given the name Maine (see note to 84). Maeve is associated with several locations, including Cruachan in Co. Roscommon and Tara in Co. Meath; a large cairn on the summit of Knocknarea in Co. Sligo, known to WBY from

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childhood, was also connected with the queen in local tradition. WBY’s knowledge of the myths in which Maeve featured was the foundation for a large number of diferent portrayals, in both drama and poetry, in the course of his writing career. In 1902, there were some particular associations with the legendary queen of Connaught which perhaps helped in the conception of this narrative poem. Maeve herself was already fairly at home in contemporary Irish literature, and WBY’s awareness of this may have some part in his decision both to portray the queen much later in her life, and to provide a narrative that departs radically from any major source (see Sources). In 1882, Aubrey De Vere published his poetic re-telling of the Irish texts making up the Táin narrative, Te Foray of Queen Maeve and Other Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age: in 1889, WBY had grandly (and rather too confdently, given his ignorance of Irish) announced of one poem in this book that De Vere’s ‘version is very readable, but over-embroidered, and lacking entirely the favour of the original’ (Providence Sunday Journal, 10 Feb. 1889, CW 7, 81). Interest in the narrative materials of the Táin was common among WBY’s Irish contemporaries, and it may be signifcant that WBY chooses here to write a story about a time afer that narrative’s events, referring to these glancingly as ‘the great war | Over the WhiteHorned Bull and the Brown Bull’ (49–50: see note). In this respect, the poem ofers a portrait of one of the Táin’s important characters, Maeve, in a context that is distinct (temporally and otherwise) from the better-known narratives. WBY was not the frst to attempt something of a reinvention of the legendary queen. Edward Martyn’s play Maeve centred on a young modern woman who is given to visions of her mythic namesake, and who manages to fall in love with one of Maeve’s retinue, while on the eve of her wedding to an English landlord. Afer witnessing the queen and her entire court emerging from the opened-up site of an ancient cairn, Martyn’s Maeve dies, presumably in order to be welcomed to the society of the legendary (and supernatural) order. WBY sent MG a copy of the play, published with Martyn’s Te Heather Field as its companion piece, at the start of 1899 (see G-YL, 103). In his Introduction to the book, GM ofered a description (and diagnosis) of Martyn’s heroine. Tis interpretation of the play insists on the possibility of embodying the mythic in the real, and merging legendary with contemporary time; its version of Maeve is partly GM’s distinctive fantasy of a combined nationalist and sexual dedication (Edward Martyn, Te Heather Field and Maeve (1899), xxvii): Maeve is the spirit and sense of an ill-fated race, and she portrays its destiny and bears the still unextinguished light of its heroic period. Maeve is all ecstasy, tremulous white ecstasy, cold as ice and glittering like ice in the moonlight. She looks beyond the world for her love; she is haunted by the herolepsy [a coinage of GM’s] of the plume and the spear of the warrior, and sees her lover the chiefest among the chiefains of Queen Maeve. Maeve’s love is a cerebral erithism [GM probably intends ‘erethism’: ‘Excitement of an organ or tissue in an unusual degree; also transferred morbid over-activity of the mental powers or passions’, OED] which shrinks from all contact or even thought of the contact of fesh. But this severance of her temperament from the strange fruition of all our holy and most tender aspirations does not alienate our sympathy from her.

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Although shorn of all common humanity, our sympathy is with her as it is with Garden Tyrrell [in Te Heather Field], and we cry, ‘Believe in your warrior of long ago, and let go by you the young Englishman who seeks to rob you of your dream’; and to triumph thus over common instincts and infect the reader with sympathies and longing which lie beyond the world is surely to succeed where hitherto no modern English dramatist has even dreamed that drama was to be found. Mistakenly or not, WBY at this time had taken MG’s word for it that she, too, was someone who ‘shrinks from all contact or even thought of the contact of fesh’. Another irony here, and not one specifc to MG and WBY, is that the legendary Maeve possessed also, in the Irish sources, a legendarily voracious sexual appetite. While on this matter Edward Martyn was able to look in a diferent direction, it was much less likely that GM would do so; and in 1902, GM and WBY were in prolonged and detailed literary contact. WBY’s decision to depict a much older and a sexually battle-hardened Maeve, a grandmother, in the context of a narrative of young love, introduces an intricacy of perspectives beyond anything ofered by Martyn, and one which GM’s ironic sensibilities might have appreciated. It is unlikely that MG would have shared GM’s high estimate of Martyn’s play (she found his other play, Te Heather Field, ‘heavy and rather indigestible’ (G-YL, 105)), but GM’s account of the stage-Maeve might well have struck a chord in terms of MG’s own ideas of her romantic identity. In 1900, when she became the founding President of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (the Daughters of Ireland), she adopted the name Maeve for the purpose, and she published a piece on the Queen of Connaught in A. Grifth’s United Irishman in Oct. 1901. WBY was well aware of MG’s identifcation with Maeve, and its political intent (one of his letters from her at around the time of this poem’s composition (Aug. 1902, G-YL, 158) was signed – with innovative spelling of even this variously spelled name – ‘Always your friend | Maedbe’); but he was also deeply informed on the legendary fgure herself, whose dimensions went beyond those accepted by MG. In Te Speaker for 19 Apr. 1902 WBY published (as part of ‘New Chapters of the Celtic Twilight’) his prose piece ‘And Fair, Fierce Women’. Tis title was taken directly from Martyn’s Maeve, where it is quoted from an Irish poem: ‘Every hill which is at this Oenach | Has under it heroes and queens, | And poets and distributors | And fair ferce women’ (frst translated and published by George Cofey in 1892). Martyn’s heroine repeats the fnal line as her cry of identifcation and triumph in the play. WBY’s short essay uses material gathered from Mary Battle in Sligo in 1898, combining this with material collected in Co. Galway. Te opening places Maeve in a Co. Sligo context (M, 38–39): One day a woman that I know came face to face with heroic beauty, that highest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, a beauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place. She was standing at the window, looking over to Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve is thought to be buried, when she saw, as she told me, ‘the fnest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountain

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and straight to her.’ Te woman had a sword by her side and a dagger lifed up in her hand, and was dressed in white, with bare arms and feet. She looked ‘very strong, but not wicked,’ that is, not cruel. WBY’s interlocutor goes on to compare Maeve with Queen Victoria: ‘the present Queen is a nice, pleasant-looking woman, but she is not like her’. Te short article moves on to material provided by ‘a friend of mine’ (who is AG), quoting an old woman in a Galway workhouse: ‘Queen Maeve was handsome, and overcame all her enemies with a hazel stick, for the hazel is blessed, and is the best weapon that can be got. You might walk the world with it,’ but she grew ‘very disagreeable in the end – O very disagreeable. Best not to be talking about it. Best leave it between the book and the hearer.’ My friend thought the old woman had got some scandal about Fergus son of Rogh and Maeve in her head. Tis is the Fergus in lines 63–64 of WBY’s poem; and the anecdote, channelled as it is through AG, is one that acknowledges the scandalous aspects of Maeve. Te poem, on the other hand, is deaf to the injunction, ‘Best not to be talking about it’. Te article ends with a fnal anecdote, supplied this time from WBY’s own experience, which links Maeve, poetry, and eroticism: And I myself met once with a young man on the Burren Hills who remembered an old poet who made his poems in Irish and had met when he was young, the young man said, one who called herself Maeve, and said she was a queen ‘among them’, and asked him if he would have money or pleasure. He said he would have pleasure, and she gave him her love for a time, and then went from him, and ever afer he was very mournful. Te young man had ofen heard him sing the poem of lamentation that he made, but could only remember that it was ‘very mournful’, and that he called her ‘beauty of all beauties’. When using this anecdote previously, in Beltaine for Feb. 1900, WBY quoted the remembered verse as ‘beauty of all beauty’ and added that this was ‘a phrase that makes one think that she [Maeve] had become a symbol of ideal beauty, as the supernatural lover is in Mr. Martyn’s play’ (CW 8, 157). In fact, the phrase comes from AE’s [George Russell’s] poem ‘Carrowmore’, which he sent to WBY in Feb. 1898, including the line ‘’Tis the Beauty of all beauty that is calling for your love’. Te context in the letter is a report of the experiences of one Caden More, a farmer in Mayo who as a young man had ‘spent the whole night with the faeries in a great palace below Nephin’ [Néifnn, a mountain in Connaught]. According to Russell, ‘He remembers it all most distinctly and gave me a vivid account of his reception his feelings and his behaviour’: in context, it is clear that the reception, as well as the feelings and behaviour, had an erotic element. Russell himself, accounting for his poem, told WBY how ‘I remember once as I lay on the mountains seeing in dream a fgure moving into the heart of the dawn, sadly, slowly alone it went

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into the golden fre and I knew that it saw nothing and the dawn was invisible and the golden fre only a chillness around it, and the dawn light may be glittering everywhere for all I know’ (Denson, 25–26). Russell’s reverie may contribute to WBY’s presentation of the sexual union between Aengus and Caer, ‘two lovers came out of the air | With bodies made out of sof fre’ (135–136), while AE’s poem and its supposed provenance in the experiences of Caden More almost certainly were understood by WBY as witnesses to the sexual power of the fairy world, with particular closeness to the stories of Queen Maeve. MG’s signifcance, nevertheless, was always apparent to close followers of WBY’s work, and Austin Clarke’s account of his meeting with an elderly MG uses the poem to focus his impressions (Shanendoah (1965), repr. in G.A. Schirmer (ed.), Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke (1995), 33): Much to my surprise, she spoke of the heroic past, of the visions she had seen ofen and of her awareness of the Invisible Ireland. She, too [. . .] seemed to change. She was pale and wrinkled but her eyes, with their golden circles, were unusual and reminded me of the astonishing beauty of her early years. I remembered the many poems which Yeats had written about her and realised for the frst time how greatly they had infuenced one another. She had drawn him for a time into revolutionary politics, but he had lured her into the invisible land of the Ever Young. Tere came into my mind that neglected poem of his, ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve,’ which tells how the children of Maeve dug into an enchanted hill to rescue the blue-eyed Caer [quotes 105–111] Te poet turned from his narrative to tell of Maud Gonne [quotes 122–133]. Modern criticism, too, can read the poem’s Maeve as being more or less straightforwardly a version of MG. D. Toomey writes of how in the poem ‘the persona which refects the ‘new’ Maud Gonne is human, all too human’ (Toomey, 15): Yet, if all idealisation of women conceals actual denigration, then this shif has a progressive aspect. Maeve is old, has been married, has had lovers and, most signifcantly, ‘had been great-bodied and great-limbed, | Fashioned to be the mother of strong children’. His novel obsession with Maud Gonne is made explicit [quotes 128–133]. In his narrative poem, WBY focuses on Maeve in her old age, with her husband as soundly asleep as the porter in his lodge; but it is through these sleeping men that the other world speaks to her – in a literal sense – to require her aid in facilitating a lovematch. It is as though Maeve must remain for WBY a fgure invested in sexual passion. MG’s presence as a contemporary parallel (though one who is not yet old, or even middle-aged) is both privately important and part of a series of more public hints in what the poem’s narrative voice says (see note to 122–133). One of the poet’s earliest lovepoems for MG had imagined her in old age (‘When you are Old’ (1891)), but the portrait in ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ possesses a complexity of emotional commitment

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which comes in part from a decade more of lived experience, and which colours the depiction of ‘angry, amorous Maeve, with her long pale face’, as WBY called her in his 1902 Preface to CM (CW 4, 123). Reception and critical interpretation. On its frst periodical publication, the poem was noticed in the pages of Te Speaker (4 Apr. 1903) as being ‘a fne and characteristic piece’ by WBY. Te poem was perhaps so ‘characteristic’ of WBY for its early readers that it did not need to generate much comment, and there was little critical discussion, even once WBY became the subject of widespread critical attention. H.F. Krans, in his William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival (1905) accorded high praise to the poem, while also suggesting the modernity of its context (58–59): In ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ may be recognised that kinship of spirit between the poetry of the Irish heroic age and the Homeric epics, which students of the Gaelic have so ofen remarked. But this poem and others of the same kind are rather appreciations of the temper of ancient Irish literature than embodiments of it. Tey belong to the poetry of an age of thought, revolting against itself, and imitating the poetry of an age of action. Modern analysis has also been rare, though this may have more to do with the poem’s placing in collected editions afer 1933 amongst the ‘Narrative and Dramatic’ works at an easily neglectable position afer the ‘Lyric’ work in those books. Apart from the biographical interest of 122–133 (see note), the poem’s specifcally literary aspects are not ofen assessed. In its way, the poem is a bravura piece of narrative, which both compresses and drastically modifes its source, efecting a series of disconcerting alterations to the expected angles of narration. It profts from the example of ‘Baile and Aillinn’, sharing some of that poem’s broad subject matter (love frustrated and fulflled, and the role played in this by Aengus), also repeating one of that poem’s more daring innovations (the insertion of frst-person refection as a kind of staged personal interruption of the story itself). Te formal medium, however, is strikingly diferent to that of ‘Baile and Aillinn’: in place of the rhymed tetrameters of the previous summer’s poem, WBY writes in a strictly observed – but still individual – blank verse. Like much of his best short prose fction of the previous decade or so, the poem combines telescoped narration with a vivid and unsettling strangeness of particular efects. Tere is a deep – but in artistic terms an enabling – uncertainty in the poem about the very meaning of voice, which brings human and supernatural into a difcult kind of proximity. Te porter frst, and then Ailill, are possessed by the other world, which employs their voices to make its communication with the human world. Te porter produces only an ‘ear-piercing noise’ (38), but Maeve’s sleeping husband Ailill is the vocal conduit for Aengus himself. Te divine does not appear to the mortal, but disruptively inhabits it, and requires the mortal world to serve its desires with the invasive violence of digging out the sidhemound of ‘Bual’s hill’. Te alliance between Aengus and Maeve, then, is one between supernatural and natural realms; yet it is far from easily achieved, and depends upon Maeve’s willingness – long afer her most active years as a lover – to facilitate the erotic desires of an unageing divinity, by delivering him the lover he has desired, but has so

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far been powerless to possess. In the shape of the poem’s narrative, both Aengus’s desire and Maeve’s memories of desire are satisfed. All of this is deepened by the efect of a frst-person narrator who refects on his own love: this may be a still vigorous desire, or the memory of a desire now far from its point of initial vigour. Or, if WBY is imagining himself as both Maeve and Aengus, it may in fact be both of these things. Textual and publication history. No MS material survives, and the earliest text is a six-page TS with handwritten corrections in the Berg Collection, NYPL (TS: repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 6–17). Te paper is the same as that used for the poem ‘Adam’s Curse’, composed around the same time at Coole. Te poem had its frst publication in Te Fortnightly Review for Apr. 1903 (FR). WBY seems to have ofered it to this publication in Jan. 1903, for a letter to AG of 15 Jan. reports that FR’s editor, W.L. Courtney, ‘ofers £12 for ‘Old Age of Queen Maeve’’: having experienced some stalling from Courtney in the past, the poet adds that ‘I have asked when he can publish it and given him three months’ (CL 3, 304). Te poem was next printed in the New York journal Te Gael in Jun. 1903 (G). In the Dun Emer ISW, which was published on 25 Aug. 1903, the poem immediately followed ‘In the Seven Woods’, the opening piece, on that book’s frst page of verse. In 1904, ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ was included in the selection of WBY’s work for vol. 9 of the American anthology, Irish Literature, ed. by Justin McCarthy. Te text of this version corresponds to that of G, rather than the more recently published ISW. WBY made some revisions to the text for A selection from the poetry of W.B. Yeats (Tauchnitz, 1913, repr. 1922), which were not carried forward to subsequent collected editions (T). Te poem was included in all of WBY’s collected editions of verse, and was part of the ‘Narrative and Dramatic’ section at the end of CP33, then CP50 and its successors. Introductory lines added in 1933. For CP33, WBY added eight lines of introduction to this poem, one that had been fnished a good thirty years earlier. Te lines were set in italics, and were to frame the ensuing narrative as one produced by a far-wandering Irish bard in the Byzantium of WBY’s later mythic-historical imagination. Since ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ was in print for so long without these lines, and because the 1933 verses essentially appropriate its narrative for a context that was wholly unimaginable for both the poet and his readers for much of that time, the present text omits them, while reproducing them in this headnote. Te lines (for which there is extensive MS draf material) will be edited separately in the present edition in their chronological place, as work of 1933. Te eight lines themselves, from P33 and subsequent collected editions, are these: A certain poet in outlandish clothes Gathered a crowd in some Byzantine lane, Talked of his country and its people, sang To some stringed instrument none there had seen, A wall behind his back, over his head A latticed window. His glance went up at times As though one listened there, and his voice sank Or let its meaning mix into the strings.

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Copy-text: P49

5

10

Maeve the great queen was pacing to and fro, Between the walls covered with beaten bronze, In her high house at Cruachan; the long hearth, Flickering with ash and hazel, but half showed Where the tired horse-boys lay upon the rushes, Or on the benches underneath the walls, In comfortable sleep; all living slept But that great queen, who more than half the night Had paced from door to fre and fre to door. Though now in her old age, in her young age She had been beautiful in that old way That’s all but gone; for the proud heart is gone,

1. Maeve the great queen] Maeve, the great queen, FR, G. 2. bronze,] bronze TS, FR, G. WBY’s image of the walls covered in bronze may owe less to the evidence about ancient Irish buildings than it does to Homer: in Book 7 of the Odyssey, Odysseus approaches the palace of Antinous by way of (in G. Chapman’s version) a ‘brazen pavement’, and here ‘On every side stood frme a wall of brasse’, where ‘Te brazen thresholds both sides did enfold’ (Book VII, 114, 117, 120). 3. long] great TS. Cruachan] Tis was the capital of Queen Maeve of Connaught. It is referred to as this in the narrative of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and elsewhere. Te likely site is Ráth Cruachan (the fort of Cruachan) in Co. Roscommon, where a very large area containing features and remains from the Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron ages onwards includes most notably a circular mound, some 86m in diameter and over 5m in height. Tis, along with evidence of a much larger surrounding enclosure, makes the mound likely to have been at some point the stronghold of a royal clan. Te association with Maeve in the medieval sources was strong, and modern literary treatments of this material (such as those by Aubrey De Vere, Te Foray of Queen Maeve (1869), and of course AG’s own CM) make Cruachan

Maeve’s home. In CM, Ch. 9 (‘Cruachan’) begins with the plain statement ‘Now as to Cruachan, the home of Ailell and of Maeve, it is on the plain of Magh Ai it was, in the province of Conaught’ (148). 4. hazel,] hazel TS. 5. horse-boys] Tese domestic servants feature also in T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘Te Wanderings and Lamentations of Queen Gormfaith’, 27: ‘And by the door were horse-boys’; they had been seen earlier in E. Bulwer Lytton, Clytemnestra, Te Earle’s Return, the Artist, and Other Poems (1855), ‘Elayne le Blanc’, 238: ‘And drowsy horseboys singing in the straw’. 7. sleep; all] sleep. All FR, G. 9. fre and] fre, and FR, G. 12. the proud heart] Te phrase had accrued associations of heroic resistance in nineteenth-century poetry: perhaps cp. Wordsworth, Poetical Works (1850), ‘Rob Roy’s Grave’, 119: ‘Te proud heart fashing through the eyes’, ‘Speranza’ (Lady Jane Wilde), Poems by Speranza (1864), ‘Te Young Patriot Leader’, 5: ‘At his Cyclopean stroke the proud heart of man awoke’, John Keegan Casey, Te Rising of the Moon, and Other Ballads, Songs, and Legends (1869), ‘Face the Storm! Song of Ofaly, 1559’, 21–22: ‘But the hands shall not get weak, | Nor the proud heart wail at loss’. gone; for] gone, for TS, FR, G.

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And the fool heart of the counting-house fears all But soft beauty and indolent desire. She could have called over the rim of the world Whatever woman’s lover had hit her fancy, And yet had been great-bodied and great-limbed, Fashioned to be the mother of strong children; And she’d had lucky eyes and a high heart, And wisdom that caught fre like the dried fax, At need, and made her beautiful and ferce, Sudden and laughing. O unquiet heart, Why do you praise another, praising her, As if there were no tale but your own tale Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound? Have I not bid you tell of that great queen Who has been buried some two thousand years? When night was at its deepest, a wild goose Cried from the porter’s lodge, and with long clamour

13. fool] Tis adjective is OED B 2., ‘Foolish, silly, stupid. In early use ofen:  spec.  showing a lack of judgement; rash, imprudent, unwise’. OED goes on to observe that it is ‘Not in formal or standard use afer 16th cent. Subsequently, in colloquial or regional use throughout the British Isles, esp. in Scotland, and North America.’ 14. sof beauty and indolent desire] Both terms here are touched by cliché: ‘sof beauty’ was especially common in nineteenth-century poetry, while ‘indolent desire’ spread vigorously then in many religious texts. WBY’s dealings with the ‘fool heart’ here suggest the clichés are deliberate: however, in WBY’s and E.J. Ellis’s commentary on the works of William Blake, in their edition of 1893, Te Book of Ahania IV, 7 (‘Round the pale living Corse on the Tree | Forty years few the arrows of pestilence’) is annotated: ‘Round the pale, living body of passion, fashioned to containing fesh, the arrows of pestitential [sic] indolent desire few’ (vol. 2, 143).

15. the rim of the world] Te phrase is John Todhunter’s, from Irish Bardic Tales (1896), ‘Te Fate of the Sons of Usna’, ‘Te Fifh Duan: Te Flight from Alba’, 156–157: ‘You pine here in your dun | Beyond the rim of the world’. 17. great-limbed] Perhaps cp. Katharine Tynan, Louise De La Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘Waiting’, 22: ‘great-limbed, bearing helm and shield and sword’. 20.] Te fax plant (Linum usitatissimum), common in Irish agriculture, is harvested and frst lef to dry in order to extract the seeds: at this stage, it is especially fammable. 22. O unquiet heart,] O unquiet heart TS; O, unquiet heart, FR, G. Cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), V, 5: ‘But, for the unquiet heart and brain, | A use in measured language lies’ – and cp. 25, ‘measure of sweet sound’ and 133, ‘Outrun the measure’. 23. praising her,] praising her TS, FR, G. 25. knitting] setting TS. sound?] sounds TS; sound. FR; sound! G. sweet sound] A recollection of Shakespeare, Twelfh Night I i 5–6: ‘O, it came o’er my ear

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Shook the ale-horns and shields upon their hooks; But the horse-boys slept on, as though some power Had flled the house with Druid heaviness; And wondering who of the many-changing Sidhe Had come as in old times to counsel her, Maeve walked, yet with slow footfall, being old, To that small chamber by the outer gate. The porter slept, although he sat upright With still and stony limbs and open eyes. Maeve waited, and when that ear-piercing noise Broke from his parted lips and broke again, She laid a hand on either of his shoulders, And shook him wide awake, and bid him say Who of the wandering many-changing ones Had troubled his sleep. But all he had to say Was that, the air being heavy and the dogs More still than they had been for a good month, He had fallen asleep, and, though he had dreamed nothing, He could remember when he had had fne dreams.

like the sweet sound | Te breathes upon a bank of violets’. 30. hooks;] hooks, FR, G. 33, 43. many-changing] Tis epithet for the Sidhe, indicating their ability to take on many diferent forms, seems plain enough; but it is in fact extremely rare in poetry, its one appearance that WBY could have known being in Christopher Smart’s translation of Horace, Epistle I (in Te Works of Horace, Translated into Verse (1767)). Here, the context (as well as WBY’s later use of the Proteus fgure in ‘At the Abbey Teatre’ (1911)) may be suggestive (166–169): But if he’s single, he’ll protest Tat married men alone are blest; What noose for Proteus shall I fnd, His many-changing form to bind? (In Horace’s Latin (Epistles I i, 90), the line ‘quo teneam voltus mutantem Protea nodo?’ means

‘With what knot shall I hold this face-changing Proteus?’: ‘many-changing’ is Smart’s embellishment, not to be found elsewhere.) 34. come as in old times] come as in old time TS; come, as in old times, FR, G; come as in the old times T. 35. footfall, being] footstep, being TS; footfall being ISW. 37. slept, although] slept although TS, ISW. 40. lips and] lips, and FR, G. 45. Was that, the air being heavy] Was that the air bring heavy, TS; Was that the air, being heavy, FR, G. 47. and, though] and thought corr. to and though TS; and though FR, G. 48. he had had] he had TS. fne dreams] Perhaps cp. W. Allingham, Blackberries (1890), ‘Where is the wise and just man?’, 6–7: ‘Unmeaning promises they were | Tat fed my youth, fne dreams of night’.

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It was before the time of the great war

49–50. the time of the great war | Over the White-Horned Bull and the Brown Bull] WBY had already made use of this shorthand mythic history in ‘Baile and Aillinn’ (1901), 14–15 (see note). As in that poem, the reference here is something of a cue for AG’s CM, rather than any independent foray on WBY’s part into the Old Irish sources. AG gives her version of the story, beginning from where ‘the two bulls were born, the White-horned and the Brown’, in CM, 272–275: Tey were the fnest ever seen in Ireland, and gold and silver were put on their horns by the men of Ulster and Connaught. In Connaught no bull dared bellow before the White-horned, and in Ulster no bull dared bellow before the Brown. As to the Brown, he that had been Friuch, the Munster swineherd, his lowing when he would be coming home every evening to his yard was good music to the people of the whole of Cuailgne. And wherever he was, neither Bocanachs nor Bananachs nor witches of the valley, could come into the one place with him. And it was on account of him the great war broke out. Now, when Maeve saw at Ilgaireth that the battle was going against her, she sent eight of her own messengers to bring away the Brown Bull, and his heifers. ‘For whoever goes back or does not go back,’ she said, ‘the Brown Bull must go to Cruachan.’ Now when the Brown Bull came into Connaught, and saw the beautiful trackless country before him, he let three great loud bellowings out of him. As soon as the White-horned heard that, he set out for the place those bellowings came from, with his head high in the air. Ten Maeve said that the men of her army must not go to their homes till they would see the fght between the two bulls. And they all said one must be put to watch the fght, and to give a fair report of it aferwards. And it is what they agreed, that Bricriu should be sent to watch it,

because he had not taken any side in the war; for he had been through the whole length of it under care of physicians at Cruachan, with the dint of the wound he got the day he vexed Fergus, and that Fergus drove the chess-men into his head. ‘I will go willingly,’ said Bricriu. So he went out and took his place in a gap, where he could have a good view of the fght. As soon as the bulls caught sight of one another they pawed the earth so furiously that they sent the sods fying, and their eyes were like balls of fre in their heads; they locked their horns together, and they ploughed up the ground under them and trampled it, and they were trying to crush and to destroy one another through the whole length of the day. And once the White-horned went back a little way and made a rush at the Brown, and got his horn into his side, and he gave out a great bellow, and they rushed both together through the gap where Bricriu was, the way he was trodden into the earth under their feet. And that is how Bricriu of the bitter tongue, son of Cairbre, got his death. Ten when the night was coming on, Cormac Conloingeas took hold of a spear-shaf, and he laid three great strokes on the Brown Bull from head to tail, and he said: ‘Tis is a great treasure to be boasting of, that cannot get the better of a calf of his own age.’ When the Brown Bull heard that insult, great fury came on him, and he turned on the White-horned again. All through the night the men of Ireland were listening to the sound of their bellowing, and they going here and there, all through the country. On the morrow, they saw the Brown Bull coming over Cruachan from the west, and he carrying what was lef of the White-horned on his horns. Ten Maeve’s sons, the Maines, rose up to make an attack on him on account of the Connaught bull he had destroyed. ‘Where are those men going:’ said Fergus. ‘Tey are

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Over the White-Horned Bull and the Brown Bull. She turned away; he turned again to sleep That no god troubled now, and, wondering What matters were afoot among the Sidhe, Maeve walked through that great hall, and with a sigh Lifted the curtain of her sleeping-room, Remembering that she too had seemed divine To many thousand eyes, and to her own One that the generations had long waited That work too difcult for mortal hands Might be accomplished. Bunching the curtain up She saw her husband Ailell sleeping there, And thought of days when he’d had a straight body, And of that famous Fergus, Nessa’s husband, Who had been the lover of her middle life. Suddenly Ailell spoke out of his sleep, And not with his own voice or a man’s voice, But with the burning, live, unshaken voice

going to kill the Brown Bull of Cuailgne.’ ‘By the oath of my people,’ said Fergus, ‘if you do not let the Brown Bull go back to his own country in safety, all he has done to the White-horned is little to what I will now do to you.’ Ten the Brown Bull bellowed three times, and set out on his way. And when he came to the great ford of the Sionnan he stopped to drink, and the two loins of the White-horned fell from his horns into the water. And that place is called Ath-luain, the ford of the loin, to this day. And its liver fell in the same way into a river of Meath, and it is called Ath-Truim, the ford of the liver, to this day. Ten he went on till he came to the top of Slieve Breagh, and when he looked from it he saw his own home, the hils of Cuailgne; and at the sight of his own country, a great spirit rose up in him, and madness and fury came on him, and he rushed on, killing everyone that came in his way. And when he got to his own place, he turned his back to a hill and he gave out a loud bellowing of victory. And with that

his heart broke in his body, and blood came bursting from his mouth, and he died. 50. White-Horned Bull and the Brown Bull] Whitehorned bull and the [Black del., corr. to Brown] bull TS; White-horned Bull, and the Brown Bull FR, G; White-Horned Bull, and the Brown Bull ISW-LP31. 61. Ailell] Maeve’s husband and king of Connaught. According to some sources, he was married to the adult Maeve while himself still a boy. He is Ailill Mac Máta in the legendary narrative; WBY adopts AG’s spelling. 62. he’d had] he had TS. 63. Fergus] Fergus mac Róich, a king of Ulster, is Maeve’s adulterous lover in the Táin. In associated texts, he meets his death at the hands of Ailill, who sees the lovers together by a lake, and arranges to have Fergus run through by a spear. (See also headnote on Queen Maeve, and MG.) Nessa’s husband] Fergus was married to Ness, who bore him Conchobar as a son: this was Conchobar mac Nessa, and WBY’s mistaken use of ‘Nessa’ for ‘Ness’ may be carried over from this name (which AG in CM spells correctly).

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Of those that, it may be, can never age. He said, ‘High Queen of Cruachan and Magh Ai, A king of the Great Plain would speak with you.’ And with glad voice Maeve answered him, ‘What king Of the far-wandering shadows has come to me As in the old days when they would come and go About my threshold to counsel and to help?’ The parted lips replied, ‘I seek your help, For I am Aengus, and I am crossed in love.’

68.] Of those that it may be shall never die, TS; Of those that it may be shall never fade. FR, G; Of those that it may be can never age ISW-LP31. 69. High Queen of Cruachan] Queen of unsheltered Cruachan, T. Magh Ai] Te Plain of Ai: cp. the opening of Ch. 9 of CM: ‘Now as to Cruachan, the home of Ailell and of Maeve, it is on the plain of Magh Ai it was, in the province of Connaught’ (148). Te plain in Roscommon carried the name Mag nAí, probably afer an early people in Connaught, the Ciarraige Aí. In CM, however, AG gives a completely different explanation of this name, as the ‘Plain of the Livers’, which involves Druids, magic, and some three hundred cows. 70. the Great Plain] In a note to ‘Baile and Aillinn’ for its appearance in the Monthly Review in Jul. 1902, WBY explained the reference in that poem to the Great Plain (123: ‘Where wild bees hive on the Great Plain’): ‘‘Te Great Plain’ is the Land of the Dead and of the Happy; it is called also ‘Te Land of the Living Heart,’ and many beautiful names besides.’ In that poem, the pastoral landscape is aligned with Magh Meall (Mor), the lovely (great) plain, a legendary destination in the Old Irish echtrae (adventure narratives) and medieval voyages. Here, there may also be some suggestion of Magh Tuireadh, where the Tuatha De Danaan had dwelt in legendary time. 71–73.] And with glad voice Maeve answered ‘many a time

Kings of the Great Plain have come and gone About my door to counsel and to help.’ T. 76. Aengus] Here WBY introduces a fgure already important in his recent work, notably in TSW (1900) and ‘Baile and Aillinn’ (1901). Tis member of the Tuatha De Danaan was now rapidly evolving, in WBY’s hands and also in the hands of AG and other writers in the ‘Celtic’ circle, into what the poet called on his headnote to ‘Baile and Aillinn’ ‘Aengus, the Master of Love’, or an Irish love-god roughly corresponding to Eros in classical myth. Where this supernatural fgure had previously been seen in his aspect as a helper of lovers, now WBY presents him as a lover who is himself in need of help. (Te possibly late addition of his name to the title of ‘Te Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897) was part of the poet’s discovery and exploration of the mystical and artistic possibilities of an Irish god of love, which took place with George Russell and others at Tillyra and Coole in 1897 and afer: see notes to 174 in vol. 2 of the present edition.) As a narrative situation, Aengus’s being ‘crossed in love’ is in accord with WBY’s source material: in the Irish aisling narrative found in the Book of Leinster, the Aislinge Óenguso (Te DreamVision of Aengus), Aengus Óg pines away for love of a beautiful girl who has appeared to him in a dream. Te solution in that story is not the one pursued in the narrative of ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’ (see Sources), though WBY does make use of the name of the beloved of Aengus there, Caer Iborméith.

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‘How may a mortal whose life gutters out Help them that wander with hand clasping hand, Their haughty images that cannot wither, For all their beauty’s like a hollow dream, Mirrored in streams that neither hail nor rain Nor the cold North has troubled?’ He replied, ‘I am from those rivers and I bid you call The children of the Maines out of sleep, And set them digging under Bual’s hill.

77. still] out T. 78^79.] By rivers where the rain has never dimmed TS, FR, G; By rivers where nor rain nor hail has dimmed ISW-P99–05. 78–80.] Help them that pace, hand in unwithering hand, | For all their beauty’s like a hollow dream T. 78. hand clasping hand] Perhaps cp. R. Browning, Pippa Passes (1841), Introduction, 53–54: ‘Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be | Sunbeams and pleasant weather’, and John K. Casey, A Wreath of Shamrocks (1866), ‘My Hope’, 37–38: ‘hand clasping hand, | We’ll trample on foul slavery’. 79. wither] fade TS, FR, G, ISW, P99–05. 80. For all their beauty’s like] For all their beauty ^is^ like TS; For all their beauty, like FR, G. 81.] Mirrored in waters that nor hail nor rain T. 83.] I come from undimmed rivers to bid you call TS; I come from the undimmed rivers to bid you call FR, G, ISW, P99–05; I am from those rivers and would have you call T. Final text (PW06 onwards) frst entered as correction to page proofs for PW06 (Berg Collection, NYPL). 84. Te children of the Maines] Maeve and Ailill gave the name Maine to each of their seven sons, heeding a prophecy that their great enemy, Conchobar, would meet his death at the hands of a man of this name. In CM, AG provides a list of the Maines, though adding that they did not in fact reside with their mother at Cruachan (149): Seven sons Ailell and Maeve had, and the name of every one of them was Maine. Tere was Maine Mathremail, like his

mother, and Maine Athremail, like his father, and Maine Mo Epert, the Talker, and Maine Milscothach, the Honey-Worded, and Maine Andoe the Quick, and Maine Mingor, the Gently Dutiful, and Maine Morgor, the Very Dutiful. Teir own people they had, and their own place of living. In WBY’s narrative, it is the children of these Maines who are set to work – that is, Maeve’s grandchildren (see 101, ‘her grandchildren’). 85. under Bual’s hill] LP22 and afer; into Anbual’s hill TS, FR, G, ISW-SP21; in the west of the hill T. Bual is Ethal Anbual, a king of the Sidhe, whose mound-palace was located in Uaman in Connaught. Tus, ‘Bual’s hill’ is in fact the dwelling-place of the king, inside the mound itself. Aengus’s request that the Maines should be ‘set [.  .  .] digging’ is an adaptation of the more traditional military raid described in the source. In AG’s version (CM, 146): ‘Ten there was anger on Ailell and on the Dagda, and they went out, and their armed men with them, and they destroyed the whole place of Ethal Anbual, and he was brought before them.’ In the Irish original, the Dagda and Ailell’s joint expedition is described, beginning with Anbual’s response to a messenger from Cruachan (E. Müller, Revue Celtique 3 (1876), 349): An order to thee from Ailell and Medb to go to speak to them. I will not go, said he, I will not give my daughter to the son of the Dagda. Tis was told to Ailell. His coming is not to be obtained from him. He knows the reason for which he is

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We shadows, while they uproot his earthy house, Will overthrow his shadows and carry of Caer, his blue-eyed daughter that I love. I helped your fathers when they built these walls, And I would have your help in my great need, Queen of high Cruachan.’ ‘I obey your will With speedy feet and a most thankful heart: For you have been, O Aengus of the birds, Our giver of good counsel and good luck.’ And with a groan, as if the mortal breath Could but awaken sadly upon lips That happier breath had moved, her husband turned Face downward, tossing in a troubled sleep; But Maeve, and not with a slow feeble foot, Came to the threshold of the painted house Where her grandchildren slept, and cried aloud, Until the pillared dark began to stir

called. Not so, said Ailell, I will go and my soldiers shall be taken unto him. Ten the household of Ailell and the army of the Dagda arose towards the fairies. Tey destroy the whole síd. To destroy the síd is to destroy a mound (the sidhe are named afer the mounds in which they dwell), and WBY makes an attack on the earth itself clear at this point in the narrative. WBY’s decision to identify the assault as given in the source with a process of excavation is likely to have been infuenced by the archaeological assaults of the British Israelites on the site of Tara in Co. Meath, still going on in the summer of 1902 (see notes to ‘In the Seven Woods’): the point is made by A. Davis, ‘Edwardian Yeats: In the Seven Woods’, Études Anglaises 68/4 (2015), 465. 86. earthy] earthly TS. 86–86^87.] the earthy house | Of one who is no friend to me or mine T. 88. Caer] Tis woman with whom Aengus is in love is (in AG’s version) ‘Caer Ormaith, daughter of Ethal Anbual’. 93. Aengus of the birds] WBY does not lose the opportunity here to associate Aengus with the fying birds that were supposed to

symbolize his kisses, an iconography which he and others were keen to promote. See e.g. TSW (1900), 260: ‘the ageless birds of Aengus’. Te iconography – developed in part from TSW itself, and the lines there that were later to become the poem ‘Te Harp of Aengus’ – is present in AG’s GFM (1904), 82: ‘over the harp [of Aengus] were two birds that seemed to be playing on it [.  .  .] Te birds, now, that used to be with Angus were four of his kisses that turned into birds that seemed to be playing on it’. George Russell had had a vision of Aengus in 1897, which he later incorporated into a story, ‘A Dream of Aengus Oge’. Here, ‘a glowing fgure’ appears, whose ‘body was pervaded with light as if sunfre rather than blood ran through its limbs’: ‘Birds few about it, and on the face was an ecstasy of beauty and immortal youth’ (AE, Te Candle of Vision (1918), 447). In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Buck Mulligan calls Stephen Dedalus (in the ninth section, ‘Scylla and Charibdis’) ‘wandering Aengus of the birds’: the year in which Joyce’s fction is set (1904) was one in which ISW was still a recently published collection (see also note to ‘Baile and Aillinn’, 1–12). 98. downward] downwards TS.

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With shouting and the clang of unhooked arms. She told them of the many-changing ones; And all that night, and all through the next day To middle night, they dug into the hill. At middle night great cats with silver claws, Bodies of shadow and blind eyes like pearls, Came up out of the hole, and red-eared hounds With long white bodies came out of the air Suddenly, and ran at them and harried them. The Maines’ children dropped their spades, and stood With quaking joints and terror-stricken faces, Till Maeve called out, ‘These are but common men. The Maines’ children have not dropped their spades Because earth, crazy for its broken power, Casts up a show and the winds answer it With holy shadows.’ Her high heart was glad, And when the uproar ran along the grass She followed with light footfall in the midst, Till it died out where an old thorn-tree stood.

103^104.] Break TS, FR, G, ISW-SP21; [no break, T]. 104. many-changing] See note to 33, 43. 106. night, they] night they TS, FR, G. 106, 107. middle night] Tis term for midnight, used in Anglo-Saxon and early middle English, vanished until it was briefy revived in the nineteenth century, but is classed by OED as ‘poetic’ and ‘regional’. 107–111.] Cp. AG, CM, 69: ‘When night came on, three enchanted monsters, with the shape of cats, were let out from the cave that was in the hill of the Sidhe at Cruachan, to attack them’ [i.e. to attack Conall, Laegaire, and Cuchulain]. 107. night great] night, great FR, G. 108. shadow and] shadow, and FR, G. 109–110. red-eared hounds | With long white bodies] Tese symbolic dogs were by now familiar pets in WBY’s poetry: the frst appearance is in ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889) I, 177–178: ‘a phantom hound | All pearly white, save one red ear’, while in ‘He

Mourns for the Change that has Come upon Him and his Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World’ (1897), 2: ‘I have been changed into a hound with one red ear’. WBY’s ultimate source is in the Irish material for ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’, in Bryan O’Looney’s translation of Michael Comyn’s Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youths, and the reference there to ‘a red-eared white dog’. Tough still supernatural, the hounds in the present episode are no longer primarily symbolic, and are being put to practical work. 113 terror-stricken] terror strucken ISW-LP31; terror-stricken TS, FR, G. ‘Strucken’ had been obsolete (except in regional dialect) for more than a century; it was introduced to the ISW text, and retained for so long, perhaps in order to introduce archaic diction to an otherwise fairly standard phrase. WBY had frst marked a return to ‘terror-stricken’ in annotations to a copy of SP21. 121^122.] Verse-paragraph break here, in all texts except FR, G.

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Friend of these many years, you too had stood With equal courage in that whirling rout;

122–133.] Te address is, in personal terms, likely to be one to MG: ‘Friend’ (122) is charged with specifc personal meaning, since MG habitually signed of letters to the poet with ‘your friend’. Such an identifcation, which would have been made easily in WBY’s circle, plays no part in the poem’s public function or meaning, except to indicate that there is a woman alive, and known intimately to the narrating poet, whose courage in violent circumstance equals that of the legendary Maeve. Attempts to read the lines as exclusively personal or confessional in nature are likely to fall fat: e.g. ‘Yeats’s comments about his own love for Maud are unnecessarily intrusive, though they obviously reveal his motivation for writing this celebratory poem’ (H.J. Levine, ‘Yeats’s Exorcism of Maud Gonne’, English Literary History 48/2 (Summer, 1981), 412). However, some critics have responded more sensitively to the balance between WBY’s life and his literary imagination here. M.J. Sidnell, writing that ‘the poet’s own story is represented as forcibly interrupting his attempt to tell the old one’, adds that ‘the interruptions in the poem are the entrance into a kind of dramatization of the self that began in the poems of In the Seven Woods’ (Sidnell, 100). For N. Grene, ‘Te verse here enacts the emotional process’, since ‘the realization of [Maeve’s] vulnerability and mortality’ is ‘all the more painful when this is translated into writing’: ‘Te ostensible address of the apostrophe to Gonne is metamorphosed into the live action of autonomous poetic language that is beyond the control even of the poet’ (Grene, 183). Te interpretation of these lines as a point where ‘the poet, dramatized within his poem, proves unable to stick to what is

supposedly his task, is unable to keep his own concerns from forcing their way into the poem’, as R. Greaves puts it, may well heighten, as he says, ‘the impression of the poem as performance’ (Greaves, 33–34); but of course the poem is not simply the record of any performance, and such an efect, if achieved, is brought about by WBY’s deliberated design. Te main point of the lines is to announce a spiritual kinship between Maeve and the friend: though the deep similarity is played of against specifc diferences. Te friend/MG does not, in this account, possess the ‘wandering heart’ of Maeve (124) – that is, behind WBY’s euphemism, she has not the queen’s propensity for sexual adventure (here, the poet is partly discounting things he already knows about MG, and is also partly mistaken owing to his ignorance). Another diference is implicit in the future tense of 130: Maeve is in her old age, and MG was only thirty-fve years of age in the summer of 1902. In the narrative, Maeve is not especially unhappy (and is not known outside this story for unhappiness), but ‘she has wept’ (130, 132) seems here almost to be an equal outrage to the fact that the friend/MG ‘will grow old and die’, potentially disarming the poetry itself by shattering its composure (132–133). ‘Greatness’ and ‘great’ (125, 133) are the verbal points at which the legendary queen and the contemporary friend are fused: in a way, this identifcation acknowledges the friend’s more than personal meaning and signifcance. Te critical consensus that WBY intends MG as the ‘friend’ in these lines need not be gratuitously challenged; even so, there is a possibility that the poet has AG in mind, perhaps as well as MG; and there is no evidence for any particular identifcation.

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For you, although you’ve not her wandering heart, Have all that greatness, and not hers alone, For there is no high story about queens In any ancient book but tells of you; And when I’ve heard how they grew old and died, Or fell into unhappiness, I’ve said, ‘She will grow old and die, and she has wept!’ And when I’d write it out anew, the words, Half crazy with the thought, She too has wept! Outrun the measure. I’d tell of that great queen Who stood amid a silence by the thorn Until two lovers came out of the air With bodies made out of soft fre. The one, About whose face birds wagged their fery wings, Said, ‘Aengus and his sweetheart give their thanks To Maeve and to Maeve’s household, owing all In owing them the bride-bed that gives peace.’

124. you’ve] you have TS, FR, G. wandering heart] Perhaps cp. Mary Tighe, Psyche (1811), 37–38: ‘Tat anxious torture may I never feel, | Which, doubtful, watches o’er a wandering heart’, and Tomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘Te Ring’, 41–42: ‘other nymphs to joy and pain | Tis wild and wandering heart hath moved’. 128. And when I’ve read how they grow old and die TS. In the proofs for ISW, a change of ‘grow’ and ‘die’ to ‘grew’ and ‘died’ is proposed in the hand of Dun Emer’s adviser on printing, Emery Walker (NLI 30246, and adopted in NLI 30247). 129. fell] fall TS. I’ve] I have T.

130, 132. wept!] wept TS; wept, FR, G. 134. amid a silence] Te unusual efect achieved by WBY here uses ‘amid’ in the sense of OED 3.a., ‘Without reference to physical location: in a context, setting, etc., of; against a background of; in the course of, during’. 136. made out of] made of TS sof fre] Te phrase itself is not very uncommon in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury poetry (John Hughes and Aaron Hill e.g. have instances of ‘love’s sof fre’), but WBY might have encountered it in Tomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘She sung of love’, 3–4: ‘to feed with their sof fre | Te soul within’. one,] one TS, FR, G.

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Then Maeve: ‘O Aengus, Master of all lovers, A thousand years ago you held high talk With the frst kings of many-pillared Cruachan. O when will you grow weary?’ They had vanished; But out of the dark air over her head there came A murmur of soft words and meeting lips.

141.] Tus Maeve and Angus master of all lovers TS. O Aengus,] O, Aengus, FR, G. 142. years] year TS. high talk] Tis is WBY’s frst use in poetry of a phrase which would return much later as the title of a poem of 1938. It was used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose with overtones of scepticism which are wholly absent here – e.g. Edmund Burke, Works (1815), vol. 2, Observations on a Late Publication Entitled Te Present State of the Nation

(1769), 131: ‘It is easy to parade with a high talk of parliamentary rights’, or R.L. and M. Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls (1815), 131: ‘he was in high talk with the aunt’. WBY’s sense of exaltation for the phrase follows Shelley, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1817), 52: ‘Hopes of high talk with the departed dead’. 143. many-pillared] With this unusual epithet, perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Te Wager (1878), III, 2: ‘High shines a many-pillared villa’. 144. O when] O, when TS, FR, G. weary?] weary. TS, ISW.

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ADAM’S CURSE Date and circumstances of composition. Probably composed in Sep. 1902. GY’s note on the date, in her TS carbon list (NLI 30166), is ‘before Nov. 20, 1902’: this derives from a letter from WBY to AG of 20 Nov. 1902, saying that ‘the Monthly Review has sent me a proof sheet of Adam’s Curse’ (CL 3, 257). Te magazine had received ‘Adam’s Curse’ more than a month earlier, for WBY’s agent A.P. Watt had sent the poem to its editor Henry Newbolt on 10 Oct. 1902 (CL 4, 996). One of WBY’s earliest drafs (MS2) has on its reverse a scenario (in AG’s hand) for the play Where Tere Is Nothing, much of which was composed at Coole in Sep. 1902: this seems a likely time, too, for composition of the present poem (AG also typed and made WBY’s emendations by hand to TS1). Although there is a probable reference to the idea for this play (to be carried through in collaboration with GM) as early as Jul. 1901 (WBY to JBY, CL 3, 87), there is no trace of any actual composition before the following summer. YP assigns a date of composition for ‘Adam’s Curse’ to May 1901, but this seems to be solely on the basis of the supposition that it was then that WBY had a conversation with MG and her sister, Kathleen Pilcher. R. Foster, too, sees the poem as an ‘evocation of [WBY’s] conversation with Gonne and her sister the previous May [i.e. May 1901], lounging in a Kensington drawing-room as the moon rose’ (Foster 1, 282). In fact, WBY was in Ireland from 9 May 1901, and MG returned from her lecturing and fund-raising tour of the US on 24 May, going directly to France to see her young daughter Iseult there, before coming to London to nurse her sister Kathleen in early Jun. WBY received a letter from MG (G-YL, 141) in Jun. (dated only ‘Monday’, but probably either 3 or 10 Jun.), giving him the address where she would be staying with her sister for about a week (the Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood, Croydon: a fashionable location, whose previous guests had included Wilhelm II and Emile Zola), and saying ‘I would like very much to see you’. But there was no possibility of any meeting until MG came to Dublin later in the summer: WBY went from Dublin to Sligo to stay with George Pollexfen on 30 May, returning to Dublin on 20 Jun. Many years aferwards, MG ofered an account of a visit by WBY to her and Kathleen, linking this directly with the poem (Servant, 317): While we were still at dinner Willie Yeats arrived to see me and we all went into the drawing-room for cofee. Kathleen and I sat together on a big sofa amid piles of sof cushions. I was still in my dark clothes with the black veil I always wore when travelling instead of a hat, and we must have made a strange contrast. I saw Willie Yeats looking critically at me and he told Kathleen he liked DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-19

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her dress and that she was looking younger than ever. It was on that occasion Kathleen remarked that it was hard work being beautiful, which Willie turned into his poem Adam’s Curse. If MG is remembering her arrival in London in Jun. 1901, this meeting cannot have happened then (and neither can the following day have seen a marriage proposal to her from WBY in Westminster Abbey, in front of the Stone of Scone). So it would be unwise to take all of the details here at face value. When and where did the meeting remembered by MG, and clearly important for the poem, actually take place? WBY had been on good terms with Kathleen Pilcher for some time (he saw a lot of her, e.g., in May 1899); from Nov. 1899 to Apr. 1900, Mrs. Pilcher was with her husband in South Africa (where he fought as a British ofcer in the Boer War), but by Jun. 1900 she was again part of WBY’s London circle: ‘I have been seeing a lot of Mrs. Pilcher,’ WBY wrote to AG on 2 Jun. 1900, ‘She is a vehement Imperialist and that makes her admiration and devotion to her sister all the more charming’ (CL 2, 533). Although it is known that Kathleen and MG were together in occasional attendance at WBY’s ‘Monday evenings’ in London, these seem unlikely occasions for the scene of ‘Adam’s Curse’: MG’s version of events, whatever its inaccuracies, clearly associates the meeting with 1901. WBY did stay in Dublin briefy in late Jun. 1901, when he knew MG would also be arriving there (CL 3, 81): although there is no record, it is possible that Kathleen accompanied her sister (the two had just been staying in Upper Norwood to aid Kathleen’s convalescence, and might have prolonged their holiday by going to Ireland). By late summer, MG was back in France. It is impossible to say with any certainty when the afer-dinner conversation remembered by MG took place; it is conceivable, in fact, that the recollection itself was shaped in signifcant ways by MG’s reading of the poem (which she goes on to quote in its entirety). D. Donoghue ofers a very literal reading of the poem as the record of a meeting at the beginning of his book Adam’s Curse: Refections on Religion and Literature (2001), dating the conversation to May 1902 – a month in which WBY, MG, and Mrs Pilcher were all far apart. Yet this poem (above all of WBY’s perhaps, given its insistence on how long the labour of artistic composition must take) is not in any case the record of any on-the-spot reaction by the poet. It is much more likely that the subject took time to settle as a possible poem in WBY’s mind, and that work on it was begun in the late summer of 1902 at Coole. Critical reception and interpretation. Tis poem has been studied and cited frequently in much modern criticism of WBY, ofen as a signifcant point in the evolution of his attitudes and his poetic style. In the earlier years of its reception, ‘Adam’s Curse’ was not so generally seen as pivotal, or even as potentially so. Tere was cautious (and doubleedged) early praise for the poem in Te New York Times (31 Oct. 1903), which quoted the opening lines with broad approval, but mentioned the poet’s ‘Celtic faults as well as Celtic virtues’, the chief of these being ‘the tendency to complain aloud of grievances’ so that ‘we fnd Mr. Yeats lamenting and scolding that art is not beloved of the multitude, and that artists are not treated with deference’; the reviewer did add that, given the standard of contemporary poetry, ‘it is impossible not to sympathise with his discontent’. In 1915, F. Reid’s pioneering study of WBY named this as a poem ‘which suddenly sofens towards the end, closing in a strange tender beauty’, and which ‘begins with a bald

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narrative statement, plain as prose, plainer a good deal than most of Mr. Yeats’s prose’ (Reid, 236). For British poets in the 1930s, the poem fgured as testimony to WBY’s need to leave the nineteenth century behind: Stephen Spender, in Te Spectator 23 Feb. 1934, wrote how ‘In this poem Mr. Yeats seems aware of the deadness and unreality of the twilight world which he had woven out of his dreams’, and Louis MacNeice remarked of ISW merely that ‘In this volume we also fnd [WBY] beginning to write poems which in their manner and content are casual or occasional; for instance, ‘Adam’s Curse’’ (MacNeice, 92). T.S. Eliot singled out the poem in his 1940 tribute to WBY as one in which ‘something is coming through, and in beginning to speak as a particular man he is beginning to speak for man’ (Complete Prose vol. 6 eds. D.Chinitz and R. Schuchard, 81). Developmental signifcance was central to J. Hone’s understanding of the poem: ‘With ‘Adam’s Curse’ Yeats began the series of poems in which he gave personal expression to early experience [. . .] love-poems of a kind very diferent from those in Te Wind Among the Reeds [.  .  .] Now he is more pointed, epigrammatic and colloquial’ (Hone, 188). By 1948, R. Ellmann was able to put critical fesh on the previously rather bare bones of a response to the poem (Ellmann, Man and the Masks, 152–153): Tis verisimilitude is a new development for Yeats in lyrical verse [. . .] words like ‘marrow-bones,’ ‘kitchen pavement,’ ‘bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen,’ which he would once have rigorously excluded, do not undermine the tone because of the tight, formal syntax in which they are contained. But the ending of the poem reminds us that he has still not gone over defnitely to his mature manner [. . .] Even here, however, the loosening of rhythm in the next to last line, the somewhat abrupt ‘for no one’s but your ears,’ and the imperfect rhymes of the last two couplets show that Yeats was pulling away from his earlier method. Tis sense of the poem’s closing lines is perhaps shared by T.R. Henn’s reading in 1950, and his observation that ‘Te texture is closer, and the verse is starting to grow from within; though the shadow of [William] Morris is still there, and a certain syntactical vagueness’ (Henn, 55). By 1965, C. Bradford was able to call the poem confdently WBY’s ‘breakthrough to personal utterance’ (Bradford, 63), and this understanding of its signifcance has remained something of a critical constant. However, the poem has never been so highly praised and prized as it was by H. Bloom in 1970: for him, ‘Adam’s Curse’ ‘could hardly be improved’ as ‘one of the undoubted poems of the language’, and the critical analysis ofered aligns WBY’s achievement with that of Shelley’s ‘Epispychidion’, while in some ways going beyond that poem in its conception of romantic love: ‘In the weary-heartedness of Yeats and Maud Gonne alike, the poem studies frmly the limits of its own mastery, and hints at the troubles ahead for those who live so audaciously out of phase’ (Bloom, 166–169). Tis too, however, may be an instance of reading the poem rather too far ‘ahead’ in WBY’s artistic and intellectual development; and Bloom’s wholly unreserved celebration of ‘Adam’s Curse’ has found few close followers. Te poem’s centrality to critical narratives of WBY’s development, on the other hand, is one that seems solidly established. An important reading was given by D. Donoghue in 1971, who noted

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that ‘Te structure of the poem embodies its feeling; beginning with forms, speeches, tokens of a brave start, but ending abruptly [. . .] If moral power is certifed by speech, lapse into silence marks its loss and perhaps the poet’s acceptance of that loss or his bewilderment in defeat’. Te conclusion seems more in tune with WBY’s actual achievement than was Bloom’s slightly hyperbolic reaction (Donoghue, 37, 39): Te poignancy of the poem, especially when we read it with ‘Te Secret Rose’ not wholly forgotten, is that in the earlier poem Yeats got whatever he needed from the symbols at hand, and he had merely to fnd his power in them; but in ‘Adam’s Curse’ the symbols cannot help, beyond providing an appropriate décor for his sorrow. Yeats’s mastery in the later poem is a remarkable achievement of style, and its proof is composure, the dignity of tone with which time’s cruelty is received. It is proper to speak of such poetry as a form of power, even where the ofcial theme is the defeat of that power. Te poet is not obliged to report that his values prevail, as a practical matter, in the objective world. It is not entirely possible, though, to interpret the poem as a forward-looking ars poetica on WBY’s part: it was composed several years before the poet – with his experience of dramatic verse upon which to draw – began to make concerted eforts to embody a rhetorical speaking voice in his lyrics; and its content is, in any case, not so much (self-) prescriptive in terms of style as refective about the virtues and the rigours of artistic labour. In that sense, it could well be argued that ‘Adam’s Curse’ looks backwards to the aesthetic surroundings of WBY’s 1890s verse, albeit with a sense of weariness and longaccommodated frustration. Moreover, the poem carries within its fabric a good deal of Romantic matter. Tis is true even at the level of form, and H. Vendler is acute when she writes of how ‘Yeats himself was no doubt thinking of Keats when he adopted Keatsian enjambed couplets for ‘Adam’s Curse,’ a poem about the pang of unrequited love, but also about the efort of verse’ (Vendler, 375). Shelley, too, is in the mix (see note to 31–33), and Bloom’s sensitivity to the subliminal presence of ‘Epispychidion’ may also have been triggered by the enjambed couplets here. Although modern readings are generally of a heavily biographical cast, the poem itself does not rely upon biographical information other than that which it already supplies. It is important that the speaker is cast as male, and as a poet (thus opening lines of literary communication with the tradition of courtly love), but the two women in the poem, one a contributor to the conversation and the other completely silent, though addressed, deepen and confrm the speaker’s preoccupations and convictions on the topic of beauty and hard work. Te gender dynamics, as well as the subject for debate, point to WBY’s artistic past without a clear sense of what any future might hold. In particular, the concept of ‘love’ (a word that occurs four times in ffeen lines, along with ‘lovers’) is imaginatively placed in the past: ‘old’ (a word used three times in the poem) seems to be its proper adjective, and the ‘weary-hearted’ nature of WBY’s fnal lines looks forward scarcely at all. Textual history. Probably close to the time of composition are the four pieces ultimately from Coole which are preserved in the Berg Collection, NYPL (MS1, MS2, MS3, TS). MS1 is in WBY’s hand, with versions of 1–4, and beneath these, in a form that

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looks less like a frst draf, a version of 15–20. MS2 contains a further, longer version of the opening lines (1–14), again in WBY’s hand and with a number of revisions. MS2 contains the whole poem in WBY’s hand; TS is probably typed by AG, and it contains alterations in her hand (likely to have been from WBY’s dictation). MS1–3 are transcribed and partially repr. in Cornell ISWGH, 50–55. Te poem was frst published in Te Monthly Review Dec. 1902 (MR), and next appeared in the USA in Te Gael Feb. 1903 (G). Numerous trial proof sheets for ISW carry the poem (NLI 30246, 30247) (Proof); it was published in the Dun Emer ISW in Aug. 1903, and included in all collected editions thereafer.

Title.] No title MS1, MS2. WBY employs a phrase which was very common in Christian and especially Evangelical writings from the seventeenth century onwards, referring to the original sin of Adam (and Eve) in Eden. Te Biblical source is well-known, and probably taken for granted by the poet (Genesis 3.16–19): Unto the woman he [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire  shall be  to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Tou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Torns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the feld; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou  art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

A common understanding of this, which WBY would have inherited, was that manual labour, all through life to the point of death, is the ‘curse’ brought upon Adam for the sin of disobedience, itself a direct consequence of having ‘hearkened unto the voice of thy wife’ [Eve]. In Church teaching, this ‘curse’ was, strictly speaking, lifed by the atonement of Christ on the cross; and this was celebrated in e.g. Aubrey De Vere’s pious ‘Te Descent into Hell’ (A Song of Faith (1842)), where Christ harrows Hell: ‘All guilt forgiven! Adam’s curse annulled!’ (143). 1–4.] Te version in MS1, with its many deletions, looks as though it might be a frst draf of this opening: [Tat beautiful mild woman your del.] close friend [And you and I sat talking at the del.] end [And you and I towards the day’s end del.] [And you and del.] We sat together at [the del. one] summer’s end Tat beautiful mild woman your close friend And you and I and talked of poetry [I said [what’s lost[?]] an hour a day del.] maybe And I said

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Copy-text: P49.

5

We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said: ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

1. summer’s] Summer’s G. one summer’s end] Te phrase is unusual; perhaps cp. R. Browning, Pippa Passes IV, 27: ’But winter hastens at summer’s end’. Insofar as WBY’s poem is related to talk with MG and Kathleen Pilcher, this time of year may well be inaccurate; but artistic purposes come before autobiographical accuracy here. 2.] Tere could be two women in this line: the frst is certainly Kathleen Pilcher, MG’s married sister, who was recovering from an illness at the time of the likely conversation; but there may perhaps be a second, possibly in the shape of Mary (May) Gonne, MG’s cousin, who was soon to be married. It seems initially unlikely that WBY would refer to Kathleen as ‘your close friend’, given that she was MG’s sister; at the same time, the poem itself has no need of any distinction between the ‘mild woman’ and the ‘close friend’ (and may indeed sufer from one being made). More straightforwardly, as N. Grene puts it, WBY ‘might have been deliberately camoufaging the actual relationship [of Kathleen Pilcher] with Maud Gonne, or he might simply have needed a rhyme for ‘end’’ (Grene, 38). It is in any case important to understand that no particular people are named in this poem at all, and that the specifc identity of the participants is does not form any part of the meaning of the verses as published. 3^4.] No break CP33. Space between lines MS3, TS, MR-LP31. 4.] I said ‘a [good del.] line will take ^us^ hours may be MS2. 4–14.] Te thought in these lines has featured ofen in critical accounts of WBY, and the lines are commonly cited as a kind of defence of the painstaking nature of Yeatsian

verse composition. Tis began very early: H.C. Beeching in Te Bookman (Nov. 1906) saw here ‘something of an apologia,’ though warning that [WBY] ‘can hardly expect to have it both ways,’ since ‘it is perhaps not wise of a poet to make much of the labours of his art, if he wishes ‘the bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen’ to give him credit for inspiration’. A much sharper satirical light was shed by GM in his account, which appeared frst in Te English Review (Jan. 1914) and subsequently in his book Vale (1914), of ‘a story [about WBY] that had been foating about Dublin for some time’: A visitor had come back from Coole telling how he had discovered the poet lying on a sofa in a shady corner, a plate of strawberries on his knee, and three or four adoring ladies serving him with cream and sugar, and how the poet, afer wiping his hands on a napkin, had consented to recite some verses, and the verses he recited were these [quotes 4–14]. 5. a moment’s thought] WBY’s casual-sounding phrase had already been productive for poetic thinking about what it is to sound casual. Cp. Keats, ‘Lamia’ (1820), 38–39: ‘knowing well | Tat but a moment’s thought is passion’s passing bell’, W. Wordsworth, Te Prelude (1850), IX, 136–138: ‘nor would have stirred | Nor deemed it worth a moment’s thought to stir, | In any thing’, and A.H. Clough, Poems and Prose Remains (1869), ‘Dispychus’, I i 6–8: ‘Still resting on thyself – a thing ill-worked – | A moment’s thought committed on the moment | To unripe words and rugged verse’. 5–6.] And yet must seem a momentary thought | Or all [the del.] [our del.] the stitching’s and

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Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set

unstitching’s naught MS2 And yet must seem a momentary thought | Or all that stitching and unstitching’s naught MS3. rev. to But if it does not seem a moment’s thought | Our stitching and unstitching has been but naught [AG’s hand], then rev. to Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought | Our stitching and unstitching has been naught [WBY’s hand] TS. In 1914 (7 Mar.), Te Athenaeum ended a review of a book of poems by Marie Stopes by quoting 5–6, and ofering the summary that ‘A poem must seem spontaneous; there art comes in’. Te couplet has been quoted many times since as a fgure for poetic art. For E. Cullingford this is straightforwardly ‘a gendered metaphor for the poetic process’ (Howes and Kelly, 175); though it may not in fact be all that straightforward, or indeed may be straightforwardly other things as well. 7. go down upon your marrow-bones] Te meaning is to go down upon the knees to do housework. See OED ‘marrow-bones’ 2.a: ‘Te shin bones; (also) the knees. Frequently used humorously in phrases referring to kneeling in supplication, prayer, etc.’ Te overtones of supplication seem less important for WBY than those of physical menial labour. Te notion of WBY undertaking such work was sufciently amusing to Susan Mitchell in 1913 for her to begin her satirical poem ‘Te Voice of One’ with ‘Bates’ declaring (1, 4): ‘I’d rather scrub foors on my marrow bones [. . .] Tan hear your players playing plays together’ (Aids to the Immortality of Certain Persons in Ireland Charitably Administered). Te phrase occurs in J. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), but in its supplicatory sense: ‘Tey would all to a man have gone down on their marrowbones to him’ (‘Eumaeus’, p. 603).

8. break stones] Te phrase had been a common one from the beginning of the nineteenth century, describing hard manual labour undertaken either for punishment or by the impoverished. John Ruskin in his lecture ‘Work’ told his audience in the Working Men’s Institute at Camberwell that ‘Te worst that can happen to you is to break stones; not to be broken by them’, ofering in the published version a gloss: ‘Break stones: that is, go to the work-house, where the male paupers are ofen set to break stones for repairing the macadamized roads’ (Te Crown of Wild Olive (1866), 54). In his late squib ‘Parnell’ (publ. 1936), WBY returned to the remembered phrase: ‘Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: | ‘Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone’’. W. Chapman hears in the phrase an allusion to ‘breaking stones like Oscar Wilde at Reading Gaol’ (Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (2010), 3), but this is unlikely to have been intended. 10. sweet sounds together] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), ‘A Child’s Laughter’, 4–5: ‘All the winds on earth may bring | All sweet sounds together’. 12. noisy set] Te phrase is very common in nineteenth-century writing (to describe riotous, high-living people at play), but by the turn of the century had lost its freshness. WBY’s cast here is not one usually encompassed by the term. More extravagantly, James Tomson had used the phrase to describe the Salvation Army in his satirical poem ‘Law vs. Gospel’, Poetical Works (1895): ‘And now a new and noisy set – | Te Army of Salvation’ (33–34).

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Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.’ 15

20

And thereupon That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There’s many a one shall fnd out all heartache On fnding that her voice is sweet and low Replied: ‘To be born woman is to know – Although they do not talk of it at school – That we must labour to be beautiful.’ I said: ‘It’s certain there is no fne thing Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

14–15.] LP22 and afer. Tat woman then | Murmured with her young voice for whose mild sake MR-SP21. 14. martyrs] Te slight oddness of this word in its context seems to have been the stimulus for remarks in a tart paragraph about P99– 05 in Te Athenaeum, which paired ‘Adam’s Curse’ with ‘Te Folly of Being Comforted’ as ‘exquisite little poems,’ and opined that ‘it would almost seem that Mr. Yeats is a victim to the law whereby even a literary movement requires its martyrs’ (15 Dec. 1906). 15–17.] In an entry in his Journal for 5 Apr. 1910 (Burns Collection, Boston Coll., Mem., 244) WBY attempted an ‘alteration in Adam’s Curse’ here: for whose mild sake Many a man shall fnd out all heart break In fnding out that it can murmur so or Many a man shall light upon heart break In fnding out that it can murmur so. Te lines’ most recent publication had been in PSS, but WBY made no change for the next

appearance (in the Tauchnitz A Selection from the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913)). 17–19.] In fnding that it’s young and mild and low. | ‘Tere is one thing that all we women know | Although we never heard of it at school MR-SP21. 17. sweet and low] A cliché in nineteenthcentury poetry, and used by (among a great many others) Katharine Tynan, Ballads and Lyrics (1891), ‘In Iona’, 5–6: ‘Te birds sing sweet in Iona, | O very sweet and low!’, and Lionel Johnson, Poetical Works (1915) ‘Ireland’s Dead: Harmonies’ [1889], 20–21: ‘First strangely, sweet and low, | Slowly her careless ears entrancing’. 18–20.] WBY found this thought serviceable in Discoveries (1907), ‘Te Looking-Glass’ (CW 4, 197): ‘A wise theatre might make a training in song and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most difcult of the arts?’ 20^21.] Break between lines ISW and afer. No break G (line 20 is the last on page in MR).

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30

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There have been lovers who thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books; Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’ We sat grown quiet at the name of love; We saw the last embers of daylight die, And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

24. high courtesy] Tis medieval-sounding phrase has its currency much later. Although to be found in Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt. 1 V v 53, ‘I thank your Grace for this high courtesy’, it seldom enters poetry, and it is to be found more ofen in nineteenth-century prose. One instance of the latter, however, may be suggestive with regard to WBY, for whom the adjective ‘high’ in connection with aristocratic or minority virtues was to remain important (see e.g. the title of ‘High Talk’ (publ. 1938)). In Tomas Moore’s recollections of his early days at the doors of fashionable London society, the ‘high courtesy’ of Lord Moira draws his awestruck admiration: (Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence vol. 1 (1853), 75–76): Among the most vivid of my early English recollections is that of my frst night at Donington, when Lord Moira, with that high courtesy for which he was remarkable, lighted me, himself, to my bedroom; and there was this stately personage stalking on before me through the long lighted gallery, bearing in his hand my bed-candle, which he delivered to me at the door of my apartment. I thought it all exceedingly fne and grand, but at the same time most uncomfortable; and little I foresaw how much at home, and at my

ease, I should one day fnd myself in that great house. Te striking verb ‘stalk’ here is the same one chosen by WBY for ‘Malachi Stilt-Jack’ in ‘High Talk’, 13: ‘I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on’. In 1902, WBY is (like Moore) new to great houses, and still freshly impressed by the welcome he fnds there: something of this, and in the process something of Moore (of whom WBY was inclined to be critical) possibly attaches to the ‘high courtesy’ that is being looked on here with approval. 27. an idle trade] Cp. Pope, Works (1736), ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’, 127–129: ‘As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, | I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. | I lef no calling for this idle trade’. 28. the name of love] Perhaps cp. W. Allingham, Irish Songs and Poems (1895), ‘Te Music-Master’, II, 159–160: ‘though I never named | Te name of love to her, or any one’. 30. trembling blue-green of the sky] WBY’s efect here is original, but develops from earlier skies that tremble with erotically excited colours, e.g. F.T. Palgrave, Idyls and Songs (1854), ‘It Ver, Et Venus’, 9: ‘O deep fushed skies: O passion-trembling blue’, and Edmund Gosse, On Viol and Flute (1873), ‘Song’, 5–6: ‘So come out to me now while the moon is on high | Like a sickle of fre on a blue-green sky’.

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A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years. 35

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

31–33.] Although it is tempting to read these lines as a premonition of WBY’s later moon symbolism, they are more likely to record the infuence of other poets’ uses for the moon as an image. E. Cullingford mentions in particular two fragments by Shelley, both of which are pertinent: ‘Te Waning Moon’ (‘And like a dying lady lean and pale, | Who totters forth [. . .] Te moon rose up in the murky east, | A white and shapeless mass’ and ‘To the Moon’: Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a diferent birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye Tat fnds no object worth its constancy? Cullingford comments (96) that ‘the Romantic metaphor, like the lovers, is literally exhausted’.

31. moon, worn] moon – moon worn MR, G. shell] shell, G. 32. time’s waters] Perhaps cp. J. Keble, Te Christian Year (1846), ‘First Sunday afer Christmas’, 43–44: ‘Time’s waters will not ebb, nor stay, | Power cannot change them, but Love may’, and James Tomson, Poetical Works (1895), ‘Philosophy’, 22–23: ‘Saw Space a mist unfurled around the steep | Where plunge Time’s waters to the blackest deep’. 34. no one’s] no one MR, G. 36. high way] highway G. 37–38.] grown | As weary-hearted] Perhaps cp. W. Allingham, Flower Pieces and Other Poems (1888), ‘Twilight Voices’, 12: ‘Guardian spirits grown weary-hearted’. 38. hollow moon] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems (1866), ‘Voyage’, 49: ‘the wan and hollow moon’; also perhaps cp. Edmund Gosse, On Viol and Flute (1873), ‘Lovers’ Quarrel’, 6: ‘And watched the rising of the hollow moon’ (see possible echo from the same vol. at 30 above).

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THE HAPPY TOWNLAND Date and circumstances of composition. Although there is only circumstantial evidence for this, the poem was probably composed, at least largely, in Oct. 1902; it was certainly completed by 25 Mar. 1903. Te verse composition is clearly one part of the writing of AG and WBY’s collaborative short play which was eventually entitled Te Country of the Young. Tis play was abandoned in its collaborative form in the spring or early summer of 1903, but was completed by AG alone as Te Travelling Man (publ. in 1906, and produced on stage in 1910). Although AG had had the idea for the drama’s subject-matter for some time, and had published the germ of the story in an article of 1900, work with WBY on what she called ‘the little Christ play’ began with the poet’s visit to Coole of 8–13 Oct. 1902, recorded in AG’s Diary (AGD92–02, 313). Tere is no frm proof that the poem was written at this time; nevertheless, it seems likely that it existed in some form as what both writers understood as the ‘ride to Paradise’ which was in fact central to the whole action, and letters between WBY and AG of Nov. 1902 point towards its presence – or the presence of some version of it – in the play as existing at that point (see Dramatic context). Tere was further work on the play when WBY was at Coole from 15 Mar.–25 Apr. 1903; the poet wrote out a version of the poem (compressing its length by omitting the repeated chorus stanzas) in AG’s vellum-bound copy of Te Wind Among the Reeds, signing this and dating it ‘March 25 1903’: this must be taken strictly as the date of inscription, rather than that of composition; it may suggest, also, that WBY was in this way elegantly marking the end of Te Country of the Young as his collaborative project with AG. Sources. Although it would be unhelpful to single out any specifc source for a narrative scenario as common in WBY’s work as the allure of the fairy world for those working in rural Ireland, there are literary sources which do contribute to the poem. Te most significant is the Old Irish poem embedded in the Tochmarc Étaine (‘Te Wooing of Edaine’), an 8th-9th century piece preserved in the medieval Yellow Book of Lecan. WBY singled this out in his 1903 Preface to AG’s GFM (xviii, repr. CW 6, 130): ‘Te god Midhir sings to Queen Etain in one of the most beautiful of the stories: ‘Te young never grow old; the felds and the fowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird’s eggs; warm streams of mead and wine fow through that country; there is no care or no sorrow on any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not seen.” AG’s longer version is in GFM, 96: O beautiful woman, will you come with me to the wonderful country that is mine? It is pleasant to be looking at the people there, beautiful people without DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-20

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any blemish; their hair is of the colour of the fag-fower, their fair body is as white as snow, the colour of the fox-glove is on every cheek. Te young never grow old there; the felds and the fowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird’s eggs; warm, sweet streams of mead and of wine fow through that country; there is no care and no sorrow on any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not seen. Tough the plains of Ireland are beautiful, it is little you would think of them afer our great plain; though the ale of Ireland is heady, the ale of the great country is still more heady. O beautiful woman, if you come to my proud people it is the fesh of pigs newly killed I will give you for food; it is ale and new milk I will give you for drink; it is feasting you will have with me there; it is a crown of gold you will have upon your hair, O beautiful woman! Another source is to be found in what WBY knew of the work of the wandering poet Rafery, again relayed to him partly through AG’s writing. In her Poets and Dreamers (1903), AG quotes Rafery extensively, in ways that are suggestive of the motifs used by WBY for his poem (30): Afer the Christmas, with the help of Christ, I will never stop if I am alive; I will go to the sharp-edged little hill; for it is a fne place, without fog falling; a blessed place that the sun shines on, and the wind doesn’t rise there or any thing of the sort. And if you were a year there, you would get no rest, only sitting up at night and eternally drinking. Te lamb and the sheep are there; the cow and the calf are there; fne lands are there without heath and without bog. Ploughing and seed-sowing in the right month, and plough and harrow prepared and ready; the rent that is called for there, they have means to pay it. Tere is oats and fax and large-eared barley . . . Tere are beautiful valleys with good growth in them, and hay. Rods grow there, and bushes and tufs, white felds are there, and respect for trees; shade and shelter from wind and rain; priests and friars reading their book; spending and getting is there, and nothing scarce. WBY’s central fgure in the poem, the red fox, may also come to him by way of Irish sources. A poem by Douglas Hyde was being translated by AG at Coole, and was almost certainly known to WBY at the time he was composing ‘Te Happy Townland’; in this, one of lives that are envied by the speaker belongs to a fox (AG Poets and Dreamers, 78): It’s my grief that I am not a red fox, Leaping strong and swift on the mountains, Eating cocks and hens without pity, Taking ducks and geese as a conqueror. A.N. Jefares also reports the reasonable speculation that WBY could have heard the Irish children’s song ‘An Maidrin Rua’ (‘Te Little Red Fox’) performed at the Aug. 1902

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Connaught Feis in Galway which he attended with Hyde, AG, and Edward Martyn (Jefares, 89). See S. O’Sullivan, ‘W.B. Yeats’s Use of Irish Oral and Literary Tradition’, Béaloidias 39–41 (1971–1973), 276. Dramatic context. Te Country of the Young exists as an eleven-page TS (see Textual and publication history), and represents the furthest point reached by WBY and AG in their collaboration over what was intended as a short one-act play. AG’s article ‘Mountain Teology’, published frst in 1900 and included in her Poets and Dreamers (1903) is the probable starting-point for the play. Here, a poor girl wandering alone on the mountain roads meets ‘the Saviour’, in the form of a stranger who takes her to a place of shelter; once there, she meets the man she will later marry, and some years later, when she is living comfortably, the stranger returns to her door as a poor wanderer. Te woman gives him scanty help, but when she understands who he is she runs afer him to ask forgiveness, and he warns, ‘whenever you have plenty in your hands, divide it freely for my sake’ (Poets and Dreamers, 106). Te action of the play, which is simple, builds on AG’s original scenario: a widowed mother prepares to bake for a special guest whom she expects on one day each year, though he has never yet come to visit. As the mother explains to her child, this hoped-for guest is a stranger she met once years ago, when he and a mysterious black horse appeared to her, shortly before she made her fortunate marriage to the child’s now deceased father: [Mother.] One time when I was in my young youth and when I was in my father’s house on the other side of Slieve Echtge, it was the frst day of summer the same as this, and I went out to the stream for a vessel of water. And I thought I heard the steps of a horse on the path behind me, and there came past me a horse, very black and shining, like the stepping stones in the river afer rain, and he went down before me to the stream, and whether he went into it or not, he vanished away, and of all the horses I ever saw he was the quickest. Tere was a great fear on me, but I flled the vessel with water, and when I was coming up the path at the same place where I frst heard the horse, there was a young man sitting on the bank, having a bridle in his hand and it shining with silver. And he was singing a song about some good place. Child. What did he say to you mother? Mother. He said nothing, he only gave a shake to the chains on the bridle, and he vanished from me the same way as the horse. But a while afer that he came to me in a dream and told me that if I could ever catch a hold of that black horse he would put the bridle on him and that I could ride to that good place. I grew someway restless afer that, and one night when all was quiet I stole away out of the house, thinking I might meet with the horse again, and I followed the road a long way, but I saw nothing at all, and then I met some people, wandering people they were, and I went along with them, thinking I might come some day to where the horse was, and I was a long time on the roads and sometimes poor as I was I had dreams, and the young man would shake the bridle at me and sing his song about that good place, and I had friends on the road, now one, now another, and bad things were said about me, maybe some of them were true.

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Child. Were you afraid of him? What was he like? Mother. I never could remember his face well, but I think he was always comely and laughing. Some that were on the roads with me said that they had seen him one time or another, and that he was never the same to any two of them, for those he belongs to can take their choice shape. By this stage in the play’s composition, it is clear that WBY had efected a considerable departure from AG’s original scenario, where the mysteriously encountered stranger had a much more religious cast, being in fact Jesus Christ (hence AG and WBY’s references to ‘the little Christ play’). Te Mother leaves the child alone briefy while she goes to fetch four, and tells him to break and count some sticks for frewood. A stranger comes into the cottage, barefooted and ‘very ragged and dusty’. Tis stranger helps the child, and then joins him in a game, based on the child’s wish to recreate the ‘good place’ his mother has been speaking about; he questions the child about what his mother has told him of her long-ago encounter: Stranger. Who does your mother think is coming? Child. Somebody that she saw long ago. He has a black horse and a silver bridle and if anyone could catch the black horse and get up on it it would carry him far away to a good place. Stranger. Did your mother tell you where that good place is? Child. She did not tell me. Do you know where it is? Stranger. I know well where it is, and I know well what it is like and I am ofen thinking of it. Child. What is it like? Stranger. O it is on the top of a high mountain, and there is a silver wall about it, and there are four gates that open to the four quarters of the world. Child. And do you know about the black horse too? Stranger. Only the young can see that horse, and I never knew of anyone young or old that was able to catch it, though I have known many that tried. With this, the child and the stranger make use of objects in the room – the sticks, some fowers, and plates from the dresser – to construct a version of the walled ‘good place’, and pretend to be riding the black horse. As they do so, the stranger announces that ‘Now I will sing you a song about the country we are going to’, and sings the frst stanza of the poem. Afer this, there is some dialogue: Stranger. Did you like that song, child? Child. I liked about the gold and silver trees. Stranger. It is a very old song; it has been on the road since the beginning of the world. Child. Go on, go on with the song. Stranger. It is the chorus that comes next, and when I come to it again you must be able to sing it with me, or the game won’t be right.

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Te ‘chorus’ follows (lines 14–20 of the poem), then the second stanza, the chorus again (now ‘Child sings some of the chorus with him’), the third stanza and the fnal chorus (here again, ‘Te Child sings chorus with him’). Te mother now re-enters, and, not recognizing the stranger, is persuaded to allow him to remain and tell some stories to the child. When she discovers that her best plates have been used in the game, she sends the stranger away, ofering him fve pennies. As he leaves, he declares that ‘I will go, I will go, to the young careless homeless people, sitting over their empty pots’ who ‘will listen to my stories’, and departs while murmuring again lines 29–32 of the poem. Te child, seeing that the stranger has lef his pennies behind, runs out afer him, and comes back in with news: I went afer him to the river, and he went out on the stepping stones, to the big ones in the middle, and he turned round and shook some shining thing at me, I heard it ringing like bells, and there were faces up in the air laughing and he vanished all in a minute . . . Mother, could he be the man you used to see in your dreams? When the mother says that the stranger ‘was not that man, he was some mocking thing’, the child goes to the door and sees the black horse outside: this is invisible to his mother, but she decides that ‘I am getting old, and that is why I cannot see it . . . I understand now, it is only the young can see it’. Te horse departs, and the child begins to cry; the play concludes with the mother comforting him: O do not cry! You will see it again many a time, I will never see it but you will see it, you will go wandering away from me but not yet, but not yet. (She holds child very close to her.) Such was the stage of completion the play had reached when the TS was made by AG at Coole, probably in early 1903, for dispatch of a copy to WBY in London. Yet the play must have been in something close to this form in Oct. 1902, though probably with more material on the circumstances in which the stranger and the mother had frst met, to judge from a letter sent to AG by WBY on 18 Nov. 1902 (CL 3, 252): I have found out what was wrong with the little play. Te inner thought does not quite correspond with the picture which the play raises before the mind. Te travelling man meets a woman on the road, who is full of anxiety, who fears to knock at any door lest she should be refused admission. He sends her to a house where she is well received and becomes prosperous. Ten, when he comes into the cottage himself he upsets things that he may help the child in its play. One can’t get away from the fact that to do these things is not to be the supreme disturber we have thought him. We have tried to impose a meaning on the play instead of fnding a meaning in it. Now it seems to me that the travelling man goes about seeking to persuade people to live in some near and innocent happiness, putting away anxieties and worldly things. He is only a

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disturber because they put between themselves and this innocent happiness idols of various kinds which are symbolized by the plates on the dresser, and perhaps by the woman’s fear of what people would think of her. He is much the same as various spiritual beings in Blake’s prophetic books, who bid man’s mind not to look before and afer. He is in truth almost God Pan who was I think in the renaissance sometimes identifed with Christ. I am afraid this means a good deal of re-writing of Christ’s part, but I will send you a sketch as soon as I can and get you to work over it for me. Now that I have persuaded myself that this is the true meaning of the fable, I have begun to fall in love with the little play. What WBY describes here seems closer, in fact, to the play that became AG’s Te Travelling Man; and certainly WBY’s Nietzschean conception of the stranger as the ‘great disrupter’ does not accord well with AG’s initial (and later) conceptions, which were more piously Christian in nature. Almost by return, AG rejected WBY’s ideas (letter to WBY 22 Nov. 1902, Berg Collection NYPL): If the Stranger wanted the child to be content with the things near him, why did he make the image of the garden of Paradise and ride to it? I am more inclined to think the idea is the soul having once seen the Christ, the Divine Essence, must always turn back to it again. One feels sure the child will, through all its life, – and the mother with all her comforts, has never been quite satisfed, because she wants to see the Christ again. But the earthly side of her has built up the dresser, and the child will build up other earthly veils – yet never be quite satisfed. WBY himself was giving little ground, and his reply a few days later shows some clear signs that the content of the poem, if not its every detail, was already known both to him and AG (27 Nov. 1902 (CL 3, 264)): I do not think the Ride to Paradise changes the motive of the little Christ Play from what I suggested. Paradise is happiness, the abundance of the earth, the natural life, everyman’s desire, or some such thing. WBY and AG seem to have been envisaging quite diferent plays, in everything but the basics of plot, and it is hardly surprising that the collaborative progress stalled for good afer the next attempt to fx things in 1903. It is clear, however, that the ‘ride to Paradise’ was always central; and there is no reason to suppose that the verses for this, which are not at all an incidental part of the Country of the Young, and account for fve of the play’s eleven pages in TS, did not come along until the spring of 1903. It was then that WBY relinquished the play to AG, in whose hands it would become Te Travelling Man – a work that is so completely a ‘Christ play’ that the stranger is last glimpsed walking on the waters. Having taken possession of the verses in Te Country of the Young for publications of his own in 1903, WBY helped AG fll the gap in her play which they lef with the lines ‘Come ride and ride to the garden’, frst appearing as part of the play in

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Te Shanachie, Spring 1906 (poem 212 in the present edition). For further discussion of both the abandoned play and the poem, see J. Pethica, ‘Recontextualising the Lyric Moment: Yeats’s “Te Happy Townland” and the abandoned play Te Country of the Young’, YA 10, 65–91. WBY did not forget his and AG’s joint project, and in an interview published in the Boston Pilot (5 Oct. 1911) he spoke of Te Travelling Man as AG’s ‘little play’ ‘in which Christ comes into a cottage as a wandering tramp’, and noted that ‘She had got the story in her own Kiltartan, Galway, where they tell of Christ walking the roads of Ireland and doing his miracles there’ (Mikhail 1, 71). Critical reception and interpretation. On its frst periodical publication, the poem was quoted and praised for its ‘haunting verses’ in the round-up section of Te Academy and Literature 13 Jun. 1903. On the same day, Te Outlook noticed the poem in connection with ‘the free prosody which marks a great deal of modern English poetry’, quoting the frst two stanzas and commenting that ‘Te verses are made, not born, no doubt; but it cannot be denied that they are made excellently well’. Pamela Colman Smith told WBY excitedly in Dec. 1903 of how ‘I think the sales of your books should go up! For the numbers of people who have asked where the Red Fox comes from [. . .] and then they dash out to get the book!’ (LTWBY 1, 132). However, Te Athenaeum of 15 Dec. 1906 was able to refect that ‘Another tendency greatly to be regretted – is an increasing lack of restraint, which in the verses called ‘Te Happy Townland’ comes perilously close to grotesqueness’. Later Katharine Tynan, reviewing Te Wild Swans at Coole, classed this poem among ‘the precious and beautiful things straight from the heart of inspiration that Mr. Yeats has given the dull world’ (Te Bookman, May 1919). Te poem was seldom at the forefront of critical attention to WBY, and modern studies have largely taken it for granted. Its signifcance in the poet’s work, however, may be rather underestimated. Te piece’s narrative spine is one that connects directly to a major theme in WBY’s earlier writings, an abduction from the mortal to the immortal world. Here, the vestigial force of the dramatic work is an important factor. Te Country of the Young is a translation of the legendary Tir-na-nOg, and it is hardly a place to which WBY was any stranger in creative terms. But the perspectives of 1902 on this difer for the poet from those of the 1890s and 1880s. One contrast in particular may be revealing: instead of an otherworldly woman on horseback coming to lure a mortal man to her realm, the plot of Te Country of the Young had a male rider from the fairy world coming to aid, and not abduct, a mortal woman. Te catch to this, as the play imagines it, is that habituation to mortal experience removes the power to recognize the otherworld when it appears at the door. It is the poem, forming the core of the whole play, which gives the full story of the interaction between the two realities, and which both voices and stands at a distance from the fairy world’s call of ‘Away, come away’ (in the words from ‘Te Hosting of the Sidhe’). Tere is also a distinct mirroring here of ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889, 1895), as described by F. Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism (1988), 127: ‘With its three stanzas – the frst describing the apparent joys to be found in the otherworldly townland of the title, the second a series of battles that conclude with those who have been killed ‘awaken[ing] to life again’, the third a drinking bout that ends in sleep – the poem is a thumbnail sketch of the same fabulous territories that Oisin had traversed at full length’. Less specifcally, R. Greaves remarks how ‘we might think of the townland as the manifestation of an

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energy reciprocal to the energy of which our world is a manifestation’ (Greaves, 61). Certainly the ‘fairy’ dimension is at the heart of the poem. WBY was reported as attributing ‘Te Happy Townland’ to ‘the romance of the distant world’ at a Dublin reading in 1923 (Te Irish Times, 30 Jun.), and he included it in a number of readings he gave in the early 1920s. In his fnal radio programme, ‘My Own Poetry Again’, on 29 Oct. 1937, WBY read the poem with a short introduction (CW 10, 291–292): As a child and as a young man I went into country cottages and heard stories of fairies and spirits. One woman told me that when she was in chapel a tall grey man sat beside her. She said ‘Where are you from?’ and he said ‘From Tir-nanoge’, which means the land of youth and is one of the names of fairyland. Many people are said to go to that land and never return. I describe such a journey in the poem which I am about to read. I called fairyland ‘the world’s bane’ because I thought of it as that ideal perfection which is the source of all hopeless longing and public tumult. I call the poem ‘Te Happy Townland’. WBY’s late perception of the creative connection between ‘the world’s bane’ and ‘hopeless longing and public tumult’ ofers a somewhat sombre perspective on the kind of imaginative vista which was more commonly celebrated by admirers as essentially an escapist virtue of his work. Just as the abandoned play would have reconfgured conventional piety and the faith in good works as a fundamental (and perhaps sexually charged) transgression and undermining of normal patterns of domestic life, so fairyland as ‘the world’s bane’ upsets the idea that WBY’s images of the otherworld may have any purely aesthetic or decorative function. Already a poet of ‘hopeless longing’ in a romantic sense, WBY in 1902 was also ready to accommodate in the world of otherworldly imagination the ‘public tumult’ which had once seemed to stand at a great distance from such emotion. Textual and publication history. AG’s TS of Te Country of the Young with MS revisions in her hand is NLI 30287, and it is reproduced and transcribed in J. Pethica’s Cornell Collaborative One-Act Plays 1901–1903, 168–193 (TS). Pethica’s dating of the TS as c. Jun. 1903 seems too late: the fair copy of the poem entered in AG’s collection of presentation volumes by WBY (MS1, now in Emory University) shows evidence of revisions to the text as found in TS, with its readings in some lines matching those of the frst published version, which was in the Paris-based journal Te Weekly Critical Review in Jun. 1903 (WCR). Te poem appeared next in ISW, and was retained in collected editions thereafer. Te extensive surviving proofs for ISW show that the work was introduced to the collection relatively late, replacing another poem in the position of the fnal lyric before the play On Baile’s Strand, a similarly excerpted lyric from a drama, ‘Te Blood Bond’ (poem 193 in the present edition). Te proofs are preserved as NLI 13584 (Proofs 1) and NLI 30246 (Proofs 2) (with fnal lines of the poem in NLI30073 (Proofs 3) and NLI 30246). WBY also gave a bound set of the ISW proofs to AG (now in Berg Collection, NYPL). A rewritten version of 1–12 was incorporated as part of the story ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’ in CWVP08 vol. 5 (separately edited in present edn.), and these

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lines became the frst stanza of a version of the poem (without the second iteration of the chorus) in ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’ in the same volume. Copy-text: P49.

5

There’s many a strong farmer Whose heart would break in two, If he could see the townland That we are riding to; Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over

Title.] No title TS; A rider from the North MS1; Te Happy Townland WCR; Te Rider From Te North | From Te Play Of [Te Water Horse del.] Te Country of the Young Proofs 1; Te Rider from the North | From the Play of Te Country of the Young ISW: in proofs of P99–05 bound and given to AG, the title is revised to Te Happy Townland. WBY alluded to the title in his play (again in close collaboration with AG) Te Unicorn from the Stars (1908), when the character Martin Hearne praises the country of which he has experienced a vision (CW 2, 225): I have been beyond the earth. In Paradise, in that happy townland, I have seen the shining people. Tey were all doing one thing or another, but not one of them was at work. All that they did was but the overfowing of their idleness, and their days were a dance bred of the secret frenzy of their hearts, or a battle where the sword made a sound that was like laughter. In Wade (67), there is a note that ‘I asked Yeats in 1908 why he had changed the title of the poem ‘Te Happy Townland’ to ‘Te Rider from the North’ and subsequently back to the original title; he said that he had completely forgotten doing so.’ 1. Tere’s] Tere is WCR. many a strong farmer] WBY’s phrasing is close to AG’s remark in connection with the

poet Rafery (see Sources), Poets and Dreamers (1903), 30: “Cnocin Saibhir,’ ‘the Plentiful Little Hill,’ must have sounded like a dream of Tir-nan-og to many a poor farmer in a sodden- thatched cottage’. 2. heart would break in two] Te naturalsounding phrase has its poetic antecedent in Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde V, 531: ‘Him thoughte his sorweful herte  braste atwo’ (in Wordsworth’s version, ‘Him thought his sorrowful heart would break in two’). WBY, however, is probably aiming for an efect closer to folk-song. 3. townland] country corr. to townland Proofs 1. 4. we are] I am MS1. 5–6.] Te thought here is one of preternaturally rapid natural abundance. Perhaps cp. Katharine Tynan, Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘Aspiration’, 6–7: ‘Green are the felds of the earth, holy and sweet her joys; | Take and taste, and be glad – as fruit and blossom and bird’, and E.B. Browning, Poetical Works (1897), ‘An Island’, 37–39: ‘Trees .  .  . | whose clear fruit and blossom fne’. AG retained this motif of WBY’s in Te Travelling Man, when the Child asks the stranger about the place from which he has come (163): Child: Tell me now about the Golden Mountain. Travelling Man: Tere is a garden in it, and there is a tree in the garden that has fruit and fowers at the one time.

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With red beer and brown beer. An old man plays the bagpipes In a golden and silver wood; Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, Are dancing in a crowd. The little fox he murmured, ‘O what of the world’s bane?’ The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, ‘O do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world’s bane.’ When their hearts are so high That they would come to blows, They unhook their heavy swords From golden and silver boughs; But all that are killed in battle Awaken to life again.

In WBY’s verses for the play, the motif is used for lines 2–3 (see ‘Come Ride and Ride to the Garden’). 8. red beer] Irish red ale originated (in commercial terms at least) in eighteenth-century Kilkenny, though WBY may be infuenced by the antiquarian imagination of e.g. T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches, and Songs (1889), ‘An Old Irish Scene’, 29: ‘furthest from the freplace, a huge bronze vat of red beer’. 11. like the ice] MS1 and afer; like fre TS. 13. fox] [red del.] fox TS. 14. of] is TS, MS1. 14, 20, 34, 40, 54, 60. the world’s bane] Tis phrase, a crucial one in the poem, may well derive from WBY’s work on William Blake. In E.J. Ellis’s and WBY’s Te Works of William Blake (1893), commentary on the poem ‘Te Grey Monk’ is relevant (vol. 2, 225): It is easy to see that in the ‘Monk,’ as in ‘Milton,’ Blake had his own career in mind. ‘He told me that all I wrote should prove the bane of all that on earth I love,’ recalls some lines written at Felpham about the

same time and sent in a letter to Mr. Butts – ‘Must my wife live in my sister’s bane | And my sister survive on my love’s pain?’ Te word ‘bane’ is so rare in Blake, that though the use of it is not the same here, both belong to the threat of evil accompanied by command to work [. . .] See also Blake, Songs of Experience, ‘Earth’s Answer’, 21–23: ‘Selfsh! vain, | Eternal bane! | Tat free love with bondage bound’. WBY’s letter of Nov. 1902 (see Dramatic context) says of the Stranger, ‘He is much the same as various spiritual beings in Blake’s prophetic books, who bid man’s mind not to look before and afer’. 16. my] MS1 and afer; the TS. 19. He is] He’s MS1. 21–24.] When anger has come upon them Tey unhook their yew bows, And their two handed swords From [the (TS)] golden and silver boughs; TS, MS1. 22. would] must WCR.

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35

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It is lucky that their story Is not known among men, For O, the strong farmers That would let the spade lie, Their hearts would be like a cup That somebody had drunk dry. The little fox he murmured, ‘O what of the world’s bane?’ The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, ‘O do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world’s bane.’ Michael will unhook his trumpet From a bough overhead, And blow a little noise When the supper has been spread. Gabriel will come from the water With a fsh-tail, and talk

27. It is] It’s MS1. 31. Teir hearts] For their hearts MS1, WCR, ISW; Teir hearts corr. to For their hearts Proofs 1. 31–32.] With the thought and the simile here (as well as with the adjective ‘strong’ in 29), perhaps cp. E. Dowden, Poems (1876), fnal lines of ‘Burdens’ (11–12): ‘Strong soul to strong soul rendered up, | And silence flling like a cup’. 34. O what of] O that is TS; O what is Proofs 1, ISW. 35. laughing] shining TS; shining corr. to laughing Proofs 1. 36. my] the TS. 41–52.] Of this stanza, a very early critic, H.S. Krans, remarked that ‘Here poetry becomes an enigma whose solution must be lef to the fortunate few who possess that sixth sense in which Mr. Yeats fnds Rossetti’s edition of Blake so lamentably lacking – the sense for mystic and symbolic terms’ (William Butler

Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival (1905), 106–107). 41–44.] Te archangel Michael is ofen depicted armed and with a sword, but in some later Christian tradition he is associated with the day of judgement, and the blowing of the last trumpet on that occasion. WBY was familiar with various magical associations of Michael, in Cabbalistic and GD practices. Here, however, such arcane aspects are not in view, and Michael’s unhooking of a trumpet from a tree in order to ‘blow a little noise | When the supper has been spread’ turns him (with deliberate bathos) into a kind of domestic servant whose musical talent is as limited as his instrument. Later, in ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time’ (1911), WBY presented a more orthodox version of ‘St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection’ (CW 4, 229). 45–46.] Te next archangel, Gabriel, is like Michael familiar to WBY through esoteric

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Of wonders that have happened On wet roads where men walk, And lift up an old horn Of hammered silver, and drink Till he has fallen asleep Upon the starry brink. The little fox he murmured, ‘O what of the world’s bane?’ The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, ‘O do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world’s bane.’

associations; notably here, he is identifed with the element of water (where Michael’s element was taken to be that of fre). Tis identifcation rests on very slender evidence, and may indeed have its origin in purely personal symbolic improvisation on WBY’s part; staying with George Pollexfen at a time when his uncle was ill, the poet remembered how he helped to banish the ‘red dancing fgures’ of fever: ‘I imagined the cabbalistic symbol of water [. . .] I told him what I had done and that, if the dancing fgures came again, he was to bid them go in the name of the Archangel Gabriel.’ Te reason for this was that ‘Gabriel is an angel of the Moon in the Cabbala and might, I considered, command the waters at a pinch’ (Te Trembling of the Veil (1922), CW 3, 214). K. Raine

(Yeats the Initiate (1990), 24) writes of this reference that water is ‘the moist element of generation over which Gabriel, as the angel of the Annunciation, is held in esoteric terms to preside’. D.H. Purdy, contrasting Gabriel here with angelic depiction in Revelation, sees WBY as establishing an ironic parallel to the Bible: ‘a Gabriel out of occult lore will relate wet wonders rather than announce the birth of God to Mary’ (Purdy, 65). In terms of iconography, WBY’s introduction of a fsh-tail in these lines is rare, and possibly unique. 48. On wet] On the wet MS1. where] that TS; that corr. to where Proofs 1. 54. what of] that is TS; what is Proofs 2, Proofs 3, ISW. 56. my] the TS.

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O DO NOT LOVE TOO LONG Date of composition. WBY dated his inscription of the poem (MS2) in AG’s copy of P95 ‘July 12th, 1903’, adding ‘Written July 8th and 9th’. Te poet was in London on 8 and 9 Jul., and at Coole by 12 Jul., when he entered this inscription. Tereafer, however, the poem appears to have languished. In a letter to AG of 27 Feb. 1905, WBY reports that ‘I am making my lyric for Pamela Smith’ (CL 4, 48): Pamela Colman Smith was hoping to turn the periodical Te Green Sheaf into a quarterly publication, and for this she seems to have solicited verse from WBY. Te project in fact collapsed, and WBY sent the poem to Te Acorn on 19 Jul. 1905 (CL 4, 137). Nevertheless, ‘I am making my lyric’ suggests ongoing revision in early 1905: this must have been mainly to the fnal stanza, which had been lef in MS2 in something of an unfnished state. (WBY was in Dublin, and not at Coole, at this point: so he cannot have been revising from MS2, but from a now-lost MS in his own possession.) Textual and publication history. A single sheet of paper (removed from a larger sheet) carries a draf of the poem in ink (Emory University, MS1). Another version is inscribed in AG’s copy of P95 (Emory University, MS2). Comparing the versions of MS1 and MS2, it is interesting to note that MS1 is in several places closer to the eventual fnal text than MS2; in particular, MS2’s fnal stanza is more in the nature of an alternative version, in the event unadopted for publication. A typed version of the poem, with some deletions by hand, is in the Berg collection, NYPL (TS). MS1, MS2, and TS (with reproduction of MS1) are transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 114–117. Te poem frst appeared in a shortlived magazine hailing from Bedford Park, Te Acorn, Oct. 1905, and next in vol. 1 of CWVP08, among poems in the section ‘In the Seven Woods’. WBY then included the poem in PSS (1909), and it was next collected in LP22, and thereafer in all of the poet’s collected editions. Between 1908 and 1922, then, this poem was not being included by WBY in several collected and selected editions: it had not featured in P99–05 or PW06, and did not appear in GH10, the Tauchniz Selection of 1913, the Cuala Press Selection from the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913), in R16, or in SP21. Context and critical interpretation. Tere is no reason to look for any immediately biographical meaning in this lyric, and certainly it does not require one. Nevertheless, the poem’s frst-person voice inevitably establishes a certain resonance with WBY’s experiences as a long-habituated writer of love poetry (and therefore, in some respects, a lover in public). Te summer of 1903, in which this poem was brought to birth, was a time of early middle-aged romantic retrospect for WBY. Before his departure for Ireland in early Jun., the poet had an important (and perhaps rather daunting) meeting with DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-21

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MG in London, on 4 May. Tis was his frst interview with MG since the news of her marriage to John MacBride and her conversion to Roman Catholicism that Feb. AG was kept abreast of events at the encounter by WBY himself, and in a letter to her of 5 May he wrote (CL 3, 356–357): Poor Maud Gonne was here yesterday for two hours. I am afraid that she has been more foolish than any of us imagined possible. She is looking worn out. [. . .] I thought that her mind had gone back some years to a hardness and aridness she had been getting out of a little. Te following day, writing again to AG, WBY summed up the situation (CL 3, 359): I am very glad the interview with Maud Gonne is over. [She seems to be further of from me than ever before del.] I feel somehow that the Maud Gonne I have known so long has passed away. I had the feeling that a time of bitterness and perhaps of self distrust and of fading life has begun for her. It is tempting to link this with the poem’s awareness of how the lover has ‘changed’; and an acknowledgement of divergence, which the poem certainly voices, does indeed appear to be something WBY was himself inclined to make when considering his relationship with MG that summer. It may be too thoroughgoing a biographical analysis that would next ask whether the poem’s addressee – ‘Sweetheart’ – is MG herself or another woman. Te latter, in this connection, seems perfectly plausible; and it is even possible that Florence Farr, whom WBY saw a lot of in May, and with whom he travelled to Manchester for a psaltery performance from 17–19 May, gave the poet some notion of a lyric addressee, even if she could not enjoy this particular appellation of ‘sweetheart’ from the poet in real life. Despite speculations such as these, the poem remains primarily a lyric piece that draws upon, rather than simply expresses, the experiences of its poet. Te work’s absence from several collections (see Textual and publication history) need not suggest any personal bashfulness on WBY’s part; and this was in any case afer 1922 a poem with its secure place in his poetic canon. Te poem has not been one that has compelled intense critical scrutiny. In a short notice of Te Acorn in the Irish Times (16 Mar. 1906), it was singled out for faint praise (along with quotation in full): ‘Perhaps we ought to be thankful for trifes, and Mr. W.B. Yeats places us under obligation for twelve lines which seem to contain one idea’. Te only substantial early admiration was voiced by F. Reid, who noted how the poem had (at that point) not been republished since 1908, and quoted it in its entirety as a piece showing ‘transitional style perhaps more perfectly than any other’ (Reid, 237–238): Here we have the very barest statement of the idea, absolutely unelaborated, unless in that very bareness, with its deliberate repetitions, we may trace the entrance of a new elaboration; but the tune is beautiful, while in the frst two lines of the fnal verse there is an extraordinary emotional quality, an efect

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produced entirely by the art with which the metre is slightly lengthened so as to shif the speech-stress, and release the cry of passion. G.B. Saul in 1957 called the poem ‘this triviality’, whilst recording his sense of afront at ‘the atrocious grammar’ of the second stanza as something simply ‘inexplicable’ (Saul, 81). R. Ellmann (Man and the Masks, 164) mentioned the poem as the ‘only one lyric’ written by WBY ‘during almost six years’, but about it he said nothing more. Te lines were set to music for Peter Pears by the composer Raymond Warren (1928–) as part of a sequence of WBY settings, Te Pity of Love (1966). Copy-text: P49. Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

Title.] Do Not Love Too Long TS, Acorn. Tough WBY’s title obviously is keyed to the wording of the lyric itself, there is a possible point of comparison with a poem published in Te Irish Monthly by Dora Sigerson in 1891: ‘Lady Kathleen’ describes a woman who spends all her years adoring an absent lover and, by the time she locates him with the aid of the fairies with whom he has been living in perpetual youth, has grown too old for him even to recognize. Sigerson’s sententious conclusion runs: ‘But ah! For woman whose heart is strong | To weary never and love too long; | And what is life to a heart denied?’ Tis poem exists somewhere in a Yeatsian orbit of subjectmatter and style (though the bathos of its fnal line is far from WBY – ‘Fair Lady Kathleen drooped and died’); Sigerson was a member of the poet’s social circle, in whose poetry he took an active interest, and he had included her work in A Book of Irish Verse (1895). Sigerson and her husband, Clement Shorter, saw WBY frequently in London, and the poet had dined with them earlier in 1903, the year of his poem’s composition.

2.] I loved [too del.] long and long TS. long and long] A common nineteenthcentury poeticism for duration, but frequent in Walt Whitman, e.g. Leaves of Grass (1891), ‘When I peruse the conquer’d fame’, 3–4: ‘But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them, | How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long’, and ‘Mother and Babe’, 2: ‘Te sleeping mother and babe – hushed, I study them long and long’. Also perhaps cp. J.C. Mangan, Poems (1903), ‘Te Lover’s Farewell’, 5: ‘Long and long before the house I stand’. 3–4.] Cp. W. Allingham, Blackberries (1890), ‘Tough out of fashion . . .’, 1–4: Tough out of fashion, still to me A verse of sweet simplicity Doth chiefy charm; and still I long From poet’s mouth to hear – a song. 3.] And grew out the fashion MS1; [And now I am out of fashion del.] And grew [out of the del.] to be out of fashion TS. 4.] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches, and Songs (1889), ‘Song of a Druidess’, iii, 1–2:

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All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other’s, We were so much at one. But O, in a minute she changed – O do not love too long, Or you will grow out of fashion Like an old song.

‘Yet, sometimes like an old song, | Te sweet day when I was young’. 5.] [Trough the del.] All through the [long del.] years of our youth MS1; All the years of [our del.] ^ [my del.] our ^ youth MS2. 6.] Neither [has ever del.] could have known MS1.

9.] Before writing the line as it stands, WBY in MS1 tries out and deletes a line that may be ‘She has forgotten suddenly’; In a moment she [had del.] was changed MS2. 10.] Because I had loved too long MS2. 11.] I had grown to be out of fashion MS2.

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[‘I HEARD UNDER A RAGGED HOLLOW WOOD’] Dates of composition and revision. Perhaps Aug.–Sep. 1903, but evidence for a date when WBY composed this poem is scanty; it is likely that the verses were written during revision of the short story ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’: this would make a probable date one before WBY’s departure on his American lecture tour in Nov. 1903. In Aug. and Sep. of that year WBY was staying ofen at Coole, where he and AG might well have been collaborating on the revision of his Hanrahan stories in preparation for a projected edition with the Dun Emer Press. Circumstantial evidence suggests that WBY’s work was fnished well before Te Stories of Red Hanrahan went into its production process: the book was heavily delayed, and although it was not published until May 1905, WBY told JQ that ‘My sisters have just started work on the Hanrahan stories’ on 2 Apr. 1904 (CL 3, 586). On 1 Jan. 1904, AG had let WBY know that SMY did not want the new stories for another two months, but WBY’s impatient message to his sister the next day, that ‘I want to have some idea, too, as to when the Red Hanrahan Tales are likely to be printed’ (CL 3, 511) suggests that he was already in possession of all the necessary materials. Te poem was to be revised on removal from its fctional context for CWVP08 in Jul. 1907, and that revision is separately edited in the present volume (‘Te Ragged Wood’). Textual and publication history. Te poem was frst published as part of ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’ in Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905), a short story that had already been thoroughly revised once for Te Secret Rose (1897) afer its initial publication in 1892. Rewriting this yet again, now with AG’s help, WBY wished to bring the verbal atmosphere closer to that of Co. Galway. As he phrased this in his note at the beginning of the book, ‘A friend has helped me to remake these stories nearer to the mind of the country places where Hanrahan and his like wandered and are remembered.’ Perhaps in keeping with this, WBY found himself wishing to substitute alternative verses for the poem which had stood in the story in both 1892 and 1897 versions, ‘I Never Have Seen Maid Quiet’; these lines had been employed (in revised form) as a poem in Te Wind Among the Reeds (1899), ‘Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings’. Whether the song eventually put into Hanrahan’s mouth (and identifed as a translation from his Irish) is convincingly of the West of Ireland folk tradition, is open to debate; but it is at least keyed into the Yeatsian character of Hanrahan and his experiences (see Fictional context). Te only surviving MS, in the collection at Emory University, is a single sheet of paper with a draf in ink and numerous cancellations, which could well be WBY’s earliest attempt at the new poem (MS). Tis is repr. and transcribed in ISWGH, 108–109.

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Fictional context. In ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’ the itinerant poet Red Hanrahan is welcomed into a party where amongst the local guests he meets a girl, Oona, with whom he talks intently all through the dancing that is taking place. In his whispered addresses to the girl as overheard by her anxious mother, Hanrahan alludes to the story of Deirdre in terms that recall strikingly WBY’s own poem ‘Te Rose of the World’ (1891) (‘And one time, she heard him telling about white-handed Deirdre, and how she brought the sons of Usnach to their death; and how the blush in her cheeks was not so red as the blood of kings’ sons that was shed for her, and her sorrows had never gone out of mind’). To this, Hanrahan adds more material that will have a bearing on the poem he eventually performs: Te sun and the moon are the man and the girl, they are my life and your life, they are travelling and ever travelling through the skies as if under the one hood. It was God made them for one another. He made your life and my life before the beginning of the world, he made them that they might go through the world, up and down, like the two best dancers that go on with the dance up and down the long foor of the barn, fresh and laughing, when all the rest are tired out and leaning against the wall. As the party continues, Hanrahan is persuaded to dance, yet he does not do so in the end, performing the song instead: But another couple that had been sitting together like lovers stood out on the foor at the same time, holding one another’s hands and moving their feet to keep time with the music. But Hanrahan turned his back on them as if angry, and in place of dancing he began to sing, and as he sang he held her hand, and his voice grew louder, and the mocking of the young men stopped, and the fddle stopped, and there was nothing heard but his voice that had in it the sound of the wind. And what he sang was a song he had heard or had made one time in his wanderings on Slieve Echtge, and the words of it as they can be put into English were like this: [poem follows here] And while he was singing it Oona moved nearer to him, and the colour had gone from her cheek, and her eyes were not blue now, but grey with the tears that were in them, and anyone that saw her would have thought she was ready to follow him there and then from the west to the east of the world. Oona’s mother, alarmed at the prospect of Hanrahan successfully wooing her daughter and taking her away, contrives a means of persuading the poet back out across her threshold – this is the ‘Twisting of the Rope’ of the title, where Hanrahan unwittingly backs out whilst helping the mother make a rope from some hay. Once out, he is barred from the house, and retreats to the seashore. He sings to comfort himself, but past encounters with the Sidhe come back to haunt him:

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But afer he had been singing a while, mist and shadows seemed to gather about him, sometimes coming out of the sea, and sometimes moving upon it. It seemed to him that one of the shadows was the queen-woman he had seen in her sleep at Slieve Echtge; not in her sleep now, but mocking, and calling out to them that were behind her, ‘He was weak, he was weak, he had no courage.’ Tis ‘queen-woman’, who features at the start of the poem Hanrahan performs, was encountered in another story, ‘Red Hanrahan’, when she was found in the world of the sidhe to which the poet had been led: ‘Tere was a high place at the end of the house, and on it there was sitting in a high chair a woman, the most beautiful the world ever saw, having a long pale face and fowers about it, but she had the tired look of one that had been long waiting.’ Te somnolent fgure is not roused by Hanrahan, because he fails to rise to a symbolic challenge when four old women show him items that were for WBY the talismans of ancient Ireland (as well as of his own projected Celtic Mysteries). Tese are the cauldron, the stone, the spear and the sword – Pleasure, Power, Courage and Knowledge, as the women inform him – but Hanrahan can say nothing in return. Te women leave, taking their treasures with them, ‘and as they went out one of them said ‘he has no wish for us’; and another said ‘he is weak, he is weak’; and another said ‘he is afraid;’ and the last said ‘his wits are gone from him.’ And then they all said ‘Echtge, daughter of the Silver Hand, must stay in her sleep. It is a pity, it is a great pity.” Tis moment of original failure for Hanrahan continues to haunt him, as when the girl Nora, in ‘Red Hanrahan’s Curse’, tells him ‘Owen Hanrahan, I ofen heard you have had sorrow and persecution, and that you know all the troubles of the world since the time you refused your love to the queenwoman in Slieve Echtge; and that she never lef you in quiet since.’ Copy-text: Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905). I heard under a ragged hollow wood, A queen-woman dressed out in silver, cry When the sun looked out of his golden hood, O that none ever loved but you and I!

1.] [Under a sharp hill and a little del.] wood ^I heard under a ragged hilly wood MS. 2. [I have heard a tall del.] queen-woman [of del.] [^dressed out in^] silver cry MS. For identifcation of this ‘queen-woman’ see Fictional context. Cp. William Larminie, Glanula and Other Poems (1889), ‘Glanula’, ‘Te Forest’ 409: ‘the fair queen-woman’. (WBY had previously drawn on Larminie’s work, and reviewed him several times, including in 1892, when he damned his poetry with the faint praise of ‘he can do fairly well now and then’ (CW 9, 171).)

3. his golden hood] Te remarks of Red Hanrahan (see Fictional context) are relevant: ‘Te sun and the moon are the man and the girl, they are my life and your life, they are travelling and ever travelling through the skies as if under the one hood.’ But ‘hood’ itself also provides a link back towards the poem that had occupied this position in WBY’s short story in 1892 and 1897, with ‘maid Quiet, | Nodding her russet hood’. 4, 8, 12.] Te poem’s quasi-refrain may carry Shakespearean trace elements: see As You

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O hurry to the water amid the trees, For there the tall deer and his leman cry When they have but looked upon their images, O that none ever loved but you and I! O hurry to the ragged wood for there I will drive out the deer and moon and cry – O my share of the world, O yellow hair, No one has ever loved but you and I!

Like It, III v 87: ‘Who ever loved that loved not at frst sight?’, and Sonnet 116, 13–14: ‘If this be error, and upon me proved, | I never writ, and no man ever loved’. 5. to the water] to ^the^ water MS. 6.] For there ^the^ doe and ^the^ horned deer [will del.] would cry MS. leman] ‘A person beloved by one of the opposite sex; a lover or sweetheart’ (OED): WBY’s diction here is consciously archaic. 7. When they have] If they had but MS. 8^9.] [O come, come and come del.] [Come to the del.] MS. 9.] O come come to the hollow wood for there MS. 10. and moon] and [the del.] moon MS. 11.] As D. Donoghue noted (YA 21, 56), WBY intends an allusion here to the poetry of the nineteenth-century Irish-language poet Antony Rafery; cp. D. Hyde, Songs Ascribed to Rafery (1903), ‘Mary Hynes, or Te Posy Bright’, p. 333: ‘O Star of Light, O Sun of Harvest, | O Amber Coolun, my share of the world’. Before this, AG had translated the same material, which WBY included in his Te Celtic Twilight piece, ‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye’; here, the lines are given as ‘O star of light and O sun in harvest, | O amber hair, O my share of the world’ (M, 15; frst publ. Te Dome, Oct. 1899). WBY also quoted these lines in ‘Te Literary Movement in Ireland’ (1899), repr. in AG’s Ideals in Ireland (1901) (CW 9, 464), and he

made signifcant use of them in his abandoned novel Te Speckled Bird (fnal version of 1902) where the hero discusses Rafery and Mary Hynes with an old man, and the poem comes up (SB, 44–45): ‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I see by the way you sing the verse that ends ‘O amber hair, O my share of the world’ that you have some sweetheart of your own in your head. Is she beautiful to other people’s eyes? Or is she beautiful to your eyes only?’ ‘She is beautiful in everybody’s eyes.’ ‘Ah well, there is the beauty that’s happy in this world, and there are many that have it, and there is the beauty that’s not happy in this world, and that’s what the poets make their songs about. Never make a song about your sweetheart.’ It is plausible, as Donoghue suggests, that Raftery’s ‘amber hair’ suggests to WBY the hair belonging to MG. And ‘amber’ does, in fact, appear feetingly in the textual record in 1905 (see note to ‘Te Ragged Wood’). Yellow hair itself is common in poetic diction, but the excited tone here may recall the refrain of R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘Te Yellow Hair’: ‘Oh the yellow, yellow hair! oh, the glittering yellow hair | Sweetly fowing, brightly glowing, o’er her neck and shoulders fair!’ 12.] [O that none ever loved but you and I del.] Nobody has ever loved but you and I. MS.

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OLD MEMORY Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was composed to order by WBY during his American lecture tour of 1903, between 8 and 20 Dec.; it seems that he had been putting of the task of its composition for some time. In a letter to AG from Bryn Mawr on 8 Dec. (CL 3, 483) WBY ended with ‘I must stop now for I am trying to write a poem’; according to him, most of the composition took place on a railway trip from Montreal to New York over twelve hours on 17 Dec., and JQ noted in his copy of PSS that the poem was fnished ‘in my place in New York’. It appears that WBY was frst asked to produce a poem in the late summer of 1903 by a friend of AG’s, Lady Millicent Fanny LevesonGower, Duchess of Sutherland (whom he wished to cultivate as a patron for psalteryrelated plans); he was able to send her the fnished poem by 20 Dec. 1903. Te verse was being solicited for a charitable publication project by the Duchess; as Te Sketch described the resultant book (16 Nov. 1904): Te Duchess has established the Potteries and Newcastle Cripples’ Guild, and many other things. Te children who belong to it are taught printing. Tey wished to prove their skill by producing a fne edition of some work of literary value, so the Duchess turned to the poets, begging them to contribute to a volume which the Guild should print. Te contributors have no remuneration other than the knowledge that the money accruing from each copy sold goes to the beneft of the cripples. (Te charitable efcacy of this project was questioned, however, and Te Sketch’s writer allowed himself to refect on how ‘It seems almost impossible for outsiders to understand that a literary man lives by his writings, and that to hand over a saleable bit of work is to hand over the money that he might receive from it’. Te tardiness of WBY’s inspiration in responding to the request for a free poem was probably not uninfuenced by such considerations.) Sending the lines from New York to the Duchess around 20 Dec. 1903, WBY was unusually expansive in his account of his new work (CL 3, 494–495): I enclose that poem. I could not make myself do it, when I did get a couple of days free of lectures, partly because I had a cold partly because the rhymes would not come; but at last I did it the other day when shut up in a railway carriage for twelve hours coming from Canada. I think that we poets would all write the most admirable poetry if government would shut us up in American trains and keep us ever on the road and give us nothing but American DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-23

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newspapers to read. I think the little poem good but then one’s last poem always does seem good. WBY repeated the gist of this in a letter to AG of 21 Jan. 1904, again calling ‘Old Memory’ ‘a very good poem’ (CL 3, 530). Textual and publication history. What is likely to be the earliest surviving text of the poem is not an early draf, but a fair copy in ink with deletions and corrections of two lines in WBY’s hand: this is in Emory University (MS1), and is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH 100–101. On the same-sized paper is a hol. fair copy, possibly the one sent to the Duchess of Sutherland (Princeton University). A very similar ink hol. is NLI 21865 (MS2): with WBY’s signature at the foot of this, there is a deleted date of ‘Dec’. Te poem frst appeared in the charity anthology, Wayfarer’s Love: Contributions from Living Poets (1904) (WL), and was then collected in P99–05, for which the galley proofs survive (NYPL, Berg Collection) (Proofs). Tereafer, the poem was included in all of WBY’s collected and editions, and in the German Tauchnitz selection of 1913 (T). Critical reception and interpretation. Tere was some positive reaction to the poem on its frst appearance: Te Saturday Review for 12 Nov. 1904 proclaimed that ‘We would willingly give more than the price of this book for the poems by Mr. Sturge Moore and Mr. Yeats’, and Te Sketch for 16 Nov. 1904 called it ‘the most memorable piece’ in WL, quoting the frst fve lines and remarking how ‘Mr. Yeats is almost at his best in these lyrics of a gently remonstrating love’. But the warmth of this welcome was not universal, and WBY’s presence in the Duchess of Sutherland’s cast-list of poets was not always noticed: Te Academy and Literature (29 Oct. 1904), Te Irish Times (17 Mar. 1905), and Te Spectator (5 Nov. 1904) all covered the book without mentioning WBY’s contribution. Te poem has generally kept a low critical profle ever since, attracting mainly straightforward biographical interest. M.L. Rosenthal found the lines an expression of WBY’s ‘outright resentment’ of MG (Running to Paradise: Yeats’s Poetic Art (1994), 30), while C. Bradford found that the poem ‘moves from bitterness to philosophic resignation,’ and that ‘Maud’s strength is but half here; Yeats is responsible for the other half ’ (‘Yeats and Maud Gonne’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 3/4 (Winter 1964)). It is possible to register more subtle levels of interaction between WBY’s love for MG and the poem, however, as R. Greaves does when he writes that ‘the textual fgure of Maud Gonne’ is realized in the lines where ‘the thought that [WBY] sends fying to her, reminding her that her strength is only half hers, acknowledges the extent to which the Maud Gonne who exists in the poems is the creation of the poems’ (Greaves, 80). Te idea that WBY is engaging in a creation of MG has been taken further, to suggest that the poem is an invitation to breed: ‘Her [MG’s] beauty and strength are the looking glass that might make a new age if such beauty and strength should inspire emulative behaviour – emulation extending all the way to procreation’ (D.J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics (2001), 192–193). Tis is almost certainly to push the matter too far: but it is the case that the short poem attempts far-reaching alterations to the relationship between WBY and MG, efectively re-casting her as in some ways a child, liable to break her word and to stray from the paths of romantic safety. In point of fact, it had been MG rather than the poet who had efected the furthest-reaching of changes to their relationship in Feb. 1903, in

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the dual betrayal (from WBY’s perspective) of marriage to John MacBride and adoption of the Roman Catholic faith. Writing his poem in America, WBY was in certain respects far away from MG, whose life in France and Ireland he followed closely; in other ways, he was now moving in the American circles she too had frequented, and where she was, for the Irish community at least, a celebrated name. Tis mixture of distance and proximity is important for the poem, where ‘thought’ is sent out – like the dove from the Ark – to fnd MG. If the beloved, then, is one who has been in some way lost, she is also the fgure that the poet has a responsibility to fnd – and in this way, WBY assumes the role of a parent as much as a lover. At the same time, the poem contains high ambitions, relating to MG’s ‘strength’ (3) and its potential: these are not altogether cancelled by the fact that ‘dear words meant nothing’ (9), and the ‘he’ who ‘kneaded in the dough’ of MG’s identity (6) is not perhaps completely frustrated in his purposes by the current state of afairs. It may be a weakness of this poem that this ‘he’ is not easy to identify (a creator God, perhaps; or perhaps a creating poet/lover), and there is arguably a further weakness in the somewhat overcrowded syntax and straining diction of the fnal couplet – as though a Shakespearean sonnet had found itself having to fnish early, and compress everything into a hurried epigrammatic conclusion. Yet the main thrust of the poem is to absolve love itself from its consequences, with the possible implication that MG herself – like love, or the wind that bloweth where it listeth – is not to be held fully responsibile for the damage that has been wrought. Copy-text: P49. O thought, fy to her when the end of day Awakens an old memory, and say, ‘Your strength, that is so lofty and ferce and kind, It might call up a new age, calling to mind

1. O thought, fy to her] O thought fy to her WL; I thought to fy to her PW06, CWVP08. Tis alteration is revised back to the earlier reading in Proofs, and by WBY’s hol. alteration in a copy of CWVP08; in a letter to A.H. Bullen of 28 Jul. 1909, WBY writes (CL 5, 570) ‘Do you remember my showing you a misprint in the collected edition [CWVP08] of the frst line of a poem called I think ‘Old Memory’? I have no copy at hand – If you have not my correction (– I think it should read ‘O thought fy to her at the end of day’) and have not printed that page, let me know and I will look the poem up.’

Perhaps cp. the opening stanza of John Ruskin, Poems (1891), ‘Good-night’: She lays her down in beauty’s light, – Oh, peaceful may her slumbers be! She cannot hear my breathed ‘Good Night,’ I cannot send it o’er the sea; And though my thoughts be feet and free To fy to her with speed excelling, Tey cannot speak – she cannot see – Tose constant thoughts around her dwelling.

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The queens that were imagined long ago, Is but half yours: he kneaded in the dough Through the long years of youth, and who would have thought It all, and more than it all, would come to naught, And that dear words meant nothing?’ But enough, For when we have blamed the wind we can blame love; Or, if there needs be more, be nothing said That would be harsh for children that have strayed.

4–5.] Tat it seemed made to measure to mankind | Queens, that the poets wrote of long ago del. MS1, MS2. 6. but half yours] N. Grene draws attention to this diction’s possible echo in J. M. Synge’s poem ‘Prelude’, 8: ‘did but half remember human words’, a line later reworked by WBY in ‘Te Municipal Gallery Revisited’ (49) to evoke ‘John Synge himself ’ (Grene, 220). 7. years] days MS1, WL. Who would] who’d MS1. 8. It all, and more] It all, more T: this change for the 1913 selection (which was repr. in 1922) need not be a misprint, and in fact seems to have been made to render the line metrically more smooth. But WBY either rejected this later on, or forgot that it had once been a possibility. 9. dear words] Perhaps cp. Lord Byron, ‘From the Portuguese: Tu mi Chamas’, 3–4: ‘Dear words! on which my heart had doted | If Youth could neither fade nor die’. words meant nothing] In biographical terms, there seems to be some specifc element of blame here: presumably, WBY recalls promises from MG in the context of a supposed spiritual union or ‘marriage’ to him that have been rendered meaningless by her actual marriage to John MacBride. Tat the

words themselves are ‘dear’ to WBY does not cease to be the case. 10. we have blamed the wind] we’ve blamed the wind MS2. Cp. Abraham Cowley, Poems (1656), ‘Called Inconstant’, 11–12: ‘Or can you fault with Pilots fnd | For changing course, yet never blame the wind?’ Cowley’s poem (which was included in many nineteenth-century anthologies) afects a cavalier attitude towards romantic inconstancy, as a property only of women’s, and not of men’s, afections, e.g. 3–6: ‘A Name, that’s full and proper when assign’d | To  Womankind: |But when you call us  so, |It can at best but for a Met’aphor go.’ 11–12.] Tis closing couplet employs diction that is epigrammatically dense; perhaps overly so, given the amount of work the three uses of ‘be’ are given (‘needs be’, ‘be nothing’, ‘would be’ – all three difering in grammatical function, but all three also jammed tightly together in the two lines). 12. Tat would be] Tat had been MS1, WL. children that had strayed] Tis is an early instance of WBY refguring MG as in some sense his child, a process taken furthest in the late ‘A Bronze Head’ (1939), 20–21, where MG is perhaps a Blakean little girl lost: ‘I had grown wild | And wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my child!’

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NEVER GIVE ALL THE HEART Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was composed by 1 Mar. 1904, and it was probably begun a little earlier than this. In New York City at the Academy of Music theatre on 28 Feb. 1904, WBY gave a well-attended lecture on Robert Emmett; the fair copy of the poem which is its earliest surviving MS is dated for the following day, and is on headed paper from a hotel which was much closer to this venue than JQ’s address (the hotel was on Greenwich Avenue and 6thAvenue, and the venue on E. 14th Street and Irving Place; JQ was living at 1 W. 87th Street). Te copy itself is dated in WBY’s hand ‘March 1, 1904’, but this does not mean that the poem was composed on that day (a busy one in fact, when WBY and JQ had a business meeting at the New York ofces of Macmillan). It is likely that the poem began life earlier, and possibly in the second half of Feb. when the poet was staying with JQ: a note by JQ in his copy of PSS claims that this poem (along with ‘Old Memory’) was written ‘in my place in New York’. WBY and JQ met with Witter Bynner of McClure’s Magazine (where the poem eventually appeared) on 4 Mar., and a single-sheet fair copy (MS2) carries the date ‘March 6, 1904’ in WBY’s hand. It was not until 7 Nov. 1904, however, that WBY gave the poem to JQ to send on to Bynner (see CL 3, 669). A circumstantial factor that may strengthen the case for the poem’s composition in late Feb. 1904 is WBY’s receipt of a letter (the frst since the previous Sep.) from MG. On 12 Feb. she wrote to the poet with news of the birth of her and John MacBride’s son Sean, apologizing for past misunderstandings on the subject of national literature: ‘I did not mean to say anything to pain you and would be very VERY sorry if I thought there was any serious misunderstanding between us’; she added that ‘Tere would not be if we could talk things over but I fnd it hard to express my thoughts in writing’ (G-YL, 181). Te letter is likely to have troubled WBY at an emotional level, especially since he had been aware as long ago as the autumn of 1903 of what he called in a letter to AG of 16 Nov. 1903 the ‘very painful rumour’ that ‘Major MacBride is said to be drinking’, refecting there that ‘It is the last touch of tragedy if it is true’ (CL 3, 468). Critical reception and interpretation. WBY was able to place this poem with the American McClure’s Magazine, and it was sufciently well-received afer its appearance in PW06 to be reprinted in Te Literary Digest 32 (1906), and in the New York journal Current Literature for Mar. 1907. In WBY’s own circle, positive reaction came from T. Sturge Moore, who called this poem (along with ‘Te Folly of Being Comforted’) ‘the best of their kind ever written’ in an early letter of his to WBY of 1906 (Moore, 10); this was a view which he had not changed by the time he wrote in 1929/30 that the poem ‘is all but as beautiful [as ‘Te Folly . . .’] and certainly more fawless’ (“Do We, or Do We DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-24

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Not, Know It?’: An Unpublished Essay on W.B. Yeats’, YA 4, 150)). Anthology choices suggest a continuing level of popularity: the poem was included in both Te Home Book of Verse (1923), and L. Binyon’s Te Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics (1924). In modern criticism, the poem has been seen less as a lyric in the genre of love poetry than as a piece of more or less confessional writing. Yet in this light, the verses are not perhaps especially revealing. Undoubtedly, the lyric voice is explicitly a male one; critics are prone (understandably) to identify this with WBY’s own brand of masculinity, but issues of generic conditioning cannot be entirely discounted. It is difcult to say how ironically self-aware, in terms of gendered analysis, G.S. Fraser’s remark really is when he writes of how the poem ‘in its nakedness and through-thrusting syntax seems almost like one of the bitter poems of Catullus to Lesbia’ (Essays on Twentieth-Century Poets (1977), 66), but there is a sense in which WBY’s voice here emulates renaissance rhetorical manoeuvres in the love-poetry genre. To take the resultant poem as straightforwardly self-expressive, and then to criticize that expression, is arguably to miss the artistic point. Tis seems to happen when S. Smith writes about ‘a more realistic assessment of the complexity of sexual relations’ (W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (1990), 91–92): Tere is real bitterness in the acerbic aside of [lines 9–10]. In reacting against an unduly romantic, idealising vision of the woman, one derived in part from the medieval ‘courtly love’ tradition, the poet adopts a more cynical, combative idea of sexual relations. [. . .] But the potentially cynical tone lapses back into reproachful wistfulness in the closing lines, with the deadbeat rhythms and plaintive whinge [lines 13–14]. Tere is little that is ‘realistic’ about the close reading ofered here (and much, in fact, that is ‘cynical’): both identifying a specifc ‘bitterness’, and declaring it ‘real’, do little to register the poem’s actual artistic force. A better – because more closely attentive – reading is that of M.L. Rosenthal, which makes its angle of approach to gendered attitudes more interesting as part of WBY’s creative work (Running to Paradise: Yeats’s Poetic Art (1994), 32–33): Te frst sentence [of the poem] has a worldly edge. In itself it might be taken as a sophisticated bit of practical advice to young men about how to deal masterfully with women. But any such impression is soon counteracted. Te middle lines reverse the implied situation: it is women, not men, who exercise mastery and tire of lovers whose constant devotion is unquestionable. Tey are conscious actors or directors in love’s rituals, while men are too immersed in their love itself to play their roles coolly enough. Te gender dynamics at work in the poem are (in part at least) consciously manipulated by the poet. ‘Te problem for Yeats,’ E. Cullingford writes, ‘as for the speaker of ‘Never Give All the Heart’, is that recognition of the erotic power of the mask long precedes the ability to assume it’ (Cullingford, 52). Yet this may be as much an opportunity as a problem, and the poem does seem to take artistic advantage of such a situation. Intimations

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of this may lie behind D. Kiberd’s reading, which takes the poem as ‘a recommendation to throw energy into form rather than content: in other words, never to say it all in one poem’ (Inventing Ireland (1995), 308): Tis raises the inevitable question about art as bad faith, but perhaps the notion of a false imitation of a true thing is more applicable to performers than to artists. Te paradox in ‘Never Give All the Heart’ is bitter, and that bitterness is rendered in the jagged syntax and awkward repetitions. On the one hand there is the need to ‘act’, but on the other there is the impossibility of acting out of deep feeling. Te answer is the Mask, a necessary fakery, which, if consciously and confessedly manipulated, is not vulnerable to the charge of bad faith. While this is possibly too ready to allow a later WBY to set the terms for the interpretation of his earlier work, it is not unjustifed, in the sense that the poem relies heavily on generic positioning in order to function. Tis is not necessarily the same thing as what D. Holdeman sees as the ‘explicit interest in self-construction manifested here’ which ‘is new to Yeats’s poetry and marks a prominent milestone in his evolution as a modernist’ (Holdeman, 116); there is, on the other hand, certainly an interest in construction (as opposed to ‘self-construction’) which is a part of the poem’s motive force. One formal area that can be useful in approaching the poem critically is the fact that it is a sonnet (albeit an unorthodox one, cast entirely in rhymed couplets). Tere are obvious connections between the sonnet form, the subject of love, and the employment of explicitly gendered perspectives; and all of these have their sources in the renaissance. WBY would have been aware of many precedents for the male sonnet-speaker adopting the role of the wounded lover, who issues advice to other men on how best to avoid his own sad fate at the hands of a woman. But the poet does not write a sonnet here that is fully orthodox in either generic or formal terms. Generically (as pointed out by Rosenthal), WBY upsets the gendered balance by admitting that ‘passionate women’ are more completely masters of the ‘game’ than the fully honest male lover, whose declaration of his emotions proves to be a sign of weakness and the source of any ultimate defeat. And this is a sonnet which, like the sonnets of Shakespeare, is a poem written by someone who is also a practising playwright. ‘Te play’ (10) is indeed the thing, and is conceivably as concrete as it is abstract; and in the poem’s argument hearts invested in this will be more securely in charge of events than those that have been completely (if rashly) given in love. Te idea of a poet writing a love-poem is familiar enough; but it is hard to imagine a playwright writing a love-play, and for good reason. Te word that might be expected to attach to the male lover here belongs in fact to the women who do not make his mistake: ‘passionate’. Tis adjective will become increasingly signifcant in WBY’s writing, and it is important that here it accommodates love’s larger complications of dramatic role and action, rather than the ‘outright’ declaration of love itself. If the speaker declares himself to have ‘lost’ (14), it is still true that in the course of the poem he has also gained, in sensing a knowledge of what it is to be ‘passionate’: to be artful, that is, as opposed to artless in matters of the heart. In formal terms, the sonnet is not at all orthodox; and there is no volta, unless there is a designedly misplaced one afer line 7. Yet the fnal couplet

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does work in a way that suggests a strong relation to the sonnet form, and particularly the form of the Shakespearean sonnet; its clinching force is much more successful than that at the end of the last poem WBY had composed, the not-quite sonnet ‘Old Memory’. If these fnal lines announce the poet himself as the speaker of the poem, they also lay stress on the poem as a constructed thing (‘He who made this knows . . .’); the fnal gesture is one of candour, though not the same candour that is admitted to at the poem’s beginning: what is frankly given outright to the reader is not the heart, but the fnished piece of verbal artifce. Textual and publication history. A fair copy by WBY on headed paper from the Columbian Hotel, New York, now in Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia, is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 102–103 (MS1). Another hol. fair copy, a single page in ink, is in Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (MS2). Te poem is inscribed by WBY on the front fyleaf of JQ’s copy of Te King’s Treshold (1904): this book, now in Berg Collection, NYPL, was not published until mid-Mar. 1904 (by which time WBY had lef the US); WBY made the inscription for JQ in London, on 11 Nov. 1904 (MS3). JQ was instrumental in arranging for the poem’s frst publication in McClure’s Magazine, Dec. 1905 (McClure’s): for this (along with the opening chorus from Deirdre, JQ secured a $40 fee. A handwritten copy (MS4) now in the Houghton Library, Harvard was included by WBY in a letter sent to Witter Bynner (poetry editor of McClure’s) on 31 Dec. 1905 (CL 4, 265); this was for publication, as WBY thought: but the poem had already been published in McClure’s by this time. Volume publication came in 1906, frst with Bullen’s P99–05 in Oct., and next in Nov. with PW06 (proofs in Berg Collection, NYPL (Proofs PW)). Te poem was included by WBY in all subsequent collected editions. Copy-text: P49

5

Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

Title. No title MS1. 3. women if] women, if MS1, MS3, McClure’s, PW06, SP21. 4. Certain, and] Certain and MS2, MS3, McClure’s, Certain and rev. to Certain, and Proofs 06. 5. from kiss to kiss] Perhaps cp. A. O’Shaughnessy, Songs of a Worker (1881),

‘Colibri’, II, 32–33: ‘Tat deathless fend, Mistrust – from kiss to kiss, | From heart to heart, crawling for aye unseen’. 7^8.] Tere is no break here in any texts of the poem. 7. brief, dreamy, kind] Although present in McClure’s and P99–05 the punctuation here is largely absent from MS and printed versions until P33 (and subsequently the copy-text);

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O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.

it is entered in the proofs for the projected Macmillan Edition de Luxe in late summer 1932. 11.] How can we play it well enough MS1; And who can play it well enough MS2, MS3, McClure’s, MS4.

12. with love] from love MS1. 13. He that] He who MS2.

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SONGS FROM DEIRDRE: I Date of composition. Probably fnished Sep. 1904. One of the earliest versions of WBY’s play Deirdre is a fragment in hand-corrected typescript, which includes lines 19–21 (see Textual and publication history): the fve pages are dated, possibly in AG’s hand, ‘Apr. 28–May 18’, and this must be in 1904, when WBY in London (where AG was present) began drafing his play. ‘I have a play to suggest’ [for future production as part of the Irish Literary Teatre] WBY told George Roberts on 18 May, ‘but cannot speak of it for two or three weeks’ (CL 3, 599). It appears that the chorus was completed on 28 Sep. 1904: on that date, WBY included copies in letters to JQ and Florence Farr. To JQ, he wrote how ‘I have been working for weeks upon weeks at my Deirdre,’ telling him that ‘It goes very slowly and gives me a great deal of trouble,’ but ‘I have just today fnished my frst chorus’ (CL 3, 651). Dramatic context. In WBY’s version of the Deirdre story, which became his verseplay Deirdre for the Irish Literary Teatre, produced in Dublin in 1906 and London in 1908, Deirdre and her lover Naoise are arriving at the guest lodge of the Red Branch king Conchubar, accompanied by their sponsor, the king Fergus. In the past, Naoise had stolen Deirdre from Conchubar, who was to marry her, and the pair had escaped into exile in Scotland. Teir return to Ireland has been brokered by Fergus, on an understanding that Conchubar is ready to put his anger aside, and receive and forgive the couple. Te lodge that awaits them is ominously bare, and deserted but for three women, who are the musicians instructed by Fergus to sing a song of welcome. Once Deirdre and Naoise enter the lodge, they are doomed: for Conchubar will go back on his promises, and murder Naoise in order to make Deirdre his bride at last. Te plot is foiled by Deirdre’s suicide over Naoise’s body (in a scene reminiscent of the end of Romeo and Juliet). Te musicians’ song, then, is one of both welcome and menace. Although the fnal stanza (where all three musicians sing together) emphasizes the mutual involvement of the lovers, the frst two verses are haunted by doomed love and foreboding of disaster. Te subject chosen by the musicians is Edain, the beloved of the god Aengus. WBY had already found the Aengus and Edain story important, and it is especially signifcant in TSW, where the 1900 version has lines that both celebrate the pair’s love, and mention how Edain ends up being transformed into a fy (296–310; later excerpted and printed as a prefatory poem in the 1906 TSW). Edain’s anxiety, and her anticipatory tears, are best glossed by AG’s version of the Irish story (see notes to TSW 1900, 296–310). Te parallel to Deirdre’s situation in the play is that a woman is to be taken from her lover by an act of deceit on the part of a frustrated would-be DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-25

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husband: Conchubar, in this sense, plays a role akin to that of the jealous and deceitful Fuamach, Midhir’s jealous wife. Textual and publication history. Te earliest sign of this chorus comes in a fragment of the play, then called Te House of Usnach, which WBY was drafing in the summer of 1904. In this fve-page typescript (possibly produced by AG, who was in London at this time), which bears corrections in WBY’s hand, four lines of verse for the Musicians’ song are followed by a prose version of what WBY presumably intends to turn into the remainder of his lyric. Te whole section is as follows (NLI 8760 (7), p. 4; transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 104 and Cornell Deirdre, 20): MUSICIANS begin to sing. Praise the beautiful and strong Praise the blossoming ^apple^ stem Praise the redness of the yew Praised be the king and praised be the queen Of them all songs tell, of them are all stories made; for them is the opening of every door, for them every trumpet sounds. Ah how beautiful is the queen. Hold your swords in your hands, maybe some one has looked upon her with love. Is that why her cheeks are pale. Set the horses about her, hold the shields in your hands, maybe some one has looked on her with love. Who knows what armies and what battles may be at hand. O beautiful young man, O king at the queen’s side, do not lay the helmet too long away maybe some one has looked at the queen with love. From this, it would seem that WBY was working with the intention of structuring the chorus around the refrain of ‘maybe some one has looked upon her with love’. Tere are three refrains, and so in all probability a three-stanza piece was already in WBY’s mind. Another draf outline for the play also envisages some kind of refrain, and proposes a possible line-length (though the fnal piece is not in octosyllabic verse but in catalectic trochaic tetrameters (i.e. seven syllables)). Te text in TS for this is as follows (NLI 8760 15 (E), transcribed Cornell Deirdre, 101): MUSICIAN Even still we know what it is to love, many evils has love worked upon us and works even yet (She begins by speaking a poem in octosyllabic verses. Te last two lines she sings) Love makes all things false surrounds us with illusions it blinds our eyes. Out of our own sorrows we will acclaim her that comes. (Te chorus repeat the last two lines) Te frst full text of the chorus, sent on the day of its composition according to WBY, is in a typed letter to JQ (Berg, NYPL) with some corrections in WBY’s hand (TS1: transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 105–107). A holograph copy is on the single surviving page of a letter to Florence Farr, dated the same day as that to JQ (MS1; NLI 30343, transcribed in

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CL 3, 653). Tis seems to incorporate a revision of TS1 (in line 15) which is in line with later versions of the text. Te three-stanza version of the chorus is succeeded by a hol. version as part of a draf of the play (NLI 8760 (18G)) in which only the frst two stanzas are present (MS2; transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 104 and Cornell Deirdre, 217). What is probably a pre-performance copy of the poem in hol. is found on the rear fyleaf of AG’s copy of P01 (Emory). Another hol. copy (Berg, NYPL), on the opening fyleaf of Te King’s Treshold, was given to JQ in London by WBY, and is signed and dated ‘Nov. 11 1904’ by the poet (Quinn). When the poem appeared in print in Sep. 1905, in McClure’s Magazine, it was in this two-stanza form. JQ arranged for the magazine to take the poem (along with ‘Never Give All the Heart’), reporting this in a letter to WBY of 17 Mar. 1905. In the poem’s next printed appearance, in Te Shanachie for Spring, 1906 (still ahead of Deirdre’s frst performance, which was not until Nov. 1906), the chorus reverted to its three-stanza form. In late May 1906, the poem was published in Te Shanachie, and was subsequently incorporated into P99–05, published by A.H. Bullen at the end of Oct. A single typed sheet (Berg, NYPL) seems to have been copy added to this volume at a late stage, when the poem took the place in the book which was vacated by ‘Yellow Haired Donough’ (TS2). Soon aferwards, the poem was included in the frst volume of PW06, published in New York on 27 Nov. Tis publication came just three days afer the frst night of Deirdre, and the poem was incorporated in the text of that play published in Aug. 1907, and then in all editions of the play in WBY’s lifetime. As part of the printed play, the poem had no signifcant textual changes, but did carry additional stage-directions. WBY included the poem as one of three songs from Deirdre in PSS, and this was the last occasion on which it appeared outside the context of the play itself. Form, and musical context. WBY’s determination in composing his play Deirdre was to have choral lyrics in the drama which could be chanted to music. For the Irish National Teatre production in 1906, this music was composed by Arthur Darley, and the performers included Sara Allgood as the First Musician. Later, WBY decided on the need for a psaltery-chant, and he allowed Florence Farr to provide this. Te results, in Farr’s notation, were eventually printed in vol. 3 of CWVP08. Productions of Deirdre from 1907 onwards were marked by intense work on chanting techniques, especially once Farr became involved: for a detailed record of these, see R. Schuchard, ‘Te Chanting of Yeats’s Deirdre’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 68:1–2 (Winter 2007), 201–252. From the beginning, WBY himself thought of the lines as being chanted, and was prepared privately to demonstrate this, as remembered by O.St.J. Gorgary, who was present with GM at such an occasion on 10 Dec. 1904 (Many Lines to Tee: Letters to G.K.A. Bell ed. J.F. Carens (1971), 58–59): Te efect of his reading this [Song from Deirdre I] is not to be transmitted to you. He forgot himself and his face seemed tremulous as if an image of impalpable fre – and not red, black and white-coloured Yeats. His lips are dark cherry red and his cheeks too take colour, and his eyes actually glow black and then the voice gets all vibrating as he sways like a Druid with his whole soul chanting. No wonder the mechanics in America were mesmerized! I know no more beautiful face than Yeats’s when lit with song.

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Te intricate inner structures of this chant, as subsequently explored by Farr, are located in fact within a recognisable metrical pattern, which is on the face of it not very experimental (and is shared by the second chorus from Deirdre, ‘Love is an immoderate thing’). Te lines are four-foot trochaics, rhymed ababcdcd, where the fnal foot is of one stressed syllable (making the metre catalectic, in metrical jargon). T. MacDonagh, locating WBY within the metrical traditions of Irish and Anglo-Irish verse, heard something more particular in these lines (Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916), 72–73): Tis poem is really syllabic, seven syllables to the line, like one species of Debhidhe poems in Irish – without, of course, the arrangements of assonance. I do not know if Mr. Yeats is aware of this syllabic measure; but again and again in his poems and in the poems of many contemporary Irishmen I fnd this tendency. Indeed I should say that the efects of our more deliberate Irish speech on our verse are these two: frst, a prose intonation, not monotonous, being saved by the natural rise and fall of the voice, a remnant of the ancient pitch – a quality, as it were, of chanted speech – and second, a tendency to give, in certain poems, generally of short riming lines, almost equal stress value to all the syllables, a tendency to make the line the metrical unit. (WBY, who had been pleased by MacDonagh’s earlier praise of ‘the chanting quality’ in his poetry, had no specifc Irish measure in mind or in earshot: he told him in 1913 that ‘I fnd it extraordinarily difcult to explain to any my own system of scansion, for I have very little but instinct’ (W.Parks and A.W. Parks (eds.), Tomas MacDonagh (1967), 120)). Less technical praise the poem came in a review of Te Shanachie in Te Gentleman’s Magazine for Dec. 1906, by (a hardly disinterested) A.H. Bullen, who noted that ‘the three songs [WBY] gives us [in fact, the three stanzas of this one song] from an unfnished play are quite in his best manner and full of the elusive charm that is his and his alone among living poets’. Place and function. In P99–05, this poem occupies the fnal position in the section entitled ‘In the Seven Woods’. It was not in the 1903 Dun Emer ISW, and is placed here to follow the fnal poem of that collection, ‘Te Happy Townland’ (the section itself is followed in P99–05 by the play Te King’s Treshold). WBY added this poem in a position once occupied by another drama-derived piece, removed from ISW only at proof stage, ‘Yellow Haired Donough’. Discussing this, D. Holdeman maintains that the poem ‘fts its new context remarkably well’: ‘Because the speakers [. . .] are women, and because they praise the union of lovers, the poem resolves precisely that aspect of the solarlunar antinomy addressed least satisfactorily by ‘the Happy Townland,’ and thus restores something of the efect of ‘Yellow Haired Donough’’ (Holdeman, 113). In PW06, the poem is also in the ‘In Te Seven Woods’ section, but now is placed as the third piece from the end, afer ‘Under the Moon’ and before ‘Te Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Temselves’; the fnal poem is now ‘Te Happy Townland’. PSS has a section entitled ‘Te Musicians’ Songs From Deirdre’, which immediately follows its ‘In Te Seven Woods’ section, and precedes the fnal section in the book, ‘Te Shadowy Waters’. Te present poem is the frst of the three Songs.

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Copy-text: PSS FIRST MUSICIAN.

5

‘Why is it,’ Queen Edain said, ‘If I do but climb the stair To the tower overhead, When the winds are calling there, Or the gannets calling out, In waste places of the sky, There’s so much to think about, That I cry, that I cry?’ SECOND MUSICIAN.

10

But her goodman answered her: ‘Love would be a thing of naught

Title.] Queen Edaine McClure’s; Te Praise of Deirdre Shanachie; Te Entrance of Deirdre: A Lyric Chorus P99–05; Chorus from a Play PW06. Headnote.] WBY gives the poem a headnote on three occasions: A chorus from an unfnished play called ‘Te House of Usnach.’ Deirdre is about to enter the house of the Red Branch. Tree women, wandering musicians, sing these lines: Shanachie. Two women are waiting the entrance of Deirdre into the House of the Red Branch. Tey hear her coming and begin to sing. She comes into the house at the end of the second verse, and the women seeing her standing by Naoise and shrinking back from the house, not understanding that she is afraid of what is to come, think that it is love that has made her linger thus. P99–05. It is sung at the entrance of Deirdre into the House of the Red Branch by certain wandering musicians. She comes to the threshold at the end of the second verse,

and they, seeing her whispering to Naoise who is beside her, think that she is busy with her love, not knowing that she is hesitating in fear. PW06. 1. Queen Edain] Wife of Midhir, who becomes wife of the god Aengus before being transformed into a fy by Midhir’s jealous wife Fuamach. See Dramatic context. 6. sky] [air del.] sky MS2. (If this represents a compositional revision, there may be a case for regarding MS2 as earlier than MS1; but there are no other signs of revision in the hol. version here, and it is more likely that WBY’s attention slipped as he copied in his text at this point, leading him for a moment to provide a rhyme in a position where in the other stanzas no rhyme-word is used.) 9. goodman] good man TS1, MS1, MS2, McClure’s, Shanachie, P99–05. WBY employs a term here which by the later nineteenth century was strongly Scottish in usage (OED goodman 2.a: ‘Te male head of a household; the master, the householder’). 10.] Cp. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV ii 13: ‘A paramour is [. . .] a thing of naught’.

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Had not all his limbs a stir Born out of immoderate thought; Were he anything by half, Were his measure running dry. Lovers, if they may not laugh, Have to cry, have to cry.’ THE THREE MUSICIANS [together]

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But is Edain worth a song Now the hunt begins anew? Praise the beautiful and strong; Praise the redness of the yew; Praise the blossoming apple-stem. But our silence had been wise. What is all our praise to them, That have one another’s eyes?

11. a stir] astir corr. to a stir TS2. 12. Born] Made del. Born TS1, Emory. 14. measure] measure[s del.] TS1, measures MS1, Quinn, Emory, McClure’s, Shanachie, P99–05, PW06; measure Deirdre (1907) and all subsequent printings: this may be the reading of MS2 (though certainty is impossible), and is the reading of a pre-performance TS (transcr. as Berg (3), Cornell Deirdre, 757) as well as a post-performance TS (transcr. as NYPL, Cornell Deirdre, 1038). Te present version follows the copy-text, as the last occasion WBY printed these verses as a separate poem. 15–16.] Wherefore, if we may not laugh | We must cry, we must cry. TS1.

16^17.] Between these stanzas in Shanachie is a prose description of the stage action: Deirdre comes in led by Naisi. Recognising the house where she and her lover are to die, she hangs back; but to the singers she seems to be preoccupied with her lover. 17–24.] Not in MS2, McClure’s. 22.] [Yet our silence had been wise del.] Yet would silence have been wise, TS1 But our silence had been wise. MS1 But our silence had been wise PW06. 23. praise] speech TS1.

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THE RAGGED WOOD Date of revision. Tis reworking of a poem in WBY’s story ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’, as published in Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905), was fnalized between 10 and 28 Jul. 1907, but the revision had been essentially made much earlier than this, by 18 Apr. 1905 (see Textual and publication history). WBY frst sent A.H. Bullen the older version of the verses on 10 Jul. 1907, then on 28 Jul. sent him instead the fully revised poem (CL 4, 694, 700). Textual and publication history. WBY inscribed the poem in AG’s copy of Stories of Red Hanrahan (1905), where he added, ‘Lady Gregory from her friend W.B. Yeats, April 18, 1905’. Tis book was sold at Sotheby’s in Jul. 1979, and its present whereabouts are unknown: the text is transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 111 (MS). At Coole in Jul. 1907, WBY was sending of copy to A.H. Bullen for CWVP08, and on 10 Jul. told him to include ‘the poem about the ragged hollow wood which I have taken out of Red Hanrahan’ (CL 4, 694). Tis is the poem in its previous form, and it may well be that WBY had for the moment forgotten ever having made revisions to it; but by 28 Jul. he was able to send Bullen the corrected text (possibly having found this in the library at Coole, or having been reminded about this by AG in the meantime) (CL 4, 700): I enclose the correct version of the poem which I call ‘Te Hollow Wood’ and I want you to substitute it for ‘I heard under the ragged Hollow Wood’. I think you will admit the improvement. Te old poem was always spoiled by the poverty of rhyme. Tis is practically only a change of four lines. Te revised poem frst appeared in CWVP08, placed among poems in its ‘In the Seven Woods’ section, and then in the same position in PSS the following year. WBY’s appetite for revision was still not entirely assuaged, however, and in his Journal (Burns collection, Boston College) for 7 Mar. 1910 he attempted a ‘Re-writing of O that none ever loved but you and I’ (BC). Te Journal page is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 112–113, and is also transcribed in Mem., 241–242. Tis issued in the text of the poem’s next appearance in print, the Tauchnitz Selection of 1913 (T). Tereafer, the poem was included in all collected edns. of WBY’s work. Two family copies of books also contain relevant material: a copy of PSS has alterations in ink by WBY (PSS copy), and a copy of CWVP08 has a hol. version in WBY’s hand pasted over the poem’s printed text

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-26

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(CWVP08. hol.). Either or both of these may be later than T, but there is no conclusive evidence to determine this. Reception and critical interpretation. Few critics have said much about this poem, and in WBY’s lifetime it was seldom singled out for mention. On the one hand, it can be understood as a very simple (if picturesque) love lyric, with its refrain performing the unremarkable trope of wishing that the lover and his beloved were the only two lovers on earth. It can then become little more than a song lyric – and it appeared in this guise (albeit misquoted) in a short story by the American poet Beatrice Ravenel (1870–1956): here, a young man strolling through a small park in the southern states, ‘inhabited by a depressed and lonesome young deer’, misremembers WBY’s poem while singing part of it (Harper’s Magazine, 1 Mar. 1919): ‘Oh, hurry to the ragged wood –’ he sang. ‘No,’ ‘Oh, have you seen in the ra-a-a-ged wood, Have you seen the stag and his lady sigh When they have gazed but on their images? Oh, who ever loved like you and I?’ ‘Say, that’s great, bad grammar and all. Where’d you get it?’ demanded a robust voice startlingly near his ear.

On the other hand, the poem may be able to show a more sombre side. Edward Tomas’s poem ‘Te Hollow Wood’ (Dec. 1914) expresses a debt to WBY in its title, and the title itself, as E. Longley explains, carries ghostly overtones: ‘Besides a wood in a hollow, which the sun cannot penetrate, ‘hollow wood’ suggests a wood consisting of hollow or dead trees, a ghost-wood emptied of life’ (Edward Tomas: Te Annotated Collected Poems (2008), 171). Tomas’s wood, though peopled by a goldfnch and ‘birds that swim like fsh’, is a place that is pregnant with horrors: ‘trees | Tat stand half-fayed and dying, | And the dead trees on their knees’ (9–11). WBY’s hollow wood is not a theatre of horror, but may nevertheless be haunted by the troubled and troubling spirit of jealousy. In the poem’s fnal form, the refrain at the end of each stanza does not repeat exactly, and there is a sense of argumentative progression from ‘Would none had ever loved’ to ‘O that none ever loved’ (the wish here has become less determined and more hopeless), and fnally to a bald and insistent ‘No one has ever loved’ (which may voice a decision to leave the facts and history of love behind altogether). Te stag and ‘his lady’, then the moon and the sun, are felt as benign parallels to the lyric lover and his beloved; but the last stanza wants the very opposite of company: ‘I will drive all those lovers out’ (10). Love – at any rate, love as lyrically voiced by the lover – becomes exclusive in character, and the poem concludes by entering an oddly cramped kind of romantic world. ‘My share of the world’, which was for WBY a highly charged phrase (see note to 11) feels both assertive and jealously guarded. For all that, the ghosts that may have been sensed in the wood are not conclusively banished.

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Copy-text: P49. O hurry where by water among the trees The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh, When they have but looked upon their images – Would none had ever loved but you and I! 5

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky, When the sun looked out of his golden hood? – O that none ever loved but you and I!

Title.] Te Hollow Wood CWVP08, PSS; Hollow corr. to Ragged PSS copy; Te Ragged Wood CWVP08 copy. 1.] LP22 and afer. O hurry to the water amid the trees, MS, CWVP08, PSS; O hurry where by water among trees, CWVP08 copy, BC, T. 2.] For there the tall deer and his leman sigh MS, CWVP08, PSS. 4. Would that none ever] O that none ever MS, CVWP08–T. Final form of the line frst in CWVP08 copy.

6. silver-proud] Cp. Keats, ‘Daisy’s Song’ (1818), 3: ‘the Moon, all silver-proud’. queen-woman] Cp. William Larminie, Glanula and Other Poems (1889), ‘Glanula’, ‘Te Forest’ 409: ‘the fair queen-woman’. (WBY had previously drawn on Larminie’s work, and reviewed him several times, including in 1892, when he damned his poetry with the faint praise of ‘he can do fairly well now and then’ (CW 9, 171).)

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O hurry to the ragged wood, for there I will drive all those lovers out and cry – O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.

9. ragged] hollow MS, CWVP08, PSS. Final form frst in CWVP08 copy. 10.] I will drive out the deer and moon and cry – MS, CWVP08, PSS; I’ll hollo all those lovers out and cry– PSS copy. CWVP08 copy, BC, T. 11.] As D. Donoghue noted (YA 21, 56), WBY intends an allusion here to the poetry of the nineteenth-century Irish language poet Antony Rafery; cp. D. Hyde, Songs Ascribed to Rafery (1903), ‘Mary Hynes, or Te Posy Bright’, ‘O Star of Light, O Sun of Harvest, | O Amber Coolun, my share of the world’. Before this, AG had translated the same material, which WBY included in his Te Celtic Twilight piece, ‘Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye’; here, the lines are given as ‘O star of light and O sun in harvest, | O amber hair, O my share of the world’ (M, 15; frst publ. Te Dome, Oct. 1899). WBY also quoted these lines in ‘Te Literary Movement in Ireland’ (1899), repr. in AG’s Ideals in Ireland (1901) (CW 9, 464), and he made signifcant use of them in his abandoned novel Te Speckled Bird (fnal version of 1902) where the hero discusses Rafery and Mary Hynes with an old man, and the poem comes up (SB, 44–45):

‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I see by the way you sing the verse that ends ‘O amber hair, O my share of the world’ that you have some sweetheart of your own in your head. Is she beautiful to other people’s eyes? Or is she beautiful to your eyes only?’ ‘She is beautiful in everybody’s eyes.’ ‘Ah well, there is the beauty that’s happy in this world, and there are many that have it, and there is the beauty that’s not happy in this world, and that’s what the poets make their songs about. Never make a song about your sweetheart.’ It is plausible, as Donoghue suggests, that Rafery’s ‘amber hair’ suggests to WBY the hair belonging to MG. And ‘amber’ does, in fact, appear feetingly in the textual record: [O amber hair del.] O my share of the world ^O amber hair^ MS. Yellow hair itself is common in poetic diction, but the excited tone here may recall the refrain of R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘Te Yellow Hair’: ‘Oh the yellow, yellow hair! oh, the glittering yellow hair | Sweetly fowing, brightly glowing, o’er her neck and shoulders fair!’ hair!] hair, CWV08–LP26, LP31. 12. you and I.] you and I! CWVP08–LP26, LP31.

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THE HARP OF AENGUS Date of composition. Every word in this poem was composed in 1899, as part of WBY’s TSW (1900), where the material constitutes lines 296–309. However, these lines from the verse drama became a poem on their own right when the poet decided to print them separately as the second of two sets of prefatory verses, in front of his completely revised version of the poetic drama which appeared frst in P99–05 (1906). Tere is no evidence for when exactly WBY decided to use the lines as a poem (though of course this must have been at a point when he knew they would be excluded from the play itself, and therefore some time in summer 1905); but the decision had clearly been taken by c.23 Sep. 1905, when he contacted A.H. Bullen as the prospective publisher of P99–05 with both these lines and ‘I wandered in the seven woods of Coole’ (which immediately precedes this dedicatory poem in all editions), to say that ‘the verses about the Seven Woods come frst’ (CL 4, 187). Sources. Te mythological material here derives ultimately from the Old Irish Torcmarc Etaine (Te Wooing of Etain). Midher was a chiefain of the Tuatha De Danaan, who loved Edain. Tis earned Edain the jealousy of Midher’s wife, Fuamach, which continued once the god Aengus had taken Edain for himself. AG’s version of this is close to what WBY is using as his material here (GFM, 88–89): Afer a while Midhir took Etain Echraide to be his wife. And there was great jealousy on Fuamach, the wife he had before, when she saw the love that Midhir gave to Etain, and she called to the Druid, Bresal Etarlaim to help her, and he put spells on Etain the way Fuamach was able to drive her away. And when she was driven out of Bri Leith, Angus Og, son of the Dagda, took her into his keeping; and when Midhir asked her back, he would not give her up, but he brought her about with him to every place he went. And wherever they rested, he made a sunny house for her, and put sweet-smelling fowers in it, and he made invisible walls about it, that no one could see through and that could not be seen. But when news came to Fuamach that Etain was so well cared for by Angus, anger and jealousy came on her again, and she searched her mind for a way to destroy Etain altogether. And it is what she did, she persuaded Midhir and Angus to go out and meet one another and to make peace, for there had been a quarrel between them ever since the time Etain was sent away. And when Angus was away from Brugh na Boinn, Fuamach went and found Etain there, in her sunny house. And she turned her with Druid spells into a fy, and then she sent a blast of wind into the house, that swept her away through the window. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-27

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‘Te Harp of Aengus’ as a poem. It does not follow from the fact of these lines having been drawn from an earlier play that they are not, once so removed and re-presented, a separate poem. And if the lines are a poem, then their being fourteen in number ought to make it possible to speak of the verses as a sonnet, albeit a sonnet that is without rhymes. Tis is the approach taken by H. Vendler, who sees the poem’s structure as a Petrarchan one, with a volta between lines 8 and 9. Te critical contention here is that Edain is the agent of the octave, and Aengus of the sestet; however, Vendler concedes, ‘Because the actions of Edain and Aengus remain complementary and not antagonistic, the true confict-potential of the Petrarchan division into parts remains unused’. A conclusion to this reading seems to forget that WBY did not compose the lines as a sonnet, Petrarchan or otherwise (Vendler, 116–117): Nonetheless, in this narrative sonnet Yeats has at least moved away from meditative immobility, and has introduced an Irish myth of aesthetic creation into a tradition which, in its continental and English manifestations, had been more hospitable to classical and Christian myth than to local folk material. Yeats marks his Irish sonnet as anomalous with respect to the European tradition not only by its abandonment of rhyme and its use of folk material but also by its closing dimeter line, which leaves the rest of the fourteenth line open for Aengus to continue, into an indefnite expanding future, his ministry to ‘faithful lovers’. Although Vendler explains the poem’s origins in a note (396), her argument does not really accommodate the bibliographical truth of the matter. Formally speaking, it is hard to accept an ‘abandonment of rhyme’ when rhyme was never there in the frst place; in terms of source material, also, it is difcult to take the highly literary narrative of Aengus and Edain as ‘folk material’. Vendler’s identifcation of the poem as a sonnet is not mistaken as such; but it is contentious, and depends upon a willing suspension of textual history. Even so, WBY must have been aware, when extracting and recycling these lines, that they now formed a sonnet of sorts. A. Gillis includes the poem in his essay on ‘Te Modern Irish Sonnet’ without misgivings, and risks a subtlety of formal interpretation beyond anything attempted by Vendler. Noticing that ‘Te Harp of Aengus’ ‘feels less like a conventional sonnet’, Gillis claims that ‘this is precisely why it has been quietly infuential’ (F. Brearton and A. Gillis (eds.), Te Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), 572): While it would be wrong to claim that anything about this poem is abrupt, as we are languidly led into that fnal short line we are nonetheless tripped by its unexpected break into silence. Again, Yeats has defly resisted the form in the act of using it, exploring what efects might be garnered from toying with expectation. Te reading of the poem’s fnal line is a perfectly justifed one, and it records a real efect; though it is also proper to remember that the half-line itself echoes what had been line

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295 in TSW (1900), when Forgael says, ‘He watches over none but faithful lovers’, before beginning the story of Aengus and Edain which forms the later extracted poem. Also, ‘that fnal short line’ is in TSW (1900) the frst half of a line, where Forgael’s words are followed by those of Dectora, who provides the line’s other half with ‘Something glitters there – ’. None of this does more than explain the material from which WBY was working when he carved out the poem, making (in some sense) a sonnet of it. Under the misapprehension that this poem was actually ‘written as a prologue’ in 1900, S. Regan treats the fourteen lines straightforwardly as a sonnet from the point of birth, ‘a meditation on the magic and wonder of love, using the unrhymed sonnet form to emulate the incantatory music and vivid presentation of Irish storytelling’; he goes on to note how ‘Te dramatically foreshortened closing line gives prominence to ‘faithful lovers’, while letting the remaining silence and blankness speak eloquently of an uncertain future’ (Te Sonnet (2019), 160). It may be interesting that readings of the poem as a sonnet efectively treat it as having thirteen and a half, rather than fourteen lines. ‘Te Harp of Aengus’ also stands as an example of how a sonnet can be something quarried, as well as composed. Textual history. Afer their frst appearance as a page of introductory verse for TSW in P99–05, WBY used the lines in every version of that poem in subsequent collected editions, always italicized and with a page of their own. Copy-text: P49. Edain came out of Midher’s hill, and lay Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,

1. Midher’s hill] WBY’s phrasing is close to that of AG in GFM, suggesting that he may be drawing on her ongoing work for that project: ‘Midhir took a hill for himself [. . .] Ten the girl turned back to Midhir’s hill’ (GFM, 88). 2. his tower of glass] Although Aengus’s construction with ‘invisible walls [.  .  .] that no one could see through’ is in WBY’s mind here, this phrase is itself one with resonances in Irish myth. Te glass tower is present in Henri D’Arbois de Jubainville’s account (following the Latin source in Nennius) of the Milesian invasion of Ireland. In R.I. Best’s translation of 1903, Te Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, (67):

remained in Ireland for the space of a year, then they perceived in the midst of the sea a tower of glass, and on the tower they saw what were like to be men, quasi homines. Tey called out to them, but never got any answer. For a year they were preparing to attack the tower, then they set out with all their ships and all their women folk, saving one ship that foundered, and the thirty men and thirty women that were on board her. But when they landed on the shore that surrounded the tower, the sea rose up over them, and they perished in the waves. From the thirty men and thirty women of the ship that was wrecked are descended the present inhabitants of Ireland.

Ten came three sons of Mile from Spain, with thirty ships, each ship containing thirty men and as many women. Tey

Tis story was used by William Larminie for the poem ‘Te Tower of Glass’ in his Glanlua and Other Poems (1889).

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Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds And druid moons, and murmuring of boughs, And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite Awake unsleeping fres; and wove seven strings, Sweet with all music, out of his long hair, Because her hands had been made wild by love. When Midher’s wife had changed her to a fy He made a harp with druid apple-wood That she among her winds might know he wept; And from that hour he has watched over none But faithful lovers.

3. odour-laden winds] Cp. C.G. Rossetti, New Poems (1896), ‘Te Dead City’, 150: ‘the odour-laden air’. 6. chrysolite] OED 1, ‘A name formerly given to several diferent gems of a green colour, such as zircon, tourmaline, topaz, and apatite [. . .] Its colour varies from pale yellowish-green (the precious stone) to dark bottle-green.’

WBY may be remembering Othello V ii 175–176: ‘another world | Of one entire and perfect chrysolite’. 9. love.] love; P99–05, PSS, CWVP08. 12. winds] woods is the reading here in WBY’s Plays for an Irish Teatre (1911) when repr. in 1913, but this seems very likely to be a misprint.

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THE SHADOWY WATERS Date of revision. A thorough rewriting of WBY’s poetic drama of 1899 (publ. 1900) took place in the summer and autumn of 1905. TSW had in fact been in a state of sporadic revision for a long time. When in 1903 Frank and William Fay began work on what they called a ‘Costume recital’ of the play, WBY was rapidly enlisted to answer a great many queries, practical and otherwise, relating to the planned performance (this did not in fact take place until early 1904, when the author was away on his American lecture tour). Te poet dispatched one set of specifc revisions to Frank Fay in mid-Apr. 1903 (CL 4, 1008–1009), and continued to think of amendments thereafer. In 1905, WBY was still wholly committed to TSW as a play for the stage. In achieving this, he initially worked with his theatrical patron Florence Farr [Florence Emery]. Te poet gave Farr substantial control of both production and direction, and WBY – keen on learning experimentally for future revision – allowed her to stage a performance of the piece for Teosophical Society in Jun. 1905. On 30 May 1905, in the run-up to this, WBY wrote to JQ (CL 4, 103): [. . .] Mrs Emery is to give a performance of ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ for some Teosophists. I don’t expect much success for the play which is hardly suitable for more than about 50 people who know my work well. I gave her leave as I want to try some experiments. I have written in several new passages and hope to use a harp made of dim glass and lighted from inside by electricity, so that the harp will seem to burn with supernatural fre. It is an efect Charles Ricketts suggested to me. I have also made some one or two other slight changes of an experimental nature. I want to get the three recent verse plays ‘Te King’s Treshold’, ‘Baile’s Strand’ and ‘Shadowy Waters’ as perfect as revision afer performance can make them. Tat same day, WBY wrote to AG (CL 4, 106) of how ‘I have just completed the revision of ‘Shadowy Waters’’. In fact, such rewriting as had taken place was far from over at this point. In his Note on TSW in PSS, WBY mentioned the Jun. 1905 performance, and claimed that ‘I then completely rewrote [TSW]’. Plans for publication of TSW in its new form went ahead throughout 1905, and in Jul. WBY’s agent, A.P. Watt, brokered a deal to take back both the rights and the plates and stock of the 1900 version, published by Hodder and Stoughton (CL 4, 132). On 15 Jul., WBY wrote from Coole to Farr that his further revision to TSW was in progress. In this letter, it seems that the idea of the work as a piece for the stage was still at the forefront of the poet’s mind (CL 4, 133): DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-28

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I am at work on Shadowy Waters changing it greatly, getting rid of needless symbols, making the people answer each other, and making the ground work simple and intelligible. I fnd I am enriching the poetry and the character of Forgael greatly in the process. I shall make it as strong a play as Te King’s Treshold and perhaps put it in rehearsal in Dublin again. I am surprised at the badness of a great deal of it in its present form. A few days later, WBY again told Farr that ‘I am changing Te Shadowy Waters on almost every page’ (CL 4, 134). By late Jul., WBY could report to A.H. Bullen that ‘I have practically rewritten Te Shadowy Waters [. . .] I should say that another couple of weeks will sufce to get it and probably the rest of the material ready for the new book [P99–05]’ (CL 4, 139). On 3 Aug. Arthur Symons, too, was informed by WBY that ‘I am rewriting Te Shadowy Waters, every word of it’ (CL 4, 144), and Bullen was told that ‘I am still going through that heavy marsh, Te Shadowy Waters’ (CL 4, 148); by 13 Aug., Farr was being reassured that ‘Shadowy Waters is getting gradually fnished’ (CL 4, 160). On 10 Sep., WBY told Arthur Symons how ‘You will hardly recognise’ TSW in its new version for the forthcoming P99–05; and refecting on the lessons of revision, he wrote (CL 4, 176): I have learned a great deal about poetry generally in the process, and one thing I am now quite sure of is that all of the fnest poetry comes logically out of the fundamental action, and that the error of late periods like this is to believe that some things are inherently poetical, and to try to pull them on to the scene at every moment. It is just these seeming inherently poetical things that wear out. My Shadowy Waters was full of them, and the fundamental thinking was nothing, and that gave the whole poem an impression of weakness. Tere was no internal life pressing for expression through the characters. And a week later, the poet found himself expanding such thoughts into what looks like something of an ars poetica, in writing to JQ (CL 4, 179): I have altogether rewritten my Shadowy Waters. Tere is hardly a page of the old. Te very temper of the thing is diferent. It is full of homely phrases and of the idiom of daily speech. I have made the sailors rough as sailors should be, characterised all the people more or less, and yet not lost any of my lyrical moments. It has become a simple passionate play, or at any rate it has a simple passionate story for the common sight-seer though it keep[s] something back for instructed eyes. I am now correcting the last few lines, and have very joyfully got ‘creaking shoes’ [‘creaky shoes’, 128] and ‘liquorice-root’ [116, removed by WBY afer 1912] into what had been a very abstract passage. I believe more strongly every day that the element of strength in poetic language is common idiom, just as the element of strength in poetic construction is common passion. Yet on 6 Oct., WBY told Florence Farr that ‘I am still in the abyss over Shadowy Waters, it is not yet fnished’ (CL 4, 203), and by the end of the year the abyss had been crossed,

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while intensive work on another major part of the projected P99–05, the play On Baile’s Strand, was waiting to be encountered on the other side. WBY’s 1906 introduction. In Te Arrow for 24 Nov. 1906, published to coincide with the play’s 1906 performances, WBY ofered a brief introduction to TSW (CW 8, 185–186): I began Te Shadowy Waters when I was a boy, and when I published a version of it six or seven years ago, the plot had been so ofen re-arranged and was so overgrown with symbolical ideas that the poem was obscure and vague. It found its way on to the stage more or less by accident, for our people had taken it as an exercise in the speaking of verse, and it pleased a few friends, though it must have bewildered and bored the greater portion of the audience. Te present version is practically a new poem, and is, I believe, sufciently simple, appealing to no knowledge more esoteric than is necessary for the understanding of any of the more characteristic love poems of Shelley or of Petrarch. If the audience will understand it as a faerytale, and not look too anxiously for a meaning, all will be well. Once upon a time, when the herons built their nests in old men’s beards, Forgael, a Sea-King of ancient Ireland, was promised by certain human-headed birds love of a supernatural intensity and happiness. Tese birds were the souls of the dead, and he followed them over seas towards the sunset, where their fnal rest is. By means of a magic harp, he could call them about him when he would and listen to their speech. His friend Aibric, and the sailors of his ship, thought him mad, or that his mysterious happiness could come afer death only, and that he and they were being lured to destruction. Presently they captured a ship, and found a beautiful woman upon it, and Forgael subdued her and his own rebellious sailors by the sound of his harp. Te sailors fed upon the other ship, and Forgael and the woman drifed on alone following the birds, awaiting death and what comes afer, or some mysterious transformation of the fesh, an embodiment of every lover’s dream. Reception and critical interpretation. On TSW’s 1906 appearance, the work’s wholesale revision, albeit difcult to miss, did not go without comment. H.C. Beeching was thoroughly won over (Te Bookman, Nov. 1906): It is pleasant to be able to congratulate Mr. Yeats on the remarkable improvement he has made in his beautiful poem. In the present version all this [the earlier version’s supernaturalism] has been put right; the introductory dialogue repeats the situation, and the characters are discriminated more clearly. Indeed the realism has been carried rather far. [. . .] Te diction through all the play, while preserving not a few of the old fowers of speech has become more straightforward and stronger in its expression of passion. Private reactions were not always so enthusiastic as this, and T. Sturge Moore wrote to WBY in late 1906 that TSW ‘is improved [. . .] but I can’t say I believe in it wholly even yet’ (Moore, 10). JBY wrote to JQ, 11 Dec. 1906 (NYPL, quoted Murphy, 303): To my mind there are defects in Te Shadowy Waters. Te character of Forgael, for instance, is extremely ambiguous. Is he in love or not in love with Dectora?

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Willie answers this by saying that his work is not the drama of character but of mood, and to this I reply that Forgael is very distinctively a character though not the one he means him to be. Certainly, not all minds were quick to be made up. In Country Life for 24 Aug. 1907, a reviewer observed that WBY ‘does not try so much to paint human nature as to get far away from it into a region of vague dream and mystery,’ and said that ‘Whether all this has the stuf in it that will last or not remains to be seen,’ concluding only that ‘At present it gives a pleasure as vain and uncertain, as dim and shadowy as itself ’. With the passing of time, this air of uncertainty proved to be persistent. In Te Edinburgh Review (Jan. 1909), WBY was ofered praise largely for his way with the insubstantial: Still more, passing on to the fantastic drama of imaginative idealism, ‘Te Shadowy Waters,’ Mr. Yeats’s claim to participate in the creation of a distinctively national dramatic literature in Ireland is perceptibly justifed. [. . .] His romance is unsubstantial [.  .  .] it has a portion, and not a small one, of the exotic morbid beauty of Maeterlinck’s earlier dramas of destiny; it deals with actors, actions, and passions as vague in their suggestive symbolism as a grey glass splashed with vaporous colours by a blind hand; it lures us into regions of mist; unfolds vistas of dreams opening into blanknesses; when the imagination demands foothold, it is landed in quicksands of shifing ideas [. . .] a dreamtragedy of objectless passion and illusive vision. In 1915, F. Reid’s emphatic praise for the earlier text of TSW told its own story about the degree to which WBY’s new expression of the work was found convincing (see Critical interpretation notes to TSW (1900)). Lawrence Gilman in the same year ofered the new version(s) approval of a qualifed kind (Te North American Review, 1 Jul., 1915): Tere are [. . .] at least three diferent versions of Te Shadowy Waters, each one of a poetic value inferior to its predecessor; and the frst and surpassing version is not included in the Collected Works. Yet this earliest version still exists, of course, for those whose appreciation of it is juster than the author’s own; and so it is, happily, with the bulk of his fnest work: it survives its alterations, and can yield for us to-day, as it did a score of years ago, delight of a kind which no other body of English verse can quite aford. It is fair to say that the question of the relative merits of diferent iterations of TSW, and indeed the question of the merits of the work in general, became afer this point marginal matters in the reception of WBY’s writings. In 1922 (as quoted by J.M. Hone in 1943, for whom ‘Yeats’s eforts whether to modernise this play or to render it theatrically efective must be certainly considered ill-judged’) Cecil French wrote to the poet in frank terms on how ‘Te frst edition is rare [. . .] Had I the wealth I should like to issue a reprint of it, and have the lawsuits and quarrels with you’ (Hone, 168: see also note to

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lines 8–17). Tere was still occasional appreciation for TSW along the lines WBY had probably hoped for; Forman G. Brown, in his article ‘Mr. Yeats and the Supernatural’, detected how ‘Here, as in the lyric poetry, the poet’s idealism is objectifed, and takes on a supernatural signifcance,’ claiming that ‘Tese manifestations are always indefnite, elusive, and seen as through a misty twilight, but there is no vagueness’, since ‘Te symbols are transparent, and even the minutest detail is dramatically indispensable’ (Sewanee Review 33/3 (Jul. 1925), 329). But the general tendency was to regard TSW as a memory of WBY’s last century, if not something of a downright museum-piece. In 1940, speaking in the Abbey Teatre, T.S. Eliot saw the play as the culmination of WBY’s Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, associating it explicitly with William Morris (‘Yeats’, frst publ. in Purpose (1940), and included in Eliot’s On Poetry and Poets (1957), repr. in Te Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot vol. 6 eds. D. Chinitz and R. Schuchard, 82): Te Yeats of the Celtic twilight – who seems to me to have been more the Yeats of the pre-Raphaelite twilight – uses Celtic folklore almost as William Morris uses Scandinavian folklore. His longer narrative poems bear the mark of Morris. Indeed, in the pre-Raphaelite phase, Yeats is by no means the least of the pre-Raphaelites. I may be mistaken, but the play, ‘Te Shadowy Waters,’ seems to me one of the most perfect expressions of the vague enchanted beauty of that school: yet it strikes me – this may be an impertinence on my part – as the western seas descried through the back window of a house in Kensington, an Irish myth for the Kelmscott Press; and when I try to visualize the speakers in the play, they have the great dim, dreamy eyes of the knights and ladies of BurneJones. I think that the phase in which he treated Irish legend in the manner of Rossetti or Morris is a phase of confusion. Eliot’s admiration was – and was possibly intended to be – of an ultimately damaging kind. Louis MacNeice’s book on WBY of 1941 carried through Eliot’s project with regard to TSW, by claiming that the poet’s ‘nostalgia for another world, for a dreamworld which is all knowledge and no action, reached its culmination’ in this play, ‘an extreme example of old-fashioned Romantic escapism’ and WBY’s ‘last great acclamation of that dream-world’ (MacNeice, 74, 91, 102). Modern criticism has largely been content to leave TSW at the back of the Collected Poems and to take as a given its aesthetic status as the 1890s preserved in aspic. R. Ellmann was content to treat TSW as a historical artifact in his two books on WBY, and in 1964 saw it as ‘a play which elaborates [WBY’s] conceptions more lengthily than any other work [in the 1890s]’ (Identity, 49): Here the ideal state is the perfect union of hearts, not truth. Will the hero and heroine attain union in life or in death? Yeats admits the question without deciding it, preferring to celebrate the consummateness of their love. T. Parkinson made a detailed comparison of the 1900 and 1906 versions of TSW, maintaining that in revision WBY ‘clarifed and strengthened his sense of character,

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contracted his vocabulary to exclude his most esoteric symbolism, and expanded his vocabulary to include more common language and provide an elucidating context for the symbols he retained [. . .] He tuned his verse to suit the actual mind and voice of a distinctive living man’ (Parkinson, 75). Tis confdence has not been widely shared, not least because it is more than WBY (let alone a critic) can do to make Forgael a fully persuasive ‘living man’. Te editors of DC, intimately acquainted as they were with the long and tangled history of MS revisions in the play’s life, allowed themselves some regret in contemplating the ‘fnal’ version: ‘One might wish [.  .  .] that the ‘dramatic poem’ of 1900 or even earlier had not sufered all the violence of the attempts to make it ‘theatrical’’, they wrote (DC, 312); though for all this their insights into the 1906 version were acute (DC, 305): [WBY] spoke, and critics have followed him, as though the mature playwright were fnding the appropriate dramatic terms for the earlier poetic vision. In this view there is some truth, but too little emphasis has been placed on the essential changes in his thought that accompanied the new kind of craf. In general, the play in the new version is concerned with the negative aspects of love, and the idealism of the earlier version is routed out to be replaced with a vein of cynicism. Te very end of the play is much as before, but this ending is now in defance of the logic of the earlier part and lacks the motivational conviction that it once had. H. Bloom accorded TSW a place of high importance, but in its 1900 version only (see Critical interpretation in TSW (1900)). Also in 1970, G. Bornstein recognized TSW as a signifcant point in WBY’s use of Shelley, and emphasized the work’s complex refgurings of love and death as elements inherited from the romantic poet (Bornstein, 160): Death appropriately symbolizes the annihilation of time for which every lover yearns. To the timorous Aibric death is only literal [. . .] Forgael remains more optimistic. For him, literal death is possible but not ‘for certain’ [564]; he allows for its symbolic implication of a victory over time. [. . .] In growing immortal he forsakes the world of mutability for the perfected sphere of Yeats’s Intellectual vision. [. . .] Yeats and Shelley both recognized the appropriateness of death as a metaphor for such transcendence. More recently, E. Cullingford has cited the Shelley of ‘Alastor’, who ‘seeks union in eternity with the woman of his dreams’, in connection with TSW, while paying more attention to the character of Dectora as presented by WBY (Cullingford, 97): Like the sufragists who were attaining independent voice as Yeats was revising his poem, Dectora gradually acquires a separate identity and a will of her own. She changes from a passive, Rossettian symbol of Forgael’s soul to a passionate individual, and her speaking role is increased from draf to draf until

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she comes to dominate the conclusion of the poem. Unlike the devoted Arab maiden ignored and abandoned by the Poet of ‘Alastor’, Dectora claims the right to join Forgael on his journey: to replace the solitary male quester of courtly and Shelleyan tradition with a united couple. Tis point is just, and important; what is remarkable is that it took so long for it to be made by a critic of TSW. Cullingford allows for an aspect of the play which has been very largely ignored in favour of a Forgael-centred interpretation, in which masculine will, questing against death in order to fnd and possess the perfect woman, has been at the centre of attention. In the revised TSW, Dectora is a signifcant agent, and not just a symbolic prize. It remains true, of course, that this Dectora is still an object of male fantasy. Yet A. Frazier’s contention that WBY rewrote the play ‘attempting to rid [it] of efeminacy’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 41) is at best a half-truth, for the attempt is also one to construct a heroine with the will to pursue and complete what had hitherto been presented as a masculine imaginative and erotic quest. Stage and page: the double life of TSW. From 1906 onwards, TSW was bound for separate textual lives, as a play for the stage and as a verse-drama intended to be read amongst the author’s poems. On 23 Nov. 1906, WBY informed his publisher of how ‘I have made a stage version [of TSW] partly prose and about one third shorter than the old version’, suggesting that Bullen produce this ‘for sale in theatre’ (CL 4, 522). Tis did appear, early in 1907; performances of the play in WBY’s stage-adaptation were given at the Abbey Teatre on 8 and 10–15 Dec. 1906. Reaction was mixed, and Te Freeman’s Journal said of TSW ‘A thing of beauty it is, but not a play’. WBY was always inclined to see the work as both, and allowing the two things to be separately manifested in the form of texts was a logical outcome to this. As early as P99–05, the poet included a Note which described the Jan. 1904 performance (of the earlier TSW), and outlined various practical difculties on stage with Forgael’s magical harp, and its replacement with a hurriedly made psaltery: the lines that were changed in order to accommodate this were duly quoted (though a practical end of the information for any reader was not at all clear). Te acting version of TSW was included in Vol. 2 of PW06 (publ. 1907) as an appendix, and the same arrangement was applied in Vol. 2 of CWVP08. Tus, although the stage version was not included in PSS, it shared covers with the two major collected editions of WBY’s work in these years. Later, a stage version lived on in the pages of WBY’s Collected Plays (1934, and posthumous edn. 1952); its last publication in WBY’s lifetime was in Nine One-Act Plays (1937). Despite this bibliographic doublelife, the two versions of TSW are not radically diferent: the stage version is still mainly in verse (which sticks relatively close to the other version), with the dialogue for the Sailors being recast into prose. WBY’s persistence in keeping two versions in circulation is slightly odd. Te stage version met with distinctly limited success when its staging was attempted, while the version WBY wished to include among his poems was seldom seen as central to his twentieth-century achievement (this being made even less likely once the work was moved to the ‘Narrative and Dramatic’ grouping at the end of CP33 and its successor posthumous Collected editions). In ofering TSW to posterity as (on one hand, anyway) a stage play, WBY has had very few takers in over a century. Even

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the spirited advocacy of R.A. Cave (whose notes are illuminating on the play’s stage conception and realization) values the drama fnally as ‘an excellent yardstick against which to measure the extent of Yeats’s subsequent innovations in dramatic technique’ (W.B. Yeats: Selected Plays (1997), 274). In some far-reaching remarks on ‘Yeats and the Drama’, B. O’Donoghue has noted that ‘the double life’ of TSW ‘is a further indication that the absolute separation of the two literary forms [poetry and drama] is fnally not possible for Yeats,’ and comparing the ‘poem’ with the ‘stage’ versions of the Sailors’ dialogue, he concludes that ‘Te irony is that Yeats’s dramatic language, which was such a powerful instrument in his poetry, is ofen disablingly defcient in the plays’ (Howes and Kelly, 106, 112.) A balanced judgement might be that neither the ‘poem’ nor the ‘play’ version of TSW is wholeheartedly what it claims to be in generic terms: the poem remains very much a play, and the play remains too much a poem. One sharply contrasting example of verse drama that is confessedly unstageable, from the time when WBY was beginning his major revision of TSW with the stage still centrally in mind, is that of Tomas Hardy and his epic poem-drama Te Dynasts (1903), in the Preface to which the poet wrote of the work being for ‘mental performance alone’ (Complete Poetical Works ed. S. Hynes, vol. 4 (1995), 8–9): Some critics have averred that to declare a drama as being not for the stage is an announcement whose subject and predicate cancel each other. Te question seems to be an unimportant matter of terminology. [.  .  .] To say, then, in the present case, that a writing in play-shape is not to be played, is merely another way of stating that such writing has been done in a form for which there chances to be no brief defnition save one already in use for works that it superfcially but not entirely resembles. WBY would never concede that TSW was ‘not for the stage’ – even though so much in it was in fact much better as ‘mental performance’. Te resultant dual poem/stage versions are perhaps in the end no more than two versions of a poem, or two versions of a play. At all events, the corpus of WBY’s poetry was never obliged to accommodate this level of undecidedness again. Textual history. Te revised TSW was frst published in P99–05 in Oct. 1906; it next appeared in Vol. 2 of the American PW06 in Jul. 1907, and subsequently in vol. 2 of CWVP08 in 1908. Some revisions were made in the second edn. of PW06 publ. in 1912 (PW12). Tis version (as distinct from the stage version of the play) was incorporated in collected editions of WBY’s poems from PSS and LP22 onwards.

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Copy-text: P49.

The Shadowy Waters Persons in the Dramatic Poem Forgael Aibric Sailors Dectora The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast, with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a series of steps behind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves overhead. When the play opens there are four persons upon the deck. Aibric stands by the tiller. Forgael sleeps upon the raised portion of the deck towards the front of the stage. Two Sailors are standing near to the mast, on which a harp is hanging. First Sailor. Has he not led us into these waste seas For long enough? Second Sailor. Aye, long and long enough. First Sailor. We have not come upon a shore or ship These dozen weeks. 1. waste seas] Cp. WBY’s Mosada (1886), Sc. 1, 9: ‘From waste seas crossed’. Tis phrase is rare. Perhaps cp. Frederick Tennyson, Days and Hours (1854), ‘Ambition: II’, 8–9: ‘the roar | Of the waste seas’. Waste sea is analogous to waste land, and carries overtones of OED 1.a.: ‘Uncultivated and uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. Sometimes with stronger implication: incapable of habitation or cultivation; producing little or no vegetation; barren, desert’. 2. long and long enough] ‘Long and long’, ofen in the phrase ‘long and long ago’, is not uncommon in nineteenth-century verse. However as a doubled adverb (as here), it is particularly favoured by Walt Whitman, e.g. Leaves of Grass (1891 edn.), ‘Song of Myself ’, 685: ‘I stand and look at them long and long’, and ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking’,

67–68: ‘I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafing my hair,| Listened long and long’. WBY would have known J.C. Mangan, Poems (1903),‘Te Lover’s Farewell’, 5: ‘Long and long before the house I stand’. 8–17.] I am so lecherous with abstinence I’d give the proft of nine voyages For that red Moll that had but the one eye. Second Sailor. And all the ale ran out at the new moon; And now that time puts water in my blood, Te ale-cup is my father and my mother. First Sailor. It would be better to turn home again, Whether he will or no; and better still

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Second Sailor. 5

10

And I had thought to make A good round sum upon this cruise, and turn – For I am getting on in life – to something That has less ups and downs than robbery. First Sailor. I am so tired of being bachelor I could give all my heart to that Red Moll That had but the one eye. Second Sailor. Can no bewitchment Transform these rascal billows into women That I may drown myself? First Sailor.

15

Better steer home, Whether he will or no; and better still To take him while he sleeps and carry him And drop him from the gunnel. Second Sailor. I dare not do it. Were’t not that there is magic in his harp, I would be of your mind; but when he plays it Strange creatures futter up before one’s eyes, Or cry about one’s ears.

To make an end while he is sleeping there. If we were of one mind I’d do it. Second Sailor. Were’t not Tat there is magic in that harp of his, Tat makes me fear to raise a hand against him, I would be of your mind; P99–05–PW12. In 1922, WBY’s friend Cecil French deplored the loss of these lines: ‘Te one thing for which we occasionally referred to the later version is spoiled. Te lines ‘I am so lecherous with abstinence’, etc., have aroused unlimited admiration among certain men of letters – they have been placed with the best and raciest of Shakespeare’s lines. Your tinkering in that case will cause great indignation among certain of your readers’ (quoted Hone, 168).

9. Red Moll] Perhaps cp. the title of a traditional Irish jig, Moll Rua (Moll Roe), meaning ‘Red Moll’, which was collected frst in Francis O’Neill, O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903). 10. bewitchment] Tis rare word (OED 1. ‘Te fact or power of bewitching; ‘fascination, power of charming’ (Johnson)’) may come to WBY from Shakespeare, Coriolanus II iii. 101: ‘I will counterfeit the  bewitchment  of some popular man’. 11. rascal billows] Cp. Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt 2 III i 21–22: ‘the winds, | Who take the rufan billows by the top’. 19. cry about one’s ears] Cp., Shakespeare, Te Tempest III ii 150–151: ‘Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments | Will hum about mine ears’ and 155–156: ‘that when I waked | I cried to dream again’.

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First Sailor. Nothing to fear. 20

Second Sailor. Do you remember when we sank that galley At the full moon? First Sailor. He played through all the night.

25

30

Second Sailor. Until the moon had set; and when I looked Where the dead drifted, I could see a bird Like a grey gull upon the breast of each. While I was looking they rose hurriedly, And after circling with strange cries awhile Flew westward; and many a time since then I’ve heard a rustling overhead in the wind. First Sailor. I saw them on that night as well as you. But when I had eaten and drunk myself asleep My courage came again. Second Sailor.

35

But that’s not all. The other night, while he was playing it, A beautiful young man and girl came up In a white breaking wave; they had the look Of those that are alive for ever and ever. First Sailor. I saw them too, one night. Forgael was playing, And they were listening there beyond the sail. He could not see them, but I held out my hands To grasp the woman. Second Sailor. You have dared to touch her?

30.] But when I had eaten and drunk a bellyful P99–05–PW12. 34–35.] Cp. the ending of WBY’s ‘Baile and Aillinn’ (1901), 205–207: ‘for never yet | Has

lover lived, but longed to wive | Like them that are no more alive’. Cp. also TSW, 202: ‘None but the dead, or those that never lived’.

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239

First Sailor. O she was but a shadow, and slipped from me. Second Sailor. But were you not afraid? First Sailor. Why should I fear? Second Sailor. ’Twas Aengus and Edain, the wandering lovers, To whom all lovers pray. First Sailor. But what of that? A shadow does not carry sword or spear.

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50

Second Sailor. My mother told me that there is not one Of the Ever-living half so dangerous As that wild Aengus. Long before her day He carried Edain of from a king’s house, And hid her among fruits of jewel-stone And in a tower of glass, and from that day Has hated every man that’s not in love, And has been dangerous to him. First Sailor.

55

I have heard He does not hate seafarers as he hates Peaceable men that shut the wind away, And keep to the one weary marriage-bed. Second sailor. I think that he has Forgael in his net, And drags him through the sea.

42. Aengus and Edain] See Sources in headnote to ‘Te Harp of Aengus’ (poem 210 in the present edn.).

49. jewel-stone] Cp. Lionel Johnson, Collected Poems (1915), ‘To Ocean Hazard: Gypsy’ [1888], 13–14: ‘the red earth | Full of gold and jewel-stone’.

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First Sailor. Well, net or none, I’d drown him while we have the chance to do it.

60

65

Second Sailor. It’s certain I’d sleep easier o’nights If he were dead; but who will be our captain, Judge of the stars, and fnd a course for us? First Sailor. I’ve thought of that. We must have Aibric with us, For he can judge the stars as well as Forgael. [Going towards Aibric.] Become our captain, Aibric. I am resolved To make an end of Forgael while he sleeps. There’s not a man but will be glad of it When it is over, nor one to grumble at us. Aibric. You have taken pay and made your bargain for it.

70

75

First Sailor. What good is there in this hard way of living, Unless we drain more fagons in a year And kiss more lips than lasting peaceable men In their long lives? Will you be of our troop And take the captain’s share of everything And bring us into populous seas again? Aibric. Be of your troop? Aibric be one of you And Forgael in the other scale! kill Forgael, And he my master from my childhood up! If you will draw that sword out of its scabbard I’ll give my answer.

58. drown] kill P99–05–PW12. 68.] Aibric. Silence! for you have taken Forgael’s pay. First Sailor. We joined him for his pay, but have had none

Tis long while now; we had not turned against him If he had brought us among peopled seas, For that was in the bargain when we struck it. P99–05–PW12. 72–77.] In their long lives? If you’ll be of our troop You’ll be as good a leader.

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First Sailor.

80

You have awakened him. [To Second Sailor.] We’d better go, for we have lost this chance. [They go out.] Forgael. Have the birds passed us? I could hear your voice, But there were others. Aibric. I have seen nothing pass.

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Forgael. You’re certain of it? I never wake from sleep But that I am afraid they may have passed, For they’re my only pilots. If I lost them Straying too far into the north or south, I’d never come upon the happiness That has been promised me. I have not seen them These many days; and yet there must be many Dying at every moment in the world, And fying towards their peace. Aibric. Put by these thoughts, And listen to me for a while. The sailors Are plotting for your death. Forgael.

95

Have I not given More riches than they ever hoped to fnd? And now they will not follow, while I seek The only riches that have hit my fancy. Aibric. What riches can you fnd in this waste sea Where no ship sails, where nothing that’s alive

Aibric. Be of your troop! No, nor with a hundred men like you When Forgael’s in the other scale. I’d say it Even if Forgael had not been my master

From earliest childhood, but that being so, P99–05–PW12.

79. awakened] awaked P99–05–LP31.

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100

Has ever come but those man-headed birds, Knowing it for the world’s end? Forgael. Where the world ends The mind is made unchanging, for it fnds Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope, The fagstone under all, the fre of fres, The roots of the world. Aibric.

105

Shadows before now Have driven travellers mad for their own sport. Forgael. Do you, too, doubt me? Have you joined their plot? Aibric. No, no, do not say that. You know right well That I will never lift a hand against you.

110

Forgael. Why should you be more faithful than the rest, Being as doubtful? Aibric. I have called you master Too many years to lift a hand against you.

115

Forgael. Maybe it is but natural to doubt me. You’ve never known, I’d lay a wager on it, A melancholy that a cup of wine, A lucky battle, or a woman’s kiss Could not amend.

99. man-headed birds] From early stages of TSW in the 1890s, WBY had featured a race he called the Seabar, who were half-birds. Te term ‘man-headed’ here is distinctively the poet’s own, though possibly cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Te Foray of Queen Maeve’, III, 249: ‘A hound man-headed’. 100–104.] Working on his revision of TSW at Coole in Jul. 1905, WBY quoted these lines in a letter to Florence Farr, telling her that ‘Te play is now upon one single idea –

which is in these new lines’ (CL 4, 134). In the letter ‘hope’ (102) is ‘joy’, and ‘roots’ (104) is ‘root’. 103. the fre of fres] Cp. R. Browning, Men and Women (1855), ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’, 20–22: ‘thanks to Him | Who never is dishonoured in the spark | He gave us from his fre of fres’. 104–105.] Who knows that shadows | May not have driven you mad for their own sport? P99–05–LP31.

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Aibric. I have good spirits enough.

120

125

Forgael. If you will give me all your mind awhile – All, all, the very bottom of the bowl – I’ll show you that I am made diferently, That nothing can amend it but these waters, Where I am rid of life – the events of the world – What do you call it? – that old promise-breaker, The cozening fortune-teller that comes whispering, ‘You will have all you have wished for when you have earned Land for your children or money in a pot.’ And when we have it we are no happier, Because of that old draught under the door, Or creaky shoes. And at the end of all How are we better of than Seaghan the fool,

116.] [Aibric’s speech continues] I’ve nothing to complain of but heartburn, | And that is cured by a boiled liquorice root. P99–05–PW12. Objection to these lines had been voiced by JQ in a letter to WBY of 8 Dec. 1907: ‘I think [TSW] has been greatly improved, but two new lines of it struck me as a little too homely for a dream play [. . .] I can’t make any rhythm out of these lines and they break the mood that the rest of the play brings on one.’ 129.] We have been no better of than Seaghan the fool, P99–05–PW12. Seaghan the fool] In a long letter published in Te United Irishman, 17 Oct. 1903, WBY had written scornfully of the Irish priest who ‘would have all mankind painted with a halo or with horns’: ‘Literature is nothing to him, he has to remember that Seaghan the Fool might take to drinking again if he knew that pleasant Falstaf was not sober’ (CL 3, 446). WBY brought up the same character in his 1903

Preface to AG’s GFM: ‘If we would create a great community [. . .] we must recreate the old foundations of life, not as they existed in that splendid misunderstanding of the eighteenth century, but as they must always exist when the fnest minds and Ned the beggar and Seaghan the fool think about the same thing, although they may not think the same thought about it’ (CW 6, 133–134). Tis proverbial fgure is not the poet’s own invention, and a translation by AG of a poem by Douglas Hyde, ‘He Meditates on the Life of a Rich Man’, has the same character in its fnal couplet: ‘What are you better afer tonight | Tan Ned the beggar or Seaghan the fool?’ Clearly, WBY had already encountered this translation by 1903; it appears later in AG ‘s Te Kiltartan Poetry Book (1918). In 1936, WBY included the poem amongst the pieces by AG in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

244 130

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That never did a hand’s turn? Aibric! Aibric! We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh, And fnd their laughter sweeter to the taste For that brief sighing. Aibric. If you had loved some woman –

140

Forgael. You say that also? You have heard the voices, For that is what they say – all, all the shadows – Aengus and Edain, those passionate wanderers, And all the others; but it must be love As they have known it. Now the secret’s out; For it is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world. Aibric. And yet the world Has beautiful women to please every man.

145

Forgael. But he that gets their love after the fashion Loves in brief longing and deceiving hope And bodily tenderness, and fnds that even The bed of love, that in the imagination Had seemed to be the giver of all peace,

130. a hand’s turn] Tis phrase is classed as colloquial and regional by OED: ‘A piece or stroke of work. Chiefy in negative contexts: any work whatsoever’. 131–135.] Tese lines are adapted from part of TSW (1900), 64–74. Tat passage prompted a breathlessly enthusiastic reviewer in Te Manchester Guardian (4 Mar. 1901) to declare that ‘the words [. . .] are as moving as the complaint of [Tennyson’s] Tithonus [. . .] Tis is large, transparent, and inevitable, with something of the marmorean quality of a chorus from Sophocles’. 132. burnished mirror] To burnish here is (OED 1a.) ‘To make (metal) shining by friction; to

furbish; to polish (a surface) by rubbing’. Burnished mirrors are very rare in poetry, but perhaps cp. an early work by Wordsworth, ‘An Evening Walk’, 124–125: ‘And now the whole wide lake in deep repose | Is hushed, and like a burnished mirror glows’. 133. ivory hands] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Te Life and Death of Jason (1867), IV, 425 ‘Her ivory hands, with wrist set close to wrist’. 148–149.] Cp. WBY’s ‘Te Old Age of Queen Maeve’, 140: ‘the bride-bed that gives peace’; cp. also his ‘Solomon and the Witch’ (1918), 25: ‘Maybe the bride-bed brings despair’.

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150

245

Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting, And as soon fnished. Aibric. All that ever loved Have loved that way – there is no other way.

155

Forgael. Yet never have two lovers kissed but they Believed there was some other near at hand, And almost wept because they could not fnd it. Aibric. When they have twenty years; in middle life They take a kiss for what a kiss is worth, And let the dream go by. Forgael.

160

It’s not a dream, But the reality that makes our passion As a lamp shadow – no – no lamp, the sun. What the world’s million lips are thirsting for Must be substantial somewhere. Aibric.

165

I have heard the Druids Mutter such things as they awake from trance. It may be that the Ever-living know it – No mortal can. Forgael. Yes; if they give us help.

170

Aibric. They are besotting you as they besot The crazy herdsman that will tell his fellows That he has been all night upon the hills, Riding to hurley, or in the battle-host With the Ever-living.

156–158.] Seeing these lines as a strong statement of Aibric’s status as a ‘spokesman against the romantic point of view [. . .] who counsels acceptance of mortal life’, E. Cullingford notes how in them ‘Romantic passion is now defned as an adolescent complaint’ (Cullingford, 96).

167–169.] In ‘Mortal Help’, a chapter added to Te Celtic Twilight in 1902, WBY wrote (M, 7): ‘I have been told, too, that the people of Faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal, whose body – or whatever has been put in its place, as the storyteller would say – is asleep at home’.

246

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Forgael. What if he speak the truth, And for a dozen hours have been a part Of that more powerful life? Aibric.

175

His wife knows better. Has she not seen him lying like a log, Or fumbling in a dream about the house? And if she hear him mutter of wild riders, She knows that it was but the cart-horse coughing That set him to the fancy. Forgael.

180

185

All would be well Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, And get into their world that to the sense Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly Among substantial things; for it is dreams That lift us to the fowing, changing world That the heart longs for. What is love itself, Even though it be the lightest of light love, But dreams that hurry from beyond the world To make low laughter more than meat and drink, Though it but set us sighing? Fellow-wanderer, Could we but mix ourselves into a dream, Not in its image on the mirror! Aibric.

190

195

While We’re in the body that’s impossible. Forgael. And yet I cannot think they’re leading me To death; for they that promised to me love As those that can outlive the moon have known it, Had the world’s total life gathered up, it seemed, Into their shining limbs – I’ve had great teachers. Aengus and Edain ran up out of the wave –

193. those that can outlive the moon] Tis formulation recurs at 320 and 531. On its place in the evolution of WBY’s lunar symbolism, see Larrissy, 107: ‘Te moon, then, is associated with the cycles of this life, and, at least at

the full, may represent these cycles as imbued with imagination. But to ‘outlive the moon’ and enter into the eternal reality of great lovers, is to enter a world for which the most appropriate emblem is the sun’. It is possible

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200

205

247

You’d never doubt that it was life they promised Had you looked on them face to face as I did, With so red lips, and running on such feet, And having such wide-open, shining eyes. Aibric. It’s certain they are leading you to death. None but the dead, or those that never lived, Can know that ecstasy. Forgael! Forgael! They have made you follow the man-headed birds, And you have told me that their journey lies Towards the country of the dead. Forgael.

210

What matter If I am going to my death? – for there, Or somewhere, I shall fnd the love they have promised. That much is certain. I shall fnd a woman, One of the Ever-living, as I think – One of the Laughing People – and she and I Shall light upon a place in the world’s core, Where passion grows to be a changeless thing, Like charmèd apples made of chrysoprase,

that WBY’s phrase derives from a memory of Psalm 72:5, 7: ‘Tey shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations. | In his days shall the righteous fourish; and abundance of peace, so long as the moon endureth’. 202.] See note to 34–35 above. 204, made] bade P99–05, PW06 Vol. 2 (1907), PW12. 206. the country of the dead] Te phrase had been employed before only by R. Southey in e.g. Madoc and A Tale of Paraguay, but was more recently revived: cp. Michael Field [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper], Underneath the Bough (1893), ‘Te winds today are large and free’, 5–6: ‘the dimpled light to spread | From the country of the dead’ and 13–15: ‘Great within me is my soul, | Great the journey to its goal, | To the country of the dead’. 211. Laughing People] laughing people P99– 05–PW12. J. Ramazani sees here an early sign

of WBY’s attraction to what the poet would much later identify as ‘tragic joy’, noting that ‘His poetry persistently reverses the commonplace – derived from Aristotle – that of all living creatures human beings alone are endowed with laughter,’ and that ‘In the early poetry laughter ofen distinguishes inhuman stars, waves, gods, fairies, animals, madmen, and godlike heroes from human mourners’ (Ramazani, 103). 214. charmèd] charmed P99–05–LP31. chrysoprase] OED b., ‘an apple-green variety of chalcedony’ is also ‘the ancient name of a golden-green precious stone, now generally believed to have been a variety of the beryl, or to have included that among other stones of similar appearance’: it was, the OED defnition continues, ‘one of the stones to which in the Middle Ages was attributed the faculty of shining in the dark’.

248 215

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Or chrysoberyl, or beryl, or chrysolite; And there, in juggleries of sight and sense, Become one movement, energy, delight, Until the overburthened moon is dead. [A number of Sailors enter hurriedly.]

220

First Sailor. Look there! there in the mist! a ship of spice! And we are almost on her! Second Sailor. We had not known But for the ambergris and sandalwood. First Sailor. No, but opoponax and cinnamon. Forgael [taking the tiller from Aibric] The Ever-living have kept my bargain for me, And paid you on the nail. Aibric.

225

Take up that rope To make her fast while we are plundering her. First Sailor. There is a king and queen upon her deck, And where there is one woman there’ll be others.

215.] Chrysoberyl can be a kind of beryl (which is ofen pale green) with a yellow tinge (OED a.) or ‘a yellowish green gem’ (OED b.); chrysolite is also a green-coloured gemstone, OED 1: ‘A name formerly given to several different gems of a green colour, such as zircon, tourmaline, topaz, and apatite [. . .] Its colour varies from pale yellowish-green (the precious stone) to dark bottle-green.’ WBY may be remembering Shakespeare’s Othello V ii 175–176: ‘another world | Of one entire and perfect chrysolite’ 216. juggleries] OED jugglery 2: ‘Te playing of tricks likened to those of a juggler; trickery, deception’. 221. ambergris] ‘A wax-like substance having a brownish grey colour and a sweet earthy

scent, formed as a natural secretion in the bile duct of sperm whales, which is occasionally found foating in the sea or washed up on coasts around the Atlantic, Indian, and western Pacifc oceans, and has long been used in perfumery’ (OED). 222. opoponax] Tis cargo is OED 1.a., ‘A fetid gum resin obtained from the root of Opopanax chironium  (a yellow-fowered plant of the family Apiaceae (Umbelliferae) of southern Europe) and formerly used medicinally’. Cp. J. Todhunter, Helena in Troas (1886), p. 60: ‘what sovereign gums – myrrh, or opoponax, | Or pectoral bdellium, or warm zedoary, | To balm this anguish?’

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249

Aibric. Speak lower, or they’ll hear. First Sailor.

230

They cannot hear; They are too busy with each other. Look! He has stooped down and kissed her on the lips. Second Sailor. When she fnds out we have better men aboard She may not be too sorry in the end.

235

First Sailor. She will be like a wild cat; for these queens Care more about the kegs of silver and gold And the high fame that come to them in marriage, Than a strong body and a ready hand. Second Sailor. There’s nobody is natural but a robber, And that is why the world totters about Upon its bandy legs. Aibric.

240

Run at them now, And overpower the crew while yet asleep! [The Sailors go out.] [Voices and the clashing of swords are heard from the other ship, which cannot be seen because of the sail.] A Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am slain! Another Voice. Wake all below! Another Voice. Why have you broken our sleep? First Voice. Armed men have come upon us! O I am slain! Forgael [who has remained at the tiller] There! there they come! Gull, gannet, or diver,

244. diver] OED 2.b., ‘Any of various large, diving waterbirds of northern latitudes constituting the genus Gavia  and family Gaviidae,

having a sleek black or grey head, a straight pointed bill, and short legs set far back under the body.’

250 245

250

255

260

265

270

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But with a man’s head, or a fair woman’s, They hover over the masthead awhile To wait their friends; but when their friends have come They’ll fy upon that secret way of theirs. One – and one – a couple – fve together; And I will hear them talking in a minute. Yes, voices! but I do not catch the words. Now I can hear. There’s one of them that says, ‘How light we are, now we are changed to birds!’ Another answers, ‘Maybe we shall fnd Our heart’s desire now that we are so light.’ And then one asks another how he died, And says, ‘A sword-blade pierced me in my sleep.’ And now they all wheel suddenly and fy To the other side, and higher in the air. And now a laggard with a woman’s head Comes crying, ‘I have run upon the sword. I have fed to my beloved in the air, In the waste of the high air, that we may wander Among the windy meadows of the dawn.’ But why are they still waiting? why are they Circling and circling over the masthead? What power that is more mighty than desire To hurry to their hidden happiness Withholds them now? Have the Ever-living Ones A meaning in that circling overhead? But what’s the meaning? [He cries out.] Why do you linger there? Why linger? Run to your desire, Are you not happy wingèd bodies now? [His voice sinks again.] Being too busy in the air and the high air, They cannot hear my voice; but what’s the meaning?

248. that secret way] Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound II ii 40–47: Tere those enchanted eddies play Of echoes, music-tongued, which draw, By Demogorgon’s mighty law, With melting rapture, or sweet awe, All spirits on that secret way; As inland boats are driven to Ocean Down streams made strong with mountain-thaw.

250.] Te fatness of this line, in the context of the elaborate diction of much of the dialogue, is strikingly bathetic. WBY does not allow the line into his later stage-versions of TSW, but does not alter it in any of the ‘poem’ presentations of the text. 264. meadows of the dawn] Te phrase is John Todhunter’s: see e.g. Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘Hymn for a May Morning’, 21: ‘Fresh from the lucid meadows of the dawn’, and ‘A Vision of Death’, 524: ‘Over the misty meadows of the dawn’.

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251

[The Sailors have returned. Dectora is with them.]

280

Forgael [turning and seeing her]. Why are you standing with your eyes upon me? You are not the world’s core. O no, no, no! That cannot be the meaning of the birds. You are not its core. My teeth are in the world, But have not bitten yet. Dectora. I am a queen, And ask for satisfaction upon these Who have slain my husband and laid hands upon me. [Breaking loose from the Sailors who are holding her.] Let go my hands! Forgael.

285

290

Why do you cast a shadow? Where do you come from? Who brought you to this place? They would not send me one that casts a shadow. Dectora. Would that the storm that overthrew my ships, And drowned the treasures of nine conquered nations, And blew me hither to my lasting sorrow, Had drowned me also. But, being yet alive, I ask a ftting punishment for all That raised their hands against him. Forgael. There are some That weigh and measure all in these waste seas – They that have all the wisdom that’s in life,

272. Run to] Why do you not run to P99–05–LP31. 275. S.D.] Dectora is with them. She is dressed in pale green, with copper ornaments on her dress, and has a copper crown upon her head. Her hair is dull red. P99–05–PW12. 279–280.] WBY appears here to be making more solid Forgael’s repeated metaphor of ‘the world’s core’, but by attaching it to the biting of something like an apple. Te efect (whether or not this is intended) is slightly awkward, for if teeth are in anything, they may well be said in fact to have ‘bitten’ it; though perhaps 281 is to be understood

as ‘But [I] have not bitten yet’. Forgael may imagine himself, somewhat extravagantly, as on the verge of accepting the fruit of Eden, by taking and eating the knowledge of the world as profered by Dectora. 283, 285. cast[s] a shadow] Tis may be recalling WBY’s early Te Island of Statues, which ended with the mortal heroine Naschina being transformed into a supernatural fgure, who is known to be such by the fact that she now casts no shadow. 292. weigh and measure] Perhaps cp. W. Allingham, Life and Phantasy (1889), ‘I know

252 295

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And all that prophesying images Made of dim gold rave out in secret tombs; They have it that the plans of kings and queens Are dust on the moth’s wing; that nothing matters But laughter and tears – laughter, laughter, and tears; That every man should carry his own soul Upon his shoulders. Dectora. You’ve nothing but wild words, And I would know if you will give me vengeance. Forgael. When she fnds out I will not let her go – When she knows that. Dectora. What is it that you are muttering – That you’ll not let me go? I am a queen.

305

310

315

Forgael. Although you are more beautiful than any, I almost long that it were possible; But if I were to put you on that ship, With sailors that were sworn to do your will, And you had spread a sail for home, a wind Would rise of a sudden, or a wave so huge It had washed among the stars and put them out, And beat the bulwark of your ship on mine, Until you stood before me on the deck – As now. Dectora. Does wandering in these desolate seas And listening to the cry of wind and wave Bring madness?

not if it may be mine’, 10–11: ‘Unskilled to break and weigh and measure | Te World’s materials’. 295. Made of dim gold] WBY may be remembering a phrase in ‘Fiona Macleod’’s [William Sharp’s] From the Hills of Dream (1907), in a poem he had frst read in 1901, ‘Te Dirge of the Four Cities’, 9: ‘the spires of dim gold’. (For Sharp, WBY, and the ‘Four Cities’ of ancient Irish myth, see notes on ‘Baile and Aillinn’, 161–163.)

297. dust on the moth’s wing] Perhaps cp. Katharine Tynan, Poems (1901), ‘Poppy’, 6: ‘the moth’s wing at eve astir’. 298.] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 729–733: ‘For an evil blossom was born | Of sea-foam and the frothing of blood, | Blood-red and bitter of fruit, | And the seed of it laughter and tears, | And the leaves of it madness and scorn’. 315, 317.] Perhaps cp. H.W. Longfellow, ‘Earth, with her thousand voices, praises

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253

Forgael. Queen, I am not mad. Dectora. Yet say That unimaginable storms of wind and wave Would rise against me. Forgael.

320

No, I am not mad – If it be not that hearing messages From lasting watchers, that outlive the moon, At the most quiet midnight is to be stricken. Dectora. And did those watchers bid you take me captive?

330

Forgael. Both you and I are taken in the net. It was their hands that plucked the winds awake And blew you hither; and their mouths have promised I shall have love in their immortal fashion; And for this end they gave me my old harp That is more mighty than the sun and moon, Or than the shivering casting-net of the stars, That none might take you from me.

335

Dectora [frst trembling back from the mast where the harp is, and then laughing]. For a moment Your raving of a message and a harp More mighty than the stars half troubled me, But all that’s raving. Who is there can compel The daughter and the granddaughter of kings To be his bedfellow?

325

Forgael. Until your lips Have called me your beloved, I’ll not kiss them. Dectora. My husband and my king died at my feet, And yet you talk of love.

God’, 58–59: ‘And the wild song of winds came o’er the waters, | Te mingled melody of wind and wave’.

317.] And yet you say the water and the wind P99–05–LP31. 327.] Tey gave me that old harp of the nine spells P99–05–PW12.

254

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Forgael.

340

The movement of time Is shaken in these seas, and what one does One moment has no might upon the moment That follows after. Dectora.

345

I understand you now. You have a Druid craft of wicked sound Wrung from the cold women of the sea – A magic that can call a demon up, Until my body give you kiss for kiss. Forgael. Your soul shall give the kiss. Dectora.

350

I am not afraid, While there’s a rope to run into a noose Or wave to drown. But I have done with words, And I would have you look into my face And know that it is fearless. Forgael. Do what you will, For neither I nor you can break a mesh Of the great golden net that is about us. Dectora. There’s nothing in the world that’s worth a fear. [She passes Forgael and stands for a moment looking into his face.] I have good reason for that thought. [She runs suddenly on to the raised part of the poop.] And now

343. the cold women of the sea] Although Dectora seems to allude in a general way to supernaturally attuned witches or mermaids, WBY may be remembering an incident in the story of the three sons of Tuireann, the Irish Oidheadh Chlainne Tuireann (prob. 16th c., from the Lebor Gabala, the Book of Invasions), and retold in AG’s GFM (1904). Here, the three heroes fail to perform their imposed task of wringing a cooking-spit from the possession of the women of Inis Fionnchuire, a magical island underwater, populated by women who exist wholly under

the sea. Besides AG’s treatment of this material, WBY would have known also John Todhunter’s ‘Te Lamentation of the Tree Sons of Turann’ (Te Banshee and Other Poems (1888)), where an introductory note explains how ‘Tey returned without the cooking-spit of the Women of the Sea’. 352, 360. golden net] WBY’s knowledge of William Blake is probably relevant here, and there is an allusion to a poem in the Pickering MS of Blake, ofen given the title ‘Te Golden Net’. Te net of this poem is that wielded by three female fgures in order to entrap

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355

255

I can put fear away as a queen should. [She mounts on to the bulwark and turns towards Forgael.] Fool, fool! Although you have looked into my face You do not see my purpose. I shall have gone Before a hand can touch me. Forgael [folding his arms].

360

My hands are still; The Ever-living hold us. Do what you will, You cannot leap out of the golden net. First Sailor. No need to drown, for, if you will pardon us And measure out a course and bring us home, We’ll put this man to death. Dectora. I promise it. First sailor. There is none to take his side. Aibric.

365

I am on his side. I’ll strike a blow for him to give him time To cast his dreams away. [Aibric goes in front of Forgael with drawn sword. Forgael takes the harp.] First Sailor. No other’ll do it. [The Sailors throw Aibric on one side. He falls and lies upon the deck. They lift their swords to strike Forgael, who is about to play the harp. The stage begins to darken. The Sailors hesitate in fear.] Second Sailor. He has put a sudden darkness over the moon. Dectora. Nine swords with handles of rhinoceros horn To him that strikes him frst!

a man; but in TSW Forgael seems to have successfully appropriated the device. In the commentary of Te Works of William Blake co-edited by WBY with E.J. Ellis in 1893, the poem is given a brief gloss, in which ‘Te net

was disguised in gold, to make it seem to be of the South’: it is ‘the story of ‘Pity seeking dominion’’, and ‘Te idea is – catch the eye and the man is caught’ (Vol. 2, 29). 357. do not] did not P99–05.

256

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First Sailor.

370

I will strike him frst. [He goes close up to Forgael with his sword lifted.] [Shrinking back.] He has caught the crescent moon out of the sky, And carries it between us. Second Sailor. Holy fre To burn us to the marrow if we strike.

375

Dectora. I’ll give a golden galley full of fruit, That has the heady favour of new wine, To him that wounds him to the death. First Sailor. I’ll do it. For all his spells will vanish when he dies, Having their life in him. Second Sailor. Though it be the moon That he is holding up between us there, I will strike at him. The Others. And I! And I! And I! [Forgael plays the harp.]

380

First Sailor [falling into a dream suddenly]. But you were saying there is somebody Upon that other ship we are to wake. You did not know what brought him to his end, But it was sudden. Second Sailor. You are in the right; I had forgotten that we must go wake him.

385

Dectora. He has fung a Druid spell upon the air, And set you dreaming. Second Sailor. How can we have a wake When we have neither brown nor yellow ale? First Sailor. I saw a fagon of brown ale aboard her.

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390

257

Third Sailor. How can we raise the keen that do not know What name to call him by? First Sailor. Come to his ship. His name will come into our thoughts in a minute. I know that he died a thousand years ago, And has not yet been waked.

395

Second Sailor [beginning to keen]. Ohone! O! O! O! The yew-bough has been broken into two, And all the birds are scattered. All the Sailors. O! O! O! O! [They go out keening.] Dectora. Protect me now, gods that my people swear by. [Aibric has risen from the deck where he had fallen. He has begun looking for his sword as if in a dream.] Aibric. Where is my sword that fell out of my hand When I frst heard the news? Ah, there it is! [He goes dreamily towards the sword, but Dectora runs at it and takes it up before he can reach it.] Aibric [sleepily]. Queen, give it me. Dectora. No, I have need of it.

400

Aibric. Why do you need a sword? But you may keep it. Now that he’s dead I have no need of it, For everything is gone. A Sailor [calling from the other ship]. Come hither, Aibric, And tell me who it is that we are waking.

393. Ohone!] An Irish word expressing sorrow or grief, commonly employed in nineteenthcentury Anglo-Irish fction and poetry. WBY

had previously employed the term (with the spelling Ochone) in an early printed version of his ‘Te Ballad of Father Gilligan’ (1890).

258

405

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Aibric [half to Dectora, half to himself.] What name had their dead king? Arthur of Britain? No, no – not Arthur. I remember now. It was golden-armed Iollan, and he died Broken-hearted, having lost his queen Through wicked spells. That is not all the tale, For he was killed. O! O! O! O! O! O! For golden-armed Iollan has been killed. [He goes out.] [While he has been speaking, and through part of what follows, one hears the wailing of the Sailors from the other ship. Dectora stands with the sword lifted in front of Forgael.]

415

Dectora. I will end all your magic on the instant. [Her voice becomes dreamy and she lowers the sword slowly, and fnally lets it fall. She spreads out her hair. She takes of her crown and lays it upon the deck.] This sword is to lie beside him in the grave. It was in all his battles. I will spread my hair, And wring my hands, and wail him bitterly, For I have heard that he was proud and laughing,

406, 442, 464]. golden-armed Iollan] Douglas Hyde trans., Eactra cloinne rig na n-Ioruaide: Adventures of the Children of the King of Norway (Irish Texts Society, 1899) contains the story of a prince, Cod, who in his quest through the Forest of Wonders fnds the corpses of ‘thirteen men, and they lacking their heads’. One of the severed heads speaks to him, and agrees to tell its story if he will prepare a grave for them all; when Cod does so, the head explains in full (127): ‘Golden-armed Iollan, son of the King of Almain, is the man whose head I am, and the children of the King of the Land-ofSnow are these twelve men round me, and they are my foster-brothers. And I gave a food of heavy love and a stream of constant afection to the daughter of King Under-Wave,’ said the head. ‘And this is how that woman was. She had an oath upon

her that she would have no man but the man who would bring to her the Tree of Virtues, and my foster-brothers came with me. And enchantment was wrought upon us here; for the frst thing we saw coming towards us was a little man and a gentlestringed harp with him in his bosom, and the little man struck a fst on the mouth of the man of us who was nearest to him, and that man drew his sword to strike the man of the harp, as he thought, but it was not he whom he struck, but a man of us; so that it was ourselves who beheaded one another, through the enchantment of the man of the harp.’ [.  .  .] Ten Cod put his hands around gold-armed Iollan, and placed him in the middle of the grave, and he placed six on each side of him, and he wrote their names in Ogam above the grave, as was the custom with them at that time.

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420

425

259

Blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet, And that he died a thousand years ago. O! O! O! O! [Forgael changes the tune.] But no, that is not it. I knew him well, and while I heard him laughing They killed him at my feet. O! O! O! O! For golden-armed Iollan that I loved. But what is it that made me say I loved him? It was that harper put it in my thoughts, But it is true. Why did they run upon him, And beat the golden helmet with their swords? Forgael. Do you not know me, lady? I am he That you are weeping for. Dectora. No, for he is dead. O! O! O! O! for golden-armed Iollan.

430

435

440

Forgael. It was so given out, but I will prove That the grave-diggers in a dreamy frenzy Have buried nothing but my golden arms. Listen to that low-laughing string of the moon And you will recollect my face and voice, For you have listened to me playing it These thousand years. [He starts up, listening to the birds. The harp dips from his hands, and remains leaning against the bulwarks behind him.] What are the birds at there? Why are they all a-futter of a sudden? What are you calling out above the mast? If railing and reproach and mockery Because I have awakened her to love By magic strings, I’ll make this answer to it: Being driven on by voices and by dreams That were clear messages from the Ever-living, I have done right. What could I but obey? And yet you make a clamour of reproach.

430–431.] Forgael’s remarks on the gravediggers, who he claims have been labouring under an illusion, show knowledge of the

burial carried out by Cod in Eactra cloinne rig na n-Ioruaide.

260 445

450

455

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Dectora [laughing]. Why, it’s a wonder out of reckoning That I should keen him from the full of the moon To the horn, and he be hale and hearty. Forgael. How have I wronged her now that she is merry? But no, no, no! your cry is not against me. You know the counsels of the Ever-living, And all the tossing of your wings is joy, And all that murmuring’s but a marriage-song; But if it be reproach, I answer this: There is not one among you that made love By any other means. You call it passion, Consideration, generosity, But it was all deceit, and fattery To win a woman in her own despite, For love is war, and there is hatred in it; And if you say that she came willingly – Dectora. Why do you turn away and hide your face, That I would look upon for ever? Forgael. My grief! Dectora. Have I not loved you for a thousand years? Forgael. I never have been golden-armed Iollan.

459.] Tis line develops a very old commonplace into something much more striking. For the comparison between love and warfare, cp. Ovid, Amores 1.9, 1–2: ‘Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido; | Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans’ [Every lover fghts as a soldier, and Cupid has his own camp; | Atticus, believe me, every lover fghts as a soldier’]; in Christopher Marlowe’s translation, ‘All Lovers warre, and  Cupid  hath his tent, |Atticke  all lovers are to warre farre sent’. WBY sharpens this, by identifying love’s antithesis, hatred,

in the ‘war’ metaphor. Te general efect may be thought indebted to Nietzsche, and F.N. Oppel’s Mask and Tragedy: Yeats and Nietzsche 1902–10 (1987) notes how in the line ‘the concept of love itself has been amended’ from that of TSW (1900): ‘ideal in the 1900 version, in 1906 its meaning involves opposition’ (132). 462. My grief!] Forgael’s exclamation here matches closely the Second Sailor’s ‘Ohone!’ (393), itself a version (as WBY was aware) Mavrone, from the Irish mo bhron, meaning ‘my grief ’.

THE SHADOWY WATERS

465

261

Dectora. I do not understand. I know your face Better than my own hands. Forgael. I have deceived you Out of all reckoning. Dectora.

470

Is it not true That you were born a thousand years ago, In islands where the children of Aengus wind In happy dances under a windy moon, And that you’ll bring me there? Forgael. I have deceived you; I have deceived you utterly. Dectora.

475

How can that be? Is it that though your eyes are full of love Some other woman has a claim on you, And I’ve but half? Forgael. O no! Dectora.

480

And if there is, If there be half a hundred more, what matter? I’ll never give another thought to it; No, no, nor half a thought; but do not speak. Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and fattery; And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story. Forgael. That’s not the story; But I have done so great a wrong against you,

470. windy moon] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), ‘A Dark Month’, 703: ‘Cloud and windy moon’.

476. half a hundred more] Te expression is conventional, but perhaps cp. Byron, Beppo (1817), 466: ‘Yourself and friends, and half a hundred more’.

262

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485

There is no measure that it would not burst. I will confess it all. Dectora.

490

495

What do I care, Now that my body has begun to dream, And you have grown to be a burning sod In the imagination and intellect? If something that’s more fabulous were true – If you had taken me by magic spells, And killed a lover or husband at my feet – I would not let you speak, for I would know That it was yesterday and not to-day I loved him; I would cover up my ears, As I am doing now. [A pause.] Why do you weep? Forgael. I weep because I’ve nothing for your eyes But desolate waters and a battered ship. Dectora. O why do you not lift your eyes to mine?

500

Forgael. I weep – I weep because bare night’s above, And not a roof of ivory and gold. Dectora. I would grow jealous of the ivory roof,

487. a burning sod] Te metaphor here is a homely one: this is a sod of turf kept alight, which is used to ignite other things. In Dectora’s mind, however, it is not a part of domestic routine but the spark of apocalyptic confagration. WBY himself sometimes charges this image with symbolic force: in Te Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), a burning turf from the family hearth is one of the things that ofers a representative of the faery world power in the household. Maire Bruin, who gives the lighted turf to a supernatural caller on request, speaks of ‘A little queer old man in a green coat, | Who asked a burning sod to light his pipe’. As a detail from early memory, too, the image has a place: in Landscapes of Childhood and Youth (1914), WBY remembers trips

of the Donegal coast, with ‘Tory Island men coming alongside with lobsters, talking Irish and, if it was night, blowing on a burning sod to catch our attention’ (CW 3, 70). Dectora’s ‘burning sod’ is the ancestor, perhaps, of another method of confagration in WBY’s later poetry, the struck matches of ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’ (1927): ‘Bid me strike a match and blow’ (32). In the stage version in PW06 Vol. 2 (1907) and afer, WBY changed ‘sod’ to ‘coal’: G. Bornstein felt that the resultant metaphor ‘suggests Shelley’s famous image of the fading coal,’ and that in TSW ‘the wind of spiritual infuence has blown the fading coal into a burning one’ (Bornstein, 161).

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And strike the golden pillars with my hands. I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved – that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips. Forgael. You turn away. Why do you turn away? Am I to fear the waves, or is the moon My enemy? Dectora.

510

515

I looked upon the moon, Longing to knead and pull it into shape That I might lay it on your head as a crown. But now it is your thoughts that wander away, For you are looking at the sea. Do you not know How great a wrong it is to let one’s thought Wander a moment when one is in love? [He has moved away. She follows him. He is looking out over the sea, shading his eyes.] Why are you looking at the sea? Forgael. Look there! Dectora. What is there but a troop of ash-grey birds That fy into the west? Forgael. But listen, listen! Dectora. What is there but the crying of the birds?

520

Forgael. If you’ll but listen closely to that crying You’ll hear them calling out to one another With human voices. Dectora. O I can hear them now. What are they? Unto what country do they fy?

517. ash-grey] Te compound adjective is used three times in W. Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung (1876), where it is applied to a serpent, and

adder, and a dale. It is otherwise rare, though R. Browning’s ‘An Epistle of Karshish’ (47) has a spider with ‘an ash-grey back’.

264

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Forgael. To unimaginable happiness. They have been circling over our heads in the air, But now that they have taken to the road We have to follow, for they are our pilots; And though they’re but the colour of grey ash, They’re crying out, could you but hear their words, ‘There is a country at the end of the world Where no child’s born but to outlive the moon.’ [The Sailors come in with Aibric. They are in great excitement.] First Sailor. The hold is full of treasure. Second Sailor. Full to the hatches. First Sailor. Treasure on treasure. Third Sailor. Boxes of precious spice. First Sailor. Ivory images with amethyst eyes.

535

Third Sailor. Dragons with eyes of ruby. First Sailor. The whole ship Flashes as if it were a net of herrings. Third Sailor. Let’s home; I’d give some rubies to a woman. Second Sailor. There’s somebody I’d give the amethyst eyes to.

540

Aibric [silencing them with a gesture]. We would return to our own country, Forgael, For we have found a treasure that’s so great Imagination cannot reckon it. And having lit upon this woman there, What more have you to look for on the seas?

531.] See note to 193 above.

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545

550

265

Forgael. I cannot – I am going on to the end. As for this woman, I think she is coming with me. Aibric. The Ever-living have made you mad; but no, It was this woman in her woman’s vengeance That drove you to it, and I fool enough To fancy that she’d bring you home again. ’Twas you that egged him to it, for you know That he is being driven to his death. Dectora. That is not true, for he has promised me An unimaginable happiness.

555

Aibric. And if that happiness be more than dreams, More than the froth, the feather, the dust-whirl, The crazy nothing that I think it is, It shall be in the country of the dead, If there be such a country. Dectora.

560

No, not there, But in some island where the life of the world Leaps upward, as if all the streams o’ the world Had run into one fountain. Aibric. Speak to him. He knows that he is taking you to death; Speak – he will not deny it. Dectora. Is that true?

550. egged him to it] Tis use of the verb, which is OED 1., ‘To incite, encourage, urge on; to provoke, tempt’, was supplanted by the more usual modern idiom, ‘egg on’ (OED) by the later seventeenth century, and ‘egg on’ was standard in WBY’s time. 555. dust-whirl] Tis is a term for a miniature whirlwind (more ofen called a dust-devil), and was commonly employed in nineteenthcentury meteorology, but not in poetry. One

early use emphasizes its gyre-like dynamics and inner formations: ‘the dust-whirl [.  .  .] is found to be composed of several distinct vortices, or spiral bodies, each one rotating on its axis as it revolves round and round the whirling circle’ (P.F.H. Baddeley, Whirlwinds and Dust-storms of India, 7). 556.] Perhaps cp. John Donne, ‘Air and Angels’, 6: ‘Some lovely glorious nothing I did see’.

266

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Forgael. I do not know for certain, but I know That I have the best of pilots. Aibric. Shadows, illusions, That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing Ones, The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind, Or called before his eyes. Dectora.

570

O carry me To some sure country, some familiar place. Have we not everything that life can give In having one another? Forgael. How could I rest If I refused the messengers and pilots With all those sights and all that crying out?

575

Dectora. But I will cover up your eyes and ears, That you may never hear the cry of the birds, Or look upon them. Forgael. Were they but lowlier I’d do your will, but they are too high – too high.

580

Dectora. Being too high, their heady prophecies But harry us with hopes that come to nothing, Because we are not proud, imperishable, Alone and winged. Forgael. Our love shall be like theirs When we have put their changeless image on. Dectora. I am a woman, I die at every breath.

582^583] In his letter to AG of 24–25 Jun. 1905, telling her how ‘I made what are I hope my last corrections of ‘Te Shadowy Waters’,

WBY mentions how ‘I added yesterday some new lines for Dectora which I think good’ (CL 4, 117):

THE SHADOWY WATERS

585

267

Aibric. Let the birds scatter, for the tree is broken, And there’s no help in words. [To the Sailors.] To the other ship, And I will follow you and cut the rope When I have said farewell to this man here, For neither I nor any living man Will look upon his face again. [The Sailors go out.] Forgael [to Dectora].

590

Go with him, For he will shelter you and bring you home. Aibric [taking Forgael’s hand]. I’ll do it for his sake. Dectora. No. Take this sword And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael.

595

Aibric [half falling into the keen]. The yew-bough has been broken into two, And all the birds are scattered – O! O! O! Farewell! farewell! [He goes out.] Dectora. The sword is in the rope – The rope’s in two – it falls into the sea, It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm, Dragon that loved the world and held us to it, What can the eagles of the undying do But harry us with hopes that come to nothing Because we are not proud, imperishable, Alone and winged: O hide me from the eagles. I am a woman. I die at every breath.

It is likely that these became lines 578–581 of the fnished text; but they may also incorporate a deliberate repetition of some of those lines. 588–589.] Aibric echoes Hamlet I ii 377–378: ‘He was a man: take him for all in all, | I shall not look upon his like again’.

597–598.] Dectora’s metaphors here for the severed rope between the two ships may be indebted to WBY’s magical symbolism, with the ‘worm’ a version of the serpent of eternity (the ancient ouroboros) and the ‘dragon’ as a similar creator/destroyer fgure. WBY was familiar with many alchemical iterations of the worm/serpent and the dragon, e.g. William Fairthorne’s trans. of Baro Ubigerus, Aphorismi Urbigerani, or, Certain Rules, demonstrating the three infallible ways of preparing the grand elixir (1690), 7: ‘Our Serpent, which is also contained in the Bowels of the Earth, being of all created things whatsoever

268 600

605

610

615

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You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts away, And I am left alone with my beloved, Who cannot put me from his sight for ever. We are alone for ever, and I laugh, Forgael, because you cannot put me from you. The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I Shall be alone for ever. We two – this crown – I half remember. It has been in my dreams. Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it. O fower of the branch, O bird among the leaves, O silver fsh that my two hands have taken Out of the running stream, O morning star, Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn Upon the misty border of the wood, Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair, For we will gaze upon this world no longer. Forgael [gathering Dectora’s hair about him]. Beloved, having dragged the net about us, And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal; And that old harp awakens of itself To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams, That have had dreams for father, live in us.

the nearest subject of a Feminine Nature to our Dragon, through their Copulation such as an astral and metallic Seed, containing our Elements, is also to be brought forth, as can, though with somewhat more of Expense and Time, perform the whole Mystery of Hermes’. (Tis is what WBY calls ‘the mystery of the Green Dragon’ in his story ‘Rosa Alchemica’ of 1896.) In the 1912 revision of Te Countess Cathleen, WBY has the Countess remark on how ‘the old worm o’the world | Can eat its way into what place it pleases’. With ‘ancient worm’, perhaps cp. Pope, ‘To Mr. John Moore’ (1716), 12: ‘Tat ancient Worm, the Devil’. 609.] Cp. WBY’s ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), 8: ‘And caught a little silver trout’ (see notes on that poem’s fsh in vol. 2 of present edition). 610–611. star, | Trembling] Perhaps cp. Samuel Lover, Te Hall Porter (1858), ‘I think of thee’,

13–16: ‘Ten, if some trembling star | Beaming I see | Brighter than others far! – | I think of thee’. 613.] Te loosening of a woman’s hair to cover the face and body of a male lover was a recurring motif in the poems of WBY’s Te Wind Among the Reeds (1899): its earliest use by the poet was in ‘Te Heart of the Woman’ (1894), 7–8: ‘Te shadowy blossom of my hair | Will hide us from the bitter storm’. Ultimately, WBY may derive the motif from A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Before Parting’, 10–12: ‘To make your tears fall where your sof hair lay | All blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise | Over my face and eyes’. In the 1896 TS version of TSW, Dectira addresses the ‘Children of Dana’ as those who ‘shake your hair out on the tide’ (275).

212

[‘COME RIDE AND RIDE TO THE GARDEN’] Date and circumstances of composition. WBY and AG had been collaborating on a short play, at one point entitled Te Country of the Young, from Oct. 1902–Mar. 1903: a signifcant part of this play was the description in verse to a child by a stranger of a supernatural ‘ride to paradise’. Te verses supplied by WBY were those that later became the poem ‘Te Happy Townland’ (see Dramatic context in notes to that poem in the present edition). Once WBY had reclaimed his poetry from Te Country of the Young, AG’s attempt to continue with the play, which was to result in her Te Travelling Man, required verses for the visiting stranger to sing to the child. WBY provided these in the shape of the present poem. However, it is unclear when AG started serious work on bringing her play to completion: its frst appearance in print was in spring 1906, but there is no evidence for how long before then WBY gave AG these lines. It is possible that the poet provided them even while Te Country of the Young was still on the stocks, though this seems unlikely: in a letter to Te Boston Herald of 5 Oct. 1911, WBY quoted a sentence of his own from the Preface to AG’s CM, and wrote that ‘At the time I wrote these words Lady Gregory had fnished or was just fnishing a little play called Te Travelling Man’ (InteLex, 1740). Tis would place the completion of the play in spring 1902: since there is strong evidence for the collaborative play being started that autumn, and not being abandoned before the following spring, it is very probable that WBY’s recollection here is at fault. Assuming that AG was going back to work to turn Te Country of the Young into Te Travelling Man in later 1903, there is still a long time between this and the publication of her play in spring 1906. In the absence of any frm evidence for when WBY supplied AG with these verses, it may be worth remembering that the only MS source is a single sheet amongst WBY’s own papers; the only textual evidence hailing from Coole is the corrected proof of AG’s Seven Short Plays (1909), where WBY has been responsible for the corrections. Te Shanachie containing AG’s play was published on 30 May 1906, but WBY had been involved in plans for the new journal for some time, and he personally asked G.B. Shaw for a short story in Nov. 1905 (this was indeed published in the frst number) and on 7 Sep. he approached (from Coole) George Russell for a contribution (CL 4, 171). It is likely that WBY was more widely active in bringing in material (another eventual contributor with artwork was Jack Yeats), so it is reasonable to speculate that AG’s play was secured around this time. WBY lef Ireland for Coole at the start of Nov., and it is possible that his own fnal addition to Te Travelling Man was made between then and the spring of 1906. Another distinct possibility, of course, is that WBY flled up the gap his withdrawal of ‘Te Happy Townland’ had lef in AG’s play much more quickly DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-29

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[‘COME RIDE AND RIDE TO THE GARDEN’]

afer Mar. 1903. Certainty is impossible, and the present edition – very tentatively – places these verses in the autumn of 1905 or the frst months of 1906. Dramatic context. In AG’s Te Travelling Man, these verses are shared between the travelling man himself and the Child in the cottage he visits. In his mother’s temporary absence, the Child has been playing a game with the Travelling Man which involves constructing an imaginary paradisal garden (AG, Seven Short Plays, 164–165): Travelling Man: Tere now, it is fnished. Child: Is it as good as the other garden? How can we go to the Golden Mountain to see the other garden? Travelling Man: We can ride to it. Child: But we have no horse. Travelling Man: Tis form will be our horse. (He draws a form out of the corner, and sits down astride on it, putting the child before him.) Now, of we go! (Sings, the child repeating the refrain) – Afer the frst refrain, there is another exchange: Travelling Man: How did you like that ride, little horseman? Child: Go on again! I want another ride! Travelling Man (sings) – Te Travelling Man then delivers the second verse (9–12), along with another rendition of the refrain. Afer this, there is more dialogue: Child: We will soon be at the Golden Mountain now. Ride again. Sing another song. Travelling Man: (sings) – Here, the Travelling Man sings the third verse, along with the fnal refrain. Finally, afer another short exchange between the Child and the Travelling Man, the Mother returns: Child: Now another ride. Travelling Man: Tis will be the last. It will be a good ride. (Te Mother comes in. She stares for a second, then throws down her basket and snatches up the child.) Textual history. Te earliest evidence for these verses is a single leaf of MS (NLI 21866), repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 252–253 (MS). Te frst appearance in print was in AG’s ‘Te Travelling Man’ in Te Shanachie, Spring 1906, then in AG’s Seven Short Plays (1909). WBY made alterations in a proof sheet for this edition (Emory University) (Proof). Te poem was not included in WBY’s published works until VE.

[‘COME RIDE AND RIDE TO THE GARDEN’]

271

Copy-text: AG, Seven Short Plays (1909). Come ride and ride to the garden, Come ride and ride with a will: For the fower comes with the fruit there Beyond a hill and a hill. 5

10

Refrain Come ride and ride to the garden, Come ride like the March wind; There’s barley there, and water there, And stabling to your mind. The Archangels stand in a row there And all the garden bless, The Archangel Axel, Victor the angel Work at the cider press. Refrain Come ride and ride to the garden, &c.

15

O scent of the broken apples! O shufing of holy shoes! Beyond a hill and a hill there In the land that no one knows. Refrain Come ride and ride to the garden, &c.

Notes by AG.] Tese verses have been written by another hand than mine. Shanachie. I owe the Rider’s song, and some of the rest, to W.B. Yeats. Seven Short Plays. 5–6.] Hurry, hurry, hurry, | Run like the March wind; MS, Shanachie; Come ride and ride to the garden | [Run del.] Come ride Proof. 11.] Tese angelic names are fanciful, and may perhaps indicate a now lost private joke, shared between WBY and AG. An Archangel Axel must nod back to the hero of Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s play (see headnote to TSW (1900)), who was no angel; and Victor,

though an early Christian name, is not to be found among angelic thrones, dominions, or powers. Nevertheless, the angel Victor did have life of a kind as (an apocryphal) fgure in the life of St. Patrick (this was in fact an early and then persistent misinterpretation of a mortal fgure named Victorius), who is said to have told the saint in a vision that he should run from his Irish captivity. As a result, the angel Victor enjoyed a vigorous career in the many Lives of St. Patrick. In none of these, however, is he in any way associated with the production of cider. 13, 18.] Hurry, hurry, hurry &c. Shanachie.

213

AGAINST WITCHCRAFT Date of composition, and textual history. Tese lines were composed at the beginning of Jan. 1906, and were substantially completed by 3 Jan. Tey form one part of a very protracted revision and re-writing process for WBY’s play At Baile’s Strand, which had been going on for about a year. WBY informed JQ on 29 Jan. 1905 that ‘I am re-writing ‘Baile’s Strand’ (CL 4, 30), and on 20 Feb. he told AG that ‘I am all but fnished with ‘Baile’s Strand’ (CL 4, 42), but he was at work revising the play further by May (CL 4, 90). On 30 May, the poet could tell AG that On Baile’s Strand in its revised form would be included in his planned volume P99–05 with A.H. Bullen (CL 4, 106); this did not come to pass until Oct. 1906, by which time ‘Against Witchcraf’ had already appeared in the spring 1906 number of Te Shanachie in Dublin. WBY was in communication with George Roberts (who, as part of the Maunsel publishing house, was involved in editing the frst Shanachie) on 8 Nov. 1905 (CL 4, 217), but there is no evidence of an excerpted chorus from On Baile’s Strand being ofered to the journal at this time by the poet. By Dec., WBY was again rewriting his play (in the wake of English performances that autumn by the Irish National Teatre), telling JQ how ‘I made Bullen stop the publication of my new book [P99–05] which was half printed that I might work on the play again [. . .] I think I am getting it right this time’ (CL 4, 240). It is not until a letter to AG of 3 Jan. 1906 that WBY makes reference to these choral lines, in a brief postscript saying ‘Have written the lyrical bit for Baile’s Strand’ (CL 4, 278): this (as the editors of CL 4 suggest) is very likely a reference to the lines written to accompany the swearing of an oath of obedience from Cuchulain to Conchubar in the play. Te following day, the poet reported further to AG that ‘I have done good work on Baile’s Strand [. . .] I have done the lyrical bit in rhyme – quite short but sufcient’ (CL 4, 282); WBY was also able to tell Bullen that he had completed ‘thirty lines of a lyric chorus’ on 13 Feb. (CL 4, 338). WBY’s ‘thirty’ is likely to be approximate; but even so, the frst printed version has forty lines, and it is possible that composition continued past this date. Tere are two surviving MS versions. MS1 (NLI 30403, repr. with transcription in the Cornell On Baile’s Strand: Manuscript Materials (2014) eds. J. Curtis and D. Kiely) is lacking the fnal six lines of the printed version, while MS2, a version contained in a letter from WBY to Florence Farr of 16 Feb. (CL 4, 341–342), ends at the same point and also lacks the frst seventeen lines. In his letter, WBY explains that the lines were ‘suggested in some vague way by your letter, only suggested I mean in phantasmal exaggeration of some sentence’ (Farr’s letter is now lost). Another version (Berg Collection, NYPL) carries only 28 lines that are typed, with the opening six and closing six lines added in WBY’s hand: this too ends its typed section at the same point as MS1 and DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-30

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the letter to Farr (TS, repr. and transcribed in Cornell edn., 450–451). One other version in WBY’s hand is NLI 30384, a fair copy which seems to have been used in preparations for the performance of 14 Apr. 1906; this carries musical notations for a number of lines, connected with the singing (possibly with psaltery accompaniment) of the chorus (MS3); it is repr. and transcribed in Cornell edn., 372–375. In MS3, WBY’s spelling error (‘Woeman’) may disclose something of the lines’ orientation with regard to sexual and magical conficts. Te revised play opened in Dublin on 14 Apr. 1906, and the publication of the chorus towards the end of May in Te Shanachie was therefore timely. Te new version of On Baile’s Strand was included in P99–05; subsequent editions including the play have only very minor diferences from the 1906 text, and are not collated here. Since WBY did not reprint these lines as anything other than as part of the play, their form in Te Shanachie is the copy-text for the present edition. Dramatic context. In On Baile’s Strand, the verses are to be performed as part of the swearing of an oath of fealty to the High-King Conchubar by Cuchulain. Te oath itself has a pivotal role in the play’s action, since when Cuchulain meets a mysterious young man who has come to Ireland in order to challenge and fght him (Ferdia, who is unbeknownst to Cuchulain his own son by the Scottish queen Aoife) he is oath-bound, despite his own feelings of liking for the stranger, to follow Conchubar’s orders and engage in combat. During the performance of these choric lines, the three women who sing them hold a bowl of faming coals, over which Cuchulain must make his oath to Conchubar. Just before the women begin their song, Conchubar speaks (On Baile’s Strand [P99–05 text], 383–392, VPl., 493–495): The holders of the fre Shall purify the thresholds of the house With waving fre, and shut the outer door, According to old custom, and sing rhyme That has come down from the old law-makers To blow the witches out. Considering That the wild will of man could by oath be bound, But that a woman’s could not, they bid us sing Against the will of woman at its wildest In the shape-changers that run upon the wind. A possibly suggestive account of the chorus’s context is contained in a sentence from WBY’s letter to Florence Farr containing MS 2: ‘Te hero has been praising an indomitable kind of woman and the chorus sing of her evil shadow’ (CL 4, 342). In practical terms, WBY’s plans for the staging caused some problems. It was necessary for Conchubar and Cuchulain to speak about the oath-taking while the women were singing, and this dialogue had to take priority in performance: the efect of deliberately partial audibility did not strike WBY’s theatrical colleagues as especially desirable, and once the play was in rehearsal AG told the poet that ‘the only real blot at present is the song, and it is very bad – the three women repeat it together, their voices don’t go together, one gets nervous listening for the separate ones – No one knows how you wish it

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AGAINST WITCHCRAFT

done, everyone thinks the words ought to be heard’ (31 Mar. 1906, quoted CL 4, 377). Tis problem was not fully resolved on stage, though WBY’s note to the play for P99–05 made the best of things: Very little of the words of the song of the three women can be heard, for they must be for the most part a mere murmur under the voices of the men. It seemed right to take some trouble over them, just as it is right to fnish of the statue where it is turned to the wall, and besides there is always the reader and one’s own pleasure. As the action of On Baile’s Strand progresses, Conchubar and Cuchulain suspect that witchcraf has indeed played a part in the disaster, and that the choric spell against magical interference has been inefective. (Perhaps, on the other hand, the forces of darkness simply could not hear themselves being banished.) Copy-text: The Shanachie vol. 1 (1906). A chorus from a new version of ‘On Baile’s Strand.’ It is sung by three women while they wave a bowl containing fre from Kings’ hearths over the thresholds of the house and while a certain oath and prayer are made over the bowl.

5

10

May this fame have driven out The shape-changers that can put Ruin on a great King’s house Until all be ruinous. Names, whereby a man has known The threshold and the hearthstone, Gather on the wind and drive Women, that none kiss and thrive, For they are but whirling wind, Out of memory and mind; They would make a prince decay With light images of clay Planted in the running wave;

1. fame] fre hol. in TS. 5–6.] [All the del.] Names [that men have del.] ^whereby a man has^ known | [For del.] Te threshold and ^the^ hearthstone MS1; Names, whereby [mankind has del.] ^a man has^ known | [His del.] [Te del.] threshold and [his del.] [the del.] hearthstone hol. in TS.

8.] Women that none [can del.] kiss and thrive MS1; All that none can kiss and thrive TS; Woemen none can kiss and thrive MS3. 9. whirling wind] Perhaps cp. W.H. Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), ‘Te Lay of Talc Mac Trone’, II v, 16: ‘Te raging fame and the whirling wind’. 11. would make] [have made del.] would make TS corr. in hol.; [could del.] would MS3.

AGAINST WITCHCRAFT

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Or, for many shapes they have, They would change them into hounds Until he had died of his wounds, Though their change were but a whim; Or they’d hurl a spell at him That he follow with desire Bodies that can never tire, Or grow kind, for they anoint All their bodies joint by joint With a miracle-working juice That is made out of the grease Of the ungoverned unicorn; But the man is thrice forlorn, Emptied, ruined, wracked, and lost That they follow, for at most They will give him kiss for kiss, While they murmur ‘after this Hatred may be sweet in the taste.’ Those wild hands, that have embraced All his body, can but shove

15. Tey would change] Tey would [turn del.] change MS1; Tey [have del.] would [changed del.] change TS corr. in hol.; Change them to the MS3. 16.] Until [they del.] he had died of [their del.] his wounds MS1; Until he [hath del.] had died of his wounds TS corr. in hol.; Until he have died of his wounds MS3. 17. their] the TS. were] was MS3. 18. they’d hurl] [they have hurled del] they’d hurl TS corr. in hol. 25. the ungoverned unicorn] In his letter to Florence Farr including MS2 of the poem, WBY tells her that ‘I have a sketch of a strange little play about the capture of a blind unicorn’: this is probably a reference to what became the play written with AG Te Unicorn from the Stars (publ. 1908), where unicorn symbolism is important, and has apocalyptic implications. Te play’s hero is told how his dream of unicorns can be interpreted: ‘Te unicorns [. . .] strength they meant, virginal strength, a rushing, lasting, tireless strength’

(CW 2, 209). In his letter, afer the lines of MS2 are given, WBY adds that ‘Te Unicorn in the little play is a type of masterful and beautiful life but I shall not trouble to make the meaning clear – a clear vivid story of a strange sort is enough. Te meaning may be diferent with everyone’ (CL 4, 342). Unicorns were to continue as important symbolic properties for WBY. One starting-point for this (as suggested by the editors of CL 4) may be the title won by the poet when he passed the ‘Practicus’ grade in the GD (in 1891), and was given the title ‘Monoceros de Astris’ (‘Unicorn from the Stars’). 26. thrice] twice TS. 27. wracked] wrecked TS. 28. they follow] they follow MS2. 29. kiss for kiss] Perhaps cp. J. Todhunter, Laurella (1876), ‘Laurella’ I, 276–277: ‘wooing each wave | To give him kiss for kiss’ and K. Tynan, Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘Geofrey Baron: A Ballad of 1642’, 63: ‘Breath for breath and kiss for kiss!’ 31. may] [shall del.] may TS corr. in hol.

276 35

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At the burning wheel of love Till the side of hate comes up – The Kings thrust the points of their swords into the fame.

40

Therefore from this ancient cup May the sword-blades drink their fll Of the homebrew there, until They will have for master none But the threshold and hearthstone.

34. burning wheel of love] Perhaps cp. C. Kingsley, Poems (1889), ‘Frank Leigh’s Song’, 11–12:

‘For ever doomed, Ixion-like, to reel | On mine own passions’ ever-burning wheel’. 36–40.] Not in MS1, MS2. Hol. in TS.

214

SONGS FROM DEIRDRE: III Date of composition. Te extensive draf materials for Deirdre show no sign of these lines, so they are likely to have been added to the play’s closing movement in the last stages of the preparation of the script for the frst performance on 24 Nov. 1906. Although WBY did the bulk of composition in the last two months before performance, it is not possible to determine when these particular lines were written, which could have been at any point between Sep. and the end of Oct. 1906. Dramatic context. At the close of the play the heroine, Deirdre, has just made her fnal exit, on her way to commit suicide by the body of her murdered lover Naoise. She leaves on stage king Conchubar, who executed Naoise in jealousy, and hopes now to marry Deirdre: he believes that she is going simply to say farewell to her dead lover. Afer the two musicians sing their dirge, the truth of the matter comes to light with the entrance of king Fergus and his men who, along with Conchubar, discover Deirdre’s body; and with this, the play ends. Textual and publication history. Te lines were frst published in F.T. Marinetti’s Italian magazine Poesia (Winter 1906–1907), which appeared afer Mar. 1907. WBY sent Marinetti the poem on 16 Feb. 1907 (adding the chorus that became ‘Songs from Deirdre II’ on 4 Mar.) Having intended for some time to meet Marinetti’s request for a poem, which was made frst in Dec. 1904, WBY wrote apologetically (CL 3, 624): ‘I send you a photograph of myself and the only poem which I have that has not been published. It is a dirge spoken by two singers afer the death of the heroine in my play Deirdre. Deirdre has gone to kill herself upon her lover’s body.’ Te dirge appeared next in the frst publication of Deirdre in Aug. 1907, and was then included by WBY as the third in a series of ‘Te Musicians’ Songs from Deirdre’ in PSS; it was not again printed by WBY as a poem, although the lines remained in their place in all subsequent printings of the play. Copy-text: PSS. First Musician. They are gone, they are gone. The proud may lie by the proud. Second Musician. Though we were bidden to sing, cry nothing loud. First Musician. They are gone, they are gone. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-31

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Second Musician. Whispering were enough. First Musician. Into the secret wilderness of their love. 5

Second Musician. A high grey cairn. What more is to be said? First Musician. Eagles have gone into their cloudy bed.

Title] A Dirge over Dierdre e Naise Poesia. [Te spelling errors in the two names are those of WBY himself in his enclosure of the poem with his letter to Marinetti; ‘e’ replaces the poet’s original ampersand with its Italian amplifcation.] Songs from Deirdre | III PSS. 4. secret wilderness] WBY’s powerful phrase had been employed much less powerfully

by John Ruskin, Poems (1891), ‘Te Broken Chain’, II, 10–11: ‘Amidst a secret wilderness, | With deep, free forest overgrown’. 6. cloudy bed] Perhaps cp. J. Davidson, Ballads and Songs (1894), ‘A Ballad of a Nun’, 17–18: ‘Long ere she lef her cloudy bed | Still dreaming in the orient land’ and 153–154: ‘While dreaming in her cloudy bed, | Far in the crimson orient land’.

215

SONGS FROM DEIRDRE: II Date of composition. It is not possible to assign a frm date to the composition of this poem, but it is very likely to have been written afer mid-Mar. 1907. WBY was at work on his play Deirdre from the summer of 1904, though the play itself was not produced until 1906, and it was subject to revision afer its early performances, being published in 1907. Tis lyric, however, seems to have come late in the overall composition process, and may not have formed part of the frst production on 24 Nov. 1906. Probably the closest textual witnesses to that performance are the TSS produced at Coole in the summer of 1906 (Berg Collection, NYPL), and these give no details of a song at the appropriate point, even though in the fullest TS some kind of sung lyric is alluded to (see Textual and publication history). What was performed on stage in Nov. 1906 was not, however, the song frst published in the play in volume form in Aug. 1907, and two separate versions of the lyric are extant, one of which may correspond to the performed version; the other, which dates from afer the frst performance and was sent out to a periodical by WBY at the beginning of Mar., is not yet at the stage of completion reached in the play’s frst publication that Aug. It seems most likely, then, that the lyric in its fnal form was revised into being in the spring or early summer of 1907, and no earlier than mid-Mar. Textual and publication history. In his intentions for a song at this point in his play, WBY was able to sketch out a broad outline of the lyric’s content some time before actual lyric material was produced; and even then, two substantial (and substantially diferent) versions were in existence before the poem took on its eventual form, in the frst edition of Deirdre, published in Dublin by Maunsel in Aug. 1907 (D07). Te earliest trace of the poem’s theme in the Deirdre drafs is NLI 8760(2), p. 23 (repr. and transcribed in Cornell Deirdre, 436–437): Song may be about love as a hard task, a fne art or else that there is so much trouble in love that those who have loved well have endured all tests Further on in the same voluminous MS material (p. 98), it appears to be Naoise rather than Deirdre who instructs the musicians (repr. and transcribed in Cornell Deirdre, 564–565): Musicians, why should you weep? Sing of love, nothing is happening that does not ft a king and queen. If you play us a good tune, we will play a good and DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-32

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skilful game. Sing of love. Do not make it sorrowful because we are going to die – love is a daily dying and has its fulness only when the body has ceased to be a barrier between spirit and spirit. Further on still (p. 115), this prescription for a song is put into verse, afer Deirdre has instructed the musicians to ‘sing to us of love’; WBY notes at this point ‘a poem to be spoken to the strings’, and it is Deirdre who issues instructions (repr. and transcribed in Cornell Deirdre, 592–595): A king and queen Who have been true lovers and are about to die. For what’s in that? What is it but [?passing] What all true lovers have cried out upon? The too soon wearied body, barriers That are unbroken when lip touches lip And all those changes that the moon stirs up, Or some worse star, for parting lip from lip A whole day long – I’d have you laugh with me. I am no more afraid of losing love Through growing old, for temporal change is fnished And what I have I keep from this day out. Tis is immediately followed by the cue, ‘Song’, and the text here is close to the later TS (Berg Collection, NYPL) which is probably the script for the play’s production (transcribed in Cornell Deirdre, 775). It seems clear from the MS evidence, and from the likely production TS from which the lyric, though mentioned, is still absent, that the words for this song were some time in coming, and they may have waited until quite close to the rehearsal process for the Nov. 1906 performance. Tese will not have been the words of the poem as printed in 1907 at this position in the play, but are more likely to have been those preserved in TSS dating from afer the production: NLI 8670(20), a used prompt-copy associated with Annie Horniman and now among the Abbey Teatre papers in NLI (Abbey), and another prompt-copy, now in the library of Princeton University, associated with the London production of 27 Nov. 1908, and used by Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Princeton). Tis text, almost certainly that used in the production of Nov. 1906, is printed separately below (‘All love’s heart is aquiline’). Te frst major revision to the lyric as performed had been carried out by WBY in time for him to send to the Italian magazine Poesia on 4 Mar. 1907. Te editor, F.T. Marinetti, had approached WBY for a contribution as long ago as Dec. 1904, and WBY eventually replied by sending him frst the extract from Deirdre which would become ‘Songs from Deirdre III’, and then (the letter containing this having gone unsent on 16 Feb.) just over a fortnight later the lines that now began ‘Love is an immoderate thing’, also printed separately below. By the time Deirdre was published in Aug. 1907, the lines had taken more or less their fnal form. Tey appeared next in PW06 and P99–05, then in PSS: this was the last time that WBY printed the lyric separately from the play itself.

SONGS FROM DEIRDRE: II

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Two earlier texts. In the frst performance of Deirdre, the song performed at this point difered considerably from WBY’s later versions. Perhaps the closest text to the performance date is the TS NLI 8760(20), which has the version of the song given below (see Cornell Deirdre, 1068). Te TS’s light punctuation is not amended here. Two other TSS are perhaps later: one is Abbey and the other Princeton (see Textual and publication history), and some variants from these are noted below. TS NLI 8762(20)

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10

All love’s heart is aquiline And can never be content Till it leap to the divine Changeless shining element That is fed on time’s decay And grows brighter while we dim That’s the merit in love play What is there in limb on limb What can be in mouth on mouth All that mingling of her breath When love longing is but drouth For the things come after death

6.] And grow brighter while we deem Abbey; And grows brighter while we [dim del.] deem Princeton. 7.] Tat the merit in love play Abbey; Whats [Tat del.] the merit in love’s play Princeton. 10 her] [her del.] our Princeton. Later than this, the text sent to F.T. Marinetti by WBY on 16 Feb./4 Mar. 1907 shows a stage of revision that is moving towards the fnal state of the text. Te copy of the verses enclosed by WBY (encl.) was largely without punctuation, and the text in Poesia does not attempt to provide this (except in a mangling of line 14). In his letter to Marinetti, WBY sets this in context as ‘a chorus out of the play’ (CL 4, 625): During the chess the Musicians sing this song. At frst the three voices, then two drop out, perhaps frst one then another. Te last lines are spoken by a single voice hesitating over the last two, repeating or otherwise showing confusion of mind. Poesia Winter 1906–1907 [publ. spring 1907] Love is an immoderate thing What can pity ofer it Or the changing seasons bring To its laughing, weeping ft

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All its heart is aquiline And can never be content Till it leap to the divine Changeless shining element That is fed on time’s decay And grows brighter while we dim What’s the merit in love play What is there in limb on limb What can be in mouth on mouth All that mingling of our breath When love longing is but drouth For the things come after death.

4. ft] Poesia has no punctuation afer this word, though either a comma or a stop is needed: in the text sent to Marinetti by WBY, punctuation here is similarly absent, and Marinetti evidently felt no need to supply it. 10. while we dim] [when del.] while we [are del.] dim encl. 14. All that mingling] All that, minglins Poesia (but not so WBY in encl., and an obvious misprint). 15. drouth] [drowned del.] drouth encl. Dramatic context. Deirdre and her lover Naoise are playing a game of chess as they wait in the barren guest lodge of king Conchubar. Te jealous king has promised Naoise safety, but it is becoming apparent that he has treacherously lured Naoise to his place of death. D07 reads as follows: [A Musician lights a torch in the fre and then crosses before the chess-players, and slowly lights the torches in the sconces. Te light is almost gone from the wood, but there is a clear evening light in the sky, increasing the sense of solitude and loneliness.] Deirdre. Make no sad music. What is it but a king and queen at chess? They need a music that can mix itself Into imagination, but not break The steady thinking that the hard game needs. [During the chess, the Musicians sing this song]

SONGS FROM DEIRDRE: II

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Copy-text: PSS.

5

10

Love is an immoderate thing And can never be content, Till it dip an ageing wing, Where some laughing element Leaps and Time’s old lanthorn dims. What’s the merit in love-play, In the tumult of the limbs That dies out before ’tis day, Heart on heart, or mouth on mouth, All that mingling of our breath, When love-longing is but drouth For the things come after death?

9. Heart on heart] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Poetical Works (1897), ‘A Vision of Poets’, 820: ‘Life treads on life, and heart on heart’. 11. drouth] drought D07. 12.] In vol. 3 of CWVP08, WBY printed Florence Farr’s settings of all three ‘Songs’ from

Deirdre, with his prefatory note dated ‘March, 1908’. In this poem, the fnal line set is ‘For the things that follow death?’ Tis reading is not present in any printed texts (including that in CWVP08).

216

[‘THE FRIENDS THAT HAVE IT I DO WRONG’] Date of composition. Te quatrain was probably written at Coole in Jul. 1907, and the date entered by WBY in the earliest MS copy, 21 Jul. 1907, is likely to be close to its time of composition. Te poem’s subject matter, which is the poet’s own revision of his works, is pertinent to WBY’s literary activity in the second half of Jul. 1907, when he rewrote the poem ‘Maid Quiet’ between 8 and 10 Jul., and completed his revision of ‘Te Hollow Wood’ [later ‘Te Ragged Wood’] between 10 and 28 Jul. In the copy for A.H. Bullen’s projected CWVP08, which he was preparing that summer, WBY continued to make many revisions, especially to his dramatic works. Textual history. No drafs of this quatrain survive. Te earliest hol. version (MS1) was entered in a presentation copy from the poet to AG of P99–05, under the dedication ‘to Lady Gregory | from her friend | the writer’. Although the dedication itself is dated near the time of publication as ‘Oct. 15 1906’, the quatrain here is separately dated (see Date of composition). Te copy of this book in which WBY wrote the poem was sold at Sotheby’s London, 23–24 Jul. 1979, was subsequently sold on, and is now untraced. A photocopy of the relevant page taken in 1979 is repr. in P.R. Bishop, “My Dear Miss Brachvogel . . .’: A MS Version of a Yeats Quatrain’, YA 19 (hereafer, Bishop), 345. Another hol. version from before publication is inscribed in a pirated copy of Te Land of Heart’s Desire, published in the US in 1908 by Tomas Mosher, and now in the Bishop collection of Mosher Press (MS2). Tis is discussed and repr. in Bishop, 344. Te poem appeared in print in vol. 2 of CWVP08: here, it was set in italics and centred on the verso facing p. 1 (the half-title for the frst item in the book, Te King’s Treshold). A third MS version probably postdates publication (and reproduces the published text almost exactly): this is a hol. tipped into JQ’s copy of Te King’s Treshold – A Play in Verse (privately printed, 1904), now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale; it is repr. in Bishop, 345 and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 254–255. Te quatrain was not printed again by WBY during his lifetime, and was printed posthumously in VE. Reception and critical interpretation. In Te Fortnightly Review (Feb. 1909), mentioning Te Secret Rose, Te Wind Among the Reeds, and Te Shadowy Waters, the reviewer noted that ‘All of these fnd a place in the Collected Edition, but not all in their original forms’; the quatrain was then quoted, with the comment that ‘Authors are inclined to itching fngers when they re-set the stage for their old efects, and there is, maybe, a hint of penitence in the lines prefxed to the second volume’. Te lines came in handy, from early on, for accounts of WBY’s habits of rewriting; but they had evidently done little to DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-33

[‘THE FRIENDS THAT HAVE IT I DO WRONG’]

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lessen the general sense of impatience which dominated critical discussion of this, as for the reviewer of P12 in Te Academy and Literature (4 Jan. 1913): It is discomforting to see a poet, having won his way to a distinguished position, occupying his middle years with not much more than a careful revision of his early poems, just when we should expect him to display the maturity and strength of his powers. It contradicts our just expectancy of things. With Mr. Yeats, indeed, that contradiction is the more aggravating because rumours have been heard of a new play at which he has been working for many years, passing it through many versions. In the collected edition of his poems he declared that: [quotes poem] To which of course the obvious retort is that one remakes oneself best in the discipline of newer work. We have collated the poems carefully with their previous editions, and it is undoubtedly a fact that they refect Mr. Yeats of the year 1912, whereas the others neither could nor did. Tat is all. [. . .] We do not think there are many who possess the old volume who will also purchase the new. Te quatrain could also be deployed more approvingly, as in Te Bookman’s rev. of Te Cutting of an Agate (Aug. 1919): But Mr. Yeats is too sincere to re-issue work that has not kept for him some, at least, of the signifcance which originally made him write it; so that, whatever the birth date of its contents, a new book by him is always a new book. [. . .] We understand why he has remained so triumphantly young. He has never become content [quotes poem]. Of this remaking, his prose essays ofer as good evidence as the revisions of his verse. Te whole question of revision, seldom lost on WBY’s contemporaries, inevitably became a signifcant motif in modern critical reception of his work. It is difcult to fnd many pieces on the subject that avoid quoting or alluding to WBY’s quatrain; beyond these, modern criticism on the subject of poets’ revisions more generally ofen quotes the lines. In nearly all of the contexts in which it is employed, the quatrain is taken to be more or less self-explanatory, and an assertion of the link between re-fashioning a text and creating and re-creating the poetic self. T.R. Henn’s summary of 1950, that the lines show how for WBY ‘the revisions were integral with the growth of his own personality’ (Henn, 109) is representative, and hardly inaccurate so far as it goes. More recent views do not fundamentally difer from this, though they may add layers of detail. G. Bornstein cites the ‘famous quatrain’ to show how ‘Te efect of all this was to make [WBY’s] poems seem less like products than like processes, forever evolving and ofen taking their meaning in part from the earlier versions that Yeats called attention to even as he replaced’; and such processes ‘involved self-revision as well as poetic revision’ (G. Bornstein and R. Williams (eds.), Palimpsest: Editorial Teory in the Humanities (1993), 172). While all of this is perfectly valid in critical terms, the general willingness to see WBY’s quatrain as a frank disclosure of his creative rationale in the re-writing of verse

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[‘THE FRIENDS THAT HAVE IT I DO WRONG’]

may fatten out some of this poem’s oddness. First, it must be important to take some stock of the fact that WBY did not reprint these lines: they exist in his oeuvre only at the beginning of CWVP08 vol. 2., and were not (e.g.) re-used at the start of subsequent collected edns. (where re-writing was just as visibly in evidence). Furthermore, the book to which WBY afxed this quatrain is a book of plays, not poems: its appendices include ‘An acting version of Te Shadowy Waters’ and ‘A diferent version of Deirdre’s entrance’. Te MS versions of the poem entered in presentation copies (see Textual history) begin with an inscription in a book of poems (P99–05), but the other two are in copies of Te Land of Heart’s Desire and Te King’s Treshold. Of course, the quatrain itself specifes ‘a song’ and not a play; there can be little doubt, on the other hand, that WBY’s habits of revision were most evident to friends and to the reading public in his regular and ofen radical revisions of his dramatic work. It has been easy for many modern critics to see the connection between textual identity and authorial ‘self ’ as a point of intellectual and creative growth that WBY identifes and acknowledges in the quatrain. Tat is true, but it may not be in itself profoundly consequential for WBY’s imagination in 1907: in many ways, the quatrain is a refection on the work required to shape the whole project that would become CWVP08 towards a coherent expression of ‘myself ’. Yet what really is the ‘issue’ ‘at stake’? (Te turn of phrase in line 3 is not exactly that of a voice from the Celtic Twilight.) Te object is perhaps as commercial as it is personal, for WBY is concerned to make a large and miscellaneous body of work into the body of a recognisable public author: it is WBY’s brand that he remakes. As a lesson, this could easily have been learned from Oscar Wilde, whose infuence on WBY was as yet by no means exhausted. One of the franker truths which the quatrain enshrines is that writing is more than something that one does to please one’s ‘friends’. It may be salutary for criticism of WBY to regard this short poem more in its immediate context – a context that was not repeated, just as the poem itself was not reprinted by WBY – and less as a four-line key to the poet’s true artistic and personal identity. Copy-text: CWVP08 Vol. 2 The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.

1.] Te friends that have it] Te friends, who have it MS2. 2.] Because I still remake my song MS1. 3.] Know not the issue that’s at stake MS1. 4.] WBY’s much later echo of this line in ‘An Acre of Grass’ (1935), 14: ‘Myself must I

remake’ is likely to be deliberate. Perhaps cp. R. Browning, Men and Women (1855), ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, 354–355: ‘My business is not to remake myself, | But make the absolute best of what God made’. remake] re-make MS2.

217

MAID QUIET Date and circumstances of revision. WBY, at Coole while preparing copy for CWVP08, wrote to the book’s publisher A.H. Bullen on 10 Jul. 1907 that ‘I have re-written that poem about Maid Quiet and hope it is not too late for you to put it in instead of the present version’ (CL 4, 694). He had last written to Bullen only two days before, so it is possible that WBY wrote this revised version between 8 and 10 Jul. 1907. Textual and publication history. Te poem has a complex textual history, and by 1907 it had already been through the process of major revision at least once. Most recently, it had appeared in PW06 as ‘Te Lover Mourns Because of his Wanderings’, with a text identical to that of its publication in Te Wind Among the Reeds (as ‘Hanrahan Laments Because of his Wanderings’). Tis version of the poem (in Vol. 2 of present edition) was itself a revision from 1897 of a poem frst publ. in 1892, [‘I never have seen Maid Quiet’] (also in Vol. 2 of present edition): this version was used also in the Secret Rose (1897), where it formed a part of the story ‘Te Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’. In making a revision for CWVP08, WBY returned in part to this earliest version, whilst rewriting and shortening the remainder of the poem. Although ‘Maid Quiet’ is certainly a revision, it is a revision that undoes its previous version (in the Wind Among the Reeds), and comes back, though with added concentration, to something much closer to the poem’s very frst form: it is in this sense a revision that undoes a revision. In its new, shorter form the poem continued to occupy the position in the section entitled ‘Te Wind Among the Reeds’ that it had done in PW06 and the 1899 collection itself, between the poems ‘Te Secret Rose’ and ‘Te Travail of Passion’. From CWVP08 onwards, WBY made no changes to the text, which was included in all collected edns. Reception and critical interpretation. Such critical attention as this poem has received has seen it squarely in the context of the 1890s, which is certainly correct. Representative of straightforwardly biographical readings is H. Adams, who sees the poem is one where WBY ‘must turn to lamentation over the departure of a lover’ (Adams, 72): Ten, we surmise, his own knowledge that his beloved’s image dominated his heart prevented him from being able to respond to the woman’s words. Now those words thunder in his heart, tormenting him by reminding him of his passion and his failure with both women. Tis of course reads the post-1908 version, as placed back into Te Wind Among the Reeds by WBY. When WBY attended to this version in order to rewrite it, however, and returned it to a newly minted rendition of its earlier (1892–1897) form, he was DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-34

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working in the knowledge of the more recent appearance of a fgure called Quiet in his verse, in ‘In the Seven Woods’ (1902). R. Ellmann articulated the extreme contrast of these two appearances by [Maid] Quiet, seeing the Wind Among the Reeds fgure as ‘little more than a personifed counterweight for the poem’s distress’, while in 1902’s ‘In the Seven Woods’ ‘Te image has been rendered raw and barbaric instead of prettifed and civilized; it conveys a more original meaning’ (Identity, 100–101). Yet it is worth remembering that WBY resurrected ‘Maid Quiet’ (who had actually in the version of Te Wind Among the Reeds gone by the name ‘our Mother of Peace’) fve years afer writing ‘In the Seven Woods’: the ‘barbaric’ perspective mentioned by Ellmann does not simply supersede the more ‘civilized’ one. In its fnal, eight-line form, the poem has an economical power, and manages to combine apparent personal frankness with a degree of real imaginative extremity that is stated, rather than explained or examined. Te short lyric’s mixture of rhyming and unrhyming lines, also, gives it a formal echo of such a doubleness of situation and of perception. Te work proved attractive to composers, and in 1919 Ivor Gurney made a setting of the poem for voice and piano. Copy-text: P49. Where has Maid Quiet gone to, Nodding her russet hood? The winds that awakened the stars

1. Maid Quiet] WBY’s earlier personifcations of Quiet include ‘lone Lady Quietness’ in ‘She who Dwelt among the Sycamores’ (1887), and, more recently, ‘Quiet .  .  . eating her wild heart’ in ‘In the Seven Woods’ (1902), 10–11 (see notes on both poems in the present edition). In a letter of early Sep. 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, Te Life and Death of Jason (1867) II, 7: ‘His head was covered with a russet hood’ and 144: ‘Drew of the last fold of his russet hood’. ‘Russet’ may be a colour, a material, or both: ‘A subdued reddish-brown colour, formerly used for clothing esp. by country people and the poor; a kind or make of this’ (OED A.1.a).

3. awakened the stars] Possibly cp. F.R. Havergal, Poetical Works (1894), ‘Te 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. 6–8.] WBY’s language has a striking parallel in a now obscure poem by the Victorian poet Mary Howitt, Ballads and Other Poems (1847), ‘Elian Gray’, and its third stanza (11–15): I know not what may be his will; But, when I rose up to depart, – ‘Fly not, thou hast no cause to fear, Ty place of duty still is here,’ – Like lightning-words passed through my heart.

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Are blowing through my blood. O how could I be so calm When she rose up to depart? Now words that called up the lightning Are hurtling through my heart.

Tere is no evidence for WBY ever having read Howitt; but she was a popular poet still in his early years, and this particular poem (a melodramatic and sentimental wild-west yarn, of very limited merit as poetry) might possibly have caught his attention as an adolescent. If so, the ‘lightning-words’ passing

‘through my heart’ resurface in WBY’s mind in 1892; but ‘rose up to depart’ (an unusual construction, in fact) does not rise up to enter his poem until 1907. On the other hand, sheer coincidence may well be – since it is simpler – the more plausible explanation here.

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[‘O DEATH’S OLD BONY FINGER’] Textual history. Tese lines, which frst appeared in vol. 5 of CWVP08, are a revision specifcally for the short stories ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’ (the frst stanza) and ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’ (entire poem) of ‘Te Happy Townland’ (1902): WBY replaces 1–4 with new lines, and the whole poem is attributed to Red Hanrahan. Tis position of the frst stanza in ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’ had been occupied on past occasions by other verses (including in 1892 and 1897 the lines ‘I never have seen maid Quiet’, and in 1905 the poem [‘I heard under a ragged hollow wood’]), but for vol. 5 of CWVP08 the poet used this revision of another poem already in print – from ISW (1903), and grouped with poems from that collection in vol. 1 of CWVP08. In the story ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’ in CWVP08 and afer the whole poem is given, occupying a position previously taken by lines from ‘Te Song of Wandering Aengus’. In this version, the poem should certainly be regarded as (in Gould and Toomey’s words) ‘a radial annex to – rather than an abandoned version of – ‘Te Happy Townland’’ (M, 351). Although WBY aligned the variant ‘gold’ (9) with ‘Te Happy Townland’’s ‘golden’ in 1925 for EPS, he did not replace the frst four lines with the longer poem’s form of these at any stage. As employed in ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’, the second refrain-stanza of ‘Te Happy Townland’ is omitted, reducing the length of the poem overall. Date of revision. It is likely that WBY created this revised version of the frst stanza of ‘Te Happy Townland’ while preparing copy for A.H. Bullen’s CWVP08 at Coole in summer, 1907. Work involving the use and substitution of verse in the short stories was especially intense in Jul., when WBY sent Bullen his rewritten version of ‘Maid Quiet’ on 10 Jul. (CL 4, 694), and a text of ‘Te Ragged [Hollow] Wood’ on 28 Jul. (CL 4, 700): each of these poems had occupied the place in the story ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’ which [‘O Death’s old bony fnger’] would occupy in the 1908 vol. Fictional context. In ‘Te Twisting of the Rope’, Red Hanrahan takes the girl Oona into a dance in company, where the young men are making fun of him on account of his ragged appearance (M, 150): But he took no notice, and Oona took no notice, but they looked at one another as if all the world belonged to themselves alone. [. . .] But Hanrahan turned his back on them as if angry, and in place of dancing he began to sing, and as he sang he held her hand, and his voice grew louder, and the mocking of the young men stopped, and the fddle stopped, and there was nothing heard but his voice that had in it the sound of the wind. And what he sang was a song he had heard DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-35

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or had made one time in his wanderings on Slieve Echtge, and the words of it as they can be put into English were like this: – [lines 1–12 follow here] And while he was singing it Oona moved nearer to him, and the colour had gone from her cheek, and her eyes were not blue now, but grey with the tears that were in them, and any one that saw her would have thought she was ready to follow him there and then from the west to the east of the world. In ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’, the poem is found close to the beginning of the story (M, 161): 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 Ben 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: – [frst four stanzas of poem follow here] Afer the fourth stanza, there is some further narrative (M, 162): 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 brier bush, with blossoms on it, that was growing beside a rath, and it brought to mind the wild roses he used to bring to Mary Lavelle, and to no woman afer her. And he tore of a little branch of the bush, that had buds on it and open blossoms, and he went on with his song: – [ffh stanza follows here] Copy-text: M.

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O Death’s old bony fnger Will never fnd us there In the high hollow townland Where love’s to give and to spare; Where boughs have fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Where rivers are running over

[For textual variants, see notes to ‘Te Happy Townland’.] 3. high hollow] Perhaps cp. W.L. Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘Te Spirit of Discovery by Sea’, I, 170: ‘midnight’s high hollow vault’. 5–6.] Te thought here is one of preternaturally rapid natural abundance. Perhaps cp.

Katharine Tynan, Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘Aspiration’, 6–7: ‘Green are the felds of the earth, holy and sweet her joys; | Take and taste, and be glad – as fruit and blossom and bird’, and E.B. Browning, Poetical Works (1897), ‘An Island’, 37–39: ‘Trees .  .  . | whose clear fruit and blossom fne’.

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With red beer and brown beer. An old man plays the bagpipes In a golden and silver wood; Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, Are dancing in a crowd. The little fox he murmured, ‘O what of the world’s bane?’ The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, ‘O do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world’s bane.’ When their hearts are so high That they would come to blows, They unhook their heavy swords From golden and silver boughs; But all that are killed in battle Awaken to life again. It is lucky that their story Is not known among men, For O the strong farmers That would let the spade lie,

8. red beer] Irish red ale originated (in commercial terms at least) in eighteenth-century Kilkenny, though WBY may be infuenced by the antiquarian imagination of e.g. T.C. Irwin, Poems, Sketches, and Songs (1889), ‘An Old Irish Scene’, 29: ‘furthest from the freplace, a huge bronze vat of red beer’. 10. golden] EPS and afer; gold CWVP08. Te word ‘golden’ had been the consistent reading of all versions of ‘Te Happy Townland’ from ISW onwards; WBY’s use of ‘gold’ in CWVP08 vol. 5 co-exists with his continuing to have ‘golden’ in this position for ‘Te Happy Townland’ in vol. 1. ‘Gold’ is also the reading at this point in the text of the poem employed in the story ‘Hanrahan’s Vision’ for CWVP08. 20, 52. the world’s bane] Tis phrase may well derive from WBY’s work on William Blake.

In E.J. Ellis’s and WBY’s Te Works of William Blake (1893), commentary on the poem ‘Te Grey Monk’ is relevant (Vol. 2, 225): It is easy to see that in the ‘Monk,’ as in ‘Milton,’ Blake had his own career in mind. ‘He told me that all I wrote should prove the bane of all that on earth I love,’ recalls some lines written at Felpham about the same time and sent in a letter to Mr. Butts – ‘Must my wife live in my sister’s bane | And my sister survive on my love’s pain?’ Te word ‘bane’ is so rare in Blake, that though the use of it is not the same here, both belong to the threat of evil accompanied by command to work [. . .] See also Blake, Songs of Experience, ‘Earth’s Answer’, 21–23: ‘Selfsh! vain, | Eternal bane! | Tat free love with bondage bound’.

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Their hearts would be like a cup That somebody had drunk dry.

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Michael will unhook his trumpet From a bough overhead, And blow a little noise When the supper has been spread. Gabriel will come from the water With a fsh-tail, and talk Of wonders that have happened On wet roads where men walk, And lift up an old horn Of hammered silver, and drink Till he has fallen asleep Upon the starry brink.

31–32.] With the thought and the simile here (as well as with the adjective ‘strong’ in 29), perhaps cp. E. Dowden, Poems (1876), fnal lines of ‘Burdens’ (11–12): ‘Strong soul to strong soul rendered up, | And silence flling like a cup’. 33–34.] Te archangel Michael is ofen depicted armed and with a sword, but in some later Christian tradition he is associated with the day of judgement, and the blowing of the last trumpet on that occasion. WBY was familiar with various magical associations of Michael, in Cabbalistic and GD practices. Here, however, such arcane aspects are not in view, and Michael’s unhooking of a trumpet from a tree in order to ‘blow a little noise | When the supper has been spread’ turns him (with deliberate bathos) into a kind of domestic servant with a musical talent as limited as his instrument. Later, in ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time’ (1911), WBY presented a more orthodox version of ‘St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection’ (CW 4, 229). 37–38.] Te next archangel, Gabriel, is like Michael familiar to WBY through esoteric associations; notably here, he is identifed with the element of water (where Michael’s

element was taken to be that of fre). Tis identifcation rests on very slender evidence, and may indeed have its origin in purely personal symbolic improvisation on WBY’s part; staying with George Pollexfen at a time when his uncle was ill, the poet remembered how he helped to banish the ‘red dancing fgures’ of fever: ‘I imagined the cabbalistic symbol of water [. . .] I told him what I had done and that, if the dancing fgures came again, he was to bid them go in the name of the Archangel Gabriel.’ Te reason for this was that ‘Gabriel is an angel of the Moon in the Cabbala and might, I considered, command the waters at a pinch’ (Te Trembling of the Veil (1922), CW 3, 214). K. Raine (Yeats the Initiate (1986), 24) writes of this reference that water is ‘the moist element of generation over which Gabriel, as the angel of the Annunciation, is held in esoteric terms to preside’. D.H. Purdy, contrasting Gabriel here with angelic depiction in Revelation, sees WBY as establishing an ironic parallel to the Bible: ‘a Gabriel out of occult lore will relate wet wonders rather than announce the birth of God to Mary’ (Purdy, 65). In terms of iconography, WBY’s introduction of a fsh-tail in these lines is rare, and possibly unique.

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The little fox he murmured, ‘O what of the world’s bane?’ The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, ‘O do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world’s bane.’

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AN APPOINTMENT Date of composition. In his hol. version of the poem in AG’s copy of P01 WBY dates these lines ‘August 25 | 1907’; the same date is typed at the foot of the poem in a single-sheet TS (see Textual history). Circumstances. In 1907, the Directorship of the National Museum of Science and Art, in Kildare Street in Dublin, was given to George Noble, a lawyer, writer, art-historian, and former Parnellite Nationalist politician, known by his papally bestowed title of Count Plunkett: he took up his duties on 17 Oct. Te appointment rufed feathers at Coole, since AG had understood that her nephew, Hugh Lane (1875–1915), would be given the post. In Dublin when the news broke, she lost no time in sending a telegram back to Coole and WBY, who was then in residence. AG’s recollections from 1921 record WBY’s state of mind on her return to Coole (AG, Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement (1921), 85): I had sent a telegram home, as well as one to Hugh in London, telling the dreary news. Yeats was staying with us, and had raged when it was received. It was, in his mind, one of the worst of crimes, that neglect to use the best man, the man of genius, in place of the timid obedient ofcial. Tat use of the best had been practised in the great days of the Renaissance. He had grown calmer before my arrival, because when walking in the woods, the sight of a squirrel had given him a thought for some verses, the frst he had ever written on any public event: [quotes poem] WBY’s further thoughts were also dutifully recorded by the poet himself (87): Yeats says also that Hugh ‘had said in a moment of irritation to one of the ofcials of the Museum, ‘If I am ever head of this Museum I will make you work,’ and that ofcial became a very active agitator. While it was another ofcial, who would have been his superior, dreading a strong-willed subordinate, had justifed his opposition with the sentence, ‘Te time has not come to encourage the arts in Ireland.’ At least this is the account given generally in Dublin at the time. Tough I imagine that what weighed most with the Government was that the time had very defnitely come to appoint a Catholic. To them it was an entirely theological question.’ AG does not disclose the identity of ‘another ofcial’ here; but clearly both WBY and she were convinced that the appointment had been corruptly mishandled. Te tinge of DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-36

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sectarianism is perhaps revealing of both the poet’s and AG’s assumptions about current political pieties. WBY wrote to Hugh Lane in late Aug. that ‘I wanted to tell you how indignant I feel over Count Plunkett afair’ (CL 4, 715), and Lane himself must have been shown the poem (he was ‘pleased, though a little puzzled, by the lines’ according to AG (85)). It is obvious, though, that at Coole in Aug. blame for the failure to appoint Lane was being freely apportioned. AG’s later account takes pains to explain that she was herself at the time inclined to blame Augustine Birrell, the government’s Chief Secretary for Ireland, and that Birrell himself later explained that he was in no way responsible, and had indeed been shocked by Lane’s having been passed over. Birrell is very likely to have been made to scapegoat (and he was to become the subject of a hostile epigram of WBY’s in 1909 – see ‘[On a certain middle-aged ofce holder]’), along with T.W. Russell, the MP who had recently (on 21 May) replaced Sir Horace Plunkett, a core member of the Coole circle, as Vice-President of the Department of Agriculture in Ireland. But the appointment itself was not at all so plainly corrupt or short-sighted as AG and WBY suggested. Count Plunkett (who replaced – confusingly – one Colonel Plunkett as the Museum’s Director) was certainly well-qualifed for the position. Te Irish Times of 7 Sep. found no controversy to cover in the appointment, and ofered a fair profle of Plunkett’s merits: No director could bring to the important duties of his ofce more complete accomplishments, and none could hope to view the functions of a great museum in a spirit in which sympathy, keen insight, and judicious criticism are more happily combined [. . .] He has long been recognised as an authority on art. His writings on great painters and on schools of painting are now standard works. He has as fne a sense of literature as of painting; and his lectures upon sculpture show wide sympathies and an illuminative view. Tose who recall his demonstrations in the museum of which he is now to take control will realise how eminently he is ftted to the ofce of director. Hugh Lane’s accomplishments were of a diferent order, in that they belonged as much to the world of commerce as to that of art and conservatorship. Lane’s mother had been one of the Roxborough Persses (AG’s sister), but he did not begin adult life as a wealthy man; he worked his way up through the profession of art dealership in London, and afer useful but ultimately unhappy apprenticeships in the 1890s to the likes of the great dealer Colnaghi, he had an independent career of spectacular success. He was a gifed and driven businessman: as his entry in DNB records, Lane ‘sold modest paintings for immodest prices’, but he went on to discover and make killings on paintings by Hals, Romney, and even Titian. By 1907, he was a well-known fgure in the international art market, and also in Dublin, where his eforts towards setting up (and stocking) a new national gallery had been underway for some time. Tough his professional eye was extraordinarily well-developed, his other credentials for the directorship were less obvious; and Dublin gossip was quick to link his plans for a new gallery with projected profts for himself. Tis was unfair (as AG and WBY maintained), but it was not an altogether unreasonable suspicion. Lane’s reputation and practices were

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to some extent moot; as R. Foster summarizes matters (in connection with the projected gallery): ‘It was sharply remarked that [Lane] was a notably successful art dealer who turned famous profts [. . .] On the one hand, Lane was assailed by the bourgeois Dublin establishment, who thought the pictures worthless and wrote to the papers saying so; and on the other, by the United Irishman, which harped on Lane’s own art dealing and insinuated he was lining his pockets’ (Foster 1, 327). A smooth appointment to the directorship of the Museum can hardly have been a plausible prospect in these circumstances. In the event, his failure to secure the Museum post did not greatly derail the indefatigable Lane, and plans for his gallery, along with ever-changing disagreements with its possible municipal sponsors, were to continue unabated until his unexpected death on the Lusitania in 1915. Even then, quarrels over Lane’s collection and its home were far from over. Lane’s paintings, and the disputed codicil to his will, were to be the focus of a centrally signifcant public quarrel for WBY (as for AG) in the years to come. Te short poem itself is occasional in nature, and was written into the MS record, so to speak, when WBY inscribed it in one of AG’s books. Nevertheless, it was not entirely private (or private to the Coole circle), since the poet decided to publish it – though a year and a half later, in 1909 (see Textual history). If it primarily concerns Hugh Lane, and is in that sense an act calculated to please AG in her moment of indignation, it is also about the unsatisfactoriness of ‘government’ appointments more generally. AG’s addition of the names of Russell and Birrell to the MS version is signifcant: both of these men, in fact, had recently been given government jobs in place of members of the Coole circle – Russell had displaced Sir Horace Plunkett, and Birrell had succeeded George Wyndham. Birrell may even be a subliminal presence in WBY’s poem. Having apparently forgotten about the piece for seven years, WBY wrote to Padriac Colum for information on it in connection with ‘the Hugh Lane poems’ (presumably, the poems relating to Lane in R14): with his memory uncertain, the poet told Colum that the mislaid verse ‘was written the day afer I got the news of “Count” Plunkett’s appointment and was published within two or three months’ [in fact it had waited eighteen months to be published], and that ‘the poem was called something like this “On a recent Government Appointment in Ireland”, and the animal was a squirril’ (InteLex 2354). Tough WBY’s spellings are less ofen signifcant than they are unwittingly wrong, ‘squirril’ may indicate the phantasmal presence, somewhere at the back of WBY’s mind as he struggles to recollect this poem, of Augustine Birrell – a fgure much in his and AG’s thoughts in the week it was composed. Te poem did not succeed in rousing public awareness, still less indignation, though a writer for Te Saturday Review for 6 Feb. 1909 served notice that ‘Mr. Yeats will hardly advance his reputation if he endeavours to make poetry serve the ends of politics’, quoting the poem, and its squirrel, as evidence of the dangers being run. Textual history. WBY copied this poem on to a fyleaf in AG’s copy of P01 at Coole, now in the Woodruf Collection, Emory University. Te verses have some corrections in his hand, with a title written in by AG (MS): they are repr. with transcription in the Cornell Responsibilities: Manuscript Materials ed. William H. O’Donnell (2003), 368–369. Tere is also a TS copy, NLI 21855 (TS), which is a carbon with some hol. corrections by WBY. Te poet evidently did not keep a close hold on the verses, and when

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he needed to send them to Te English Review he was obliged to ask AG ‘Can you send me the squirrell [sic] poem by return?’ (letter of 30 Nov. 1908, CL 5, 343). Te poem was published in Te English Review (Feb. 1909) (ER), but it was not collected until R14: and page proofs for this carry corrections (Proofs). It was included subsequently in R16 and all future collected editions. Te poem’s absence from GH10 and GH12 probably indicates no more than that WBY had put it aside as a largely occasional piece; by 1914, his sense of that occasion had had time to deepen (see Circumstances). Copy-text: P49.

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Being out of heart with government I took a broken root to fing Where the proud, wayward squirrel went, Taking delight that he could spring; And he, with that low whinnying sound That is like laughter, sprang again And so to the other tree at a bound. Nor the tame will, nor the timid brain, Nor heavy knitting of the brow Bred that ferce tooth and cleanly limb And threw him up to laugh on the bough; No government appointed him.

Title. On the Appointment of Count Plunkett to Curatorship of Dublin Museum, by T.W. Russell and Birrell, Hugh Lane being a Candidate MS (in the hand of AG); On a Recent Government Appointment in Ireland ER; [On a Recent Government del.] Appointment Proof. 1. out of heart] OED defnes the phrase, now rare, as ‘In low spirits; discouraged, disheartened, despondent’. with] at MS, ER. 2.] I [took up a small stone del.] found a broken root to fing MS; I [took up a small stone del.] [found del.] took a broken root to fing TS. 3. proud, wayward] Tese are unexpected adjectives for a squirrel, though WBY had more regard for the squirrels of Coole Park than AG ever felt (see ‘I walked among the seven woods of Coole’ 5 and note). Perhaps cp. Lady Caroline Lamb, Fugitive Pieces (1829),

‘Would I had seen thee dead and cold’, 14–15: ‘To think afection’s chain | Could thy proud wayward heart confne’. went] was del. went Proof. 5. low whinnying sound] Cp. K. Tynan, Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘Te Story of Blessed Columba and the Horse’, 49–50: ‘With a low whinnying neigh | He ran full wild and fast’. 6. sprang] ran del. sprang MS, TS. 7. at] with del. at MS; with TS. 8.] Nor timid [heart del.] will, nor the tame brain MS; Nor timid will nor the tame brain TS. 9.] Line omitted R14, R16. Te line, which was present in ER, was probably dropped through error: it was restored in hol. by WBY in a family copy of R16, and was back in print from LP22 onwards. heavy] solemn del. heavy MS, TS. 11. And] Nor MS; Nor del. And TS. 12. government] Government TS, ER.

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[‘ACCURSED WHO BRINGS TO LIGHT OF DAY’] Date and circumstances of composition. No evidence, whether in the form of MS material or in WBY’s correspondence, survives to give a defnite date for the composition of this quatrain. Circumstantial evidence suggests Apr.–Jun. 1908, and possibly a time in the second half of Apr. or the frst half of May. Trough the spring of 1908, WBY was in constant correspondence with A.H. Bullen, the publisher of CWVP08, and with Bullen’s editorial and publishing assistant, Edith Lister: the eighth and fnal vol. of the edition as planned was partly dependent on WBY’s supplying recent or fugitive material, and it was arranged that the young Allan Wade should prepare an extensive bibliography. Wade did this (with the assistance of JQ for US materials) by Jun. 1908, the date which appears at the foot of his prefatory Note. (Even then, the text was evidently updated later, since its most recent inclusion is the publication of the poem ‘His Dream’ on Jul. 11.) Te bibliography was substantial, and took up pp. 197–287 of the volume: almost a third, that is, of the whole book. It is likely – but not certain – that WBY wrote his quatrain afer seeing Wade’s bibliography, rather than in the mere expectation of it; and he is credited in Wade’s Note with giving assistance. Te placing of the quatrain – immediately afer the Note, at the top of the facing page and just before the frst entry in the bibliography – may suggest that it was in place by Jun., when Wade entered the date. If WBY’s quatrain is in some kind of allusive relationship to Shakespeare’s epitaph (see Critical interpretation), it might not be mere literalism to connect this with the poet’s trip to see Bullen at Stratford upon Avon of 11–13 Apr. 1908, and a likely visit to Holy Trinity Church there to view Shakespeare’s monument. Discussions about publishing matters with Bullen over the weekend would have been intensive, and probably concerned substantially the selection of portraits for plates in some of the volumes of CWVP08; WBY was able to inspect a trial copy of one of the projected vols., and might well have been shown an early version of Wade’s bibliography, if only to have a sense of the space it might occupy, and how much of vol. 8 might be lef to fll. On 14 May, WBY was arranging with Edith Lister for a stray Prologue from Te King’s Treshold to be inserted in the bibliography (CL 5, 224), so he was by this stage well aware of the piece itself, and might very well already have given Bullen and Lister (or Wade) his quatrain. It is tempting to think that the poem itself was produced at Stratford during the poet’s visit. Critical interpretation. Despite its having appeared only once in WBY’s lifetime, the quatrain has had a continuing life in published criticism of the poet. It is (for obvious reasons) ofen adduced by WBY’s editors, perhaps in their anxiety to escape his curse.

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Te Fortnightly Review for Feb. 1909, gladly receiving CWVP08 as a whole, endorsed and quoted the quatrain: In this collected edition, we read the story of [WBY’s] life and of his work: we read it by the light of the Bibliography over which he has written in humorous protest at this disturbing of forgotten dreams [quotes poem]. When we compare the writings kept with the writings rejected, we fnd that the kind worm has not gone hungry. It has been said that a good author is a bad critic, for he always praises his worst work. But Mr. Yeats has shown his strength fully as much by what is cast away as by what is lef; and though bibliophiles will prize to the end their ‘frst editions,’ the lettered reader will doubtless prefer the author’s ripened judgment. Modern criticism has taken a diferent direction. In part, this is already acknowledged as an inevitability by the poem itself; indeed, it might well be argued that the poem in this respect makes assurance doubly sure. As G. Bornstein puts it, ‘Te quatrain stands in the characteristic Yeatsian gesture of calling attention to that which it claims to repudiate, and it is embedded in a project that enables the recovery of the very texts that the new edition claims to replace’ (‘What is the Text of a Poem by Yeats’, in G. Bornstein and R.G. Williams eds., Palimpsest: Editorial Teory in the Humanities (1993), 173). Tis paradox may become all the more noticeable when a possible source for WBY’s thought is brought alongside it, since the quatrain does appear to be at least aware of (and perhaps deliberately alluding to) the lines engraved over Shakespeare’s tomb in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon Avon: Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yt moves my bones. Te possible signifcance of the Shakespearean context is discussed in P. McDonald, ‘Yeats’s Canons’, Essays in Criticism 60/3 (2010), where some of the complexities of the poem’s relation to this source, and to questions of scholarly intrusion, are raised (256–257): Tat the quatrain’s place should be at the beginning of a bibliography is suggestive without being decisive: it suggests authorial distancing from scholarly events while at the same time forbidding what it obviously cannot now prevent. Te little poem’s Shakespearean dimension becomes more marked and more problematic, for its function on the page (and this particular page, in this one edition, was the only place Yeats wanted the lines to appear) is similar to that of the lines on the grave at Stratford: it stands guard over remains, reverently itemised by Wade, that are not to be disturbed by posterity. And yet, in contrast to the Shakespearean lines, this poem is rendered more puzzling, rather than

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more directly meaningful and functional, by its exact context. Short of being buried in an unmarked and secret location, Shakespeare could do no more to guard over his mortal remains; Yeats, on the other hand, if he was so anxious about the fate of his textual body, might easily have discouraged the inclusion of a bibliography, and obviated the need for his warning verses.

Copy-text: CWVP08 vol. 8. Accursed who brings to light of day The writings I have cast away! But blessed he that stirs them not And lets the kind worm take the lot!

1. Accursed who] WBY’s formal poetic diction archaizes in the same way as that attempted by Tennyson: cp. Idylls of the King, ‘Gareth and Lynette’, 340–341: ‘Accursed, who from

the wrongs his father did | Would shape himself a right’ and 427: ‘Accursed, who strikes’. 3. blessed] Disyllabic.

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HIS DREAM Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was composed on 3 Jul. 1908, a date written at the top of MS1 and printed with the poem in Te Nation (see Textual history); a letter to JQ from Coole of 4 Jul. 1908 ends with the information that ‘I wrote a lyric yesterday, and am going to settle down to a play’ (CL 5, 252). WBY had arrived at Coole from Dublin the day before; he had been in Dublin for a week, having come there from Paris by way of London, where he spent just two days. From 4 Jul., WBY was working concertedly on his play Te Player Queen. Afer the poem’s publication on 11 Jul., WBY set it aside: in Sep. 1909, however, he returned to it when entering in his Journal the ‘Corrected version of a poem written a year ago’. WBY, MG, and ‘dream’ relations in summer 1908. Writing to A. Horniman in Jun. 1907 about his work in and for the theatre, WBY had (a little breezily) refected that ‘Tere is always lyric poetry to return to’ (CL, 4, 671); and on 4 Oct. 1907, WBY had announced his intention to write lyrics for a year (letter to JQ): ‘critics generally tell one,’ he complained to T.Sturge Moore on the same day, ‘that one should go back to the lyric’; and again that day, writing to A.H. Bullen, WBY declared that ‘I intend my next book afer the collected edition to be a volume of lyrics and narrative poems’. In fact, the time between summer 1907 and the beginning of Jul. 1908 had been entirely without any new lyrics for the poet. ‘His Dream’ marks the end of this dry spell (though WBY had in other ways been far from idle during that period), but it coincides also with major changes in his personal life, and in particular changes in his relationship with MG. Trough the autumn, WBY and MG had grown closer again, initially in connection with MG’s worries over the terms of settlement for her separation from John MacBride, and WBY was on hand in correspondence to provide emotional and astrological support in MG’s difculties. For her part, MG found herself once again possessed of the ability to see the kinds of vision that WBY would be likely to fnd arousing, mystically and otherwise. Tis began on 8 Jan. 1908 (G-YL, 252): I had a strange vision this morning which makes me write to you. It is all very indefnite, only I seemed to feel afer I had to write to you. It seemed to me you had a choice to make on which much depended – I think it is in connection with your work – It is most important that you should choose the higher. [. . .] I got to a place of dazzling light where great titan forms of light and immense energy were moving. I thought they were the higher souls but I was not sure. Ten suddenly I saw you and you seemed anxious and troubled about something, DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-38

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as if you were trying to see that world of light and energy and to get help and something was impeding you then things faded [. . .] By 8 Apr., MG was informing WBY of how ‘I dreamed of you last night’ (G-YL, 253), and later that month MG’s dreams of the poet became more vivid: (G-YL, 254): I don’t think the visions I got refer in any way to your material life – One was, I saw you trying hard to climb a mountain, and some barrier preventing you. [.  .  .] I had (I don’t trust dreams) I seemed to see you in some trouble you seemed very distressed and I had that sort of nightmare feeling of powerlessness. I didn’t know how to comfort you or understand quite what was the matter. I woke up and dreamed again directly afer, but then you seemed quite consoled and to have got over whatever trouble there may have been. ‘Trouble’ was (as MG probably knew) a word with distinct sexual signifcance for WBY (he would later recall his frst meeting with her as when ‘the troubling of my life began’ (Mem., 40)). Although MG pitched these visions as relevant to WBY’s ‘occult life’, the spirit in which he would be likely to receive them was far from esoteric. And it was not any prospect of occult reconciliation with MacGregor Mathers that drew WBY back to Paris for a week from 17 to 23 Jun. 1908; staying across the road from MG, he was able to be with her constantly. R. Foster makes the reasonable speculation that WBY and MG’s ‘relationship had come closer to a resolution than ever before’, noting how MG felt the pair were ‘mystically [. . .] attuned to each other once more, and so did [WBY]’ (Foster 1, 387). A renewal of the so-called ‘mystical marriage’ between WBY and MG was of necessity a psychic matter rather than a physical one (though the week in Paris doubtless blurred that distinction somewhat). However, the main form of consummation (as is evident from both WBY’s account of evoking ‘union’ with MG in late Jul. (see Foster 1, 387) and MG’s own letter to the poet of 26 Jul. (G-YL, 256–257)) came in dream-visions. In this context, WBY’s poem of early Jul. is afected by the general atmosphere of romantic re-involvement with MG, and a certain amount of sexual/astral anticipation: ‘His Dream’, in this way, takes account of ‘her dream’, and seeks to share it. Raymond Lully [Nicolas Flamel] And His Wife Pernella. In the Cuala Press GH10 this is the frst of eight poems grouped under the heading ‘Raymond Lully and His Wife Pernella’. A factual problem with this title was brought to light ahead of publication, when WBY sent an advance copy of GH10 to MG. Replying to WBY at the end of Sep. 1910, MG asked (G-YL, 294): Tell me, are you quite sure that Pernella was the wife of Raymond Lully? My memory is so bad but I think Pernella was the name of the wife of Nicholas Flamel the Alchemist and two streets in Paris called one Nicholas Flamel and the other Pernelle named afer them. MG was right, and she cleared up the matter more completely in a letter of 10 Oct. Te book was of course already printed, so on the leaf afer the Contents page, an erratum

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slip (headed simply ‘ERROR’) was inserted: ‘By a slip of the pen when I was writing out the heading for the frst group of poems, I put Raymond Lully’s name in the room of the later Alchemist, Nicolas Flamel. | W.B. Yeats.’ Tis title for the grouping of poems was not repeated in GH12 (where the grouping itself was broken up), so WBY never was able to correct his ‘slip of the pen’ in any future printing. In her 10 Oct. letter, MG found herself in the unusual position of correcting WBY on his knowledge of mystical and alchemical history, and she briskly disentangled Lully from Flamel (G-YL, 295): I have been looking up Raymond Lully in the French Encyclopaedia – he was a most interesting person, a catholic mystic who lived in 1235 – much more interesting than Nicholas Flamel the Alchemist but there is no mention of his wife. He was a student of the Cabbala and wrote a great number of philosophic and mystical books and had wonderful ecstatic visions, he founded a convent at Majorca and fnally was stoned to death when a very old man by the musselmans who he was trying to convert into Christianity. Nicholas Flamel’s wife was named Pernella – Tey lived in Paris about two centuries later – and possessed great wealth which they made some say by usury but anyhow they used it very generously and two streets in Paris are named afer them. Nicholas Flamel (c.1340–1418) was a Parisian businessman and seller of manuscripts who was a prosperous citizen and a noted civic benefactor; he married Pernella in 1368. Raymond Lully was the Catalonian philosopher, linguist and missionary Ramon Llull (c.1232–c.1315), to whom a series of alchemical and occult treatises were falsely ascribed. WBY therefore knew of him as a mystical alchemist, and in the story ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (1896) there is a reference to ‘Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock’, and immediately aferwards, to ‘Flamel, who with his wife Pernella achieved the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the Dervishes’ (M, 185). Lully and Flamel were included together again in a passage from the 1902 version of WBY’s abandoned novel Te Speckled Bird, where a character asks (SB, 163): ‘What can Arthur’s knights be to me when compared with Francois de Brie, with that other the Frisian, with Nicholas Flamel, with Raymond Lully, with the great masters who attained to all human wisdom and made death itself their servant so that they died but at their own time, if indeed some of them are not still living on and but waiting their opportunity to teach the world once again.’ Te notion that Flamel, having discovered the Elixir, did not die but absconded into the East where he continues to live with Pernella, seems to have begun with the numerous seventeenth- to nineteenthcentury re-inventions of this medieval fnancier and philanthropist as a powerful and successful alchemist (no evidence whatsoever exists to suggest the historical Flamel practised alchemy). WBY’s GD colleagues might well have cited Flamel and Pernella, and the poet was very probably aware of the account of Flamel (a few pages on from one of Lully) in A.E. Waite’s Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers (1888). Here, Pernella is depicted as something other than a mystical and otherworldly beauty (Flamel ‘applied himself steadily to business, and contracted a prudent marriage, his choice falling on a

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widow, named Pernelle, who, though handsome, was over forty years, but who brought a considerable dowry to her second husband’ (96). Nevertheless, Waite retold the fction of the couple’s immortality, including the report of one mystical adept (117): At last I took the liberty of naming the celebrated Flamel, who, it was said, possessed the philosophers’ stone, yet was certainly dead. He smiled at my simplicity, and asked with an air of mirth: ‘Do you really believe this? No, no, my friend, Flamel is still living; neither he nor his wife are dead. It is not above three years since I lef both the one and the other in the Indies; he is one of my best friends.’ Again, WBY made use of this in his uncompleted novel, where he has the same idea voiced by one of the characters (SB [1902 version], 70): I am only ffy and have yet time to fnd the Elixir. When I have found it I will disappear. People will think I am dead, but I will go to Arabia, as did Nicholas Flamel and his wife when they found the Elixir, and perhaps I shall fnd Nicholas Flamel and his wife there. I will give you some of the Elixir too and we will grow wise together. If WBY’s memory is to be trusted, he had already ofered Flamel and Pernella as exemplars for himself and MG at the time of their frst ‘mystical marriage’ in 1891. In his 1916–1917 draf Autobiography, WBY remembered MG’s (brief) period as a fellowstudent of his in the GD (Mem., 49): ‘We went to London and were initiated in the Hermetic Students, and I began to form plans of our lives devoted to mystic truth, and spoke to her of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, Pernella’. Te sequence-title in GH10, botched as it was by WBY’s ‘slip of the pen’, recorded a period when the poet saw himself and MG as, once again, possible successors to Flamel and Pernella. Te philosophers’ stone and the Elixir, in the literal sense, were not on the cards; and a sought-afer immortality needs to be understood also in something of a metaphorical light. Interestingly, it was MG who articulated the consequences of a mystical union with WBY in the transmutation of life into love-poetry. Tanking WBY for GH10 in Sep. 1910, she voiced a telling contrast (G-YL, 294): Of all my work and all my efort little will remain because I worked on the ray of Hate, I think, and the Demons of hate which possessed me are not eternal – what you have written for me will live because our love has always been high and pure. – You have loved generously and unselfshly as few men have loved – It is what remains to me out of the wreck of life, and what I can take with me into the peace of the Sanctuary. Te sequence-title itself did not so much as make a start on immortality: in the American GH12, it had disappeared, and it did not reappear in any subsequent context.

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Reception and critical interpretation. WBY was pleased by his poem in 1908: he told his father on 17 Jul. how ‘I am better here [Coole] and am working well, and have done a new lyric, and a good one’ (CL 5, 259). How ‘new’ this really was could be questioned by early reviewers; Te English Review for Apr. 1911 found WBY ‘standing where he stood, but perplexed by fnding that the tide had receded from him,’ adding that the Flamel and Pernella sequence saw the poet seeming ‘to halt uncertainly between the poetry of meaning and the poetry of signifcance,’ so that the poems ‘seem to waver between a fame and an illumination, and are therefore extremely puzzling to locate’. F. Reid, unimpressed by GH10 as ‘of all Mr. Yeats’s books, the one we could most readily spare’, thought ‘the Flamel group of poems’ ‘more obscure than anything else [WBY] has written’, and may well have had this particular poem in mind (Reid, 238). Not all critics of WBY have been so ready to concede puzzlement. A relatively straightforward interpretation was ofered by T.R. Henn, in the biographical context that ‘Maud Gonne is divorced from MacBride [in strict point of fact, this was untrue in 1908], but the fame is burning still [. . .] Yeats is thinking of himself as in control of his destiny and his poetry: this I take to be the symbol of the steering-oar’ (Henn, 118). And when they are more complex, broadly allegorical interpretations still risk being either tendentious or overdetermined by larger arguments. Although D. Kiberd strains the poem’s resources of allusion when he states that the scene is ‘based on that biblical setting in which Jesus preached to the multitude from a boat’, his reading of the allegory is a suggestive one, that WBY ‘may be admitting his failure to evoke a respectful silence in which his own true voice would be heard’; it is more doubtful, even so, whether the poet is here ‘an early Modernist ofciating over the last rites of Romanticism’ (Howes and Kelly, 120–121). H. Bloom saw the poem as one written ‘in the manner of some of the nightmare visions of Coleridge’, in which ‘Te gaudy ship of Yeats’s love-poetry, or poetic love, carries the death-principle, as the poet’s audience or friends compel him to learn’, and ‘Maud Gonne here, by the terrible logic of nightmare, is the sweetly-named Death’ (Bloom, 168–169). Rather than looking forwards, WBY may be looking into his own past. D. Holdeman sees this poem as ‘restoring the eerie, suicidal aura of the poet’s late-nineties work’ where the ‘shrouded fgure’ entrances the speaker ‘into an ecstatic state resembling the deathlike transformation embraced by Michael Robartes and his disciples in ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (Te Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats (2006), 56). Tis connection with what might be considered something of an imaginative terminus for WBY’s 1890s fction is perceptive, for what is at stake in both short story and poem is ultimately the preservation of individuality from the death-bound power of a collective, whether that is a mob or a body of mystics absorbed in their common transcendent ritual. For N. Grene, ‘His Dream’ registers how ‘some automaton impulse moves the poet, despite himself, to join the chorus of the crowd,’ but ‘With the instability of dream imagery, the poem fgures the pull of the death wish towards an aferlife in which the individual soul is gathered into the congregation of the dead, the poet’s voice subsumed into their voices’ (Grene, 65). Whether WBY’s metrical pattern here (abab rhyme, with three tetrameters followed by a trimeter) can be interpreted as a fully calculated departure from the ballad stanza is doubtful, but H. Vendler’s reading of the poem as a ballad ‘in dream guise’ does issue in useful critical points. For Vendler, this is ‘a Symbolist poem in which narrative content

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has been reduced to a minimum’, but nevertheless ‘something of the collective anonymity of the ballad persists, since the speaker’s voice is framed by a collective utterance from the crowd, who usurp the poet’s privilege of naming the body borne by his ship’ (Vendler, 114). M. Howes also directs attention towards the signifcance of the ‘crowd’ in this poem, as one ‘erotically drawn to dissolution and death [. . .] the kind of collectivity it represents spells the erasure of the individual’ (Howes, 97). Te role and the meaning of the poem’s ‘crowd’ are certainly important, and may indicate certain profoundly unsettled issues in WBY’s creative dealings with collective emotion and individual creative vision. For this short poem is very much a matter of ‘vision’, just as much as (in another context) ‘Te Cap and Bells’ (1893) had been a vision-poem, in which multiple possibilities of private and public ‘meaning’ were allowed to interact. For this kind of poetry, as well as for the aesthetic that underlies it, WBY’s major model was William Blake. Partly, this is a matter of a certain visual priority operating in the poems themselves (cp. again ‘Te Cap and Bells’, where this is especially evident). J. Ramazani, calling this a ‘selfreferring dream poem’, argues that it ‘brings into common speech what is normally unsaid, terrifying, and irrational’: ‘It delineates and exemplifes the journey a poem ideally makes, from unconscious insight to ecstatic speech to collective chant’ (‘Self-Teorizing Poetry: Yeats’s Ars Poetica in Te Green Helmet and Other Poems’, YA 16, 58). ‘We know by Yeats’s own accounts that visions provided sources of poetry’, as E.B. Loizeaux writes, so ‘Instead of writing poems on pictures, he could write poems on visions’; as she adds, ‘Blake also provided a model for transforming visions into poetry: according to Yeats, he re-presented them in poems’ (Loizeaux, 44). It seems fair – particularly given WBY’s note for the poem’s frst appearance (see 1908 headnote) – to understand ‘His Dream’ as being to some extent in the tradition of complex vision-ballads such as Blake’s ‘Te Mental Traveller’ or ‘Te Crystal Cabinet’. Like these, however, it will not readily admit of any overarching or single interpretation. Given that, it is still possible to suggest dimensions which afect the poem’s resonance in both biographical and artistic terms for WBY. Tere is obviously a strong awareness of the voice of a ‘crowd’ in the poem, and this is not a voice only, but a physical presence, albeit one from which the speaker on the boat is distanced. What the crowd decides, and what the speaker partly goes along with, is the meaning of the ‘fgure in a shroud’: but is the ‘thing’ on board really ‘Death’? Te most the poem ofers is that the crowd names it so, but the speaker’s own judgement is self-muted: or rather, the speaker is aware that anything he does say on the subject is an echo of what the crowd says, and not an utterance of his own: ‘Tough I’d my fnger on my lip, | What could I but take up the song?’ (13–14). Here, it is tempting to cite the biographical proximity of MG, conjoined with the fctional context of Flamel and Pernella (while remembering that WBY removed this later element very quickly): for WBY, MG was always in danger of becoming the voice of a ‘crowd’ (and MG herself might not have dissented from this), while he understood their ‘mystical marriage’ as something utterly apart from the ‘crowd’, and possibly at odds with it. In the poem, what the voices from the shore call ‘Death’, and declare to be a ‘sweet name’, may have an entirely diferent private meaning. Te ‘gaudy ship’ does not, afer all, sound much like a funeral barge: its brightness of colour might suggest something closer to a wedding vessel. What is on board, then, may be a ‘fgure’ of the couple’s mystical/sexual union, and only ‘Death’ when observed from the distance

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of mundane life. Like Flamel and Pernella, the couple are seen to be dead, but are mystically – and elsewhere – alive. More doubtfully, it might be proposed that a ship with a corpse on board calls up for WBY the memory of MG’s arrival in Dublin in 1891 on the ship that carried Parnell’s body, and that ‘Pernella’ allows the ghost of the name ‘Parnell’ its feeting appearance in the background. For A. Feldman, this is a palpable presence in the poem, and she specifes ‘the fact suppressed in ‘His Dream’ – its relation to a history in which the frenzy of the crowd had ‘dragged down’ Parnell, then worshipped his dead body when it was returned to Ireland’ (‘Te Invisible Hypnotist: Myth and Spectre in some post-1916 Poems and Plays by W.B. Yeats’, YA 21, 109). In 1934, in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ II (10), WBY was to compare Parnell with modern political leaders, and pronounce ‘Teir school a crowd, his master solitude’. But it is of course in the nature of Blakean allegory to suggest many possible meanings, while keeping a stable meaning somewhat at bay; and this poem is no exception to that rule. Textual history. In the British Library, there is a photocopy of a single-page MS in WBY’s hand, containing all of the poem: the original MS from which this photocopy was taken is unlocated (MS1). Te photocopy is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 144–145. Te poem was published frst in Te Nation, 11 Jul. 1908 (this text was republished in the US in Te Living Age 10 Oct. 1908); in Sep. 1908, WBY entered a ‘corrected version’ in his Journal (Boston College, MS2): this is transcribed in Mem., 231–232 and Cornell ISWGH 146–147. Te poem was included as the opening piece in GH10, and was retained in all future collected editions. Copy-text: P49. I swayed upon the gaudy stern The butt-end of a steering-oar,

1908 headnote. In Te Nation, WBY prefaced the poem with the following note: A few days ago I dreamed that I was steering a very gay and elaborate ship upon some narrow water with many people upon its banks, and that there was a fgure upon a bed in the middle of the ship. Te people were pointing to the fgure and questioning, and in my dream I sang verses which faded as I awoke, all but this fragmentary thought, ‘We call it, it has such dignity of limb, by the sweet name of death.’ I have made my poem out of my dream and the sentiment of my dream, and can almost say, as Blake did, ‘Te Authors are in Eternity.’ Te phrase from Blake is found in his letter to Tomas Butts, 6 Jul. 1803: ‘I may praise it [his

poem Jerusalem] since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity’. Title.] No title MS1, MS2. 1–4.] Tere on the carved and painted stern I held a painted steering oar [^Crowds ran up^ del.] And every where that I could turn [I beheld a ^Crowds ran up the^ crowded shore del.] [^Tere was a crowded shore^ del.] [Men crowded del.] Men ran upon the shore. MS1. Tere on the high and painted stern I held a painted steering oar,

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And saw wherever I could turn A crowd upon a shore. 5

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And though I would have hushed the crowd, There was no mother’s son but said, ‘What is the fgure in a shroud Upon a gaudy bed?’ And after running at the brim Cried out upon that thing beneath – It had such dignity of limb – By the sweet name of Death. Though I’d my fnger on my lip, What could I but take up the song? And running crowd and gaudy ship Cried out the whole night long. Crying amid the glittering sea, Naming it with ecstatic breath, Because it had such dignity, By the sweet name of Death.

And everywhere that I could turn Men ran upon the shore. Nation. I swayed upon the gaudy stern Te butt end of a steering oar And every where that I could turn Men ran upon the shore MS2. 2. butt-end] Although ‘butt-end’ is in fact a term used in connection with sailing vessels, to denote the end of a plank that meets that of another, WBY uses the term here simply as in OED 1., ‘Te thicker end of something’. 9.] Ten [ran the fshes of the sea del.] ^And fshes bubbling to the brim^ MS1; And fshes, bubbling to the brim, Nation, MS2. Tese fsh, which were to be eliminated from the poem, seem to have drawn WBY into a somewhat jarring recollection of Keats’s ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 17): it is possible that this was one reason for their removal. brim] Tis is an archaism, and is probably OED 1., ‘An old poetical word for the sea; also, ‘food’, ‘water’’: it was used for archaic efect

by E. Spenser in Te Faerie Queene V ix 35: ‘Te bright sunne, what time his ferie teme | Towards the westerne brim begins to draw’. 10. that thing beneath] D. Kiberd (see Critical reception and interpretation) detects here the infuence of J.M Synge, Riders to the Sea (1903), and Maurya’s report: ‘I looked out then, and there were men coming afer them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it – it was a dry day, Nora – and leaving a track to the door’. 13.] [For all that my ^the^ fnger on the ^my^ lip del.] [Tough I’d my fnger on my lip del.] MS1. 15.] And fsh and crowd and painted ship MS1, Nation; And fsh and crowd and gaudy ship MS2. 16. Cried out] Cried ^out^ MS1. 17.] And in a song ^And all night long^ continuing MS1. 18. Naming it] We named ^praised^ it MS1. 17–20.] At an angle at the side of MS1, another version of the fnal stanza is entered, which is the same as the published text.

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ALL THINGS CAN TEMPT ME Date and circumstances of composition. In WBY’s own account, this poem was composed at Coole on 15 Sep. 1908; it is distinctly possible, however, that it was in fact composed in Jul. 1908. In a letter to the theatrical designer E. Gordon Craig of 15 Sep., WBY ended with these verses, introducing them with ‘Here is a poem I wrote this morning, you will probably sympathise with it’ (CL 5, 303). From composition to TS in a day would have been something of a personal record for WBY. Although the poet was to go on to have a signifcant professional relationship with Craig (who designed, e.g., the costumes for Te Hour-Glass), at this stage he was responding to a generous letter which had invited him to Florence (where Craig was then based), and which asked for contributions to Craig’s art-journal Mask: it is possible that WBY was ofering Craig this poem, though in the event it was not published in the journal. (It was highly unusual, in any case, for WBY to send work to anyone from outside his close circle so near the time of composition as this claims to be.) WBY’s remark that ‘you will probably sympathise’ with the poem relies on Craig’s being a worker in the theatre, and the voiced impatience with the practicalities of the stage comes directly from WBY’s own frustrations in this connection. However, it is also possible that WBY was somewhat overplaying the extent to which this poem was freshly baked. J.M. Hone lef an account of its composition earlier in the summer of 1908, and this is too detailed to be unpersuasive (Hone, 226): [‘All things can tempt me’ was] a composition on which [WBY] was engaged when I stayed at Coole in July. He was then in ordinary evidence at meals, but disappeared for the rest of the day, except for an hour or two in the afernoons, when he could be found on the lake catching trout. A good many guests, mainly Robert’s and Lady Gregory’s, came and went – J.D. Innes, the painter, a few of Robert Gregory’s cricketing friends and the daughter of a Cambridge clergyman. Afer dinner Lady Gregory would make him recite ‘All things can tempt me’, and I remember the charming and modest manner in which he sought the advice of the clergyman’s daughter in regard to alternative versions of the last line: ‘Deafer and dumber and colder than a fsh’. WBY was at Coole from 2 to 11 Jul., and then again from 17 to 23 Jul., and back once more from 28 Jul. 1908. Reception and critical interpretation. In an acute review of GH10, the critic for Te Academy quoted this poem in full as representative of WBY’s attitudes of the past, saying DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-39

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that ‘Hitherto he has clung to his attitude, an attitude that would judge beauty to be an entity rather than an attribute’; with this, he contrasted ‘Te fascination of what’s diffcult’ to claim that ‘Between these two poems [WBY’s] present mood is easily discoverable,’ since ‘He who once would ‘not have given a penny for a song’ (did not the poet imply that he had immediate business in hand of earnest purpose, ‘a sword upstairs’?) and who turned away mournfully from so empirical a muse, is now fnding two things assail him’ (Te Academy 6 May 1911): One is that the difcult thing becomes more and more attenuate, and that the fascination of its pursuit is drying the sap out of his veins. Te other is that the old empiric business of the world is assailing him. Between one and the other his muse is losing fre. He swears he will fee it all. A reviewer of R16 (where the poem was included) refected on how ‘Most bitter of all is the confession that the exercise of [WBY’s] art has lost its supreme attraction [quoting whole poem] On the whole, it is a saddened, disheartened and querulous Mr. Yeats that is revealed’ (Te Spectator, 17 Mar. 1917). ‘Te seeming needs of my fool-driven land’ (3) was a line destined to become much more well-known than the poem from which it came, and it was seldom known with much pleasure. In an unusual episode, the poem found itself being quoted against WBY in the Irish Senate, in a debate of 1926 on the subject of judges’ apparel. WBY had moved an amendment that would clear a path for the complete redesign of court outfts for judges (wholly untroubled by any conficts of interest, he put in a word for both Charles Shannon as designer and Dun Emer Industries as producers of such garments). Opposing, Sir John Keane quoted the frst three lines of this poem as ‘certain verses of the Senator’s in which his words seem to me rather inconsistent with the remarks I have just quoted’ [WBY on the Hugh Lane pictures]. O. St.-J. Gogarty broke in with the demand ‘What is the date?’, and when Keane confessed that he did not know when the verses were written, Gogarty declared ‘It is all-important’. At the close of the debate, WBY thanked Keane for ‘his appropriate and friendly quotations from myself ’, and went on: ‘I would like to say that when I talked of this ‘fool-driven land’ – a good many years ago now – I meant that it was fool-driven in certain matters – poetry and the theatre – matters in which I felt I had a greater right to an opinion than I have in politics’ (Te Senate Speeches of W.B. Yeats ed. Donald R. Pearce (1961), 132). It is by no means clear that WBY had meant anything of the kind. As late as 1950, Austin Clarke could quote the opening line of this poem in Te Irish Times (25 Mar.): “All things can tempt me from this craf of verse,’ wrote Yeats at a time when Irish writing had little commercial value and the Devil could only use politics as a distraction for the talented’. Literary critics have seldom gone much further than the poem’s opening salvo, seen as a statement of position (and disenchantment) by the poet. R. Ellmann’s quasi-paraphrase does, however, highlight some important points (Identity, 10): Te poet, as a young man, had believed that poetry should be written by a man of action; but now he would like nothing better than to isolate himself from action so as to devote himself wholeheartedly to his art. But in choosing a fsh

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for his model he betrays the absurdity of his own wish; he is not renouncing action, but only impatient with it. For if he were really colder and dumber and deafer than a fsh, he would not be a writer at all. So the fascination and necessity of action are implied in their seeming rejection. (If Hone’s recollections are accurate (see Date and circumstances of composition), fsh imagery might well have come readily to hand for WBY, who was regularly angling for the evening meals at Coole.) H. Bloom, too, acknowledged that ‘prolonged reading grants the justice of Yeats’s bitter pride’ here noting how the poet ‘begins to sense a new self-mastery in his craf’ (Bloom, 170). And confdence is both very much to the fore and itself a theme in this poem. V. Mahafey and J. Valente maintain that ‘what [WBY] wants is not to set his inspiration free to fy unrestrained, but to lie low and be mute, declaring that ‘could I but have my wish, | [I would be] Colder and dumber and deafer than a fsh’’ (‘Middle Yeats’, in E. Larrissy (ed.), W.B. Yeats (2010), 54). But ‘Could I but have my wish’ is a phrase that does not quite mean ‘this is what I wish’: its phrasing builds in an acknowledgement central to the poem, that such a wish is not going to be fulflled, owing both to external commitment and clamour, and to the continuing inner compulsion of ‘this craf of verse’ for WBY. Textual history. No draf material survives, but the poem was sent at the end of a typed letter from WBY to E.G. Craig on what WBY claimed was the day of its composition (TS): this is included in CL 5, 303. Te poem was entered in a fair hol. copy by WBY in AG’s PW06 (on a recto fyleaf, opposite his inscription of an untitled ‘At Galway Races’). Te book is now in the collection of Emory University, and the poem is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 212–213 (MS1). WBY also placed a copy (on a separate leaf) in hol. in AG’s CWVP08 vol. 7; this is now in the Berg Collection, NYPL (MS2). Te poem appeared as the last in a series of three short pieces by WBY (afer ‘An Appointment’ and ‘At Galway Races’) in Te English Review for Feb. 1909 (ER), then in the ‘Momentary Toughts’ section of GH10. It was next printed in GH12, and was also included in R16. Tereafer, the poem was included in all WBY’s collected edns. Copy-text: P49.

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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman’s face, or worse – The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil. When I was young, I had not given a penny for a song

Title] Distraction ER. No title TS, MS1; All things can tempt me MS2.

6. a penny] a [far del.] penny MS1: WBY may have begun to write ‘farthing’ before correcting (and putting up) the price here.

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Did not the poet sing it with such airs That one believed he had a sword upstairs; Yet would be now, could I but have my wish, Colder and dumber and deafer than a fsh.

7–8.] Did not the poet carry him [it TS] with an air | As though to say ‘It is the sword elsewhere,’ MS1, MS2, ER. 9. Yet would be now,] I would be now, TS, MS1, ER; Yet would be now MS2.

10.] Perhaps cp. K. Tynan, Cuckoo Songs (1894), ‘A Young Mother’, 19–20: ‘ere yet | Te darkness beckoned, cold and dumb’ and A Lover’s Breast-Knot (1896), ‘Garden Secrets’, 16: ‘Te Winter cold and dumb’.

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AT GALWAY RACES Date of composition. Te poem was probably composed between 10–15 Sep. 1908. WBY’s inscription of the poem in AG’s copy of PW06 carries the date ‘Sept. 1908’: the poet had been busy in Dublin for the frst week of Sep., and returned to Coole on 10 Sep. Since he wrote the poem into AG’s book on the recto of a fyleaf, and inscribed the poem ‘All things can tempt me’ on its facing verso leaf, it seems likely that WBY entered the Galway Races poem there before entering its companion (he would probably have used the recto frst, then using the verso): ‘All things can tempt me’ was composed at the very latest on 15 Sep., so ‘At Galway Races’ was by then probably already in place in the book. In 1908, the Galway race meeting took place on 5 and 6 Aug., when WBY was in Dublin; he returned to Coole on 8 Aug., perhaps hearing talk there of the recent races, and Kelly (Chronology, 121) assigns this as a likely date for composition of the poem, though there is no hard evidence for this. Galway races and WBY. Te Galway races had been taking place annually since 1869 at the Ballybrit racecourse, at Castlegar just north of Galway city. In WBY’s time this was a two-day meeting, attracting large crowds (partly owing to the Irish Bank Holiday). Te 1908 meeting was attended by AG’s uncle Captain Robert Persse, and perhaps also by Jack Yeats: WBY’s brother was in Ireland at the time, had been to previous meetings, and would attend more, using scenes from them in his artwork, from pencil and watercolour sketches to larger-scale works later in watercolour and in oils. WBY’s own sense of Irish horseracing was not recent, for his uncle George Pollexfen was long an active member of the racing world, and the poet would have been very familiar with the detail of his interest from frequent stays in his company at Sligo. Te annual meeting was a major fxture in the Irish social calendar, and in Aug. it was for some visitors a handily complementary attraction to a visit to Coole, ofen (though not in fact in 1908) with WBY in residence there. Any interest of AG’s in horseracing was tinged by her knowledge of her late husband’s youthful enthusiasm for the turf, and his losses which continued to trouble the estate she was managing. However, her plays include Shanwalla (1915), which concerns the plot to dope a racehorse, and On the Racecourse (1926). WBY’s poem, though ofen seen as the formulation of a new political/aesthetic position (see Reception and interpretation), is also a poem about racing, and its connection with Galway is importantly a connection with Coole as well, so that the poet’s decision to inscribe two copies in AG’s books (see Textual history) has meaning. D. Holdeman (Cornell ISWGH 280) sees this as especially clear in the substitution of ‘yonder’ for ‘there’ in MS2, claiming that the poem in this form ‘locates its ideal readers within the DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-40

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borders of Coole Park’ (though it would not in fact be possible to see Ballybrit from the Library in which the book resided). Of the literary circle at Coole, the member who had the most extensive knowledge of horseracing and breeding was GM, a knowledge extensively rehearsed in Esther Waters (1894); but it is doubtful that WBY was counting GM among his ideal audience at this time, and still more doubtful that he found in him any kind of artistic ‘heartener’. Reception and critical interpretation. From early on, this poem has been understood as a statement of sorts from the poet about art’s social positioning. In 1930, Stephen Gwynn quoted lines 2–4, and wrote acidly about how ‘Mr. Yeats is the admitted master of his craf [. . .] yet Mr. Yeats has never touched the crowd; and it is not because he did not want to’ (Te Fortnightly Review, Jun. 1930). For almost all modern criticism, the signifcance of this poem is limited to lines 8–9, as a major staging-post in WBY’s progression towards an attitude of scorn and rejection with regard to contemporary bourgeois Ireland. As a corollary to this, the ‘men | Tat ride upon horses’ are generally understood as more or less aristocratic, or as symbols of aristocracy. R. Foster e.g. speaks of the poem as one of ‘unashamed elitism’ (Foster 1, 435), and E. Cullingford identifes WBY’s ‘poetic denigration of the ‘merchant and the clerk’’ (Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (1981), 70). Te enemies supposedly confronted in the poem are described by M. Howes: ‘Tese crowds are middle-class materialists [. . .] and they can neither understand nor experience the erotic ecstasy of the crowd in ‘His Dream’’ (though ‘crowd’ was not WBY’s frst word here, and may not be so simple a word – see note to 4). Howes further suggests that the (by now apparently rather hapless) merchant and clerk also ‘seek to enforce moral conformity’ (Howes, 98). A much more nuanced and critically meaningful approach is taken by E. Longley, who sees how the poem is ‘symbolising cultural ‘oneness’ in Yeatsian terms’, since ‘Here ‘Delight makes all of the one mind’ as skilled performance bonds with the ‘crowd that closes in behind’’ (Longley, 4). It is important to stress that the poem does not accommodate versions of professedly ‘aristocratic’ interpretation of art and culture which WBY dwelt on in more detail much later: its artistic milieu is that of an Irish literary theatre still in its infancy, and the social world in which it tries to embed this is being presented in its aspect of class-spanning sport. In this sense, the poem is grounded in a certain cultural hope, and sounds a note of optimism: it ‘suggests that history is as circular as a racecourse and that the hegemony of the weak and timid is not permanent’ (J. Kelly and R. Schuchard in CL 5, xc). Te circularity is partly a formal one: G. Turley noted how ‘With men galloping the poem began; with men galloping it ends; only now they are not the men introduced descriptively at the beginning’, and he observed that this is a good example of how ‘Yeats’s [poetry] characteristically fulfls itself in containment’ (Te Turbulent Dream (1983), 44, 42). Textual history. Te earliest MS is a hol. version entered by WBY in AG’s copy of PW06 (MS 1), repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 208–209; another copy was made by the poet on a sheet of paper inserted into AG’s copy of vol. 7 of CWVP08 now in Berg Collection, NYPL (MS2). Te poem’s frst publication was in Te English Review for Feb. 1909 (ER), where it was the second in a sequence of three poems (the frst being ‘An Appointment’, under its title ‘On a Recent Government Appointment in Ireland’, and the third ‘All things can tempt me’, under its title ‘Distraction’). Te poem was included

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in GH10 (in the ‘Momentary Toughts’ grouping), and then in GH12, in R16, and all collected editions thereafer. In his copy of GH12 WBY entered some corrections (MS3); he also made a pencil correction in his copy of the Tauchnitz A Selection (1913) (MS4). Copy-text: P49. There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind: We, too, had good attendance once, Hearers and hearteners of the work; Aye, horsemen for companions, Before the merchant and the clerk

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Title] No title MS1, MS2. Galway Races ER. 1–4.] Tere where the racecourse is Delight makes all of the one mind Te riders upon the swif horses Te feld that closes in behind. ER. 1.] Out there where the race course is MS1; [Out there corr. to Out yonder,] where the race course is MS2; [Out yonder corr. to Tere] where the race course is MS3. 3.] Riders upon the swif horses GH12; corr. to Te riders upon the galloping horses MS3. 4. crowd] feld GH10, GH12; feld corr. to crowd MS3, MS4. WBY’s original ‘feld’ is used in the sense of OED 9.a.,‘Originally Horse Racing: all those taking part in a particular race except for one particular individual’; the substituted ‘crowd’ may not be, then, the spectators, but those horses and riders who lag behind in the race. It is possible, on the other hand, that WBY took ‘feld’ to include the spectators, who close in behind on the track once the riders have passed, and his revision is a correction to clarify this meaning. ‘Field’ is employed accurately in the ‘Circe’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) when ‘A dark horse,

riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost’, and ‘Te feld follows, a bunch of bucking mounts’. 6. Hearers and hearteners] Hearers, hearteners ER. Te signifcance of ‘Hearers’ is ofen overlooked: in maintaining that ‘Yeatsian ‘audience’ afrms literature’s oral and aural roots’ E. Longley points to this word as an indication of how ‘the theatre feshed out [WBY’s] ideal audience’ (Longley, 2). 6, 15. hearteners] A heartener is ‘A person who or thing which heartens someone or something’ (OED), but the word is uncommon, and especially scarce in poetry. 8. the merchant and the clerk] Perhaps cp. W. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), ‘Who learns my lesson complete?’, 3: ‘merchant and clerk and porter and customer’. Te intended pronunciation of ‘clerk’ here is not known, but the rhyme for WBY is with ‘work’ suggesting – if it is a full rhyme – a pronunciation aligned that common in the US: in Ireland, the British pronunciation of the word was usual, and in comic verse (where full rhyme is the norm) this is to be seen in e.g. M.J. Murphy, Te Kishogue Papers (1875), ‘Te Curse of Kishogue: A Killarney story’ 251/254, where ‘clerk’ is rhymed with ‘dark’.

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Breathed on the world with timid breath. Sing on: somewhere at some new moon, We’ll learn that sleeping is not death, Hearing the whole earth change its tune, Its fesh being wild, and it again Crying aloud as the racecourse is, And we fnd hearteners among men That ride upon horses.

In serious poetry, too, Irish poets observed the British pronunciation, e.g. W. Allingham, Blackberries (1890), ‘Two Visitors to the printing Exhibition’ 21/22, and Dora Sigerson Shorter, Collected Poems (1907), 29/31, both rhyming ‘clerk’ with ‘dark’; J.C. Mangan rhymes ‘clerk’, ‘lark’ and ‘dark’ in ‘Te Mass of the Birds’ 3/5/7 (Poems (1903)). It would seem that WBY here is either deliberately employing half-rhyme, or adopting an unusual pronunciation: in both cases, the efect would be distinct. 9. timid breath] Perhaps cp. the Victorian poet R. Montgomery (whose works were known to JBY, and are echoed in some of WBY’s very early verse), Te Omnipresence of the Deity (1854), II, 802–803: ‘Pleased at his quiet mien with timid breath | She stirs to see – alas! the sleep of Death’.

10.] But some day and at some new moon ER. somewhere] Sometime MS1, MS2, GH10, GH12–LP31; somewhere CP33 and Edition de luxe proofs (1932) (NLI 30262). 11. sleeping is not death] More prosaically, the meaning here is that being asleep does not preclude awakening into life again; WBY’s phrasing recalls Shelley, ‘Adonais’, 343–344: ‘he doth not sleep – | He hath awakened from the dream of life’. Perhaps also cp. the echo of R. Montgomery in line 9, and R.W. Emerson, Poems (1904), ‘Illusions’, 5–6: ‘Sleep is not, Death is not; | Who seem to die live’. 12. Hearing] Hear MS2. 13. Its fesh being wild,] Flesh being wild again, ER. 14. Crying aloud as] Crying aloud on as MS2. 15. And we fnd] And fnd ER.

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RECONCILIATION Date and circumstances of composition. Tis poem was composed in two bursts, about six months apart. When WBY frst copied, and then proceeded to compose more lines for the poem in 26/27 Feb. 1909 (see Textual history), he began with ‘I made the following poem about six months ago, but write it here that it may not be lost’. Although WBY’s sense of time cannot be relied upon entirely (and his ‘about’ seems already to acknowledge this), it is likely that the poem began life in Sep. 1908. WBY was at Coole for much of the second half of the month, and was writing lyric poetry then: he was also continuing to be engaged in the various acts of telepathic mystical ‘union’ with MG which had been set in train by their time together in Paris in Jun. Composition of the poem ended at this point, but began again in Feb. 1909, when WBY started to add to it in the pages of his Journal. Textual history. Te poem is found frst in WBY’s Journal, in an entry datable to 26/27 Feb. 1909 (MS1); this is in Boston College, Burns Collection and transcribed in Mem. 172–174, also repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 158–163. Another entry in the same Journal, from afer Aug. 1910 is transcribed in Mem., 259 and is identifed by D. Donoghue as belonging to this poem: however, the present edition treats this as an independent fragment, not necessarily connected to this poem at all, which is edited later in the chronological sequence. Te poem was frst published in GH10, then in GH12 and all subsequent collected editions of WBY’s poetry. Drafs of 8–12 in MS1: Tere are two full pages of draf materials for WBY’s addition of lines 8–12 to the original 1–8 in MS1. Tis ofers a picture of WBY’s compositional process in action, and is marked by extensive repetition, deletion, and repeated attempts to get the same lines into shape. Te following is neither a diplomatic nor a complete transcription (for which see Mem. 172–174 and Cornell ISWGH 158–163). As drafing begins, and afer a fair copy version of 1–8, WBY writes, ‘or it might end’: but now That you have come to me again I’ll throw Helmet and sword and crown into a pit That you have come again I’ll throw, I’ll bury Helmet and crown and sword into a pit As in a sudden crying laughing ft [We’ve so remade the world Trample leaves now upon them DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-41

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Trample the dull leaves over them del.] Find all the living world you took away but now That you have come again we’ll out and throw Helmet and sword and crown into a pit And in a sudden crying laughing ft Trample them down into the [?slimy] [?mould] [But to let me take those awhile and hold Them near del.] But now [The world’s alive again del.] We’ll out – for the world lives as long ago ^And^ in a sudden [laughing del.] crying laughing ft ^And^ [We’ll del.] tumble the crowns and helmets in the pit [But dear cling close – you have been a long while gone And barren thought has chilled me to the bone del.] [But cling more close – you have been a long time gone And barren thought has chilled me to the bone del.] But dear cling close to me – since you were gone [A barren thought has chilled me to the bone del.] or My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone. But now We’ll out – for the world lives as long ago And while we’re in our crying laughing ft ^or laughing, weeping ft^ [Tumble the crowns and helmets del.] ^Hurl helmets crowns and swords^ in the pit But dear cling close to me – since you were gone My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone. Biographical context. Tis poem is an unusually personal one for WBY, and it should to some extent be read in a biographical light. Te ‘Reconciliation’ of its title, with the specifc frankness of lines 1–2, align the poem closely to WBY’s relationship with MG in 1908–1909. Tere is, too, an acknowledgement at the beginning of the poem that the speaker is a poet whose writing of verse has been changed and interrupted, in ways that leave his audience frustrated; and that this is attributed by that audience to an act of romantic/artistic sabotage on the part of the beloved. With this initial acknowledgement made, the poem carries on to reclaim artistic ground at the same time as it makes up romantic ground by making up the original quarrel. Te title ‘Reconciliation’ is also, in its way, a sign that normal poetic service – however transformed it may be – will now be resumed. WBY’s actual measure of reconciliation by 1908 with MG is relevant to all of this. Although their relationship had long been marked by quarrels, the poet’s

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romantic fxation on MG sufered traumatic pressure when she married John MacBride in Feb. 1903, having joined the Roman Catholic church in the process. Inevitably, this was a real break between MG and WBY; and in the shorter term, it drove WBY further into the comforts of his theatrical circles, and especially those supplied at Coole by AG. But the MG/MacBride marriage, though it produced a child, did not otherwise prosper, and WBY was fully appraised of the couple’s separation – something which itself soon became matter for Irish public speculation and (in due course) partisan debate. Nor had WBY ever properly separated himself from MG, and he played a role (which he made sure she was aware of) in supporting her cause through rumours of divorce that followed on her separation from MacBride. Te marital breakdown also entailed a protracted breakdown in MG’s involvement with Irish radical nationalism (for which MacBride, a fghter against the British Empire in the Boer War, and a committed Irish physical-force revolutionary, was a hero): and for some time, MG felt unable to visit Ireland. WBY’s intense activity, in collaboration with AG and many others, in the establishment of an Irish national theatre, with the Abbey Teatre, its company and repertoire as his (ofen exhausting) focus, lef the poet in the full glare of Irish cultural publicity; it also lef him decidedly low on supplies of new lyric poetry. Te reconciliation between MG and WBY made possible by her increasing distance from political agitation, and his increasing proximity to Irish cultural activity, was gradual but defnite: in the afermath of Irish and Irish-American controversy surrounding the Abbey’s productions of Synge’s Te Playboy of the Western World in 1907 (a play MG was in fact reluctant to countenance), WBY increasingly found himself being counselled by MG to save himself for poetry by disengaging from such heavy involvement in the Irish theatre. Te poem’s apparent determination to hurl stage-props (that could easily come from Te King’s Treshold, On Baile’s Strand, or Deirdre) ‘into the pit’ feels very much like a (paradoxically dramatic) farewell to the stage. Te alternative to theatre life is partly one of a life in mystical union with MG, at least by the time this poem is composed. WBY’s short spell in Paris in Jun. 1908 was (for him at least, and at least for a while) momentous. Te new closeness with MG from that summer is visible in some of the surviving correspondence, and the period over which this poem was composed (Sep. 1908–Feb. 1909) shows a marked increase in intimacy from MG: in Dec. 1908, her opening salutation in letters goes from ‘Dear Willie’ to ‘Dearest’, and by Jan. 1909 MG, though still holding the line against a sexual union – a line she knew was also one that bound WBY ever more tightly to her – was signing of with ‘My thoughts go to you my love’, ‘How I wish you were here my love’, and (in Feb., when WBY was taking up his poem again) ‘I think of you always and I long to see you’ (G-YL, 263, 266). Te poet spent much of Dec. 1908 in Paris with MG and there, as R. Foster puts it, ‘It seems clear that their reconciliation went beyond the spiritual’ (Foster 1, 388). But even sexual consummation in Dec. was not the end of the story, for MG was keen to move on to a more sustained ‘mystical’ model for her relationship with WBY. Tis was somewhere they had been before (in 1898–1899), and D. Toomey’s remarks are pertinent, on ‘the bizarre dislocation of Yeats’s life, the increasing sense that history is repeating itself, the frst time as tragedy, the second time as farce’ (Toomey, 17). Te theatrical metaphors here are apt in relation to ‘Reconciliation’. WBY’s poem was completed at a time when his hopes of something more than a ‘mystical’ marriage to MG were on

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the rise; yet MG, for her part, was still urging the poet towards astral rather than sexual intercourse, and (more prosaically) a full legal divorce from MacBride (for religious reasons, amongst others) remained of the cards. WBY may in the poem be experimenting with the feeling of abandoning the theatre in favour of a romantic life; but in fact his involvement with the Abbey was as strong as ever, and his commitment to AG (who by Feb. had recovered from the serious illness of Jan. 1909 which – had it turned out badly – might have radically changed the prospects for WBY and his involvement in a national theatrical project) was a loyalty as strong as it had ever been. In terms of sexual attachment, too, MG was not at this stage the only option for the poet, whose relationship with Mabel Dickinson, conducted in Dublin, enabled him at this time to combine work with pleasure. A fully biographical reading of the poem, then, may be reductive in some respects: but the poem is, nevertheless, one which experiments with the friction between private love and public life, public culture and private lyric inspiration, with an apparent frankness that is relatively new in WBY’s lyric poetry. Some sense of this is probably to be gained from the Journal entry which immediately precedes WBY’s return to this poem in Feb. 1909; WBY is of course speaking to himself here, but the anxieties are close to those which permeate ‘Reconciliation’, and which are part and parcel of those ‘barren thoughts’ the poem attempts to disown (Mem., 171–172): I ofen wonder if my talent will ever recover from the heterogeneous labour of these last few years. Te younger Hallam says that vice does not destroy genius but that the heterogeneous does. I cry out vainly for liberty and have ever less and less inner life. [. . .] I thought myself free, loving neither vice nor virtue; but virtue has come upon me and given me a nation instead of a home. Has it lef me any lyric faculty? Whatever happens I must go on that there may be a man behind the lines already written. Reception and critical interpretation. Te poem did not attract much comment at the time of publication, but it was noticed by a young American poet who would go on to become close to WBY: Ezra Pound. His poem ‘Te Fault of It’ appeared in the small magazine Forum in Jul. 1911, with open homage to ‘Reconciliation’ in its frst two lines, albeit with a wider sense of poetic community than WBY: ‘Some may have blamed us that we cease to speak | Of things we spoke of in our verses early’. Modern criticism ofen seeks to pin down the poem as a kind of evidence for WBY’s feelings about MG, sometimes by enforcing a judgemental framework of its own. For S. Smith, the verses are ‘full of bad faith and evasion’, and WBY ‘dodges blaming [MG] only by projecting his accusations on to [. . .] others’; deprecating ‘the fnal plaintive appeal, disguised as a statement’, Smith fnds that ‘Tis is hardly the mood in which to contemplate great political or poetic action’ (W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (1990), 95). M. Levenson, too, makes a point of not believing a word: ‘the little ceremony of forgiveness notwithstanding, the poem hardly conceals its grievance’, he concludes (Modernism (2011), 35). For J. Hassett, the poem ‘both refects Yeats’s success in escaping the tradition of blaming the cruel Muse, and betrays the extent to which he defned Gonne as an occasion for poetry: the poet’s concern over Gonne’s marriage is not the loss of a lover, but the prospect that he

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will have ‘nothing to make a song about’’ (W.B. Yeats and the Muses (2010), 91.) A more balanced judgement is on ofer in R. Greaves’s account, where ‘the poem’s closing tone is ambivalent: there is a note of fear that the chilling efect of the lifelessness of the poet’s thought while lacking his living symbol has a permanent aspect, irremediable even by her return [. . .] Te movement from celebration to anxiety and sadness in ‘Reconciliation’ also marks a recognition of the belatedness of the new intimacy in their relationship’ (Greaves, 75–76). Any full estimate of questions such as these needs to be informed by an approach to the poem as a formal entity, rather than a revealing confession in which WBY has his guard down; and in this sense, its proximity (or otherwise) to the sonnet form may be interesting. According to J. Longenbach, WBY ‘not only writes unwavering pentameter lines but organises them into a shape that feels like a sonnet without exactly being a sonnet: the volta or turn occurs near the end of the seventh line (‘but now’), rather than at the beginning of the ninth line, and the poem concludes at the twelfh line, rather than completing the requisite fourteen’; furthermore, ‘Te rhymes, organised in couplets, are monosyllabic, starkly insistent, and the whole poem feels wilfully condensed, at war with its own formal expectations, argumentative rather than suggestive’ (‘William Butler Yeats’, in C. Rawson (ed.), Te Cambridge Companion to English Poets (2011), 462). It is possible, of course, for a poem to be at once argumentative and suggestive; and ‘Reconciliation’ can be fruitfully interpreted as just this. Te poem’s relation to sonnet-poetry, and the dominant tropes of devotion, plea, and sufering in many love sonnets, is also to be borne in mind when registering the sonnet-like elements deliberately put in place here by WBY. Copy-text: P49.

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Some may have blamed you that you took away The verses that could move them on the day When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind With lightning, you went from me, and I could fnd Nothing to make a song about but kings,

Title.] In GH10, under the same title of ‘Reconciliation’, the poem is the ffh in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and his Wife Pernella’ [for this sequence-title, see note to ‘His Dream’.] 2. could move them] GH12 and afer; they cared for MS, GH10. 3–4. the sight of the eyes blind | With lightning] Cp, Sir T. Wyatt in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557),

‘Te lover describeth his being stricken with sight of his love’, 6–10: Sunne beames to turne with so great vehemence To daze mans sight, as by their bright presence Dazed am I, much like unto the guise Of one striken with dint of lightenyng, Blind  with  the stroke, and erryng here and there.

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Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things That were like memories of you – but now We’ll out, for the world lives as long ago; And while we’re in our laughing, weeping ft, Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit. But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone, My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

6. half-forgotten things] Cp. A. Tennyson, ‘Te Lotos-Eaters’, 121–123: ‘the minstrel sings | Before them of the ten years’ war in Troy, | And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things’. 7–8.] Tat were like memories of you – but we | Will tumble crown and helmet in the sea. MS.

8–12.] For MS drafs of these lines, see headnote. 11. cling close to me] Perhaps cp. C. Lamb, Poetry for Children by Charles and Mary Lamb (1878), ‘Nurse Green’, 31–32: ‘Come, bury your fears in the arms of your mother; | My darling, cling close to me, I am alive.’

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NO SECOND TROY Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was probably composed afer 2 Dec. 1908, and some days before 13 Dec. Te version of this poem entered by WBY in his new Journal as its frst item carries the date ‘Dec. 1908’. Te date is signifcant, in that it marks the beginning of the Journal itself, with WBY’s trip to Paris which began on 2 Dec. Te following entry begins ‘the other day in Paris’, and the entry afer that is dated ‘Dec. 13’. It is clear that the poem in the Journal is not a frst draf, but a fair copy with only a couple of minor emendations, so the work of composition must have taken place already. On arriving in Paris, WBY was busy: he was seeing a great deal of MG (who lived just across the street from his hotel), while composing a detailed scenario for his projected drama Te Player Queen, and even taking French lessons. In the absence of other evidence, it appears that WBY composed this poem early in his stay; it is possible that work on it had begun before his departure from London: but late Nov. also had been a busy time, when from 22 Nov. onwards the poet had been deeply occupied with Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s Deirdre (it may be worth remembering that the poet sensed a certain mythic congruence between the Irish Deirdre and the Greek Helen: see Troy, and Helen). It is more likely that the poem was written in Paris, with WBY’s meeting MG again providing its creative momentum, than that was written in anticipation of that meeting. Troy, and Helen. WBY had made ready use of the myth of Helen of Troy, her beauty, her abduction, and the consequent Trojan War, in poetry since his teenage years; and there is nothing that is unconventional about this habit in itself: the Homerically derived femme fatale was a staple of much verse from medieval times onwards. However, WBY’s mature writing deployed Helen in ways that align her with MG, and MG’s place in the poet’s life. In this respect, the idea of Helen as a destroyer carries a potent measure of personal charge. Te poem ‘Te Rose of the World’ (1891) puts the fall of Troy alongside the Irish Deirdre myth, with ‘these red lips’ (2) being those of Helen in her ‘mournful pride, | Mournful that no new wonder may betide’ (2–3). Tis perpetual failure to be satisfed extends as far as the mass destruction carried out in Helen’s name, and so it is in vain that ‘Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam’ (4). Te association of Helen with fery ruin is again fairly conventional, and most prominently made in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Sc. xii, 132: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships | And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ Attributing blame for war and destruction directly to the exceptionally beautiful Helen was itself a trope, but one to which WBY ofered

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-42

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a certain amount of resistance. An awareness of the transitory nature of even Helen’s beauty stands at the beginning of Te Secret Rose (1897), when WBY uses as an epigraph some lines of Ovid by way of Leonardo Da Vinci (M, 96): ‘Helen, when she looked in her mirror, and saw there the wrinkles of old age, wept, and wondered that she had twice been carried away’. In his 1900 prose piece, ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye’ collected in Te Celtic Twilight (the title quoting a line from the Elizabethan poet Tomas Nashe), WBY transposed Helen to the locales of Irish folk-memory (and particularly the love between the wandering poet Rafery and his sweetheart Mary Hynes), paying attention to questions of ‘blame’ (M, 18): Tese poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things, than are our men of learning. She ‘had seen too much of the world’; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls. Why, the ‘poor countrymen’ seem to be asking, should they blame Helen? (Te allusion here to Iliad Book 3, with the ‘old men of Troy’ and the walls, may be subtly present also in a short poem of 1902: see notes to ‘Te Old Men Admiring themselves in the Water’.) A more directly personal reference to Helen comes at the close of a 1902 piece added to Te Celtic Twilight, when at the end of a story about a woman who had lost her lover, it is suggested by one hearer that ‘Mr. Yeats’ ‘will make a poem about it, perhaps’ (M, 23): ‘Alas! I never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart, which has loved Helen and all the lovely and fckle women of the world, would be too sore’. Also in 1902, in the course of a note (which quotes Nashe’s lines) on ‘the conversation of Cuchulain and Emer’, WBY claimed that this ‘must seem as empty as a Scald’s song, or the talk of Cuchulain and Emer, to one who has never heard of Helen, or even to one who did not fall in love with her when he was a young man’ (CM 352, CW 6, 227). An association between the mythic Helen of Troy and the faithful and longstanding love of a living poet was being steadily established, and for WBY the identifcation of Helen with MG was easy to make. WBY was aware also of Helen’s function in Irish poetry, and he was especially alert to the local associations of the eighteenth-century wandering poet Antony Rafery, with whose work and reputation AG, Douglas Hyde, and others had made him familiar. One poem by Rafery with strong Co. Galway associations is relevant here, and was already important for the ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye’ essay: this is ‘Mary Hynes, or the Posy Bright’ (as translated by Douglas Hyde, Songs Ascribed to Rafery (1903), 333): It is Mary Hynes is the courteous, stately woman, Of nicest mien and most lovely appearance; Two hundred clerks, and to put them together,

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One-third of her accomplishments they could not write. She beat Deirdre for fneness, and Venus, And if I were to mention Helen by whom Troy was destroyed, But she is the fower of Ireland on account of all that, The Posy Bright who is in Ballylee. WBY would have known Rafery’s other recourses to Helen of Troy, such as the poem ‘Mary Staunton’, in which (Hyde, 321) ‘Deirdre was nowhere beside my joy, | Nor Helen who boasted of conquests Trojan, | For whom was roasted the town of Troy’, and ‘Te Wife of the Red-Haired Man’ (Hyde, 217): Hercules the strong, He was destroyed in fre by a woman; By Helen was burnt Greece and the men of Troy. Fell they by Deirdre The strong sons of Uisneach who never submitted. Te association of Helen with the Irish Deirdre, and her identity as a destroyer by fre, were both of some relevance to WBY in 1908, when he was still deep in theatrical work with Mrs. Patrick Campbell on his own Deirdre, and still brooding on MG as a potentially destructive force in both Irish life and his own. Although Helen is plainly to be identifed in many ways with MG, it is less clear where WBY, or the frst-person speaker of the poem, fts into the Helen myth. R. Ellmann, noting that ‘Yeats represented his beloved not as a virginal, transcendental rose, but as the experienced Helen of Troy’, pointed out that WBY ‘wanted to invoke only a small part of the story [. . .] he ignored Paris completely [. . .] And he edged farther away from [Helen] by making her so deeply legendary, and his own failure with her so completely manifest, as to preclude any supposition that he was himself to be identifed with her Trojan lover or Grecian husband’ (Identity, 110). Tis might perhaps be qualifed by the refection that if John MacBride was a kind of Menelaus for Helen/MG, WBY might even so have thought of himself briefy – and in Paris – as Paris. Second Troy. Te notion of a second Troy is an ancient one, and its best-known expression (‘iterum [. . .] Troiam’) comes in Virgil, Eclogue 4, 34–36 (here in the translation by T. Wharton (1753)): Round cities bulwarks rise, and massy towers, And other Argo’s bear the chosen powers; New wars the bleeding nations shall destroy, And great Achilles fnd a second Troy. Where Virgil’s perspective provides a second Achilles for this second Troy – with all the extreme violence this will entail – WBY posits a second Helen instead, though he loses nothing of the implied violence, and even makes his Helen an active participant. While

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WBY might have had only a shadowy sense (or none at all) of either the Virgil or its numerous uses in English renaissance poetry, where England or Britain was ofen seen as a ‘new Troy’, he certainly knew of Shelley’s use for the lines, in the Chorus from Hellas (1072–1073), ‘A lofier Argo cleaves the main, | Fraught with a later prize’, and he knew also Shelley’s departure there from the Virgilian paradigm of a recurring Trojan War (1078–1079): ‘O, write no more the tale of Troy, | If earth Death’s scroll must be!’. Shelley’s radical alteration of the Virgilian trope is not, however, in accord with WBY’s purposes, which require a full measure of fery destruction, and are closer in spirit (even if an actual allusion is unlikely) to W. Cowper’s ‘Table Talk’ (Poems (1782), 322–323): ‘When the rude rabble’s watchword was, destroy! | And blazing London seemed a second Troy’. Violence is the keynote also of lines that are behind WBY’s fnal line, from J. Dryden, ‘Alexander’s Feast’, 147–150: And the king seized a fambeau with zeal to destroy; Thais led the way, To light him to his prey, And, like another Helen, fred another Troy. Dryden gives agency here to Helen in the ‘fring’ of the city, by setting her in parallel to Timotheus and his ‘zeal to destroy’. Critical reception. Te one contemporary reaction to this poem which might have said most about its immediate efect is tantalizingly unclear. WBY may have sent this poem to MG shortly afer returning from Paris: a letter from her from Jan./Feb. 1909 thanks WBY ‘for your letters and the poem’, and comments that it ‘is beautiful, as all you write is but perhaps it is not quite as magical as some of your poems’; MG adds to this, ‘Don’t think me ungrateful because I say so, for I like it very much too, only your new poems have such terrible rivals in the old’ (G-YL, 263). Apart from this, there were few specifc reactions in the poet’s lifetime. Louis MacNeice placed this among the poems of the early twentieth century where WBY ‘compromises with his old arch-enemy, rhetoric’ to make ‘the English language sound as if it meant business’: ‘Te love which had inspired the old wavering rhythms and twilight atmosphere, now, in the stage of resignation, expresses itself through straightforward diction, a powerful traditional metric, and the controlled rhetoric of the classicists’ (MacNeice, 94). Similar praise seems to be intended in T.R. Henn’s judgement that in this poem ‘Te rhythm is the index to the integrity and restraint of emotion’ (Henn, 119). In 1964, R. Ellmann gave an important reading of the poem, which analysed closely the nature and efect of its four rhetorical questions, and claimed that ‘Te success of the poem comes partly from the poet’s withholding the identifcation of his beloved with Helen until the last line, when it fairly explodes’. At the same time, Ellmann pointed out ‘the pity which pervades the poem, a pity for the beloved that makes the speaker forget to pity himself and fnd his misery irrelevant, her actions inevitable’ (Identity, 111–112). Much modern criticism of WBY has acknowledged the poem’s rhetorical power; sometimes, that power displaces attempted angles of critical approach. Te broadly biographical interest which is ofen taken in ‘No Second Troy’, for instance, can result in statements of the obvious when divorced from the

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poem’s particular ways and means, both stylistic and mythic. An eye to the poem’s sense of gender can all too easily look away from the poem itself, as when E. Cullingford tries to see it in relation to contemporary imagery associated with the campaign for women’s sufrage; she fnds this ‘an ambiguous poem for the feminist reader, who may suspect that the cult of the exceptional woman [. . .] can do little without the kind of collective action favoured by the sufragists’: furthermore, because ‘Revolution is not an appropriate activity for a Helen’ (though ‘No Second Troy’ surely thinks this is, for MG at least, all too appropriate an activity), ‘the poem takes back with one hand what it gives with the other: the exceptional woman is acknowledged [.  .  .] but her frustrated power is defned as destructive’ (Cullingford, 81, 82). Te poem itself renders speculations like these obtuse and unsustainable; simpler, and closer to the truth, is N. Grene’s summary, that MG here ‘becomes the very type of the heroic misplaced in an unheroic era, ‘a kind | Tat is not natural in an age like this’’ (Grene, 41). Formal analysis of WBY’s verse can help to place the poem, and perhaps to set limits to its purely personal meaning. H. Vendler has given a very detailed reading of the verses as a ‘douzain’ (the French form might be appropriate given WBY’s location around the time of composition, whether or not he had much clear sense of that form) also akin to a Shakespearean sonnet. Noting, as Ellmann had done, the fact of the poem’s construction from four questions, Vendler sets this against the rhyme structure of three abab quatrains (Vendler, 162): Even though there are only three formal units here – the three Shakespearean quatrains – the syntax refuses to obey that prosodic scheme and sets itself up as a counter-force, declaring that the poem, like a Shakespearean sonnet, actually consists of four logical units: its four questions. [. . .] Tese three quatrains have a wiry Shakespearean strength in their overlapping formal and syntactic structures, but the poem’s exclusively interrogative syntax and its (recognizable) Irish heroine prevent its being a mere imitation of Renaissance English form. Te sonnet form is of course about as English as MG was Irish; and the case for a ‘Shakespearean’ model here is not persuasively made; but WBY’s intense working of syntax around rhyme scheme is undoubtedly part of the poem’s energetic (and argumentative) momentum. Two long questions fnally collapse into the two very short (and very unanswerable) questions in 11 and 12: and these two lines do not make a couplet rhyme (as would happen in e.g. the conclusion of a Shakespearean sonnet), but develop still within the abab quatrain structure, however much they may be looking out somewhere beyond what that structure is able (on this occasion) to frame. Textual and publication history. WBY’s Journal, in the Burns Collection, Boston College, has the only hol. version of this poem, on fol. 2r. (MS): it is transcribed in Mem., 137 and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 156–157. Te poem’s frst appearance in print was in GH10; it was included in GH12, in R16, and in all collected editions thereafer. As W. Gould has remarked, this is WBY’s ‘least revised poem’ (YA 18, 54): and this fact in itself (though of course actual draf material is lost) makes it notable, since the poet never felt driven to attempt any signifcant alteration on its various appearances in print.

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Copy-text: P49.

5

Why should I blame her that she flled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?

Title.] No title MS. In GH10, as ‘No Second Troy’, this poem is placed fourth in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and his Wife Pernella’ [for this sequence-title, see note to ‘His Dream’.] 1. Why should I blame her] It may well be deliberate that this frst phrase echoes so closely the opening phrase of the poem WBY had very recently completed, ‘Reconciliation’: ‘Some may have blamed you’. When collecting the poems in GH10 and afer, WBY placed ‘No Second Troy’ before, and not afer, ‘Reconciliation’: the directly personal question here is broadened, and put in a larger context, by the poem that follows it – a poem that, unlike ‘No Second Troy’ (which is all questions) asks nothing at all, and so has no questions to leave open. A.D. Nuttall identifed in the phrase a rhetorical fgure (occupatio, where a speaker emphasizes something by pretending to pass over it): ‘Te frst words can seem for a moment merely petulant: a transparent occupatio in which the overt meaning, ‘I have no cause to censure you for .  .  .’ immediately implies the reverse, ‘I have cause to censure you for . . .’’, but he added that ‘Te transparent occupatio is deliberately planted, its self-destruction is foreseen and the petulant complaint is then appropriated by a stronger emotion’ (‘Two Political Poems: Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ and W.B. Yeats’s ‘No Second Troy’’, Proceedings of the British Academy 105 (2000), 116). 1–2.] flled my days | With misery] Te compressed dynamics of this poem naturally preclude spelling out the misery in question: that it is so openly and early declared

is, within the poem, sufcient to establish its reality. A biographical commentary, which is aesthetically irrelevant, would probably see the period immediately afer MG’s marriage to MacBride as fuelling WBY’s writing here; though of course there had been many days before Feb. 1903 that MG had succeeded in flling with misery for the poet. 2–3.] WBY’s ‘of late’ is necessarily unspecifc, but the general reference here ties the poem to MG’s public actions of many years’ standing, in alluding to her (sometimes violent) political agitation in Ireland. Notably, this reference (which the poet could legitimately expect to be picked up by his contemporary audience as a clear identifcation of ‘her’ with MG) comes afer, rather than before her private acts of destruction, exercised upon the speaker/ lover: this priority may prepare the way for the climactic (and abstract) summary of line 11, on the priority of ‘being’ over action. 4–5.] Te enforced poetic concentration here is politically reductive, but WBY lays the groundwork for the poem’s conclusion by introducing imagery of the physical destruction of a city, when he attributes to MG this particular expression of catastrophic political force. As soon as that is done, he allows more ‘blame’ to enter the poem, but this is not blame of MG: it is as though the ‘little streets’ have failed to allow themselves to be ‘hurled’ against the ‘great’ ones, thus letting her down. A gap between ‘desire’ for political change (which they catch from MG) and ‘courage’ to achieve it (which they fail to catch from her) is thus opened, and it helps to explain what is meant in line 9 by ‘an age like this’. 5. but] but [^a^ del.] MS.

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What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fre, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this,

7. nobleness] Te same word is used in WBY’s ‘Te Folly of Being Comforted’ (1901); and this earlier use also brought with it fgurative fames: ‘Because of that great nobleness of hers | Te fre that stirs about her, when she stirs, | Burns but more clearly’ (9–11). simple as a fre] In standard nineteenthcentury poetic diction, the simile ‘simple as’ usually produces ‘simple as a child’; but the efect of WBY’s simile is far from this, and far from simple. Fire is in most usual senses neither simple nor complex; but WBY may have in mind something akin to ‘simple’, OED 12. a.,‘Consisting or composed of one substance, ingredient, or element; uncompounded; unmixed’ or b., ‘Of something immaterial, such as a quality, essence, feeling, etc.: having only a single constituent; consisting purely of one thing; unitary’. It is possible that the language of alchemy, too, hovers somewhere in the background here, as in OED 17.c., ‘Of a substance: that is an element rather than a compound; elemental’. It is likely that WBY is also generating some very private allusion to MG here, recalling her GD name initials of P.I.A.L. (Per Ignem Ad Lucem, ‘through fre into light’). Tis is the frst of two similes in successive lines which partly rely for their poetic efect on especially challenging originality of comparison. 8. With] [And del.] ^With^ MS. beauty like a tightened bow] Tis next simile, which compares an abstract concept with a concrete image, does not have

any connection with Helen of Troy (though it does, of course, suggest the War that she triggered). For WBY, it is more likely to be related to Artemis/Diana, and to the vision of a mystical archer shooting an arrow at a star that he had experienced at Tillyra in 1896 and continued to brood over for many years aferwards. In terms of his own poetry, the ‘tightened bow’ of this simile draws from poems of ISW, such as ‘Te Arrow’ and ‘In the Seven Woods’, where imagery of archers is important (and also draws ultimately on the Tillyra vision). Behind – or far underneath – any referential scope the poem itself declares may lie the imagery of the Bow familiar to WBY through GD ritual (as identifed in relation to the archer vision by the editors of CL 2, 660): ‘Terefore by this straight and narrow path of [Samekh] let the Philosophus advance like the arrow from the Bow of [Qesheth] [.  .  .] he must have a perfect and absolute knowledge of the Bow ere he can follow the path of the Arrow’. Although in his Journal WBY would continue to refer to MG by her GD initials, he was by now well aware that her enthusiasm for the GD itself was minimal: for all that, it remains possible that at some level he wished her ‘beauty’ to serve a pre-mapped mystical function such as this. It may be right to give MG the last word on the further magical reaches of this symbolism as WBY used it for her: writing to the poet afer reading GH10, she said simply, ‘You and hard on poor Bow and Arrows!’ (G-YL, 294).

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Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

10. most stern] With this phrase, and perhaps with the imagery of the poem as a whole, cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘To Victor Hugo’, 67–70: ‘But not by hope or pleasure the most stern | Goddess, most awful-eyed, | Sits, but on either side | Sit sorrow and the wrath of hearts that burn’. 11.] L. Maguire ofers useful explication (Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (2009), 136): ‘the frst half of the line concerns action, ethics, behaviour, blame, responsibility; the second is about ontology’: ‘Te latter defnes the former: being (‘what she is’) leads to doing (‘have done’). Blame is thus an irrelevant concept, one attached to decisions and agency’. Tis line was to have many ramifcations in WBY’s subsequent thinking on the subject of being and action, including notably his lengthy explorations of the

variously fxed relations between these things in A Vision and its fgures of the phases of the moon. In 1908, such elaborations are both far of and unforeseeable for WBY: what the line does claim is an absolute determinative priority of being over action, and if a question seems to be begged in the poem of what ‘being what she is’ means, the full and only answer is delivered in the fnal line, with its clear assertion that ‘she’ is – regardless of any contemporary context – Helen of Troy. In its way, therefore, the compressed line, with its unanswerable rhetorical question, is an anticipation of what T.S. Eliot saw in the ‘mythic method’ of Joyce’s Ulysses. done, being] done being MS, GH10–LP31. 12. another Troy] For WBY’s allusion to Dryden here, see headnote, Second Troy. burn?] burn. MS.

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WORDS Date of composition. Te draf in WBY’s Journal is dated by WBY 22–23 Jan. 1909; the poet was then in Dublin, having attended the frst night of AG’s version of Molière’s Te Miser at the Abbey on the 21st. Context. Two pages earlier in WBY’s Journal, but possibly from the same day as the composition of this poem, there is an entry concerning MG, which substitutes for her name the initials of her Latin name in the GD (Mem., 141–142): Today the thought came to me that [Maud Gonne del.] P.I.A.L. never really understands my plans, or nature, or ideas. Ten came the thought, what matter? How much of the best I have done and still to do is but the attempt to explain myself to her? If she understood, I should lack a reason for writing, and one never can have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious. Tis goes some way towards explaining the poem’s original title, ‘Te Consolation’. Reception and critical interpretation. Te Athenaeum (18 Feb. 1911) quoted this poem in its entirety as only a partial exception to the rule that the poet’s new lyrics ‘are, if anything, overweighted with thought and not always unambiguous’. Tis belief was never necessarily well-grounded, but it has been persistent. C. Bradford, giving a brisk and efcient reading of the MS history, called this ‘a simple, easily achieved poem’: ‘Te persona is Yeats himself, the subject his own art and Maud Gonne’s relation to that art [. . .] Yeats is speaking directly out of his personal situation [. . .] I do not see that he has much trouble here imagining his I-persona’ (Bradford, 46). Tis may severely underestimate the complexities of WBY’s ‘personal situation’; and if the resultant poem is ‘simple’, then the efort of achieving that – and the poet’s awareness of the cost of achieving the simplicity – may be anything but. T.R. Henn’s reading of an apparently simple poem itself perhaps errs on the simple side, in announcing that WBY’s ‘love is justifed as the inspiration of his writing, even if Maud Gonne has not understood [. . .] Here is a new simplicity, a new restraint and tautness’ (Henn, 119). Tis is to mistake clarity of expression for simplicity of intent: and it neglects entirely the complex energies of the poem’s fnal stanza. Henn’s approach is not merely of a previous critical time, for this poem continues to generate readings that are in some ways too straightforward. M.J. Sidnell feels that ‘the poet’s complaints in ‘Words’ about having sacrifced his life for mere words appear to be strategies for diverting the reader’s attention from the verbal reality and to verbal creation of an ideal DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-43

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personality’ (Sidnell, 34–35). D. Albright also fnds this ‘verbal reality’ to be simple, and perhaps transparent: ‘It is as if Yeats felt that he was forced to give his best eforts to make himself explicit because he had to strain against Maud Gonne’s inviolable incomprehension of his work’ (Albright, 504). (Tere is, however, no evidence that MG desired WBY’s poetry to become ‘explicit’, and her comprehension of that poetry (as WBY was well aware) was ofen acute.) R. Greaves fnds in the poem a ‘practical reason why Maud Gonne is essential to Yeats’s work’, because while ‘Art may attempt to justify itself to life’, ‘Life needs and seeks no such justifcation, but its indiference to this impulse of art’s stimulates the creation of art’ (Greaves, 73). Tis circularity goes no further forward than Henn had managed to travel decades earlier. ‘Simplicity’ is, in fact, in many ways grist to the poem’s argumentative mill, as well as being an aspect of its stylistic resource: the relationship explored in the poem between ‘art’ and ‘life’ is one that the poem itself neither establishes nor understands, accepts nor rejects. Instead, WBY presents the reader with the simplicity of a complex situation, and the complexity of a simple one. As so ofen in WBY’s developing lyric repertoire, a question appears where a conclusion might have otherwise been, with ‘who can say | What would have shaken from the sieve?’ (13–14). Folk traditions regarding divination seem to be in play here (see note), complicating any meditation on past actions and choices with notions of the fated and the unfathomable. Critics are probably too ready, also, to take the last two lines of the poem in a spirit of casual confession, rather than calibrated ambiguity: ‘I might have’ means ‘I could have’ (with an implied wish that I had done so), but it simultaneously means ‘I might as well have’, as well as ‘I ought to have’ thrown away ‘poor words’. ‘Poor’, too, is an adjective that cannot be taken at face value, though criticism has done just this: were the words ‘poor’ in relation to the demands of their occasion (and thus to be despised), or ‘poor’ because harmed by that very occasion (and thus to be pitied)? H. Adams, reading the last lines of the poem, registers some (though not all) of these tonal complexities (Adams, 93): Te statement [lines 15–16] is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it might mean that had the beloved understood [WBY] could have had a life with her. Contentment to live, on the other hand, seems to be treated with slight contempt. He is, afer all, a romantic, and for the romantic poet contentment is an abdication of creative efort. Like many critical citations of the poem (and in particular its closing lines), this neglects the prominence given there to Ireland itself, ‘this blind bitter land’ (4). In the end, the poem needs to be set in the context not just of MG and WBY, but of MG, WBY, and Ireland: here, ‘words’ take on rhetorical weight, and WBY’s suspicions of rhetoric, like MG’s welcoming of it, become part of the deep entanglement that gathers up love, poetry, and Irish bitterness all together. It is not clear, in this sense, that being ‘content to live’ was ever entirely an available option. Perceptively, E. Longley notes that ‘As Yeats internalises audiences, and thereby oratory, his poetry becomes dialectical at the level of syntax [. . .] Tis fuels his special power to remake his lyric: with irony, ‘Words’ attributes Yeats’s mobile artistic horizon to Gonne’s (Ireland’s) misreadings: ‘every year I have cried,

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‘At length | My darling understands it all, | Because I have come into my strength, | And words obey my call’’ (Longley, 8–9). Textual and publication history. Drafs for this poem are found on fols. 5r and 5v (MS1) and for the second and third stanzas only on fol. 6v (MS2) of WBY’s Journal, Burns Collection, Boston College Tese pages are repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 150–153, and are also transcribed in Mem., 142–143 and 144. Te poem was frst published in GH10, then GH12; it was also included in R16, and then in all collected editions by WBY. Copy-text: P49. I had this thought a while ago, ‘My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind bitter land.’ 5

And I grew weary of the sun Until my thoughts cleared up again,

Title.] First thus in CP33, and corr. to this in page-proofs for Macmillan Edition de Luxe in 1932 (NLI 30262). ‘Te Consolation’ GH10– LP31. In GH10, ‘Te Consolation’ is placed third in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and his Wife Pernella’ [for this sequence-title, see note to ‘His Dream’.] 1. [I suddenly thought an hour ago del.] [I thought of this a while ago del.] I had this thought an [hour del.] while ago MS1. 2.] It is unwise to assume that this line simply reports MG’s understanding of WBY’s work in any straightforward way, if only because the artifce of the poem establishes a certain distance between the speaker’s ‘darling’ and WBY’s friend/lover MG. If the line is to be reduced to documentary statement, then it is factually faulty, for MG had understood perfectly well many aspects of WBY’s cultural life in Ireland over the past two decades; and the line is not designed or pitched as an insult. Additionally, ‘cannot’ need not mean only ‘is unable to’ or ‘refuses to’: it may also carry the possibility of ‘must not’.

4. blind bitter land] Perhaps cp. the ending of G. Sigerson’s version in Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897) of a warning poem from the Book of Lismore, ‘Womankind’ (29–32): Best beware of Womankind, Meetly mind, this truth proclaim: He who fails full soon shall fnd Bondage blind and bitter shame. 5. weary of the sun] Cp. Macbeth, V v 54–55: ‘I ’gin to be aweary  of the sun | And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now undone’ and Shelley, Te Revolt of Islam, I xvii, 2–3: ‘now | Tat her sweet eyes were weary of the sun’. 5–8.] [And I was dashed to think del.] And I grew sorry thinking it [I had grown sorry at the thought del.] Until my thoughts [grew clear del.] cleared up again Remembering that the best I have writ Was [but to del.] writ to make [it del.] all plain MS1. I had grown weary of the sun Until my thoughts cleared up again

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Remembering that the best I have done Was done to make it plain; 10

15

That every year I have cried, ‘At length My darling understands it all, Because I have come into my strength, And words obey my call’; That had she done so who can say What would have shaken from the sieve? I might have thrown poor words away And been content to live.

Remembering that the best [I’ve del.] I have done Was done to make it plain; MS2. 9–12. ‘At length .  .  . call;’] at length .  .  . call; GH10 (no inverted commas). 9–10.] [How del.] Tat every year [I have said del.] I’ve cried at length | [She’ll del.] She can but understand it all MS1. 13–16.] Two attempts at this stanza are del. in MS1. Tese are followed by the date ‘Jan 22’, then beneath them is a fnished version of the stanza, also dated ‘Jan 22’. [And ^But^ had she done so – [?who ?He] can say Who shook me from his sieve If I’d have thrown poor words away And been content to live. del.] [[And del.] Tat had she done so – [He del.] who can say

[Who del.] ^But he that^ shook me from his sieve [Whether del.] I’d ^have^ thrown poor words away And been content to live. del] 14.] Te line seems to refer to an old custom of divination by means of ‘the sieve and shears’: this was employed in order to detect a thief, or else fnd some item that had been stolen or lost. John Aubrey’s account of the method (in 1686) is that ‘Te Sheers are stuck in a Sieve, and two maydens hold up the sieve with the top of their fngers by the handle of the shiers: then say, By St Peter and St Paule such a one hath stolen (such a thing), the others say, By St Peter and St Paul he hath not stolen it. Afer many such Adjurations, the Sieve will turne at ye name of the Tiefe’. 15. I might [then del.] have thrown poor words away MS1.

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[‘MY DEAR IS ANGRY THAT OF LATE’] Date of composition. Te quatrain was entered in WBY’s Journal on 23 Jan. 1909, almost certainly the day of its composition. Although the entry which follows it in the Journal is dated by WBY ‘Jan. 24’, two entries later item 20 begins with ‘Last night I met Birrell’: WBY dined with Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary of State for Ireland, in Dublin on Saturday night, 23 Jan. Textual history. Tis quatrain is numbered by WBY as item 17 in his 1909 Journal (Boston College, Burns Collection), fol. 6v (MS). Te Journal page is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 258–259, and transcribed in Mem., 145. It was never published by WBY. Context and interpretation. Te poem exists as part of a developing series of thoughts in the 1909 Journal, afer material (including a draf of ‘Te Consolation’/’Words’) relating to WBY’s newly intensifed romantic relationship with MG. Te immediately preceding item (16) marks a kind of climax in these thoughts (transcr. in Mem., 145): It seems to me that love, if it is fne, is essentially a discipline but it needs [profound del.] so much wisdom that the love of Solomon and Sheba must have lasted, for all the silence of the scriptures. In wise love, each [desires del.] divines the high secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life. [It is the creation of del.] ^Love also creates^ the mask. Immediately afer this, and numbered ‘17’ by WBY, the quatrain sounds a very much less exalted note. Te contrast is a harsh one, but it is not accidental: ‘My dear’ and ‘I’ here are a far cry from Sheba and Solomon, and ‘wisdom’ has been replaced by opinionated denunciation and snappy, resentful accusation. Tis degree of come-and-go in the Journal’s thought is part of the larger picture WBY discovers in the act of writing it; and although the quatrain is not intended for publication, this is not the same thing as its having no intended audience, for evidently MG had been told of the Journal’s existence, and had been promised the opportunity to read it: ‘How interesting that manuscript book of yours will be,’ she wrote to WBY in Jan./Feb. 1909, ‘I am longing to see it, we will read it together’ (G-YL, 263). WBY was not shy, either as a lover or as a writer, of allowing MG to see ‘the mask’ slip, as it does in this quatrain. Plainly, a diference of opinion is being referred to, on the matter of ‘base blood’: this could be DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-44

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a disagreement that surfaced in conversations with MG in Paris in Dec. 1908, or perhaps WBY’s protests against someone (probably in the Abbey company, and perhaps the Fay brothers) in his correspondence with MG. In Jan., one letter from MG tells the poet that ‘I don’t feel I agree with a good deal of your last letter, though I could not argue the subject having indiferent knowledge’ (G-YL, 262). Tough WBY’s letter is lost, some idea of its general drif may perhaps be had from entry 11 in the Journal, and the determination expressed there ‘To oppose the new ill-breeding of Ireland, which may in a few years destroy all that has given Ireland a distinguished name in the world’ (Mem., 142). But there is a much more personal dimension, and the quatrain’s real animus is directed towards MG’s husband, John MacBride, as the carrier of ‘base blood’. WBY’s insult is compounded by the fact that MacBride and MG now have an infant son, Sean; and an acid view of MG herself is taken once the poet revises on the page her ‘kindness’ to MacBride (which might, however low a ‘clown’ he is, be a proof of her underlying good nature) to the actual ‘kisses’ she once gave him (which charges the last line with revulsion, especially in the light of those kisses that MG had recently been giving WBY). Copy-text: MS. My dear is angry that of late I cry all base blood down As though she had not taught me hate By kisses to a clown.

4. kisses] [kindness del.] kisses MS. a clown] WBY intends here OED 2., ‘A man without refnement or culture; an ignorant, rude, uncouth, ill-bred man’. Perhaps cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), cxi 1–4: ‘Te churl in spirit [. . .] By blood a king, at heart a clown’. Also in this context perhaps cp. G.

Sigerson’s translations of an eighteenthcentury Irish poem, ‘Te Brightness of Brightness’, in his Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897), 24, where the visionary maiden embodying Ireland is ‘Bound to a Clown – the Maid of Maids elysian!’

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[ON A CERTAIN MIDDLEAGED OFFICE HOLDER] Date of composition. Tis short squib was begun shortly afer WBY’s dinner in the company of Augustine Birrell on 23 Jan. 1909, but was taken up again on 16 Sep. 1909; afer this the piece, which was never really fnished, was abandoned by WBY. Textual history and circumstances of composition. Tis short poem was never published by WBY, and did not appear in print until D. Donoghue’s edition of Memoirs (1972). Te lines making up this attempt at a satirical quatrain are all in WBY’s Journal, in two positions: the frst version is written diagonally over entry 20/21, and deleted. Te entries over which it is written date from 24 Jan. 1909, and the lines relate directly to the anecdote contained there. WBY’s subject is the dinner at which Augustine Birrell was a guest, hosted by W.F. Bailey (a prominent Dublin fgure, associated with the Land Commission and in particular with Irish forestry, who was also a patron of the arts; an associate of GM’s, he was a Trustee of the Abbey Teatre, a governor of the National Gallery, and Vice-President of the Irish Literary Society). In entry 21, WBY recounts the evening (Mem., 146): A conversation. Last night I met Birrell. Tere was some rich man there, and some person spoke of the great power that wealth might have for good. [. . .] Birrell said, ‘Wealth has very little power, it can really do very little.’ I said, ‘Yet every now and then one meets some charming person who likes all the fne things and is quite delightful and who would not have had these qualities if some great-grandfather had not sold his country for gold.’ Birrell answered, ‘I admit that wealth occasionally – Darwin was an example – enables someone to write a great book.’ I answered, ‘Oh, that was not what I was thinking of. I meant that it creates the fne life which we look at with afectionate eyes out of our garret windows. We must not leave our garrets, but we could not write well but for what we see from the windows.’ Ten Birrell answered, ‘Ten writers are parasites.’ I noticed that most of the other guests, two or three judges among them, seemed, beside Birrell and the rich man, too sympathetic and anxious to please; I myself among the rest. Birrell and the rich man did not care a bean for any of us. ‘Parasites’ clearly stung; and WBY’s heightened eloquence (even in his own re-telling of it) seems to have made little impression. Te casual mention of Charles Darwin by Birrell is enough to send WBY on a line of imagery relating to ‘natural laws’, and the evolution from fea to tick, expressing a poet’s scorn afer the event of his failure DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-45

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to score any conversational points. Later in the Journal, an entry which WBY dates ‘September 16’ [1909] returns to the lines and attempts to redraf them, with possible titles, as well as the explicit identifcation with Birrell, also supplied. In the midst of the drafing, WBY explains: ‘Attempt to turn into rhyme a joke of Robert Gregory’s at dinner last night, but too savage to be much good. I had described an old conversation with Birrell.’ Te ‘old conversation’ is that of 23 Jan., and the reason why WBY and Robert Gregory were talking about Augustine Birrell in Dublin on 15 Sep. was probably his involvement, as Chief Secretary, with moves from Dublin Castle to apply English censorship provisions to the production at the Abbey Teatre of G.B. Shaw’s Te Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet on 23 and 25–26 Aug. Even hardened Irish enemies of the Abbey, who would otherwise have been more than ready to protest at Shaw’s play, were persuaded into a temporary truce, lest they be complicit with English interference. On 8 Sep., Florence Farr reported to JQ how ‘I heard from Yeats that Shaw’s play went enormously and Birrell swore and stamped and said that Aberdeen [J. Hamilton-Gordon, 7th Earl of Aberdeen, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1905–1915] had made the whole Irish government ridiculous. So that little trouble is over’ (CL 5, 593). In the Journal, WBY makes various stabs at producing a quatrain from Robert Gregory’s ‘joke’; however, these all turn around the material of WBY’s earlier refections on feas and ticks, and are in fact revisions of the earlier quatrain. In the midst of his revisions, WBY toys with possible titles, and fnally comes up with four lines where all but one are without deletions: this forms the basis of the present text. It is followed by further thoughts from WBY (Mem., 231): Not worth giving by itself, would seem mere party politics, but might come at end of old note of conversation at Bailey’s, names lef out. ‘Cabinet minister who had been a lively chatterbox in his youth’ would be enough of a description. Augustine Birrell. WBY’s target is the politician Augustine Birrell (1850–1933). Originally a successful lawyer and essayist, he became a Liberal MP frst in 1889, and then again in the landslide election of 1906. He was a cabinet minister for both CampbellBannerman and Asquith, and held the cabinet post of Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907 until 1911: he was largely responsible for the successful passing of the Irish Land Act (1909), and was in London in connection with this in Sep. 1909, when WBY listened to Robert Gregory’s ‘joke’ and returned to his anti-Birrell squib of eight months before. AG knew Birrell through Liberal political society and connections with her late husband, but his 1907 appointment also marked the ousting of a closer member of the Gregory circle, George Wyndham: WBY’s ‘An Appointment’ (1907), with its subliminal rhyme on ‘squirrel’ and ‘Birrell’ probably refects a certain wariness at Coole about the new Chief Secretary. In fact, Birrell was to become a signifcant parliamentary pilot of the Home Rule Bill of 1912, and a valued ally of AG’s (and thus of WBY’s) in the Hugh Lane pictures controversy. In 1909, however, he and WBY seem not to have hit it of: AG, who had been invited to Bailey’s dinner, was unable to attend, and thus was unable to smooth out the evening’s social awkwardnesses.

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Copy-text: Journal fol. 64r (fnal quatrain of draft: see MS versions), with one deletion restored. He thinks to have set all things right And be no longer parasite Now that he’s master of the trick That turns a fea into a tick.

Title.] Te title given in the present edition must be regarded as uncertain. In his Sep. entry in the Journal, WBY inserts above his second attempt at the poem ‘On a certain [cabinet minister del.] middle-aged ofceholder’, then immediately underneath, ‘or | On a [middle-aged del.] prosperous mimic of other’s thoughts’. Te end of the Journal item (see above) might suggest that a fnal thought on the possible material for any future title was ‘Cabinet minister who had been a lively chatterbox in his youth’. (Any knowledge WBY possessed of Birrell’s youth could have come only from AG.) MS versions. Both phases of the composition are transcribed in Mem. 146–147 and 230–231, and Cornell ISWGH 260–263. Te version of Jan. 24 is found in Journal fol. 7v: [Augustine Birrell dreams he has found a trick To juggle out of sight the natural laws And grow a self sufcing man because He that was once a fea is now a tick. del.]

[another version del.] [No more a parasite he has learned the trick To change a lively fea into a tick del.] WBY’s second attempt at the poem, of Sep. 16, is found in Journal fol. 64 r: A. Birrell He thinks he is master of the laws Tat made ^ him but an empty soul^ his soul mere parasite because He’s grown to be a master of the trick Tat turns a lively fea into a tick. He thinks that in the teeth of natural laws He is a self sufcing man because He thinks to [set his world aright del.] to have set all things right And be no longer parasite [Because del.] ^Now that^ he’s master of the trick Tat turns a fea into a tick.

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A FRIEND’S ILLNESS Date of composition. Te poem was probably composed 5–6 Feb. 1909. Te date of 6 Feb. is given by WBY in MS2, which accords with the evidence of drafs in the Journal; in a letter to AG postmarked 8 Feb., WBY encloses a copy of the poem in its fnished state, saying that ‘on Friday [5 Feb.] afer I had been thinking all that day and the day before of what the world would be without you I made a little [song del.] scrap of verse’ (CL 5, 416). Te versions in the Journal suggest an initial burst of composition, with the poem drafed twice, followed (afer more writing in the Journal) by a return to the page to squeeze in a third draf. It is likely that the frst two drafs come from 5 Feb., and the third from 6 Feb. Circumstances. AG sufered what may have been identifed as a cerebral haemorrhage in the frst week of Feb. 1909, and her son Robert wrote with the news to WBY on 4 Feb., telling him how AG ‘last night and today has had several very bad attacks of bleeding from the nose followed by fainting’. From Dublin that same day, WBY wrote immediately to AG herself (CL 5, 413): Dear Friend: I am utterly dazed to think that you are ill. You have been more to me than father or mother or friend, a second self. Te only person in the world to whom I could tell every thought. I blame myself that I wanted you to share the burden here [in Dublin, where WBY had been rehearsing the Abbey company], but this will never happen again. Afer this we will all work that you may rest. You have laboured for us all with uncomplaining and heroic heart. It is likely that WBY also wrote that day with the news to MG in Paris, receiving the prompt reply, ‘Dearest – I am sad for you. I know how deeply you must feel Lady Gregory’s illness – it would be horrid and unnatural if you didn’t she being such a friend of yours’ (G-YL, 263). WBY recorded his immediate reactions in the Journal, beginning with the receipt of Robert Gregory’s letter (Mem., 160–161): Tis morning I got a letter telling me of Lady Gregory’s illness. I did not recognize her son’s writing at frst, and my mind wandered, I suppose because I am not well. I thought my mother was ill and that my sister was asking me to come at once: then I remembered that my mother died years ago and that

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more than kin was at stake. She had been to me mother, friend, sister and brother. I cannot realize the world without her – she brought to my wavering thoughts steadfast nobility. All day the thought of losing her is like a confagration in the rafers. Friendship is all the house I have. On 6 Feb., the news from Coole improved, and WBY recorded in the Journal that ‘Lady Gregory is better but writes in pencil that she ‘very nearly slipped away’’ (Mem., 161). AG had indeed managed to communicate, telling WBY that ‘I am exhausted from the loss of blood and my head aches from weakness, but I may quite soon get well [. . .] I think I had nearly slipped away’. Also on 6 Feb., WBY alerted Mrs Patrick Campbell to the grave situation, telling her that ‘All my plans are in confusion’ and how ‘On Tuesday last [AG] was taken dangerously ill, constant fainting fts and bleeding from the nose, and if there had been a second attack she would have died’ (CL 5, 415). WBY wrote to AG on 8 Feb., now enclosing his poem for her, and explaining its imagery (CL 5, 416): ‘I mean by Sickness and the Scales that when one we love is ill we weigh them against a world without them’. AG recovered steadily through Feb. (and with more alacrity and completeness than might have been expected if she had indeed sufered a cerebral haemorrhage), and she told the poet later that she was ‘glad of the illness that brought you nearer to me’ (quoted Foster 1, 398). It is possible that WBY thought he had experienced some form of presentiment of AG’s illness, since the entry that follows the drafs of the poem in his Journal, and was itself written on the same day, speaks about events of 3 Feb., the day before news of her illness arrived from Coole (Mem., 163): All Wednesday [i.e. Wed. 3 Feb.] I heard Castiglione’s phrase ringing in my memory, ‘Never be it spoken without tears, the Duchess, too, is dead.’ Tat slight phrase which, – coming where it did among the numbering of his dead – has ofen moved me till my eyes dimmed, and I felt all his sorrow as though one saw the worth of life fade for ever. Tis passage, a little modifed (the phrase ‘brought before me now all his sorrow and my own’), served in WBY’s autobiographical volume Estrangement (1926) to introduce the poem itself. Reception and interpretation. In approaching his theme, WBY was probably infuenced (perhaps subliminally) by renaissance models, notably those of John Donne and George Herbert. Tat the renaissance in a more general sense was somewhere on his mind on hearing the news of AG’s illness is evident from the passage from Castiglione he cites (perhaps as a presentiment of the illness) in his Journal (see Circumstances). Donne alludes to a renaissance commonplace of the world’s consumption by fre in relation to individual loss in e.g. Te First Anniversary 427–428: ‘She, she is dead; she’s dead; when thou know’st this, | Tou know’st how dry a cinder this world is’) and in ‘A Fever’ (‘Oh do not die, for I shall hate | All women so, when thou art gone’):

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O wrangling schools, that search what fre Shall burn this world, had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire, That this her fever might be it? Herbert (perhaps following Donne in this imagery) seems to provide WBY with something of a model, in his ‘Virtue’, 13–16: Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like seasoned timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefy lives. Citing both Donne and Herbert, W.M. Carpenter pointed out that WBY ‘is not merely duplicating the thought of either poem’ (‘Te Green Helmet Poems and Yeats’s Myth of the Renaissance’, Modern Philology 67/1 (Aug. 1969), 58): ‘A Friend’s Illness’ balances the value of a single soul and that of the physical world in the striking image of the scale, a conceit not used by his predecessors. But he is using the cosmic, intellectual hyperbole that keeps poet and subject at some distance, while still signifying strong emotion in that very intellectual intensity, in the obvious signifcance the question holds for the speaker. A number of critics have pointed to the seeming presence of Herbert and Donne in the poem. It is not necessary to overplay the signifcance of these likely poetic models, since they facilitate, rather than dictate, the poem’s business: W. Chapman claims that because of them the poem ‘extols the Cavalier virtue of friendship [. . .] with a metaphysical conceit’ (Chapman, 155), but this manages to miss the strength of feeling in the poetry itself. Imagery of consuming fames did not need renaissance tradition to make it signifcant for WBY; and the Journal entry, where ‘the thought of losing her is like a confagration in the rafers’ and its instant turn towards personal metaphor with ‘Friendship is all the house I have’ (see Circumstances), along with e.g. the recent incendiary imagery of ‘No Second Troy’, play more consequential roles in this poem than do mere literary allusions. Te poem’s governing fgure is in any case that of the scales, and while this may have certain Biblical sources (see notes), it is not drawn from any metaphysical conceits. For R. Ellmann (who listed this amongst other WBY poems as an instance), ‘Te agent of transcendence is the assessor, standing at once inside and outside his own experience’, since ‘He is perpetually evaluating, weighing in a scale’; but ‘A poet has a miller’s thumb, and his scales operate in an unusual way’, since ‘consideration of wrongs done him does not lead to heaping insult upon his enemies, but to a secret, proud exultation [. . .] that he can escape the limitations of petty enmity’ (Identity, 6). Balancing one thing against another is the poem’s main task, and for

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D. Harris, this ‘plays the double theme of personal revelation and cosmic judgement: mere apocalypse cannot match the internal, refning fre which exalts Lady Gregory’s soul into a type of the indestructible anima mundi’ (Harris, 53). Although the poem was produced under considerable personal anxiety and at speed (see Circumstances), it is notable for its daring approach to verse form, and its original technical resource. Te six trimeters and the fnal dimeter are rhymed aabccbc: the opening couplet sets up a situation, and the ‘Tought’ it mentions turns out to be a question, one that does not carry through the opening a rhyme, but instead shapes its own scheme around the c rhyme, of ‘whole’, ‘coal’, and ‘soul’. Troughout, however, WBY employs enjambment between lines in a more extreme and concentrated way than he had attempted in lyrics hitherto: ‘this | Tought’, ‘whole | World’, and fnally ‘weighed | Against’ function – in a poem of only seven lines – to set the formal keynote. Te frst rhyme, also, is a very light one of ‘this’/ ‘his’, a lightness that increases the prominence of the enjambment between the frst two lines. ‘Te whole | World’ (4–5) is prominent too, though here the heaviness of the two vowels on either side of the enjambment slows, rather than speeds, the poem’s speaking voice. Te last enjambment (6–7) seems to enact its own process of weighing line against sentence-structure: ‘weighed | Against’ leaves open the question of pace in the voice that must move from the end of one line to the beginning of the next: for it is possible to see something weighed without knowing or specifying anything that it is to be weighed against. Te eye here registers its own spatial pause; the voice and its verse speak against the pause that is visible. In this respect, the shock of a dimeter, rather than the expected trimeter, in the fnal line is the poem’s clinching surprise: wisely, WBY rejected his early, and too ringing, ‘Against a lofy soul’ (see note on 7). H. Vendler mentions this as ‘the ‘extra’ coda-line’ that ‘represents the ‘supernatural’ quality in the soul that makes it outweigh the whole world’ (Vendler, 185). In the end, the material entirety of the world is weighed here against something; and the something against which it is weighed is two bare syllables: the line-lengths are out of balance, but the balance is nevertheless struck, and holds. Textual history. Drafs of this poem form section 52 of WBY’s Journal (MS1: Burns Collection, Boston College, fol. 19r.) transcr. Mem. 162, repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 210–211. Two distinct versions are entered, one below the other: these are identifed here as MS1a and MS1b. Item 53 begins immediately underneath, but WBY returned to the poem, and wrote in a third draf diagonally, at the side of the previous two (MS1c.): this is the latest Journal version. A fair copy was entered in hol. by WBY in AG’s copy of CWVP08 vol. 1, carrying the date ‘Written Feb. 6th 1909’ (MS2); another fair copy was entered by the poet in AG’s copy of CVWP08 vol. 7 (MS3). Te poem was included in GH10 and GH12, and in all collected editions thereafer; it was also included in Estrangement (1926), and collected edns. of WBY’s Autobiographies.

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Copy-text: P49.

5

Sickness brought me this Thought, in that scale of his: Why should I be dismayed Though fame had burned the whole World, as it were a coal, Now I have seen it weighed Against a soul?

Title.] No title MS1a-c, MS2; Written during a friend’s illness MS3. 1.] Sickness [has taught me del.] ^would teach me^ this MS1a; Sickness [showed del. taught del.] ^showed^ me this MS1b. 2.] With that poor scale of his MS1a With those poor scales of his MS1b. his:] his. MS3. 3.] To be no way dismayed MS1a. Not to be dismayed MS1b. Why should I be] MS1c. and afer; but [To be no del.] Why should I be MS2. 4.] Tough fames eat up the whole MS1a; Tough fames eat the whole MS1b; Tough fames [have del.]^had burned [up del]^ the whole MS1c. 5.] Not present in MS1a, MS1b. WBY’s decision to introduce this line is also one to provide the short poem with a third moment of enjambment (see Reception and interpretation). By turning ‘the whole’ into ‘the whole | World’, WBY introduces an echo of Matthew 16.26: ‘For what is a man profted, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (See Purdy, 60). were] was MS2. a coal] It is possible that WBY’s apocalyptic context registers here the infuence of Isaiah 6: 6–7: ‘Ten few one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his

hand, which he had taken with the tongs from of the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.’ Along with this, and of relevance to the entire poem, WBY makes more audible the relation of his fgure to George Herbert, ‘Virtue’, 13–16 (see Reception and interpretation). Herbert’s decision to end his poem on an unexpected dimeter (‘Ten chiefy lives’) is also to be felt in WBY’s fnal line (as noted by Vendler, 185). 6.] Now that I have seen it weighed MS1a; Now I[’ve del.] ^have^ seen it weighed MS1b. weighed] Along with ‘that scale’ (2), this makes explicit WBY’s metaphor of weighing in the poem. Tere are numerous Biblical resonances, most notably Daniel 5.27: ‘Tou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting’. Purdy (60) compares Job 6.3, ‘O that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!’; cp. also Job 31.6: ‘Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity’. 7.] [With one most lofy soul del.] Against a soul. MS1c. a soul] one soul. MS1a [one del.] a soul. MS1b. soul?] MS3 and afer; soul. letter to AG 8 Feb., MS2.

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ON GEORGE MOORE Date of composition. It is possible to establish only the date on which this poem was written down; according to WBY, it had been ‘made long ago’ when he wrote it into his Journal on 9 Mar. 1909. Tis should not be doubted, but since there is no evidence of any kind for when the quatrain frst took shape in the poet’s mind, it is included in the chronological order of the present edition at the point of its inscription, and not its composition. Any conjectural dating would have to begin by identifying a point of particular irritation with GM on WBY’s part; but there were so many of these, over a period of years, that any such conjecture would be highly unsafe. Te lack of any alteration in the text as entered in the MS does indeed suggest that the work of composition was already complete when WBY decided to include these lines in his Journal. Context and circumstances. A personal gloss on this satirical quatrain is given in the Journal, immediately afer the lines themselves: ‘Made long ago but written now because it comes up into memory, and it may amuse me in some moment of exasperation with that [word del. ?strange] artless man’. WBY had written six notes before this in the same session of Journal entries on 9 Mar., even telling AG in a letter of the same day that ‘I also wrote several pages in my Diary, rather good pages’ (CL 5, 462). Te preceding entries include thoughts on ‘A true system of morals’, and how ‘Te Catholic Church created a system only possible for saints – hence its prolonged power: its defnition of the good was narrow, but it did not set out to make shopkeepers’ (Mem., 181). In part, this refects the kinds of critique put forward by GM in e.g. his Te Untilled Field (1903) but, if this thought does occur to WBY, he remembers the pleasure of turning it back on GM himself, who was an ever more deeply lapsed catholic, as his writings showed in a way that WBY perhaps considers ‘artless’. Te adjective (though arguably justifed in this particular respect) was the last one that might be thought appropriate to GM, whose announced reverence for literary and other kinds of art was matched by artful self-estimation in print. While the most serious and far-reaching quarrel between WBY and GM still lay in the future in 1909, there had already been impassioned disagreements between the two men, not least over difcult collaborations such as their play Diarmuid and Grania (1901) and over what became WBY’s play Where Tere Is Nothing (1902), where there was an intense dispute over intellectual property rights to the dramatic content. GM’s long-established status as a member of the AG circle was owing to his involvement with key cultural projects, such as the Irish Literary Teatre (his play Te Bending of the Bough (1900) marked a signifcant point in the growing dramatic movement); he was also a cousin of Edward Martyn, and shared close contacts in every area of WBY’s literary, political, and intellectual arenas. In 1909, the two DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-47

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men were not in any position of public enmity, but WBY was in no hurry to see GM without due preparation (a few days afer entering the quatrain in his Journal, the poet accompanied W.K. Magee to GM’s front door, but WBY said ‘I would not go in though I think I shall call on Moore next week’ (CL 5, 474–475). Since he knew J.M. Synge’s death to be imminent, it is also probable that WBY felt wary of seeing GM, and of where talk with him might lead: GM was of the view that Synge had received much inspiration from his own work and artistic example, and this would scarcely make for a relaxed conversation with WBY. Less specifcally, it is interesting that WBY enters his quatrain as something which may be needed in the future, rather than as just a present thought or a record of the past: as GM’s ambitions turned more towards memoir-writing, it took little acuity to predict that trouble between ‘that artless man’ and WBY’s close circle could not be far away. Textual history. Te poem is written in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), fol. 31v. (MS): it is transcribed in Mem., 182, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 264–265. WBY never printed the quatrain, and it was frst publ. posthumously in Te Dublin Magazine, Apr.-Jun. 1951. Copy-text: MS, with editorially supplied punctuation. Moore once had visits from the muse But, fearing that she would refuse An ancient lecher, took to geese: He now gets novels at his ease.

1.] GM’s frst published book had been a youthful volume of poems, Te Flowers of Passion (1877), and his collection Pagan Poems appeared in 1881. 3. took to geese] It is possible that WBY is alluding here to GM’s story ‘Te Wild Goose’, in Te Untilled Field (1903) where the protagonist, a failed journalist and anti-clerical politician, who has also failed in his marriage, takes a last leave of Ireland (and of his wife), with echoes of the ‘wild geese’ going into exile in the sixteenth century: ‘He lef early next morning before she was awake in order to save her the pain of farewells, and all that day in Dublin he walked about, possessed by the great joyful yearning of the wild goose when it rises one bright morning from the warm marshes, scenting the harsh north through leagues of air, and goes away on steady wingbeats’ (393). But the term ‘goose’ can be used in the sense of ‘A foolish person, a simpleton’ (OED 1.f.), and WBY was fond of this as a term of derision: see letter to W. Rothenstein, 7 Sep. 1912 (InteLex, 1972): ‘He is a manifest goose. [. . .] do please see that he goes back to

his pond’, to W.F. Bailey, 25 Jun. 1915 (InteLex, 2690): ‘Sinclair has always been a selfsh goose and has saved so much money that we can’t threaten him with ultimate starvation’, and to E. Shackleton-Heald, 21 Feb. 1938 (InteLex, 7185): ‘Le Gallienne was an over-sexed sentimental  goose’. WBY referred to Lennox Robinson and M. Shawe-Taylor as geese in other letters, and he even called himself this, in a letter to GY, 11 Jul. 1932 (InteLex, 5700): ‘I am a goose in these things because my head is full of other things’. On the publication of A Vision (1925), WBY told T.W. Laurie (16 Jan. 1926 (InteLex, 4822)): ‘I await the book with some excitement as I don’t know whether I am a  goose that has hatched a swan or a swan that has hatched a goose’. It is likely that ‘took to geese’ is aimed at GM’s choice of company and projects, though with an application to him as well. 4.] GM’s career as a novelist had been a productive one: his eleven books included A Drama in Muslin (1886), Esther Waters (1894) and Evelyn Innes (1898), where the character Ulick Deane is a thinly disguised version of WBY.

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THE COMING OF WISDOM WITH TIME Date of composition. Te quatrain was written between 21 and 23 Mar. 1909, and probably on 21 Mar. Textual history. Te poem began in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), where it is frst drafed (as entry 110) at the head of fol. 42v. (MSa). It is followed by a prose entry (111), then redrafed (again as entry 110) at the foot of the page (MSb). Te Journal page is transcribed. in Mem., 196–197, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 178–179. Te poem was published in McClure’s Magazine for Dec. 1910, and was published in the ‘Momentary Toughts’ sequence of GH10. It was included in GH12, then again in R16, and subsequently in all collected edns. of WBY’s poetry. Sources. As P. Kuch has pointed out (Yeats and A.E. (1986), 63), WBY’s quatrain draws on his account of George Russell in ‘An Irish Visionary’, frst publ. in the National Observer (1891), then included in revised form in Te Celtic Twilight (1893); most recently, it had been entitled ‘A Visionary’ in vol. 5 of CWVP08. WBY’s account of Russell’s poetry (which does not name him) includes an anecdote which quotes a note sent with some of the poems (M, 8–9): Te poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions. Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his name, for he wished to be always ‘unknown, obscure, impersonal.’ Next day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words: ‘Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and fowers.’ In 1891, Russell and WBY had both been young writers; that was no longer the case by 1909, but it seems that WBY was now ready to follow – fguratively, at least – Russell’s preparations for a kind of imaginative winter. Reception and interpretation. Tis short poem has served numerous critics as a helpful indication of WBY’s change in direction (of both style and thinking) towards the more challenging material of his later years. Tis may be, however, to read with too much hindsight. It is true that ‘my youth’ is in this quatrain very defnitely a thing of the past; DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-48

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and its ‘lying days’ are not treated with much generosity. Ezra Pound, more than ready to sympathize with any such lack of sympathy, nevertheless felt that WBY was being carried away with rhetoric here: he wrote how ‘Yeats burbles when he talks of ‘withering into the truth’: you wither into non-curiosity’ (Selected Prose 1909–1965, 76; cited in Albright, 510). By the 1930s, when WBY’s later poetry was available to confrm the prophecy supposedly made in this quatrain, biographical readings were given. C.H. Warren’s ‘William Butler Yeats’ in Te Bookman Sep. 1932 was explicit: At forty-seven [in fact, WBY was 43 at the time of composition] the poet had woken up! At an age when most poets have said the best of their say, Yeats suddenly showed signs of coming into his own. Te truth is of course that his was really too great an integrity of mind and spirit to allow him to stay still, cloistered in the peaceful twilight of that youthful heritage, while the world outside went on, sufered, altered, grew. [. . .] Nevertheless, forty-seven is a late age to open one’s eyes on such a difcult realisation. P. Edgar, in the month of the poet’s death (Queen’s Quarterly, Jan. 1939), refected how ‘We must recognise it as a virtue that a poet should be able to recreate himself with advancing years, but we must also note the poet’s belief, indicated in a score of passages, that the gains were achieved at the cost of sacrifce [.  .  .] Even the compensation which he fnds is not unmixed with regret [quoting quatrain]: the passage implies a process of desiccation which I think gives a false view of the case’. Any promised ‘desiccation’ was part of the poem’s designed efect, rather than a serious report from WBY on the state of his writing life; as such, its rhetorical force is part of the poem’s formal identity, which (like other stand-alone quatrains of WBY’s in the past year) was that of a semi-classical epigram. As such, the form may be understood as in part the striking of a pose. Unlike other quatrains, this one outlived its initial moment (in this case, in his Journal), and its appearance in subsequent collections, GH10, GH12, and R16, shows that the poet felt the pose that the poem struck was of some relevance to his poetry as it developed. In the process, the original stimulus for the poem in the long-ago thoughts of George Russell about his own writing was buried further out of sight – even, quite possibly, to WBY himself. For modern critics, the poem is an example of WBY deciding his own poetic fate, and this may well be how the poet came to see it (since its renewed presence in R16 puts it amongst other pieces where much of the ‘truth’ of things is withered into by the imagination). In 1909, that fate was less settled, and was still perhaps being measured against the diferent fate of ‘AE’: Russell knew a good deal about the extent to which the days of WBY’s youth had (and had not) been ‘lying’ ones. It is possible that, nevertheless, WBY compares himself with Russell in a way that is still able to concede that, in some sense, between them the artistic/philosophical ‘root is one’. Intimations of an oncoming season of withering were presented also by the grave illness of WBY’s more recent associate (and a more major artist than Russell), J.M. Synge, whose imminent death was much on the poet’s mind at the time of composition of this poem. In the event, Synge died within a couple of days of its composition, on 24 Mar.

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Copy-text: P49. Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and fowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.

Title.] No title MSa, MSb; Youth and Age McClure’s; Youth GH10 proofs (Berg Collection, NYPL). 1.] [To lie no more del.] [To give up falsehood is to be undone del.] Who lies no longer is undone: MSa; Tough leaves are many, the root [but del.] ^is^ one MSb. WBY also enters an alternative version in MSb., signalling it ‘or’: To give up falsehood is to be undone. Diagonally at the bottom of the page, a note is added: ‘in which case read ‘blossom’ for ‘fower’ and

take out ‘my’ in line 2’. Tese directions taken together would have produced: ‘To give up falsehood is to be undone. | Trough all the lying days of youth | I swayed my leaves and blossom in the sun’. 2.] All through the days of my [lying del.] youth | Trough all the lying days of youth MSa. 3.] I swayed my blossoms in the sun | [I plucked the fower and blossoms in the sun del.] MSa. 4.] Now I may wither into truth MSa; Now I may wither into ^the^ truth MSb.

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TO A POET, WHO WOULD HAVE ME PRAISE CERTAIN BAD POETS, IMITATORS OF HIS AND MINE Date and circumstances of composition. Te frst drafs in WBY’s Journal come between an entry for 23 Apr. 1909 and one for 27 Apr. 1909. WBY attended a Dublin gathering hosted by George Russell on 25 Apr., and a letter from Russell to JQ of 27 Apr. (Denson, 66) mentions how ‘Yeats was up with me the other night’: much of their conversation related to the fate of J.M. Synge’s unfnished Deirdre MS, but Russell’s eagerness to press on JQ the merits of James Stephens’s soon to be published book of poems, Insurrections (which was dedicated to A.E.), is likely to have been replicated in talk that night with WBY, whose published support would have been invaluable. Te other poets who might have been discussed are less easy to identify; but Padraic Colum has been suggested as one such. WBY’s critical position on Stephens (and Colum) sofened over the years. Textual history. WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College) has drafs of this quatrain on fol. 59r., transcribed in Mem., 221–222 and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 180–181. Tere are three versions of the quatrain here, one beneath the frst (MSa, MSb) then revisions made to the second (MSc). A TS version is preserved in NLI 13583 (TS). Te poem was published in GH10 and GH12, then again in R16, and subsequently in all collected edns. Copy-text: P49. You say, as I have often given tongue In praise of what another’s said or sung,

Title.] To AE who wants me praise some of his poets imitators of my own MSa [though not revised for MSb and MSc, to which it presumably applies also]; To A Certain Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Imitators Of His And Mine GH10 Proofs; To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Of Mine GH10; To

A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine GH12 and all subsequent edns. 1–2.] You tell me that I ofen have given tongue | To praise what other men have said or sung MSa; You tell me that I’ve ofen given tongue | In praise of what another’s said or sung MSb;

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’Twere politic to do the like by these; But was there ever dog that praised his feas?

You say as I have ofen given tongue | In praise of what another’s said or sung MSc. 1. given tongue] WBY is using the language of hunting with hounds, OED tongue 7.a., ‘of a hound: to give forth its voice when on the scent or in sight of the quarry’. Te poet returned to this idiom much later in ‘Hound Voice’ (1938), 7–10. 3.] Tat it would get me friends if I praised these; MSa, MSb; [It were del.] ’Twere politic to do the like for these MSc. ’Twere politic] Te archaic diction here strengthens the Shakespearean feel: ‘politic’ is a common adjective in Shakespeare, e.g. King Lear I iv 341–342: ‘’Tis politic and safe to let him keep | At point a hundred knights’. 4.] But tell me do the wolf dogs praise their feas. MSa, MSb; But where’s the wolf dog that has praised his feas? MSc; But tell me does the wolf dog praise its feas TS; But where’s

the wild dog that has praised his feas? GH10, G12; But have you known a dog to praise his feas? R16; rev. to fnal version in family copy of R16, probably in 1916, then in 1917 impression of R16. In a loose leaf inserted into the Journal, Allan Wade wrote: ‘W.B.Y. recited this to me at lunch in the Queen’s Restaurant Sloane Square, I think in the Summer of 1909. Te last line then ran: ‘But tell me – does the wild dog praise his feas.’ [Te lunch with Wade may have taken place on 7 Jun. 1909.] As is evident, this fnal line gave WBY a great deal of trouble, and it did not settle into its fnal form in print until 1917, in the second impression of R16 (though WBY had arrived at this in 1916, annotating a copy of R16). As W. Chapman comments, the line ‘has been worked hard to achieve its seemingly spontaneous canine bite at the close’ (Chapman, 124).

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ON A HOUSE SHAKEN BY THE LAND AGITATION Date of composition. Both prose outline and frst draf are dated in WBY’s Journal 7 Aug. 1909. Prose outline. Afer a month without entries, WBY began his Journal for 7 Aug. 1909 with the observation that ‘[I] Have made no notes for a long time. Have feared to give my mind a critical bias at a time when I must create’. Te next entry, with the same date, is ‘Subject for a poem, ‘A [falling del.] Shaken House’’: How should the world gain if this house failed, if even though a hundred little houses were the better for it, for here power has gone forth or lingered, giving energy, precision; and it gave to a far people benefcent rule, and still under its roof living intellect is sweetened by old memories of its descent from far of? How should the world be better if the wren’s nest fourish and the eagle’s house is scattered? Related material in Journal. Immediately afer the draf of the poem, WBY’s Journal entry continues, with refections clearly relevant to the poem and its thought: I wrote this on hearing the results of reduction of rent made by the courts. One feels always that where all must make their living they will live not for life’s sake but the work’s and all be the poorer. My work is very near to life itself, but I am always feeling a lack of life’s own values behind my thought. Tey should have been there before the strain began, before it became necessary to let the work create its values. Tis house has enriched my soul out of measure, because here life [creates del.] moves without restraint [her own fruit and fower del.] ^through gracious forms^. Here there has been no [compulsive del.] compelled labour, no poverty thwarted impulse. Subject and circumstances. Tis was WBY’s frst fully occasional published poem since ‘An Appointment’ (wr. in 1907, and publ. in Feb. 1909); its occasion, like that of its predecessor, is of direct relevance to AG and her circle, and to Coole Park. In summer 1909, AG was spending time on active engagement with Abbey Teatre matters in Dublin, while WBY was at Coole, still writing Te Player Queen. Financial management of the Coole Park estate had never been easy, and AG exercised considerable ingenuity (along with – by comparison with her late husband and his landowner predecessors– a good deal of economic prudence) in safeguarding the estate for her son Robert. Rents paid by DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-50

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Coole tenants were not a negligible part of the overall fnancial picture, so when ffeen Gregory tenants applied, under the provisions of the Land Act of 1903, for reductions in their annual rent payable to the estate, the short-term budgetary consequences (and longer-term prospects for income from the land) were considerable. Te relevant Land Commissioner to whom the tenants made application found in their favour on 30 Jul. 1909 (with the ruling reported in Te Irish Times of 7 Aug.), so WBY lost little time in writing his directly reactive poem. Te Commissioner in question was not unknown to AG (and WBY also had met him on at least one occasion): this was Sir Gerald Fitzgerald, who was briefy remembered in AG’s autobiography (SY, 38): Mr. (aferwards Sir Gerald) Fitzgerald was one of those with whom I carried on a good-humoured quarrel. He, like so many others, had received some kindness from my husband when a young man in Galway town [.  .  .] He would sometimes threaten to come in return and wave the green Land League fag at the gates of Coole. In fact, AG had alerted WBY to the problem of rent reassessments earlier in the summer, writing to him on 5 May about how ‘Another batch of rents has been reduced 25 per cent’, and adding that ‘Some of the best land is in it – so there is no justice in it – and of course it is a blow’ (quoted CL 5, 539). Whether the pattern of Land Commission judgements that reduced tenants’ rents, and the implications of the 1903 and 1909 Land Acts more generally, along with the related provisions in the controversial Liberal Budget of 1909, were generally perceived by Irish landowners as altogether apocalyptic is somewhat open to question. D. Donoghue’s account, however broad in historical terms, is even so a useful reality-check on the situation as WBY chooses to present it (We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society (1986), 54): Many of the landlords in Ireland saw the 1903 Wyndham Act as a blessing: they were fnding the upkeep of their estates a burden, and welcomed the opportunity to sell, especially as they could buy back any part of their estates they wanted, on favourable terms. Te only landlords who resented the Wyndham Act and, even more bitterly, the provisions of the Acts of 1909 and 1910, were those, like Lady Gregory, who wanted to retain their estates, and to be free of Government interference. So it was not surprising that Yeats saw the reduction of her rents as a conspiracy of the British Government and the Irish members of Parliament – especially John Redmond and John Dillon – to placate the tenants and destroy the landlords at one stroke. AG was by no means completely opposed to the 1903 Act: not only was she familiar with George Wyndham, but she was the aunt of another fgure important to its genesis and operation, John Shawe-Taylor; as E. Cullingford says, ‘Land purchase helped break up many great estates, yet Yeats and Lady Gregory welcomed it’, so that this poem ‘appears rather elegiac than aggressive’ (Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1981), 69). Serious as Fitzgerald’s 1909 Commission judgement was, it presented AG’s fnancial management skills

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with nothing that could not ultimately be managed with ingenuity and prudence. WBY – whose business, strictly speaking, none of this was – took matters altogether more gravely. Doubtless aware of the progress being made towards the passing of another Irish Land Act in Dec. 1909 (this time steered through by Augustine Birrell), the poet found his moment to fear for not only for the future of the estate of Coole Park, but that of cultured Anglo-Irish establishment more generally. Actual as the fnancial pressure on Coole was, WBY nevertheless introduced a degree of exaggeration, not least in making his fgure of a falling house (which ‘Shaken’ in the title intensifes) feel so little like a mere metaphor. Some modern readers have succumbed to the appeal of this intensifcation: G.A. Schirmer, hearing WBY’s voice in the poem as that of ‘aggressive arrogance’, claims that ‘it uses the Big House as a vehicle for attacking materialism, embodied in the eforts of Irish peasants to dislodge landlords such as the Gregorys and become proprietors’ (Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English (1998), 278), and H. Vendler declares that ‘Te poem is a protest against Irish willingness to starve out, by the new land law, the architectural, governmental, and literary legacy’ (Vendler, 164); but assessments such as these should be taken as testimony to WBY’s poetic power of suggestion rather than any particular report of fact. Reception and critical interpretation. Like some other poems that appeared under the ‘Momentary Toughts’ designation in GH10, this piece sounded an unfamiliar public note for many contemporary readers. F. Reid seems to have been so thrown by this that he found the poem to be aesthetically inaccessible as well: it was for him a piece ‘which when I read it frst I took to be an allegory, but which I now know to refer to an actual house at Coole’: ‘It may be that it is quite plain to other people, but I confess that I cannot help still fnding it a little difcult; while the abuse of enjambment makes one or two of the rhymes meaningless, and the whole poem difcult to read aloud’ (Reid, 239). One early American reaction understood the poem better, though liking it just as little; Elizabeth Waddell, writing in Te Mirror (St. Louis), 9 Jan. 1913, was openly scornful (quoted by D. Holdeman, ‘Historicizing Yeats: Te Textual and Interpretive History of Te Green Helmet and Other Poems’, YACTS 12 (1994), 130): As for the gifs that govern men, have not the Great houses governed men into that poverty and oppression that gave birth to the land agitation? If the lordly House fall, have they not endowed with the governing gif pulled it down upon themselves? As for the house once convicted of injustice – how can any high and lively art come from it? Evidently, WBY could no longer rely on the power of Irish-American sentiment to foat his poetic project once he had introduced a defant note of Anglo-Irish pride to his work. Neither AG nor Coole is identifed in the poem itself (by contrast with the elaborate acknowledgements made in TSW (1900) or ISW (1903)); but the identity was probably taken by WBY to be something of an open secret. In 1926, Standish O’Grady almost identifed the house in question, but scored a near miss in thinking it was Roxborough, the seat of AG’s family the Persses (LTWBY 2, 446). A good deal of critical attention has been less interested in the historical particulars, and has been content to

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admire the verse: ‘the language is economical, the images simple and self-sufcient’ (Henn, 120); the house ‘almost disappears in the impossibly noble life it has nourished’, so that ‘We have moved from the present fact to a vision of an eternal virtue – that high disciplined mind symbolized by eagle’s eye and sun’ (Whitaker, 151). D. Harris ofers an extended reading of the poem, observing how ‘the speaker’s knowledge of Coole’s imminent doom tinges with poignant helplessness his insistence upon Coole’s virtues’; he notes how ‘Te house itself is the poem’s central character; its inhabitants are ideas, not people’, but judges that ‘the poem fails to validate its initial claim that the ‘world’ will sufer if Coole falls [. . .] because the speaker lacks complexity of vision: he is a spokesman uttering pre-existent beliefs, not a dramatic fgure whose beliefs evolve through considered testing’ (Harris, 61–62). Te poet’s later attitudes towards AngloIreland, landed estates, and Big Houses are commonly traced back to this poem, though it is still worth remembering that it begins life as an occasional piece, rather than a programmatic manifesto. It is, also, partly spurred on by WBY’s own present anxiety about his prospects as a partially supported artist in residence at Coole. Te fact that AG had recently been seriously ill is relevant to WBY’s poem, in that this had presented the poet with the prospect of life without a patron. Te editors of CL comment perceptively (CL 5, lxx–lxxii): Tere is an ambiguity about ‘last’ [11] that leaves the poem unresolved for all the assurance of its closing rhetoric and rhythm. Literature is not the latest but the ‘last’ gif that Coole may expect; it is the ‘last’ in being the greatest but also in being the fnal, the ultimate. Te poem registers a contradiction in Yeats’s thinking that was forced into articulation for the frst time at this period. Coole under Lady Gregory comes to constitute an epiphanic moment whose glory is intensifed and defned by its own imminent demise. ‘Upon a House’ ostensibly celebrates the necessity of crucial gifs while indirectly acknowledging that the time for such gifs is numbered. Te poem is, in terms of form, another of WBY’s twelve-line pieces. As with most of these, dynamics closely resembling (though not identical to) those of the sonnet are in play. H. Vendler provides the most determined formal analysis, pointing out that the poem is made up of three questions: ‘Te two especially resonant questions, the frst and the last, occur as full alternating-rhyme quatrains, and one almost feels, fnishing the poem with those quatrains in the ear, that one has read a four-part Shakespearean argument: Question, Question, Concession, Question’ (Vendler, 165). Textual history. Te poem was drafed in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), fol. 61v., transcribed Mem., 225–226, and repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 200–203 (MS1). A single page TS (NLI 21872) is repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH 204–205 (TS). WBY inscribed the poem on a rear fyleaf of AG’s copy of CWVP08 vol. 1 (MS2), and he also made a correction to the title in her copy of GH10 (GH10AG). Te poem was published in Dec. 1910 in McClure’s Magazine (McClure’s) and GH10, and was included in GH12, R16, and all subsequent collected edns.

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Copy-text: P49.

5

How should the world be luckier if this house, Where passion and precision have been one Time out of mind, became too ruinous To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun? And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow Where wings have memory of wings, and all That comes of the best knit to the best? Although Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,

Title.] No title MS1, TS; Upon a Treatened House MS2; To A Certain Country House In Time Of Change McClure’s; Upon A Treatened House GH10; [Upon A House Shaken By Te Land War del.] Upon A House Shaken By Te Land Agitation (WBY’s hol.) GH10AG. 1. luckier if] [better by del] luckier if MS1; [better del.] luckier if TS. 3. become too] [should grow too del.] become too MS1, TS. 4–5.] WBY’s eagle imagery here has attracted much comment. W. Chapman (129–130) compares this with WBY’s comments in Te Poems of Spenser (1906), 265, where WBY is annotating lines from ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie’ (‘And like the native brood of Eagles kind, | On that bright Sunne of glorie fxe thine eyes’): It was a common tradition in medieval natural history that the eagle strengthened its eyesight by gazing at the noonday sun. Cf. Milton’s Areopagitica: ‘A noble and puissant nation . . . as an eagle mewing her mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam.’ 4. lidless eye] Tis common phrase in poetry had been used frst by WBY as long ago as

1887, in ‘Te Protestants’ Leap’, 52–53: ‘far tranquil rays | As from a lidless eye’. Commonplace as this poetic diction was, WBY might nevertheless have in his memory its use by Shelley, ‘Ode to Naples’, 53: ‘beneath the lidless eye of Heaven’. 5. sweet laughing eagle thoughts] N. Grene comments that this ‘appears to be an extraordinary pile-up of incompatibles [.  .  .] But for Yeats they make up a single congeries of nobility’, since ‘Te soaring aspiration of eagles is combined with the nonchalant sprezzatura of laughter that is sweet because above and beyond petty cares and spites’ (Grene, 201). 7.] Tat comes [where del.] ^of the^ best knit ^to^ with the best; [for though del.] ^Although^ MS1; Tat comes from the best knit to the best. Although TS. 8. roof-trees] It may be ironic that WBY’s imagining of the fall of a great house echoes in this term two of the Young Ireland ballads collected in Te Spirit of the Nation (1843): ‘Ninety-Eight!’, 1–2: ‘Let all remember Ninety-eight, that hour of Ireland’s woes – | When rapine red the land o’erspread and fames of roof-trees rose’; and ‘Te AntiIrish Irishman’, 35: ‘And virgins shrieked! And roof-trees blazed!’.

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How should their luck run high enough to reach The gifts that govern men, and after these To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

the sturdier for its fall] the [luckier del.] ^stronger^ for its fall MS1; [wealthier del.] [sturdier del.] at its fall MS1; [luckier del.] ^stronger^ for its fall TS. 9.] How [could del.] ^should^ their luck [leap del.] ^run^ high enough to reach MS1; How could their luck [leap del.] ^run^ high enough to reach TS. 10. gifs that govern men] WBY seems to be expanding his compliments here to include

the career of AG’s late husband, Sir William Gregory, whose posts included that of Governor of Ceylon. See Prose outline, where the house ‘gave to a far people benefcent rule’. 11. To] [For del.] ^To^ MS1; For TS. 12.] [Where high will plays with lovely reveries. del] ^Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease MS1; Where high will plays with lovely reveries? TS.

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THE FASCINATION OF WHAT ’S DIFFICULT Date of composition. WBY’s prose ‘Subject’ for this poem is entered in his Journal in 1909 only as from ‘September’, afer an entry dated 27 Aug., and before one dated 8 Sep. Tis is the frst trace of the poem, and while there is no evidence that it was put into verse before the middle of Mar. 1910, it is likely that draf material from before then has been lost. On 21 Sep., WBY wrote to A.H. Bullen about the progress of his intended new verse play, Te Player Queen, adding that ‘I have also done a new lyric but I don’t want to publish the lyric until I have a book’ (CL 5, 596): although the editors of CL 5 speculate that this new lyric is the present poem, it could just as easily be ‘On A House Shaken By the Land Agitation’. WBY might, however, have completed a version of the poem in the fortnight since he entered the ‘Subject’ in his Journal; and the next sign of the poem in that Journal may well be a version that had – for the most part – already been composed in one or more drafs which were subsequently lost. Te page of the Journal on which there is a full and almost fnished verse draf was written on or afer 13 Mar. 1910; and on 20 Mar., a letter from WBY at Dunsany Castle to AG (CL 5, 757) told her how ‘I am alone for my working hours and have written a poem, ‘Te Fascination of What’s Diffcult’’. Te poem, then, was substantially in its fnal form by 20 Mar. 1910; however, it is reasonable to suppose that WBY had been working his 1909 ‘Subject’ into verse at some point before Mar. 1910, when it was only the last three lines that continued to present him with compositional problems (see Draf in Journal). Sep. 1909 ‘Subject’. WBY’s Journal entry is on fol. 63v. of the Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College). It is transcribed in Mem., 229 and Cornell ISWGH, 175: Subject. To complain of the fascination of what’s difcult. It spoils spontaneity and pleasure and it wastes time. Repeat the line ending difcult three times and rhyme on bolt, exult, colt, jolt. One could use the thought of the wild^winged and^ unbroken colt must drag its cart of stones out of pride because it is difcult and end by denouncing drama, accounts, public contests, all that’s merely difcult. It is necessary to take full account of the fact that this is a casual note, and not prose written for publication: WBY’s expression is not completely clear, nor is it free from DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-51

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ambiguity. Nevertheless, a plan seems to be forming here that would involve a poem returning to ‘difcult’ as a line-end word, rhyming with four others, and rhyming three times with itself. Te result would be something that, in formal terms, WBY had never attempted before and (assuming no further rhyming line-endings were to be introduced) it would have come to eight lines in all, perhaps as a kind of double quatrain, or an overgrown epigram. (Te only comparable experiment before this is ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (1898), whose eight lines include four line-end words rhyming only with themselves, in a version of the French rime riche convention: but this is a poem that is also very remote from the business of ‘Te Fascination of What’s Difcult’.) Te transcription above preserves the lineation of WBY’s note: and here – perhaps by accident only – the word ‘difcult’ does indeed come at the end of four lines. A general intention at this stage seems to be to transform ‘difcult’ as a concept-bearing word to the point where it can be seen as the ‘merely difcult’ – and thus, perhaps, no longer a matter of such difculty afer all. Already, it is clear that the theatre and all the activity related to it for WBY is the place where difculty is to be found, tested, and overcome. Less specifcally, too, WBY was at this point wary of taking on more difculty in his professional life: on 12 Oct. 1909, explaining to Sir H. Grierson his decision not to go further with an attempt to take a Chair at TCD, the poet told him that ‘It was a temptation but for me a wicked one’, since ‘I work with so much difculty, and can work so little once I am tired that it would have stopped my writing and I am only just beginning to feel I can express myself ’ (CL 5, 610). Tere was some corroboration at this time from MG too, who wrote to WBY on 12 Nov. 1909 as her ‘Dearest in Art’, telling him how ‘in life in everything the easy thing is never the interesting thing’, and that ‘Only those who make an efort to surpass themselves are interesting’ (G-YL, 283). Draf in Journal. WBY’s entry containing a full draf of the poem is on fol. 71v. of the Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College). It is transcribed in Mem., 242–243 and Cornell ISWGH, 172–175 (MS). Afer the draf, WBY enters what is a separate couple of lines, unconnected with the poem and probably intended as an aphorism for future deployment: ‘Life is memory of what have [sic] never happened | and hope for what never will happen’. On the facing page (72r.) WBY then returns to the troublesome ending of the poem (10–13), with experimental, largely deleted lines. Te material is as follows: [On the day’s war with every fool and dolt del.] [Content to del.] [Arranging this and that del.] [Arranging this del.] [On plans, del] Arranging this that, to call the tune I swear this night, if but there is no moon To fnd etc. or [Arranging that del.] Arranging that, and setting this [thing del.] ^to^ right

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[I swear to I’ll del.] I swear it – [that if] ^if but^ there is no moon to ^no^ night [I’ll del.] To fnd the stable and pull out the bolt [On settling, planning, or setting that del.] thing straight ‘Teatre business, management of men’. WBY’s summary in line 11 of the poem of his professional life (which was not arrived at easily: see note) compresses years of toil. Although the poet had always been committed to a poetic theatre in one way or another, his practical involvement with the stage had been a major part of his working life since 1898, with the formation of the Irish Literary Teatre, and subsequently the Irish National Teatre Society. WBY played a key role in the evolution of these organizations, alongside Edward Martyn, Florence Farr, GM and AG. A.E. Horniman, who was a crucial fnancial backer, enabled the purchase of a Dublin venue, which became the Abbey Teatre, in 1904. By late 1909, the Abbey company had an extensive record of performances in Ireland, in England, and in the United States; WBY (like AG) had been deeply involved throughout in both directing the company and its fnances, and in day-to-day questions of production. Business and management were ofen all-engrossing when it came to WBY’s time, and his voluminous correspondence on Abbey matters gives ample evidence of the extent to which he was at the helm of a growing and in many ways a thriving new Irish cultural operation. Tis is summed up by the editors of CL 3 (in their Appendix entry on the ‘Irish Dramatic Movement’) when they say that ‘Despite a series of managerial and fnancial crises, the Abbey maintained its national and international reputation, and much of the credit for this was due to WBY’s and AG’s unremitting artistic and administrative commitment to it’ (718). Between Sep. 1909 and Mar. 1910, work for WBY had been especially intense: alongside all the usual pressures of production, when the company staged 168 performances in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Sligo, Manchester and London, the directors had been involved in protracted and complex arrangements to buy out Horniman as owner of the Teatre, and WBY had taken a leading part in securing the appointment of a professional manager (Lennox Robinson). On the stage itself, particular pressures had been associated with the production of J.M. Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows, and problems with the British administration in Dublin Castle over G.B. Shaw’s Te Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet; additionally, WBY had brought into production his own Te Green Helmet. ‘Management of men’ was a skill learned by WBY, rather than one that came by instinct; nevertheless, had had shown a streak of ruthlessness in 1908 in dispensing with the services of the Fay brothers, who had been acting mainstays of the company, and he had also been decisive in his dealings with potential managers at the Abbey over the years, as well as in his relations with actors and playwrights. Reception and critical interpretation. Te poem gave WBY’s own professional situation, as a poet engaged in the business of the professional theatre, an unusual degree of visibility. Tis was noted in Te Academy, 6 May 1911: He who once [. . .] turned away scornfully from so empirical a muse, is now fnding two things assail him. One is that the difcult thing becomes more and

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more attenuate, and that the fascination of its pursuit is drying the sap out of his veins. Te other is, that the old empiric business of the world is assailing him [. . .] Between one and the other his muse is losing fre; it must now needs ‘shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt.’ He swears he will fee it all. Te same critical awareness that WBY has in some way stepped down from the imaginative/mystical heights with which he was commonly associated is audible in another contemporary reaction from the United States, in Te Independent (21 Nov. 1912), where lines 1–3 are quoted to show that ‘Te author recognizes the trouble and admits it’: ‘Perhaps one guesses correctly, when he imagines that at an earlier stage in the airy race the poet outran his wind’. Te notion that this poem laid bare the kind of Yeatsian turmoil that could be recognized and opined about by readers generally was voiced later by F.R. Leavis, in Scrutiny (1935), 223 (repr. in Leavis’s Te Common Pursuit (1952)), in the claim that the poem is ‘full of a bitter sense of thwarting, of sterile, issueless inner tension’. R. Ellmann also (Man and the Masks, 183) took WBY’s poem at its word when he added to the observation that ‘Te monosyllabic end rhymes are intentionally abrupt’ his conclusion that ‘Tere can be little doubt that Yeats’s Pegasus during this period did drag road metal. His lyrics have ofen an irritating air of bravado and snobbery about them’. In 1970, H. Bloom provided a salutary corrective to this degree of literalism, in reading the poem against its apparent grain, and calling it ‘ostensibly a complaint at ‘theatre business, management of men’, but actually a concealed tribute to the discipline imposed upon the frustrated lyricist by the limitations of theatre [. . .] For a man (and poet) of Yeats’s extraordinary temperament, with its mingled caution and extravagance, the fascination of what is difcult is akin to the enchantment of romance’ (Bloom, 170). Many critics of WBY refer to the poem, ofen producing divergent interpretations. R. Foster ofers necessary points of circumstantial information: assuming that composition took place in Mar. 1910, he places the poem in the context of WBY’s creatively productive brief retreat to Lord Dunsany’s estate, and the ongoing (and personally searching) critical labour of the poet’s memoir of J.M. Synge. For Foster, the poem shows WBY ‘blaming his obsession with ‘theatre business, management of men’ for harnessing the winged horse of creative imagination’ (Foster 1, 418). Refecting on the death of Synge, however, would necessarily have complicated for WBY any too simple dismissal of ‘theatre business’ as merely a hindrance to ‘creative imagination’, for the business of the Abbey Teatre had enabled Synge’s genius, just as that genius had ofered vital creative clues to WBY’s own evolving poetic and dramatic imagination. Te poem is in any case not a straightforward kind of statement. E. Larrissy feels that it is in part a complaint about Pegasus not doing his real job, and ‘the laborious character of [WBY’s] inspiration, which makes things difcult, although this does not now appear especially fascinating’; he goes on to follow (or perhaps fails to quite follow) the poet’s governing metaphor (W.B. Yeats (2015), 36): Poetry writing, unlike theatre business, is a solitary activity [. . .] but we may be puzzled: how will it really help to fnd the stable? Earlier on, it was the horse

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itself that was the problem, not the inability to visit it. Te poem is not untypical of the way in which Yeats is so concerned to create the mask of eloquence that he is ready to forgo the sinews of logic. Tis forgets the (perfectly logical) point that before you can pull the bolt you need to fnd the stable door, but there is no doubt that some kind of ‘mask of eloquence’ is intended here by the poet. Such a mask may not be one of eloquence alone; and WBY is also interested in the mask of wit. Integral to the poem is a presumed ironic (or even hostile) response to the complaint of its opening lines – that is, by lamenting that hard professional work has stolen from him ‘Spontaneous joy and natural content’, the poet is only confrming that such things are indeed gone: he is trying to shut the stable door afer the horse has bolted. Te whole poem, then, works to refgure this response into something quite diferent, and to transform the verb ‘bolted’ of the proverb into a substantive, a bolt that can be pulled in order to release the horse of poetic energy. Te pulled bolt is the means of setting Pegasus free: one critic even reads a pun into the word when she gives an account of its closing lines: ‘By letting the horse bolt, Yeats has allowed the poem – and its rhyme scheme – to get away from him, in an expression of resigned despair’ (T. Stubbs, Te Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (2020), 117); though here in other ways the reader might seem to have bolted from the poem. B. Shiels claims the poem is a ‘productive failure to achieve poetic distinction from the crude material of everyday life’ (W.B. Yeats and World Literature: Te Subject of Poetry (2016), 175), but this falls into the interpretative trap set by WBY himself in assuming that a poem about failure is in some way a failure as a poem: ‘productive’ registers as much. Te poem’s formal properties have exercised a good many of its critics. One important response to WBY’s thoughts on possible rhymes (see Sep. 1909 ‘Subject’) is by M. Perlof, Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970), 56: It is likely that Yeats dropped the originally projected three-fold repetition of ‘difcult’ because such repetition would overstate the theme of the poem. Since ‘difcult’ is used only once and the originally proposed rhyme word ‘exult’ is omitted, an interesting phenomenon occurs. Te key word, ‘difcult’, is, on the one hand, semantically related to its four rhyming partners; on the other hand, ‘difcult’ stands slightly apart from its rhyming partners phonetically [. . .] Te pattern created by the a rhymes is thus extremely subtle; the related meanings of the fve rhyme words help to unify the whole poem at the same time that the crucial word ‘difcult’ stands alone. Te degree of overlap between WBY’s word ‘difcult’ and the formal structure of the poem itself has been perceptively explored by S. Burt, in Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019), where she calls this ‘a poem about kinds of work, and about visible and invisible, pleasurable and simply draining, technique’: ‘Teatre business’ had proven difcult in one way [. . .] writing thirteen lines rhyming abb acc add aeea proved difcult in another, but Yeats can accomplish

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the latter with vigour, even with a sardonic glee that the poem invites you to share. Te poem looks like (but is not) a sonnet and does not change its apparent subject, nor its key rhyme, in the middle, as a sonnet would. Burt is responding here to a widespread interest amongst critics in the poem’s degree of approximation to a sonnet; even if the matter of its being a line short of fourteen is disregarded, the actual rhyme scheme (and the 1909 ‘Subject’’s projected rhyme scheme) take the poem formally in a rather diferent direction (Burt in fact attempts to discover the ghost of Dantean terza rima here instead). Te classic statement of the poem’s ‘nearly a sonnet’ status, on the other hand, remains that given by H. Vendler, who asserts that it shows ‘defance of the continental sonnet tradition [. . .] as it asserts that the European Pegasus, rejuvenated, is now stabled in Ireland’ (Vendler, 164): Yeats’s rhyming would not be seen as transgressive, either, if we did not bring the sonnet template to mind. By the ‘missing’ fourteenth line (recognizable, too, only by applying the sonnet template) Yeats intends to represent, I think, the airborne escape out the unbolted stable door of poet and Pegasus together. If we do not recognize the poem as a sonnet manqué, we miss the fne wit of the close, the ‘whoosh’ of non-verbal air afer the thirteenth line. Although Vendler’s added sound-efect is fanciful, and misses WBY’s actual wit (his play with the proverbial ‘closing the stable door afer the horse has bolted’) in favour of wit of the critic’s own making, her reading nevertheless concentrates usefully the issue of this poem’s shadow-existence as a kind of sonnet. Much noticed as it has been, this mode of existence cannot really be proven, and in some ways misrepresents the poem’s actual formal drive, which is not one of exploration, development, and turning, but of determined, reiterative rhyming of one word, ‘difcult’, away from itself and into an imagined – and, in rhyming terms, a realized – escape from the difculty. Something of this was perhaps intuited by W.H. Auden, when in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ (1936) he glossed WBY’s line in terms of poetic freedom (and – mischievously – the Athanasian Creed’s invitation to ‘Whosoever wishes [to be saved]’): ‘The fascination of what’s difcult’, The wish to do what one’s not done before, Is, I hope, proper to Quicunque Vult, The proper card to show at Heaven’s door. Publication history. Te poem had no periodical publication, and appeared frst in GH10, then in GH12, R16, and all subsequent collected edns.

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Copy-text: P49.

5

The fascination of what’s difcult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays

Title, 1., Fascination] WBY’s use of the word is heavily infuenced by two early OED senses: 1a. ‘Te casting of a spell or spells; sorcery, witchcraf, enchantment (esp. for malicious purposes). Formerly also: an instance of this; a spell, an enchantment (obsolete). Now historical  and somewhat  rare’; and 1b., ‘Te state or fact of being under such a spell. Obsolete’. Te more current meaning is also to WBY’s purpose here: OED 2b., ‘Something by which a person is enthralled or intrigued, or in which a person is extremely interested; a fascinating feature, aspect, person, or thing’. Commenting on the title, S. Wolfson notes WBY’s ‘ambiguous grammar’, and asks: ‘Is it a fascination on what’s difcult? Or is what’s difcult a fascinating addiction? Might fascination even be the perverse modernist muse?’ (Romantic Shades and Shadows (2018), 175). 4–8.] Te ‘colt’ here is in part to be identifed with Pegasus, the horse in Greek myth who has wings and carries Zeus’s thunderbolt. In the Roman world, Pegasus also became a symbol of immortality; and here, the creature may represent poetry that combines its immortal destiny with heavy mortal labour. It is possible that WBY remembers an article on his work by R. Ashe-King, in Te Bookman

(Sep. 1897): ‘Mr. Yeats, again, is distinctively Irish and yet more distinctively un-English, in his scorn of the theory that poetry should be practical and moral – that Pegasus should be broken to harness to drag the weary car of life up the steep and strait way’. 4. Tere’s something] [What is del.] it ^Tere is something ^ MS. 6. on Olympus] MS; on an Olympus GH10, GH12, R16. WBY revised this back to what had been the original reading in MS in his copy of R16, and the reading was then incorporated in the second impression of R16 (publ. 1917), and in all collected edns. thereafer. Te contextual redundancy of the indefnite article in ‘on an’, along with the largely otiose metrical irregularity it introduces, makes it tempting to identify it as a misprint in G10, albeit one that that was then twice repeated. 7. Shiver under] [Endure del.] ^Shiver at^ the MS. strain, sweat] and strain and sweat MS. 8. road-metal] Tis is the broken stone used for making roads: in May 1909, Te Westminster Gazette described ‘Broken granite, basalt, or other hard  road-metal held together by smaller particles’ in a description of road construction.

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That have to be set up in ffty ways, On the day’s war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men. I swear before the dawn comes round again I’ll fnd the stable and pull out the bolt.

10. knave] [fool del.] knave MS. 11.] MS here gives a complicated appearance, since two possibilities for replacing ‘Teatre business’ (which was the frst phrase written, and stands uncancelled) are squeezed in, one above and one below the draf line. Above is ‘On the day’s letters’, and below, ‘On correspondence’: WBY was considering, then, the two possible lines: ‘On the day’s letters, management of men’ and ‘On correspondence, management of men’: none of the possibilities (including what is identical to the fnished line) is deleted in MS. 12. before the dawn comes round again] C. Armstrong, noting how ‘the true nature of the Olympic horse is out of reach under some circumstances’ and ‘the poet must act while

daylight is still at an arm’s length’, links this fnal indication of time in the poem to the conclusion of ‘Te Second Coming’ (1919) and the ‘rough beast, its hour come round at last’ (21), observing that ‘Both poems celebrate long-awaited returns, unleashing primal energies’ (Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion, and History (2013), 135). 13.] WBY is here turning around the familiar English proverb, possibly medieval in origin, to ‘shut the stable door afer the horse has bolted’, which is to be found in e.g. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719): ‘It was only shutting the Stable-door afer the Steed was stolen’. For the efect of this, see Reception and critical interpretation.

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[‘IRISHMEN, IF THEY PREFER’] Date and circumstances of composition. According to WBY, the poem was composed on the night of 29–30 Oct. 1909. It is part of the entry for 30 Oct. in WBY’s Journal, where it is preceded by a few lines of explanation (Mem., 234): Last night I proposed asking Leonard Sweet, when his School ends, to take charge at the Abbey for a time. Lady Gregory wanted an Irishman. When I got home I made this poem in bed. In Oct., WBY and others were keen to fnd a professional manager for the Abbey, and it seems that the poet had foated the name of ‘Leonard Sweet’ for this position, only to run into AG’s direct veto, on the grounds of his lack of Irish nationality. Te candidate in question was E. Lyall Swete (1865–1930), an actor and producer who was indeed English; he had performed with F.R. Benson’s company in a Shakespeare season at Stratford on Avon in 1901, and had also acted in Henry Irving’s Hamlet in 1904, among other productions on the London stage. In summer 1909, Swete resigned from the Academy of Dramatic Art, where he had been an instructor, to join Herbert Trench’s Repertory at the Teatre Royal Haymarket, where he produced Maeterlinck’s Te Blue Bird (which WBY saw in Dec., and disliked as ‘a rather meretricious pantomime’ (CL 5, 645)). Swete went on eventually to become a successful producer on Broadway. No more was heard of him in connection with the Abbey, where Lennox Robinson was eventually made professional manager in 1910. WBY had been over the ground of nationality requirements for prospective Abbey managers before. As long ago as Jan. 1907 he had been trying to headhunt a suitable candidate with the London impresario J.E. Verdrenne of the Savoy Teatre. ‘I think we should take his recommendation,’ he told AG on 14 Jan., ‘If the man is not Irish we cannot help it’; he added, in terms that are picked up directly in the poem some thirty-three months aferwards, ‘If the choice is between flling our country’s stomach or enlarging its brains by importing precise knowledge I am for scorning its stomach for the present’ (CL 4, 587). Te same day, WBY repeated his thought in a letter to MG: ‘We will take whatever man he recommends for I have great reliance in him and if he be an Englishman and know his business, well, I shall be sorry, but I prefer to enlarge the brain of my country where it is weakest in expert knowledge, than to fll one Irishman’s stomach and think myself the better patriot for the choice’ (CL 4, 591). In her reply, MG issued the reproof that ‘you are making a great mistake getting an Englishman for the theatre, of course I won’t mention it to anyone’ (G-YL, 235). DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-52

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Textual history. Te poem is in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), fol. 65v. (MS). Te text is transcribed in Mem., 234–235, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 266–267. It was never published by WBY. Te lines themselves are relatively heavily revised, though this does not mean that WBY necessarily thought of retaining them as a potential poem. In fact, the revisions do not improve the verse itself: although ‘sleight of mind’ makes something memorable of the otherwise forgettable ‘sleight of hand’, changes to the frst two lines are ill-considered, leading to a weak near repetition of ‘Irishmen’ and ‘Irishman’ (this could be rendered, closer to the MS, as ‘Irish-men’ and ‘Irish man’, but with scarcely any improvement). A better version would be WBY’s original thought: ‘Patriots, if they prefer | Te native to the foreigner’. In the event, of course, this entire poem was set aside permanently by its author. Copy-text: MS (with punctuation editorially supplied).

5

Irishmen, if they prefer Irishman to foreigner Where that foreigner has just The sleight of mind they need the most, Magnify, for all their pains, Ireland’s stomach, not her brains.

1. Irishmen] [Patriots del.] Irish-men MS. 2. Irishman to] [Te native to the del.] Irish man to MS. 4. mind] [hand del.] mind MS. sleight of mind] Te phrase had been used before, by Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy (1845), ‘A Gallery of Pictures from Spenser’, 103: ‘Now, it is granted that the subtlest creations of poetry are neither efected by a painter-like process, nor limited to his

powers of suggestion. Te fnest idea the poet gives you of anything is by what may be called sleight of mind, striking it without particular description on the mind of the reader, feeling and all, moral as well as physical, as a face is struck on a mirror.’ 6.] Afer this line, WBY writes then deletes an alternative version: Te stomach, and not the brains.

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KING AND NO KING Date of composition. Te date entered above the poem in his Journal by WBY is ‘Dec 7. 1909’. While it is possible that this is the date of the poem’s composition, it is not certain; and the fair copy nature of the text in the Journal may well argue for an earlier date. However, no evidence exists beyond that preserved in the Journal. Source. WBY’s title, and the story told in the poem’s frst fve lines, are drawn from the early seventeenth-century drama A King and No King, co-written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. As a source, this play which WBY identifes with ‘Old Romance’ (5) now seems obscure, though it was marginally less so in 1909: not one but two complete editions of Beaumont and Fletcher had been in progress since 1904–1905, one from the Cambridge University Press and the other published by and under the general editorship of WBY’s publisher, A.H. Bullen; a single-volume selection featuring the play itself also appeared in the Mermaid series from T. Fisher Unwin in 1904, and Vogue in Jan. 1905 mentioned the play as one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s two ‘truly great works’ (the other was Te Maid’s Tragedy). Given the closeness of their professional relationship, it seems likely that WBY had access to the book which A.H. Bullen published in association with George Bell and Sons in 1904, as vol. 1 in Te Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: Variorum Edition, which included A King and No King. WBY had probably encountered Beaumont and Fletcher (though not necessarily this play) long before, when as a young man in Dublin he was shown a good deal of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature by the librarian T.W. Lyster: in 1947, WBY’s early friend W.K. Magee (‘John Eglington’) told R. Ellmann that he ‘frst saw him at National Library reading a big book of Beaumont and Fletcher’ (“Gasping on the Strand’: Richard Ellmann’s W.B. Yeats Notebooks’ ed. W. Gould, YA 16, 357). WBY’s apprentice poetic drama Te Island of Statues (1884) includes a character, Almintor, whose name is drawn with slight adaptation from Amintor in Te Maid’s Tragedy (and early drafs of this also use the name Evadne for the heroine, taken from the same play). A King and No King has an involved series of plotlines which are not all of relevance to WBY’s uses for the play in this poem. Te casual attitude towards recollection shown in lines 6–7 also suggests that there may be little use in tracking poem against play in too great detail. However, certain aspects of the drama’s story are worth keeping in mind. Te ‘King’ of the title is Arbaces, who has made captive in war a rival monarch, Tigranes, and intends to make peace by marrying him to his sister (whom he has not laid eyes upon since infancy), Panthea. Arrangements go badly wrong when Arbaces sees Panthea himself, and falls instantly and violently in love with her: aware as DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-53

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he is of their being brother and sister, Arbaces eventually declares his lust and – until the fnal act – it seems as though a fully incestuous catastrophe is about to unfold: Panthea herself is plain about her attraction to Arbaces, and the pair eventually kiss and embrace on stage. It transpires, though, that Arbaces’s parentage is not at all what it was thought to be, and that he is therefore not only no longer the king, but also fully at liberty to pair up with the woman he once supposed to be his sister. Te depiction of Arbaces is far from heroic, even though he is technically the play’s hero. One contemporary comment sums up the presentation of this character very well (in Te Speaker, 30 Apr. 1904): [Arbaces] falls into one of those violent passions, common among Elizabethan heroes, for the heroine, whom he supposes to be his sister. Ten he behaves like a madman, ill-treats her, reviles his best friends, and changes his course of action every half-hour. He is a fgure half tragic, half absurd, and his creators mean him to be so. At last the heroine is discovered to be not his sister at all, but the rightful Queen. He can marry her, but he is not the King. So he is delivered from his trial at the sacrifce of his pride. It is hard to see Arbaces as anything other than a semi-comic obsessive (though Swinburne thought him the tragic equal of Othello); moreover, the play is explicit in portraying his unbridled lust for the woman he thinks at the time is really his sister, as well as hinting at some degree of reciprocity in the relationship. It is not entirely easy to pass of A King and No King as the kind of tale that is simply ‘clean and sweet’ (8). WBY’s specifc use of the play comes with the apparent quotation (in fact not quite a quotation) in the poem’s opening line. Te poet’s deployment of this does not ofer much in the way of clarity about what the ‘voice’ is, and in order to explain the meaning, the whole context in Beaumont and Fletcher is needed. Tis is an exchange between Panthea and the hapless Arbaces who, having announced his burning desire, fies into a temper with the very words that forbid its satisfaction – ‘brother and sister’ (A King and No King, IV iv, 103–126): Pan. Sir, I will pray for you; yet you shall know It is a sullen fate that governs us: For I could wish, as heartily as you, I were no sister to you; I should then Embrace your lawful love, sooner than health. Arb. Couldst thou afect me, then? Pan. So perfectly, That, as it is, I ne’er shall sway my heart To like another. Arb. Then, I curse my birth, Must this be added to my miseries, That thou art willing too? is there no stop To our full happiness but these mere sounds, Brother and sister? Pan. There is nothing else:

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But these, alas! will separate us more Than twenty words betwixt us. Arb. I have lived To conquer men, and now am overthrown Only by words, brother and sister. Where Have these words dwelling? I will fnd ’em out, And utterly destroy ’em; but they are Not to be grasp’d: let ’em be men or beasts, And I will cut ’em from the earth; or towns, And I will raze ’em, and then blow ’em up: Let ’em be seas, and I will drink ’em of, And yet have unquench’d fre left in my breast; Let ’em be anything but merely voice. WBY’s rephrasing of this in his opening line does not distort its meaning to any appreciable extent: Arbaces is frustrated by his inability to lay hands upon and destroy these obstacles, ‘words’, that are ‘merely voice’. (In the play, this echoes and amplifes an earlier moment (III i, 179–180) when Arbaces asks ‘Why should there be such music in a voice, | And sin for me to hear it?) Te governing idea of the source passage, that things said can stand in the way of desire more formidably than physical obstacles, is of most relevance to the poem. Beyond this, ‘brother and sister’ – and of course the entire almostincest theme of the play’s plot – carries considerable personal resonance for WBY in his thoughts about MG, whose continuing insistence on a non-physical relationship, which had in the past and to some extent still did have a strong suggestion of sibling love, might have seemed by 1909 to be reaching a kind of breaking-point. (Indeed, meetings in Paris in 1908 might already have taken intimacy to other than sibling levels.) Just as Panthea comes round to admitting her desire for Arbaces, so (in this reading) MG may outgrow her quasi-sibling love for WBY. However, this is a possibility the poem considers ruefully in the light of its likely failure, rather than ofering it as a realistic prospect. It is likely, at any rate, that WBY sent his composition to MG fairly promptly in Dec., eliciting from her nothing more than ‘Tank you for the poem’ in return (G-YL, 286). However familiar she might have been with the alchemical romance between Nicolas Flamel and his wife Pernella (the sequence in which ‘King and No King’ would eventually be included for GH10), it may be presumed that MG was not a keen reader of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher: nor does this poem, it should be noticed, exactly instruct her in this particular play any more than it has to (and arguably, not even that much). Te result is both the acknowledgement of a source and a kind of covering-up of the source itself, which is brushed away into the cupboard of ‘Old Romance’. Biographical context, and critical interpretation. WBY’s poem is a love poem for MG (in GH10 it forms part of the MG-related ‘Raymond Lully [Nicholas Flamel] and His Wife Pernella’ sequence, and it was included in the 1913 Cuala selection made up specifcally of his love-poetry), but its personal meaning is in several important respects a hidden one. Tis element of obscurity at the personal level is matched by the literary obscurity of the poem’s use of its source in Beaumont and Fletcher. But one obscurity can do nothing to illuminate another, and this poem’s balancing of one hidden thing

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(literary allusion) against another (WBY, MG, and her ‘pledge’ that sabotages the whole relationship) is probably unsuccessful for most readers. In late 1909, WBY was thinking hard about the future (if any) that he and MG might have together. It is clear that his visit to her in Paris in Dec. 1908 resulted in an increase in the intensity of their friendship, and from then all through 1909 MG’s letters to WBY became much more strongly afectionate (see Biographical context in headnote to ‘Reconciliation’ (1908)). Some kind of ‘spiritual marriage’ had obviously been renewed between the pair, albeit without formality; and their sexually charged meetings through 1909 seem to have remained on the astral plane. Nevertheless, MG was capable of giving accounts of these dream encounters to WBY in ways that were (perhaps calculatedly) suggestive in sexual terms. On 13 Jan. 1909, MG wrote to the poet with a decidedly mixed message: on the one hand, ‘I went to you consciously on the Tuesday night when you were in Manchester. I went about 12 or 2 o’clock at night afer I had read your letter. I went with the intention of making you well, I went again Wednesday’; on the other hand, ‘I always feel that marriage for you would be a mistake, I always have felt this’ (G-YL, 261). It is hard to reconstruct precisely the comings and goings of MG’s feelings for WBY, and his for her, over the course of 1909; but one letter from MG to the poet, written immediately afer seeing him in London in May, might help to suggest how WBY could understand MG as a character was trapped – in some ways like Beaumont and Fletcher’s Panthea – between the pull of desire and the determinations of circumstance (G-YL, 271–272): Dearest I have not come to the decision I have come to without struggle and without sufering though once that decision come to, in answer to my prayers, the sufering and the struggle ceased in a way I surely do not deserve. Beloved I will pray with my whole strength that sufering and temptation may be taken from you as they have from me and that we may gain spiritual union stronger than any earthly union could ever be. [. . .] Willie your arms were not strong enough to save me for my eyes were too blind to see these things, and all the crushing sorrow that came on me I have earned. My loved one I belong to you more in this renunciation than if I came to you in sin. Did you not say yourself that our love must be holy? What MG and WBY had been quarrelling over (on 26 May) is unknown, and is not possible to reconstruct; but MG’s determination to renounce a physical relationship was sufciently intimate in its intensity to leave WBY with grounds for hope. MG’s refection, in the same letter, that ‘On me alone the blame lies for the forgetfulness of that spiritual marriage of long ago, which if we had obeyed would have saved us both from the long weariness of separation’, generates an alternative reality, in which she had never married John MacBride, and where instead the spiritual spouses had remained together. What is envisaged, perhaps, and what might well have been imagined by WBY at least, is something akin to lines 14–16 of the poem: ‘hourly kindness’ and ‘habitual content’ without the crossing [i.e. the frustrating] of either ‘soul’ or – importantly – ‘body’. By Dec., MG’s tone was no longer quite so open to hope, and R. Foster’s summary of the poem’s place in this situation is a useful one (Foster 1, 395–396):

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[WBY] wrote ‘King and No King’, which – placed in the alchemical marriagegroup [‘Raymond Lully and His Wife Pernella’ in GH10] – takes as its trope the consummation of a love previously forbidden by fear of incest. Teir old brother–sister reincarnation fantasy must lie behind this, and the poem comes back to [WBY’s] recurrent wish for the consolations of a more conventional relationship. But this was no longer on ofer; they would remain separated geographically but united astrally. Te ‘brother–sister’ version of WBY’s and MG’s relationship was frst worked on in 1891 by MG when, as WBY remembered it much later in his unpublished Autobiography (1916–1917), ‘She and I had been brother and sister somewhere on the edge of the Arabian desert’ (Mem., 46); the resultant poem, ‘A Dream of Other Lives’ (1891) signifcantly modifed this sibling relationship, so that the beloved says [emphasis added] ‘We were as if brother and sister’ in one draf line, which was itself changed to ‘You were more to me than a brother’ (see notes to poem in vol. 2 of the present edn.) Obviously, there were many things that had changed in the eighteen years between this and ‘King and No King’. Yet some at least of MG’s thoughts in 1909 were turning the clock back to the original evasion on her part of the issue of sexual union between herself and WBY. Even for so mystically credulous a man as WBY, certain aspects of all this must have seemed fanciful, and it may be against this background that his creative appropriation of a littleknown ‘Old Romance’ should be seen: the brother and sister in the play were not, as it turned out, brother and sister at all; and this was just as well, since their relationship was undisguisably an erotic one, whose natural power neither law nor custom could do very much to withstand. In WBY’s poem, the play is both brought in and sent on its way with all the high-handedness of a poetic man of the world – the spirit of WBY’s allusiveness in the frst seven lines has about it more than a touch of the Byronic, while his swerve away from the allusion in the remainder of the poem has a confdence and decisiveness that implicitly dismisses the fnally superstitious objections of MG, voiced by ‘I that have not your faith’ (11): for the speaker neither has that faith (which is MG’s adopted Roman Catholicism), nor does he intend for a single moment to acquire it. Speculatively, it might be suggested that WBY is by this point in life simply himself too old to wait for ‘Old Romance’ to dissolve MG’s qualms by means of some extraordinary turnaround in circumstances, too intimate with MG (possibly, in fact, sexually intimate) to believe in the reality of the qualms themselves, and too busy on other fronts – professionally in the theatre, and personally in his ongoing sexual relationship with Mabel Dickinson in Dublin – to spend creative energy and time on further pleas. Whatever it is that ‘we have lost’ (13), it is certainly nowhere in this poem to be found. ‘Yeats’s parallel and contrast,’ R. Ellmann wrote about the poem and its source, ‘are a little awkward’ (Identity, 252); but the awkwardness is arguably a pervasive one. Te poem is too much involved in the churn and turmoil of WBY’s life in 1909 to be an entirely successful lyric. Its twin areas of obscurity – the old dramatic source, then the unspecifed details of a fraught relationship between ‘I’ and ‘you’ – are related, but not visibly so in the workings of the poem itself, so that there is a general lack of unity about the lines that is also, in fact, a lack of cohesion and cohesiveness. It is in the

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poem’s one question (11–13) that its most arresting line (12) is to be found; yet that line foats apart from the rest of the poem, like a symbolist image lost in a welter of literary allusion and personal quarrels: ‘that blinding light’ sheds no light on what is happening in the rest of the lyric (and must wait for ‘Te Cold Heaven’ (1911) to yield its creative returns in WBY’s poetry). Few modern critics have warmed to the poem, and in general they have glossed it in biographical terms (these being usually somewhat clearer than the poem itself, in any case). Some readings fnd things to appreciate which may not quite so defnitely be there, and this is especially true of the poem’s imagining a married state that was never to be enjoyed. E. Cullingford detects ‘an explicit rejection of the idea of satisfaction in or afer death’, and claims that ‘the poem questions the Catholic justifcation for self-denial, the promise of satisfaction in the hereafer’; on a more earthly plane, she observes that ‘While the young Yeats had been torn between the desire to possess and the fear that possession destroys desire, the unmarried man of forty-four envisages passion’s demise in terms redolent of middle-aged routine’ (Cullingford, 97–98). Yet this summary may be even odder than the poem in some ways, like N. Grene’s description of the imagined state as ‘an idyll of the companionate marriage that the lovers have perversely renounced’ (Grene, 154). Te elusiveness of what WBY is seriously imagining about a possible (rather, a now no longer possible) conventional marriage is probably itself a telling sign of the poem’s unstable and unresolved mixture of literary and private allusion. Perhaps the most that can be said on this topic – though in the end it says little that is fully to the point about the poem itself – is R. Greaves’s judgement that ‘Te poem suggests resignation, an acceptance that the possibility of happiness was lost long ago, though such resignation is harder for [WBY] because he doubts the superiority of what the spiritual relationship ofers in the future compared with what marriage would have ofered in the past’ (Greaves, 76). Te more detailed the critical approach to this poem, the more slippery the subject becomes; but a good sense of the general difculty is given by J. Ramazani, who sees how WBY ‘uses the love poem to stage conficting ideas about desire, language, and ‘voice’’ (‘Yeats’s Ars Poetica in Te Green Helmet’, YA 16, 64): Lamenting his beloved’s ‘pledge’ (not to marry) and complaining that nothing is as powerful or indestructible as such ‘a word’, the poet at the same time congratulates himself as [a] person of the word, in comparison with which nothing, not even realized love, can prove as strong [. . .] Te poem is crossed by conficting desires to break and to preserve civilization’s barriers: ‘word’, ‘voice’, and ‘pledge’ are at frst unwanted obstructions to libidinal fulflment, but later the poem praises nonsexual, verbal pleasures, such as those enjoyed by brother and sister. Tis incest motif (see Source) is rendered relatively inaccessible by WBY; but this very fact may argue for its signifcance in the general question of why so much in the lyric is unresolved and unsatisfactory. Textual history. WBY wrote what was essentially a fair copy of the poem in his Journal (Burns collection, Boston University), on the facing fols. 66v. and 67r. (MS). Tis is

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transcribed in Mem., 236, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 164–167. Tere is no other trace of the poem before its inclusion in GH10; it was published again in GH12, included in the Tauchniz selection of 1913, and in the Cuala Press A Selection from the Love Poetry of William Butler Yeats (1913), then in R16 and subsequently in all collected edns. Copy-text: P49.

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‘Would it were anything but merely voice!’ The No King cried who after that was King, Because he had not heard of anything That balanced with a word is more than noise; Yet Old Romance being kind, let him prevail Somewhere or somehow that I have forgot, Though he’d but cannon – Whereas we that had thought To have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale Have been defeated by that pledge you gave In momentary anger long ago;

Title.] Tis title for the poem is an explicit acknowledgement of WBY’s source (though changing it, by omitting the play’s indefnite article). Te ‘No King’ element here almost demands a knowledge of that source which WBY must have known many of his readers (including MG) would have been unlikely to possess; it is in being found ‘no King’ that the play’s hero achieves his (unlikely) happy ending, and the freedom to wed his beloved – the play ends with ‘Come, every one | Tat takes delight in goodness, help to sing | Loud thanks for me, that I am proved no King!’ (V iv 351–353). In GH10, the poem is the sixth in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and his Wife Pernella’ [for this sequence-title, see note to ‘His Dream’.] 1.] Tis line adapts a line from the play: ‘Let ’em be anything but merely voice’ (see Source). voice] [noise del.] voice MS (this is likely a slip of the pen, mistakenly anticipating ‘noise’ in 4, which WBY corrects). 2. No King] NO King GH10 (the added capital may not be accidental, but nor is it to

any obvious purpose). On frst sight, there is some confusion here about the plot of the play, for Arbaces, who cries this, does so when he is King: nobody (including himself) has at this stage any idea that he is actually ‘No King’. It is not likely that the confusion is intended. cried] thought MS. 4. is] was no MS. 5. Yet] MS has alternatives in this position, neither of them cancelled, which are marked with a brace: And yet ^Yet old^. 6. or] and MS. 7. Tough he’d but cannon] Again, this may be a sign that WBY is not in fact especially concerned with any fdelity to his source – a source which has now, in any case, been dismissed as something ‘I have forgot’ (6). A King and No King has no role in its plot for cannon, though Arbaces has of course been at the head of an army. 9–10.] WBY’s reference to this ‘pledge’, clearly specifc, is in fact not quite straightforward for any outsider to identify. Critics generally see here an allusion to MG’s marriage to

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And I that have not your faith, how shall I know That in the blinding light beyond the grave We’ll fnd so good a thing as that we have lost? The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech, The habitual content of each with each When neither soul nor body has been crossed.

John MacBride in 1903, and this may well be correct; but it is odd, even so, that WBY sees this as having happened as a result of ‘momentary anger’ (MG had had plenty of time to think about what she was going to do in marrying MacBride, even if she aforded WBY little time to tell her what he thought of such an act). And yet MG does seem to have told WBY more or less this, and in a letter to AG of 5 May 1903, the poet re-tells a story he had just had from MG herself, about how Lucien Millevoye (Iseult Gonne’s father) had brought his actress mistress to visit his daughter: ‘Maud Gonne said ‘I don’t know whether I felt it or not but I was very angry, and when I found that he had brought her to see Iseult, one day when I was away, I resolved to get someone to keep him out and to make a fnal breach. I married in a sudden impulse of anger’’ (CL 3, 356). It is not clear that WBY really believed much of this; he clearly did, on the other hand, remember MG’s words. Other kinds of ‘pledge’ might be involved, too: perhaps in the course of one of WBY’s and MG’s serious quarrels, and an announced intention from MG never to marry the poet. However, the lack of specifcity in the poem is part of WBY’s intended efect here, and a gesture towards a privacy that is to remain hidden.

11. I that have not your faith] MG had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before marrying MacBride in 1903, and this is likely to be the private reference here. WBY probably also intends something less specifically sectarian by ‘faith’, so that in the poem the phrase functions to distance the speaker generally from Christian belief in the compensations ofered by an aferlife. 16. crossed] Tis fnal word of the poem is complex. Te primary meaning of the verb here is OED 14.a., ‘To thwart, oppose, go counter to’, and it is likely that WBY has in the background here Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, 6: ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers’. But there is also a suggestion of the act of crossing oneself (OED 2.a., ‘To make the sign of the cross upon or over’), connected here with MG’s adopted Catholicism (and therefore giving more specifcity to ‘faith’ in 11). To cross the ‘soul’ and to cross the ‘body’, in WBY’s primary meaning, is to block or frustrate spiritual and physical desire alike; ironically, the phrase is much easier to imagine in the secondary sense of crossing oneself, where a sign over the body is also a sign over the soul. In 1911, ‘Te Cold Heaven’ (a poem whose central visionary core derives from line 12 of ‘King and No King’) remembers ‘love crossed long ago’ (6).

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A DRINKING SONG Date and circumstances of composition. Te poem was written on 17 Feb. 1910, according to WBY in a letter with a copy of the verses written ‘today’ (CL 5, 729). However, as WBY made clear the poem was in fact one ‘I re-wrote’: there had been an earlier version, produced for AG’s purposes but not included in the script of the play she gave to the Abbey for rehearsal earlier that year. WBY wrote to AG on 27 Jan. 1910 to tell her that ‘You forgot to put into the script of ‘Mirandolina’ my rhymed translation of the little song in Act II. Tere is a copy at Woburn Buildings but where I don’t know. I don’t remember it but will re-translate if necessary. You may have lef the copy at Coole’ (CL 5, 698). Any search at Coole was unavailing, and WBY was still in Dublin up to the Abbey premiere (on 24 Feb.), so he undertook a reconstruction, which he sent on to AG on 17 Feb., telling her that ‘I re-wrote the little song for Mirandolina today, I think I have got it better than before [. . .] If set very simply I think it should be dramatically efective’ (CL 5, 729). AG replied the next day, telling the poet that she very much liked ‘the new little verse’, and that ‘it is better than the old one, so I am rewarded for losing it’ (Berg Collection NYPL, quoted CL 5, 729). Source and dramatic context. AG’s Mirandolina was a translated adaptation of the Italian comedy of 1753, La Locandiera [Te Mistress of the Inn], by Carlo Goldoni (in which Mirandolina is the name of a leading character). It was frst performed at the Abbey Teatre on 24 Feb. 1910, with Maire O’Neill in the leading role. Te translation was part of the ongoing Abbey project of introducing European drama to the Irish stage; as AG said later (Collected Plays of Lady Gregory ed. A. Saddlemeyer, vol. 4 (1970), 360): I translated Goldoni’s La Locandriera, calling it Mirandolina, for the Abbey Teatre, thinking it in key with our country comedies [. . .] I gave the whole play [. . .] an Irish setting, so getting a greater ease in the speaking and in the acting [. . .] the dialogue is in places less bound to the word than to the spirit of the play. New to the Irish stage as it was, the play had been a hit in London before this; and AG remembered a famous performance in the leading role of the actress Eleanora Duse, which she had seen in 1894. (For more on the signifcance of AG’s translation and the circumstances of its production, see E. O’Connell, ‘Carlo Goldoni in Dublin: Lady Gregory’s Translation of La Locandiera’, Irish University Review 35/2 (2005), 259–272.) DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-54

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Te lines which WBY translated for AG will have been prepared by him from a crib (possibly AG’s), but Goldoni’s Italian is: Viva Bacco, e viva Amore: L’uno e l’altro ci consola; Uno passa per la gola, L’altro va dagli occhi al cuore. Bevo il vin, cogli occhi poi . . . Faccio quel che fate voi. [Long live Bacchus, and long live Love: | Te one and the other both console; | Te one enters through the throat, | Te other goes from the eyes to the heart. | I drink the wine, and my eyes then . . . | I do with them what you do with yours.] In Act 2 of the play, Mirandolina the keeper of the inn is firting with one of the male characters, the Captain (Collected Plays ed. Saddlemeyer, vol. 4, 216): Captain. Take another glass of Burgundy. Mirandolina. Well, be quick, for I am going. Captain. Sit down. Mirandolina. Standing, standing! Captain. (giving her the glass gently) Take it. Mirandolina. I will give a toast, and then I will be of . . . a toast my mother taught me . . . [poem follows here] (Goes) Captain. Well done . . . Come back! Ah, the wretch, she has made of . . . And she has lef a hundred devils to torment me! ‘I lif the glass to my mouth, I look at you and I sigh.’ What does that mean? Although WBY’s poem provides only a few moments of the action, at least one member of the audience (in a production at the Abbey of Nov. 1910) was impressed: for the Manchester Guardian reviewer (21 Nov. 1910), ‘A little snatch sung by Mirandolina when she drinks the Captain’s health remains in one’s mind: there is only a suggestion of the song in the original, but it has been elaborated in translation, and a charming piece of waltz music has been put to it’. Te whole piece is quoted, but with the fnal two lines repeated, suggesting that such a repetition was used in performance. Textual history. On the back of a single sheet of TS for AG’s Mirandolina, WBY wrote two versions of the poem, the frst deleted in its entirety (MS1a, MS1b): this is in the Berg Collection, NYPL, and is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 176–177. Next, WBY sent the lines to AG in a letter of 17 Feb. 1910 (MS2), transcribed in CL 5, 729. Te version in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College) fol. 85r. (MS3) is not possible to date, but it is likely to have been entered there in May 1910 or shortly aferwards, possibly in order to put a text of the poem in order in preparation for sending the copy for GH10: it is followed by a strong horizontal line across the page, which probably

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marks the period of over a year between it and the following entry (dated by WBY ‘May 25–1911’). MS3 is transcribed in Mem., 260, and repr. in Cornell ISWGH, 248. Te poem was frst publ. in GH10 (in its ‘Momentary Toughts’ sequence), and it was reprinted in the American magazine Ainslee’s (Sep. 1911), then GH12 and the privately printed and circulated Nine Poems (1914), prepared to commemorate a dinner for WBY hosted by JQ; it was included next in R16, and all collected edns. thereafer. AG’s Mirandolina appeared in 1924, containing the poem: the text is verbally identical to WBY’s published versions, though with lighter punctuation (Mirandolina). Copy-text: P49.

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Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.

Title.] No title in MS versions. When giving the lines a title for G10, WBY slightly alters the lines’ function in the play, where they are clearly in the nature of a toast, and not a drinking song (which implies a larger company doing the singing). 2.] Perhaps cp. Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663), III 1262–1268, on Love which: Cannot but be more frm, and sound Tan that which has the slighter Basis Of Aery Virtue, Wit and Graces: Which is of such thin Subtilty, It steals and creeps in at the Eye And, as it can’t endure to stay, Steals out again as nice a way.

and love] Love MS3. love] Love Mirandolina. 3–4.] Te thought in these lines is WBY’s addition (see Source and dramatic context). 3. truth] Truth MS1b; truth, Mirandolina. 4. die.] die MS1a, MS1b, MS2, MS3; die; Mirandolina. 5.] I drink the wine with my mouth MS1a. mouth,] mouth Mirandolina. 6.] [We gaze at each other and sigh del.] I look at you and I sigh MS1a; I look at you and I sigh! MS1b. you,] you Mirandolina.

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ON THOSE THAT HATED ‘ THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD’, 1907 Date of composition. In the version of the poem entered in his Journal, WBY gives the date as ‘April 5’ [1910]; but a letter including a copy of the lines sent by WBY to AG on 7 Apr. 1910 tells her that ‘On Monday [. . .] I made this poem’, and that Monday was Apr. 4. Production at the Abbey Teatre of Te Playboy of the Western World, Jan.-Feb. 1907. Te Abbey production of J.M. Synge’s comedy Te Playboy of the Western World resulted in a violent controversy in Dublin, the echoes of which were to follow that play in future productions by the company in the USA, and were sounded regularly in WBY’s future writings about the history of the Irish dramatic movement. In fact, the poet was absent on the play’s frst night (26 Jan.), but was recalled by telegram from Scotland to face a week of crisis on the Abbey stage, and he took a leading part in events later in the week-long run, as well as in a specially arranged public debate about the play on 4 Feb. Although events in the theatre itself were initially chaotic, with loud disruption from some of the audience rendering the play impossible to hear, and with the police being brought in by the Abbey to attempt some kind of crowd control, and to keep the peace between rival factions of anti- and pro-Playboy protesters (many of them the worse for drink), the more substantial attacks on the production took place in the pages of the Dublin press. Te main line of objection was that Synge was presenting an essentially libellous picture of peasant society in the West of Ireland and, in particular, of Irish womanhood: special ofence was taken at the apparent willingness shown by the Mayo characters to harbour a supposed parricide (Christy Mahon), at the frankness of the admiration for Christy shown by both a younger and an older woman (Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quinn), at Christy and Pegeen Mike’s being lef alone overnight in an otherwise empty dwelling, and – most remarkably of all – at the speaking on stage of the word ‘shif’ (an everyday item of women’s underwear). W.J. Lawrence wrote of how ‘Te Playboy is not a truthful or a just picture of the Irish peasants, but simply the outpouring of a morbid, unhealthy mind ever seeking on the dunghill of life for the nastiness that lies concealed there [. . .] Synge is the evil genius of the Abbey and Yeats his able lieutenant’. For Te Freeman’s Journal, ‘strong protest must be entered against this unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood’. Much similar coverage made it plain that, although Synge was an Irish writer, his play would serve directly the interests of a DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-55

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British caricature of Ireland as morally depraved (and therefore wholly unftted for any measure of self-determination): activist journalists such as Arthur Grifth and D.P. Moran took this line, and the week of stage disruptions certainly contained a large element of Sinn Fein supporters, probably as the result of some degree of pre-planning. Debate, such as it was, generated much more heat than light; WBY seemed to welcome the opportunity of facing down a mob (both at the productions, and in the subsequent public discussion) though Synge himself retained a less partisan demeanour, and held back from any overtly political analysis of what was at stake. Te play did complete its run and, if the arguments of the Abbey could not be said to have exactly carried the day at this point in Dublin in 1907, those of the play’s opponents did not prevail either. With the passing of time, WBY’s determined defence of freedom of expression in the face of nationalist bigotry was vindicated by the growing success of Synge’s play, which became a staple of the Abbey repertoire at home and abroad. For a detailed and revealing account of the initial controversy, see J. Kelly and R. Schuchard, Biographical and Historical Appendix to CL 4, pp. 862–885. WBY afer the Playboy controversy, and the death of Synge. Te signifcance of the events surrounding the 1907 Playboy production was not shirked by WBY, and to a degree it was at least partly shaped by him. Afer Synge died on 24 Mar. 1909, WBY assumed an important role in the arrangement of his literary and dramatic afairs; the fact that Synge entrusted him with this on his deathbed was one the poet did not hesitate to repeat, in private and in public contexts. In fact, although WBY saw through Synge’s unfnalized Deirdre of the Sorrows to its Abbey production in Jan. 1910, he was not in full charge of the literary estate, which was administered by Synge’s brother, and found himself powerless to prevent the inclusion of some articles frst published by Synge in Te Manchester Guardian in a collected edition, to which he had already agreed to write an introduction. ‘If your brother had given me power as well as responsibility,’ WBY said in a draf letter of 25 Sep. 1910 to Edward Synge, ‘I would now stop the publication of these articles’; withdrawing his Introduction, he promised that ‘I will publish the essay, which is a eulogy upon your brother’s genius, elsewhere’ (CL 5, 894). It was in the same month that WBY fnished his ‘eulogy’ project, which became the Cuala Press book, Synge and the Ireland of His Time (1911). It is apparent from this work that WBY saw the Playboy controversy as a signifcant litmus-test for the relationship between art and Irish society, and that he wished in particular to place in the foreground the element of hypocrisy on matters of sexual morality amongst Synge’s opponents. Te entire frst section of the piece is devoted to the events of the play’s opening week, and it builds towards a kind of punchline from Synge himself, which is entirely in keeping with the scorn demonstrated in WBY’s epigram of Apr. 1910. Ironically in the circumstances, WBY is not only airing Synge’s hitherto-unpublished words, but doing so on a topic which, in 1907, Synge had treated with a marked degree of public reticence: guarded in life, WBY makes him outspoken in death (Synge and the Ireland of His Time (1911), 1–3; repr. CW 4, 226–227): On Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when my lecture was over I was given a telegram which said, ‘Play great success.’ It had

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been sent from Dublin afer the second Act of ‘Te Playboy of the Western World,’ then being performed for the frst time. Afer one in the morning, my host brought to my bedroom this second telegram, ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shif.’ I knew no more until I got the Dublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on Tuesday morning. On the Monday night no word of the play had been heard. About forty young men had sat on the front seats of the pit, and stamped and shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain. On the Tuesday night also the forty young men were there. Tey wished to silence what they considered a slander upon Ireland’s womanhood. Irish women would never sleep under the same roof with a young man without a chaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word like ‘shif;’ nor could anyone recognise the country men and women of Davis and Kickham in these poetical, violent, grotesque persons, who used the name of God so freely, and spoke of all things that hit their fancy. A patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge’s capricious imagination the enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared for this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most ignoble power of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association. Te preparation had begun afer the frst performance of ‘Te Shadow of the Glen,’ Synge’s frst play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but ‘from a writer of the Roman decadence.’ Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the depth of its compassion; but the frenzy that would have silenced his master-work was, like most violent things artifcial, the defence of virtue by those that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and its right to govern the world. As I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a school of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood beside me, and said, ‘A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly keep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling mob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.’ Ireland, Te Playboy, and eunuchs. In the published memoir, WBY made Synge posthumously voice an observation that was fully in keeping with his own satirical thoughts. Additionally, WBY was aware of Synge’s private scorn for the sexual hypocrisy of some of those most vociferous in their defence of Irish womanhood. In one of his Mar. 1909 Journal entries brooding over Synge’s death, WBY notes that ‘He knew how to hate, as witness this’, and quotes a poem by the playwright that prefgures the satirical lines WBY was himself yet to compose (Mem., 202):

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‘To a Sister of an Enemy of the Author’s, who disapproved of The Playboy’ Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow and blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, In her guts a galling give her. Let her live to earn her dinners In Mountjoy with seedy sinners: Lord, this judgement quickly bring, And I’m your servant, – J.M Synge. When he showed me this, he said with mirthful eyes that since he had written it her husband had got drunk, gone with a harlot, got syphilis, and given it to his wife. ‘Hated’ only enters the title of WBY’s poem around 1917, but knowing ‘how to hate’ is important from the beginning. Writing in his Journal in the days before what was to be his fnal meeting with Synge, WBY mentioned modern Ireland’s ‘evil luck’, and the fact that ‘Hate must [. . .] make sterile’ (Mem., 177): Hatred as a basis of imagination [. . .] helps to dry up the nature and makes the sexual abstinence, so common among young men and women in Ireland, possible. Tis abstinence reacts in its turn on the imagination, so that we get at last that strange eunuch-like tone and temper. For the last ten or twenty years there has been a perpetual drying of the Irish mind, with the resultant dust-cloud. Tis developed a thought from slightly earlier in the Journal (Mem., 176): Te root of it all is that the political class in Ireland – the lower-middle class from whom the patriotic associations have drawn their journalists and their leaders for the last ten years – have sufered through the cultivation of hatred as the one energy of their movement, a deprivation which is the intellectual equivalent to the removal of the genitals. Hence the shrillness of their voices. Tey contemplate all creative power as the eunuchs contemplate Don Juan as he passes through Hell on the white horse. What is at work in WBY’s generation and association of images here is something just as insulting as his enemies imagined: those opposed to Te Playboy were – and in 1909 continued to be – sexually maimed by Roman Catholic power in middle class Irish society. Like stereotypical eunuchs (into WBY’s idea of whom all kinds of nineteenth-century orientalist discourse is feeding, possibly along with Edward Gibbon’s take on late Roman and Byzantine history) they are ‘shrill’ in denouncing that which they secretly desire, and can never possess.

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C.R. Ricketts, and Don Juan in Hell. WBY’s Journal entry on the eunuchs and Don Juan is a direct reference to the painting which would go on to be central in this poem, Don Juan in Hell by the English artist C.R. Ricketts (1866–1931). Tis is acknowledged in a letter of 7 Mar. 1909 to AG (CL 5, 459): I wound up my note this morning with the sentence ‘culture is the sanctity of the intellect’. I was thinking of men like [Arthur] Grifth, and how they can renounce external things without it but not envy, revenge, jealousy and so on. I wrote a note a couple of days ago in which I compared Grifth and his like to the Eunuchs in Ricketts’ picture watching Don Juan riding through Hell. WBY admired Ricketts as an artist, and had known him (along with his partner, Charles Shannon) since the late 1890s. When in London, WBY was frequently in contact with both Ricketts and Shannon, and Ricketts’s skills as a stage-designer and a costumedesigner were valued by WBY. Te painting of Don Juan was one in a series of works (ftting into the narrative of e.g. Don Giovanni) that Ricketts was to produce: it dates from 1908 (and was reprinted in Te Studio vol. 43 in that year), but although it must have been seen by WBY, his memory of it was a tellingly inaccurate one. At the centre of the work, a naked Don Juan stands in the saddle, riding a white horse through a group of fgures who throng around him in attitudes of petition; as E.B. Loiseaux describes it, ‘Don Juan’s leg becomes the focal point, the ‘sinewy thigh’, apt metaphor for Playboy’s bawdy vigour, the envy of the painting’s eunuchs and the play’s critics’ (Loiseaux, 137). However, these ‘eunuchs’ – whose presence was so symbolically important for WBY – are not actually present at all. As WBY wrote to AG, including a copy of the poem on 7 Apr. 1910 (CL 5, 769): ‘Ricketts told me the other day [. . .] that I had invented that picture of the Eunuchs looking at Don Juan – they were old women’. So far as can be judged from photographic reproductions in e.g. Loiseaux, 138 (from Te Studio) or CL 5, plate 22 (the original of the painting is not traced), there are no eunuchs to be found in the composition: the central equestrian fgure is surrounded by women engaged in a naked pre-Raphaelite mobbing as Juan rides among them, though just behind him there are three hooded fgures in cloaks and two further shadowy naked female fgures. Ricketts must be presumed to have known his own painting, and identifed these in conversation with WBY as ‘old women’, not eunuchs: J.G.P. Delaney is probably infuenced by WBY when he sees ‘three clothed fgures, the eunuchs who guard this tragic harem and watch the Don riding through Hell’ (‘Yeats’s Friendship with Ricketts and Shannon’, YA 4, 60). As far as Ricketts was concerned, Juan was ‘a grand gentleman’ who ‘takes on himself almost the pains of a saint’ and ‘faced damnation for his dream – he never recoiled fearful’ (quoted, Delaney p. 60): this could well have been the gist of a conversation between Ricketts and WBY on the subject, and might have chimed for WBY in some ways with the fgure he was constructing posthumously out of J.M. Synge. At any rate, the poet was relieved to discover he had himself invented the eunuchs: ‘On Monday fnding I could claim the idea I made this poem’ (CL 5, 770). Reception and critical interpretation. In 1907, in the welter of controversy, WBY had already decisively aligned himself with the claims of culture over popular feeling; in 1911, when this poem was published in Ireland, the poet intended to re-open this wound

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(though in fact it had never healed). One aim of the verses is to give ofence, and they can be read as an act of calculated afront. Te battleground chosen by the poet is not primarily a dramatic one (though drama is essential to the poem’s meaning), nor explicitly political in nature, but that of sexual power and repression. Personal relationships were undoubtedly threatened by WBY’s front-line involvement in the Playboy disagreements: a long-lasting rif was opened between the poet and George Russell, who failed to show his hand in the Abbey debate of Feb. 1907, then a few days later attacked WBY vehemently in Grifth’s Sinn Fein paper, making a direct comparison between the Abbey director’s part in calling in the police for the week’s performances and the arrangements needed for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee events in Dublin in 1901. Te 1910 poem’s concentration on the mob-efect of ‘every crowded street’ may show a decision on WBY’s part to become explicit in his condemnation of any popular audience, meeting defantly Russell’s 1907 satire of ‘Te Chief Poet of Ireland’ who, when the fgure of the late Queen Victoria complains ‘Tere were miles and miles of soldiers in my play, and miles of policemen, but it never got a fair hearing’ chimes in with ‘We are just like that, we never got a fair hearing’. Russell had turned this point even more surely against WBY by making the Poet chastise himself for a line from ‘In the Seven Woods’(6–7): “New commonness upon the throne’: I must rewrite that, it was an appeal to the gallery: it was bad art’ (quoted in P. Kuch, Yeats and A.E.: ‘Te Antagonism that Unites Dear Friends’ (1986), 231). In 1910, returning to the passions of 1907 struck closer to home for WBY on the more intimate front also, since MG had never been on the side of the Abbey in the controversy. In Feb. 1907, MG had been solicitous for WBY’s well-being, but could ofer nothing in the way of support for his position, being herself by instinct on the side of the crowd: ‘I am dreadfully sorry about the whole thing,’ she wrote, ‘I know you think you are right – I know the men who are against you are equally sure they are right, are sufering for a good cause, and this makes it tragic, as I don’t see the same as you over it: I don’t want to go into the matter, except to say that I am feeling rather anxious’ (G-YL, 237). It is not clear whether MG read WBY’s poem in Te Irish Review in 1911, but in 1912 she told JQ that ‘As a play, I dislike the Playboy though [. . .] I shall never be able to say so’, adding that ‘I also can never quite forgive Lady Gregory and Yeats for having had it played under police protection in Dublin when the opposition to it was entirely spontaneous and when we know what police protection in Ireland stands for’ (TLAS, 96). Te poem’s note of defance, then, sounds also close to home: nevertheless, WBY was somewhat coy a couple of weeks afer composing the lines when he told MG only ‘I have written two or three short poems, one or two satirical, but London is the devil of a place to write in’ (CL 5, 775). W.K. McGee (as ‘John Eglinton’) wrote perceptively about Synge, WBY, and the Playboy afair (Irish Literary Portraits (1935), 29): But the man who really broke up the mould of Irish drama as it existed in Yeats’s mind was J. M. Synge, a writer who, caring little for Yeats’s theories of a drama ‘remote, spiritual and ideal’, gave the Abbey Teatre itself an exciting part in the drama of Irish life. In defending Synge, then, Yeats was fghting in a cause which was not really his own. Synge was more than an episode in Yeats’s history: he was a disturbing event, which brought Yeats back from the abstract to the personal. Te Abbey stage was frequently converted into a

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platform, from which, with never-failing heart of controversy and with admirable self-forgetfulness, he preached his doctrine of the imaginative arts from the ambiguous text of Te Playboy. Te poem certainly efects a shif from ‘abstract’ to ‘personal’ feeling; it also, in its short space, creates a striking dynamic between the solitary performer and the frenzied mass of onlookers, one which resonates with the basic nature of the stage and the audience. Modern critics have sensed the seismic nature of this poem’s engagement with Irish artistic, political, and moral culture. B. Levitas, quoting WBY’s anecdote about Synge and his venerally diseased detractors, adds how ‘the Playboy is, not improbably, cast in the part of a modernist confrontation of bourgeois hypocrisy: syphilitic moralists provide a late echo of Ibsen’s Ghosts, and there are shades of Parnell, too, whose defance of moral protocol came of a part with his idealized detachment and cool command of other ‘howling mobs’’ (‘A Temper of Misgiving: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of Synge’s Time’, in S. Paseta (ed.), Uncertain Futures: Essays about the Irish Past for Roy Foster (2016), 113). M. Howes contends that ‘Te poem illustrates Yeats’s new construction of nationalist crowds’, and enlarges on this novelty in the poem (Howes, 98): Te spectacle before the crowd provokes a frenzy, but a frenzy of sexual dysfunction and sexual jealousy rather than an ecstatic or erotic one. Te antierotic crowd is represented by an anti-man, a eunuch, rather than a woman. Te individual confronting the crowd [. . .] towers over and is impervious to the crowd rather than being mesmerised by it. It may be telling that interpretations such as these describe Ricketts’s painting as much as they do the actual poem: all that WBY says about ‘great Juan’ is that he is ‘riding by’ and that he possesses a ‘sinewy thigh’: confrontation – while it is certainly a part of this poem’s meaning – comes from the historical moment being commemorated, and not from inside the poem itself. WBY was in no doubt about the kind of insult he intended to deliver – which was directed especially, as there are good grounds to suspect, at Sinn Fein’s Arthur Grifth – and this is well summed up by R. Foster: ‘Unashamed sexual desire was associated with creative power; ‘Tose that hated Te Playboy’ were impotent in every way, staring at the legendary lover on his stallion’ (Foster 1, 399). Temes of sexual desire and impotence are primarily satirical tools for the poem; but this does not mean that they were merely this for WBY’s imagination more generally. Te poem’s scorn of a mob, which manages to contain some element of awe for the power to command an audience, clearly aligns the authorial imagination with ‘great Juan’ rather than the ‘eunuchs’; at the same time, a link between sexual frenzy and impotence sets up troubling forces for WBY’s poetry that go well beyond the occasional, the political, or the satirical. Textual and publication history. Te earliest version of the poem is found in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), fol. 72v. (MS 1); this is transcribed in Mem., 244, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 246–247. WBY entered the lines in a letter to AG of 7 Apr. 1910 (MS2), transcribed in CL 5, 770: this is the hol. inserted in AG’s copy of CWVP08 vol. 7 (now in Berg Collection, NYPL). Another hol. copy, on the same size paper as MS2, is in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at

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Austin (MS3). A fair copy with some changes is in a notebook given to WBY by MG at Christmas 1912 (MS4), NLI 30358: frst on fol. 27v. comes a version of two lines (MS4a), and later on fol. 43 v. is a fair copy of the entire poem (MS4b). WBY made changes in a copy of R16 (MS5), and to the 1917 impression of R16 (MS6), now kept by Washington State University; fnally, he made alterations to another copy of R16 (MS7). Te poem was frst printed in Te Irish Review Dec. 1911, then in GH12, R14, R16, and all subsequent collected editions. Te fnal form of the text was not reached until LP22, and afer then it remained stable. Copy-text: P49.

5

Once, when midnight smote the air, Eunuchs ran through Hell and met On every crowded street to stare Upon great Juan riding by: Even like these to rail and sweat Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

Title.] On the attack on the Play Boy MS1, MS2; no title MS3, MS4b; On those who Dislike the Playboy Irish Review; Te Attack on the ‘Play Boy’ GH12; rev. to On those that hated ‘Te Play-Boy of the Western World, 1907’ MS5; Te Attack on ‘Te Playboy of the Western World’, 1907 R14, R16. Te title is put into what would become its fnal (LP22) form in MS6. 1. smote the air] A fairly common piece of nineteenth-century poetic diction, cp. e.g. R. Southey, Poetical Works (1838), Talaba the Destroyer Book 9, 33: ‘And up she looked, and smote the air’ and W. Morris, Works (1910), Te Earthly Paradise ‘Bellerophon at Argos’, 1704–1705: ‘and smote the air around | With slow, hard words’. 3.] Round about Hell’s gate, to stare MS1, MS2, Irish Review, GH12, R14. From thoroughfare to thoroughfare MS4b, R16, rev. to On every crowded street to stare MS7. WBY’s thought of abolishing ‘to stare’ might have been prompted by the awkwardness of ‘to stare [. . .] Staring’ (3, 6); but in the event, this verbal heaviness was to remain in the poem’s fnal form. 4.] While that great Juan galloped by; R16, To mob great Juan riding by; MS6. Upon] At MS1, MS2, Irish Review, GH12, R14.

5–6.] Tese lines gave WBY a good deal of diffculty, and a fnal form was not reached until R16; the main previous versions are: And like these to rail and sweat Maddened at his sinewy thigh. And like these to rail and sweat Maddened by that sinewy thigh. Review, GH12.

MS1–3. Irish

And like these to rail and sweat, Staring on that sinewy thigh.

MS4a.

And like these to rail and sweat; Staring on his sinewy thigh.

MS4b.

And like these to rail and sweat, Staring on his sinewy thigh.

R14.

And like these to rail and sweat Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

R16.

[And hol. corr. to Even] like these to rail and sweat Staring upon his sinewy thigh. MS7. 6. sinewy thigh] With this very rare phrase, perhaps cp. A. Pope, Te Iliad of Homer Book 5, 854–855: ‘Brave Pelagon [. . .] Who wrenched the javelin from his sinewy thigh’.

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A WOMAN HOMER SUNG Date of composition. Te copy of the poem in WBY’s Journal, which is if not a frst draf at least an early one, is dated ‘April 18’ [1910]. If (as the editors of CL 5 believe) WBY had this poem in mind when he told MG on 13 Apr. 1910 that ‘I have written two or three short poems’, then a version must have existed a few days before work began in the Journal. In NLI 30166, a carbon TS of poems’ titles with dates (probably as supplied to R. Ellmann by GY), the date of composition is given as 5–15 Apr. 1910. Te woman Homer sung. For readers of WBY, the plain implication of this poem’s title is that this woman is Helen of Troy (for WBY’s uses of Helen, see Troy, and Helen in headnotes to ‘No Second Troy’). For GH10, WBY positions the poem before ‘No Second Troy’, separating the two with ‘Consolation’ [‘Words’]; in GH12, there are three poems coming between these lyrics, but again ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ precedes ‘No Second Troy’. Te efect is to allow readers to encounter this poem’s ‘heroic dream’ of longstanding romantic fxation before coming into contact with the heroic nightmare of that same love’s capacity for destruction. Although this poem’s Homeric dimension provides its title, in fact any specifcally Homeric meaning only becomes part of the writing in the last fve lines (or perhaps even just the last three). It would of course be obtuse to say that a number of diferent women are ‘sung’ about by Homer (the woman who occupies most Homeric attention is Penelope in the Odyssey, for example), especially since this poem declares itself so immediately as a love poem; and Helen’s implied presence is that of the mythic fgure whose beauty remains unparalleled through all later literary tradition. WBY was familiar with both the Iliad and the Odyssey from adolescence onwards, and as a poet he was a veteran of Homeric reference and resource, particularly with regard to Helen. Te frst two stanzas of the poem are, however, personal in reference, and therefore autobiographical in feel; it is only with the fnal stanza that Helen becomes the explicit subject (though even here, the name ‘Helen’ is absent – and naming, it may be implied by the poem, is in any case needless). Two things are said in the stanza about this ‘woman’: she had ‘fery blood’ (15) and ‘trod [. . .] sweetly proud’ (17). Both of these return to WBY’s habitual register for talking about both Helen of Troy and MG. Any feriness of blood in Helen is relatively muted in Homer (though it was far from muted in the young MG), but WBY had long made use of Helen as a fgure of destructiveness (in e.g. ‘Te Sorrow of Love’ and ‘Te Rose of the World’ in 1891), and he had by now already composed the confagration of ‘No Second Troy’. But with the description in 17–18, and Helen’s manner of walking here, other strong literary and personal associations come to the surface. In literary terms, WBY may be drawing upon the moment in the Iliad when Helen DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-56

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appears, walking to join the Trojan royal family to look out over the walls of Troy, and is admired by the Trojan elders (whose excited voices Homer compares to grasshoppers’); in G. Chapman’s translation, the epic simile concludes (Homer’s Iliads Book 3, 163–170): so (talking on the towre) These Seniors of the people sate, who, when they saw the powre Of beautie in the Queen ascend, even those cold-spirited Peeres, Those wise and almost witherd men, found this heate in their yeares That they were forc’t (though whispering) to say: ‘What man can blame The Greekes and Troyans to endure, for so admir’d a Dame, So many miseries, and so long? In her sweet countenance shine Lookes like the Goddesses’. Helen’s near-parity with goddesses is mentioned frequently in Homer; but the feature WBY dwells on is her walk and, although she makes a grand entrance here in Iliad 3, as she does also in Odyssey 4, Homer’s comparisons between her and divinities do not focus on her particular bearing as she walks. In fact, WBY is probably thinking of a Virgilian rather than an Homeric efect here. Te indications of this come from later than the poem, however; and may themselves be in some ways drawing upon it as a kind of corroboration. Nevertheless, WBY’s account of his frst meeting with MG in his draf Autobiography of 1916–1917 ofers useful imaginative detail (Mem., 40): I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would but speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess. By 1921 in Te Trembling of the Veil, this material has changed, and its specifc classical reference has been brought into sharper focus (CW 3, 120): To-day, with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she looks the Sibyl I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian commendation ‘She walks like a goddess’ made for her alone. Te phrase from Virgil is in fact being fltered through WBY’s memory: so much so, perhaps, that it is by now less Virgil’s than his own. But it derives from Aeneid 2, 402–405: Dixit, et advertens rosea cervice revulsit, ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem spiravere, pedes vestis defuxit ad imos, et vera incessu patuit dea.

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As this was rendered in the Victorian prose version owned by WBY (J. Davidson, Te Works of Virgil (1874)), ‘She said, and turning away, shone radiant with her rosy neck, and from her head ambrosial locks breathed divine fragrance: her robe hung fowing to the ground, and by her gait the goddess stood confessed.’ ‘By her gait’ treats ‘incessu’ somewhat stify; the word can mean a walking, a pacing, or even a stalking action: Dryden’s version catches the Yeatsian light with ‘In length of train descends her sweeping gown, | And by her walk the Queen of Love is known’. WBY seems to have remembered the poetry of this whilst forgetting (or discarding) its context, for the description is not that of Aeneas’ beloved, but of his goddess-mother, Venus. In his poem, WBY makes the Virgilian Homeric, Venus into Helen of Troy, while at the same time transforming the personal into the mythic, and MG into a woman sung about by Homer. R. Greaves writes of how ‘Te fgure that the intensifcation of [WBY’s] thought has created and projected into the past – created in his memory – promotes the life and the work which celebrate her [. . .] this fgure has a reality which throws into doubt the reality of ‘life and letters’ (Greaves, 73). ‘Life and letters’ (20), that disconcertingly journalistic phrase, becomes absorbed by something ancient, transcendent and impersonal; and banal fantasy is in the process transfgured into ‘heroic dream’. One of the poet’s fctive creations also walked like a queen: Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in the 1902 play, was played at one point by MG herself: beneath the ‘old woman’ on the stage was the ultimately unstable combination of a beautiful young woman and Helen of Troy, and the last line before the curtain is ‘I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen’ (CW 2, 93). Nor, of course, is WBY’s poetic imagination by any means yet done with Helen. For an excellent discussion of the entire MG/Helen/goddess entanglement, see W. Gould, ‘Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lachrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy’, YA 18, 15–55. Reception and critical interpretation. It is likely that Ezra Pound was amongst this poem’s frst readers, and that it is one of the recent poems by WBY which he mentions in a letter of Jun. 1910 (Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship eds. O. Pound and R. Spoo (1988), 41–42): Yeats has been doing some new lyrics – he has come out of the shadows and has declared for life. [. . .] He is in transit I think from the dolce stile to the stile grande – and he looks to his new work and l’avenir rather than playing cenotaph to the dead ‘rhymers’ and their period. His art of course can be no greater, but there is in it now a new note of personal and human triumph that will carry him to more people. But contemporary reviews generally passed over the poem; though unimpressed by GH12, the reviewer for Vogue thought this, along with ‘Peace’, the only good work to be found in the book. Later reactions were more perceptive, and in Te Dial (Oct. 1921), Padraic Colum included the poem amongst those by WBY that are ‘thrilling in their austerity, in their renunciation of what is merely emotional’, where ‘speech seems to fow into verse simply through its own energy’. Te poem’s style – and in particular its diction – is important for any critical appraisal: this stile grande, in Pound’s phrase, is in some ways archaic, though its efect is powerfully original. R. Ellmann’s observation of 1964, that ‘Closely scrutinized, [WBY’s] style of this period has for a hallmark an archaistic

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formality’, came from a feeling that ‘Having worked to rid himself of archaisms until he was about thirty-fve, [WBY] spent the next ffeen years reviving some of them’, so that ‘Writing English as a learned language, he caught up usages long out of fashion’ (Identity, 135). ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ (with grammatical word-order inversion already in its very title) features phrases such as ‘’twas bitter wrong’ (5), ‘Whereon I wrote and wrought’ (8), ‘What thing her body was’ (14), and ‘As ’twere upon’ (18): the cumulative efect is disarming, since what might be in other contexts moribund phraseology is being brought to palpable life. Exploring the means by which this poem creates such an efect is the real critical task. J. Ramazani has written insightfully on the ways in which style in the poem interacts with a generic self-consciousness, when WBY ‘has fallen from the immediacy of his early passion to a cooler awareness of linguistic mediation – of the machinery and psycho-dynamics of love poetry’ (‘Self-Teorizing Poetry: Yeats’s Ars Poetica in Te Green Helmet and Other Poems’, YA 16, 60): Biographically, Yeats could be seen as looking back to a kind of amorous poetry that can no longer be written, in the afermath of his physical afair with Maud Gonne. [. . .] now, ‘being grey’, he writes poems about having written about the beloved. [. . .] What, then, is a love poem? Tis poem’s answer is not so simple. According to its interpolated statement, a love poem is ideally the mirror image of the beloved’s beautiful body [. . .] But the love poem is also, the earlier stanzas suggest, a poem of self-portraiture, about the poet’s hopes and fears for his ability to immortalize himself. Might a love poem be, in short, as much about the poem as about the love? In formal terms, for WBY this particular poem is an innovative one: its seven-line stanzas are in trimeters, with the second line in each stanza a dimeter, and a demanding rhyme-scheme throughout of abaabcc. It seems likely that WBY decided to work here from a model, and that this model was the poem by the Elizabethan writer Tomas Nashe which he was to return to ofen throughout his career, ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’. Nashe has seven-line trimeter stanzas, each with the fnal line ‘Lord, have mercy on us!’, but with the other six lines rhymed in couplets. A stanza to which WBY ofen returned was the third: Beauty is but a fower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! In his Journal, WBY’s Helen was briefy ‘A queen by Homer sung’ (see note to 19), and Nashe’s transformation of the Helen myth into a gothic memento mori, which may be feetingly visible here, is arguably one part of WBY’s vision in this poem. Te elegiac tone is married with the celebratory: if ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ is indeed a love poem, it is

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one which also laments the loss – or at least the profound changing over time – of love itself. What is lef is (as J. Ramazani says) the artifce, the life of the genre itself, within its lyric medium. And what is fnally unsettled is the meaning of the ‘heroic dream’: ‘heroic’ may carry ironic force, and ‘dream’ may do so as well; but they cannot perhaps both convincingly do this. It may be the case that MG undergoes an ‘heroic’ apotheosis in the third stanza; but it may also be that her mythic identity is being redefned as a ‘dream’ (ironic or un-ironic) even as it is being celebrated. In this very complication, WBY masters his own stile grande. Textual history. Te earliest extant text for the poem is in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), fol. 73r. (MS1a). Tis has a fair copy of all three stanzas with, to the lef, substantial alterations that have been subsequently made by WBY (identifed here as MS1b). Te entry is transcribed in Mem., 244–245, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 148–149. Another fair copy is in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (MS2): this is a hol. in ink on a single sheet, which may once have been pasted in a book or album. Te poem was frst printed in GH10, then in GH12 and in two selected edns., the 1913 Tauchnitz edn. and the 1913 Cuala Selection from the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats; it was also privately printed by JQ for the commemorative Nine Poems pamphlet (1914). Te poem appeared as part of R16, and was included in all subsequent collected editions by WBY. Copy-text: P49.

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If any man drew near When I was young, I thought, ‘He holds her dear,’ And shook with hate and fear. But O! ’twas bitter wrong If he could pass her by With an indiferent eye. Whereon I wrote and wrought, And now, being grey,

Title.] No title MS1a and b, MS2. In GH10, as ‘A Woman Homer Sung’, the poem is second in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and His Wife Pernella’ (for note on this sequence-title, see notes to ‘His Dream’). 3–4.] I shook with hate and fear | Because he held her dear MS1a; I thought He holds her dear | And shook with hate and fear MS1b. 4. with hate and fear] Perhaps cp. the Irish nationalist poem by T.D. Sullivan, Green

Leaves (1887), ‘So Be It’, 44–45 on ‘the evils [. . .] Tat flled our land with hate and fear’. 6. could] should ^could^ MS1a. MS1a numbers above line 8 the stanza as ‘2’, and above line 15 as ‘3’. 7. an indiferent eye] Tis phrase was not a common one, but it had been used by the Brownings: cp. E.B. Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), 3, 416: ‘To catch the indiferent eye of such a man’, and R. Browning, Balaustion’s Adventure (1871), 701: ‘with indiferent eye’.

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I dream that I have brought To such a pitch my thought That coming time can say, ‘He shadowed in a glass What thing her body was.’

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For she had fery blood When I was young, And trod so sweetly proud As ’twere upon a cloud, A woman Homer sung, That life and letters seem But an heroic dream.

20

8. Whereon] [Since then del.] Whereon MS1a; Wherefore MS2. Tis is OED 4., ‘Of immediately subsequent or consequent action [. . .] Now more usually Whereupon’: although the word was employed in this sense by e.g. Robert Bridges, WBY’s efect here is decidedly antique. I wrote] I’ve writ MS2. 10. dream] [boast del.] ^dream^ MS1b. 12.] Tat I at last can say, MS1a; Tat coming time [shall del.] ^can^ say MS1b. 13–14.] I have shadowed in ^a^ [this del.] glass | Tat thing her body was MS1a; [I have del.] [I’ve del.] ^He^ shadowed in a glass | Tat ^or What^ thing her body was MS1b; He shadowed in a glass | What thing her beauty was MS2. It is possible that MS2’s ‘beauty’ is not a revision but a slip, ofering a glimpse of the ghostly presence here of E.A. Poe: cp. Te Raven and Other Poems (1845), ‘To Helen’, 1–2: ‘Helen, thy beauty is to me | Like those Nicean banks of yore’. 13. shadowed in a glass] A.N. Jefares (‘A Source for ‘A Woman Homer Sung’’, Notes and Queries 195 (Mar. 1950)) suggested here an echo of Shelley, Hellas, 805–806: ‘Te coming age is shadowed on the Past | As on a glass’. 17. so sweetly proud] WBY intends a certain oxymoronic force here, so that there is a sweetness to (and in) the pride, thus combining two usually uncompared qualities. Tey had been yoked together before, not by

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violence but by force of gushing sentimentality, in A. Swinburne, A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (1884), ‘Cradle Songs 5: ‘Baby, baby fair’’, 9: ‘Pride so sweetly proud’. 18. ’twere] it were MS1a. 19.] [A queen by Homer sung del.] A woman Homer sung MS1a (Cancelled brackets around this correction suggest that it was not immediately substituted for the subsequently deleted text of MS1a to its lef, and was provided at the same time as the MS1b material above it, and also on the right hand side of the page.) 20. life and letters] Tis phrase is a decidedly prosaic one, as WBY will have been aware. A staple of cultural journalism, it ofen described the comings and goings of literary life in general, and was also a standard title for posthumous gatherings and accounts of writers’ works and doings. In terms of poetic efect, this commonplace functions to make the poem’s fnal line shine as more brightly original by contrast, as the life of mere work is outshone by the light of mythic (and lifelong) imagination. Very shortly afer composing the poem, WBY was to refer (with no irony) in his Journal to ‘my integrity as a man of letters’ (Mem., 247). 21. heroic dream] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book 6, 61–62: ‘Heroic dreams! | Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake’.

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PEACE Date of composition. Probably composed in early May 1910. WBY stayed as MG’s guest at her house in Normandy, ‘Les Mouettes’ (in Colleville on the Normandy coast, near Calvados) from 28 Apr. until 16 May 1910. Since the next item in the Journal (a copy of ‘Against Unworthy Praise’) is dated by WBY as ‘May 11’, it is likely that the poem was composed by 10 May at the latest. It is entirely possible that this poem and ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ were being composed at roughly the same time. Circumstances of composition. Te temper of this poem, along with that of ‘Against Unworthy Praise’, might be traced back as far as Oct. 1908, when WBY was attempting to register what he took as a profound change in MG, in the wake of her disastrous marriage and the public bitterness that followed its collapse. Afer meeting MG in London around 10 Oct., WBY wrote to AG (CL 5, 308–309): Maud Gonne is sad and gentle – I can best describe the change in her by saying that there are moments when she reminds me of what one reads of religious conversions. She says that but for a letter of yours, or a message from you, I forget which, her husband would have been able to take half her fortune. It was owing to you that she got married according to English law. She spoke of your help with emotion, and said once, ‘She is very noble’. She speaks of her old politics of hate with horror. Tere is no reason to doubt MG’s gratitude to AG for ofering what turned out to be prudent advice; at the same time, praising AG to WBY was likely to do much towards persuading him that there had indeed been a ‘change in her’ for the better. Te rapprochement between MG and WBY was one that was managed by MG largely on her own terms since the summer of 1908 (see Biographical context headnote to ‘Reconciliation’), and this continued to be the case in 1910. Te invitation to Normandy – where MG and WBY were together in company with others, and where (despite poor weather) outings included an overnight trip to see Mont St. Michel – was also an invitation into MG’s domestic circle, and a way for MG to present WBY with (an albeit somewhat staged) version of her private identity. It may be that by this point MG had lost the knack of speaking of her ‘old politics of hate with horror’, and it is clear from WBY’s Journal that she and he disagreed about the political implications and content of the long piece he was composing on the recently deceased J.M. Synge (eventually, Synge and the Ireland of his Time (1911)); but the general direction of her thought was nevertheless (as far as WBY was shown it, at least) away from the more explosive activism of earlier years. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-57

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In the entry that follows the two poems in his Journal, WBY records a domestic atmosphere that is not uncomplicatedly a peaceful one (Mem., 247): Yesterday afernoon, there being much wind and rain, we all stayed indoors – Mrs. Clay, [MG’s cousin, who lived at ‘Les Mouettes’] Iseult, Maud Gonne; and Maud Gonne and I got into the old argument about Sinn Fein and its attack on Synge, and the general circumstances that surrounded the frst split in the Teatre. I notice that this old quarrel is the one diference about which she feels strongly. I for this very reason let myself get drawn into it again and again, thinking to convince her at last that apart from wrongs and rights impossible to settle so long afer, it was fundamental. I could not have done otherwise. My whole movement, my integrity as a man of letters, were alike involved. Tinking of her, as I do, as in a sense Ireland, a summing up in one mind of what is best in the romantic political Ireland of my youth and of the youth of others for some years yet, I must see to it that I close the Synge essay with a statement of national literature as I would re-create it, and of its purpose. It is useless to attack if one does not create. Te identifcation here of MG with Ireland is both tentative and acutely self-conscious; but it may refect a process intuited in ‘Peace’, whereby the touch of Time on the ‘form’ of the beloved matches the changes worked by the shaping hand of history on ‘the romantic political Ireland of my youth’. It is noticeable, too, that power relations between WBY and MG are now much more even than before: WBY’s ‘integrity as a man of letters’, and his long experience on the cultural front line, make him a force to be reckoned with; and MG’s changed ‘form’ leaves him in a stronger position, no longer a besotted petitioner for MG’s favours, but now the kind of suitor she would be well-advised to encourage. WBY’s holiday in France was in a way a working one: besides talking through his Synge essay and conducting the never-ending business of the Abbey Teatre, he was intent on writing lyric poetry again. More or less on arrival, he told AG (CL 5, 796) that ‘I have just lately been writing lyrics at much my old pace’, and on 10 May could announce (CL 5, 801) that ‘I have written a good deal of verse since I came here’. Besides this poem and ‘Against Unworthy Praise’, WBY was hoping to compose a lyric on Father Christian Rosicross (‘Te Mountain Tomb’) which, in the event, would not be written until 1912 (see CL 5, 796). Te location for all this activity, MG’s ‘Les Mouettes’, was described by WBY to AG (CL 5, 794–795): Maud Gonne met me in a cart and a couple of hours drive through a beautiful country brought me here to a big ugly house on the sea beach. I have done a good morning’s work today and expect to do a lot here where there is no distraction. [. . .] I can see the sea from the window and I can hear the waves breaking on the sand. Tere is no one to speak to, even if one did know French [. . .] Iseult is away, but the little boy and a number of brown and black

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dogs, a parrot and about a hundred caged birds and a cat excite each other at intervals. Tere is also a haunted picture. (Te picture in question, which was said occasionally to spring to life, was a portrait of MG; and ‘Les Mouettes’ itself, the ‘big ugly house’, was a property given to MG by Lucien Millevoye while he kept her as his mistress, as WBY probably knew.) Any seclusion here was not the same thing as peace and quiet, if only because of MG’s menagerie; and what peace there was for the working WBY was liable to be interrupted by the world of events. On 7 May, the death of Edward VII was announced; and before long this triggered a crisis at the Abbey, concerning whether or not to close the theatre on the day of the Royal funeral (as usual, WBY would need to act as handler for the enraged funder Annie Horniman, whilst helping to co-ordinate the Teatre’s response to the Dublin press). ‘Peace’, however, is a poem that excludes a great deal of its immediate context: WBY’s focus is kept tightly on the unnamed female fgure, her ‘life’, her ‘form’, her ‘sternness’ and her ‘sweetness’. Tis is of course MG, with her life beyond the confnes of the poem and its moment still ‘but storm’; but it is not the usual MG, in that the poem describes changes wrought by ‘Time’. ‘Touch’ and ‘touched’, in the frst and the last lines of the poem, suggest what may even be an amatory tenderness; in fact, though, the poem is an admiring, but defnite, confrmation of MG’s ageing. ‘Peace’ – which is amongst other things a lull in the turbulence of romantic fxation – comes at the price of a loss of physical attractiveness, so that MG can no longer be presented plausibly as a Homeric ‘hero’s wage’ (3). Te poem’s putative ‘painters’ (5) have plenty still to work with, and to work for; though the ‘haunted picture’ of MG in the house may operate subliminally – like Oscar Wilde’s conception of Dorian Grey’s supernatural portrait – to reinforce a sense that the true MG is more multi-faceted and dangerous than the ‘form’ currently on peaceful display. MG, WBY and ‘peace’. Te word ‘peace’, in the title and line 10, is evidently of great importance to the poem’s meaning; it is also carried through to the frst and the last lines of ‘Against Unworthy Praise’. Tere may be several registers at work simultaneously in WBY’s use of the word. While the metaphor of love as a kind of warfare is of classical origin, and has a vigorous life in renaissance poetry, the making of peace in such a context is generally equated with the romantically successful outcome of a lover’s campaign. For WBY, the attainment of ‘peace’ might also sound out another set of fgurative possibilities, more closely linked with MG’s intermittent but enthusiastic involvements with anti-British hostilities, whether in Ireland or South Africa, over the years: to these, at least for the moment, certain kinds of conclusion had been brought. But MG had given WBY her own interpretations of the state of ‘peace’ too. Two of these in particular are of relevance. Te frst came at a time of intense crisis in the relationship between MG and WBY, when MG had told the poet that she was marrying John MacBride and, into the bargain, that she had become a Roman Catholic. With WBY in a state of nervous collapse, she wrote to him from Paris in Feb. 1903 that ‘I did not myself quite understand things but I know that I am fulflling a destiny, and but for the sorrow I have in giving pain, I am at peace with myself ’ (G-YL, 166). Tat peace did not last, and soon turned to total war with MacBride in the breakdown of MG’s marriage. Somehow, MG managed

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to repair relations with WBY; and by the autumn of 1908 they seem to have become lovers, albeit of a highly unconventional kind. In her letter to the poet just afer he had lef Paris (and, in all likelihood, her bed) in Dec. 1908, MG ofered a second declaration of peace (G-YL, 258): I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you and dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed and am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too. I know how hard and rare a thing it is for a man to hold spiritual love when the bodily desire is gone and I have not made these prayers without a terrible struggle, a struggle that shook my life, though I do not speak much of it and generally manage to laugh. Tat struggle is over and I have found peace. Te poem ‘Peace’ approaches the question of earthly or bodily desire with some caution; it would probably be wrong to assert outright that the attitude to the Timetouched ‘form’ of the beloved is one that bids farewell to desire. Nevertheless, MG’s ‘peace’ in the 1908 letter is relevant to how WBY hears the word; and in that letter, she has no sooner mentioned the achieved, non-sexual ‘peace’ than she tells the poet how ‘I think today I could let you marry another without losing it’. To return to the classical love-as-war motif, it may seem to WBY that MG’s ‘peace’ is just love’s war by other means. Critical reception. Te poem has never received much in the way of critical attention. Although it was picked out and quoted in full in a review of GH10 for Te Dublin Review (1/3 (Mar. 1911)) as one of the ‘little poems’ that ‘stay in the memory’, and which ‘takes its place at once with the poems that live in our mind’, the poem was not mentioned by contemporary writers on WBY. Nor has it been conspicuous in modern criticism: R. Ellmann saw the poem as one of a number of pieces from this period that engage in ‘reanimation of myth’, noting that the poet here ‘is careful to make the myth full-bodied, as in his choice of words where he laments his beloved’s growing old [lines 1–3]: the word ‘wage’ calls attention to a feature of Homeric culture which a poet like Tennyson would have euphemized’ (Identity, 112: see also note to 2–3). More recently, R. Greaves takes the poem more mildly, noting how ‘the poet sees his muse, humanized by the efect of time, moving with him out of the formless Dionysian wildness into the more human expression of Apollonian artistic form’ (Greaves, 79). J. Ramazani notes, less sanguinely, how ‘by the poem’s end, ‘Time had touched her form’, in contrast to the less mutable form of the lyric itself ’ (‘Yeats’s Ars Poetica in Te Green Helmet and Other Poems’, YA 16, 65). Form. In terms of its verse structure, this is a somewhat atypical lyric for WBY. Te eleven catalectic trochaic tetrameters (not a rhythmic structure much used by the poet hitherto) are rhymed abbaaccadda, but the a rhyme includes two repetitions of its frst rhyme-word, ‘form’; this is also the last rhyming word of the poem. H. Vendler detects in the slight asymmetry of this rhyme-scheme the conscious efect of a ‘missing’ line in the poem (i.e. presumably an extra a rhymed line between 8 and 9), and writes that ‘a missing line ‘exists’ in order to show that Time has begun to destroy the most beautiful

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of living forms’ (Vendler, 96). Whether or not this is convincing, it is certainly true that WBY here makes his poetic form an active agent in the consideration of the word ‘form’ itself. ‘Form’ is the rhyme word that will not go away, and to which the mechanism of the verse keeps returning until the fnal circling-back to the point of departure – that Time could, indeed, somehow ‘touch’ the loved one’s ‘form’. Te two other a-rhyming words ofer between them the two poles of WBY’s sense of the beloved: ‘storm’ and ‘charm’, which complement and match the paradoxical ‘strength’ and ‘sweetness’ of line 9. Te form of the poem and the form of the beloved may both be ‘touched’ by change in their ways: but the poetic form comes back to where it began – it has absorbed change (both ‘storm’ and ‘charm’), but not in the end been ‘touched’ by them. In this, it contrasts markedly with the physical ‘form’ of the beloved; and it is in this contrast that a signifcant aspect of the poem’s emotional power resides. Textual history. Te poem, headed ‘May Colleville, Calvados’, is entered in ink hol., with pencil revisions, in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College) fol. 73v. (MS1): this is transcribed in Mem., 245, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 168–169. A hol. fair copy in ink, on a single sheet of paper which is identifed by Ezra Pound at the foot as ‘MSS of W.B. Yeats E.P.’, was sold at Sotheby’s (New York), 11 Dec. 2008 (MS2). Te poem was frst printed in GH10, next in GH12, the Cuala Selection of the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913), in R16 and then all subsequent collected edns. Copy-text: P49.

5

Ah, that Time could touch a form That could show what Homer’s age Bred to be a hero’s wage. ‘Were not all her life but storm, Would not painters paint a form Of such noble lines,’ I said,

Title.] No title MS1, MS2. In GH10, this is the seventh poem in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and his Wife Pernella’ (for note on this sequence-title, see notes to ‘His Dream’). 1. could] [should del.] could MS1. 2–3.] If these lines remember the recent poem ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ and its ‘heroic dream’, they do so by presenting a strongly contrasting image of Homeric femininity: instead of Helen of Troy, the fgure here is that of a beautiful woman as a spoil of war (e.g. Briseis in the Iliad). Insofar as MG is the intended parallel here, there is an understanding that

she has become touchable by more than Time alone. Cp. WBY’s later poem ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ (1918), 14–17: ‘But bear in mind your lover’s wage | Is what your looking-glass can show, | And that he will turn green with rage | At all that is not pictured there’. As one critic has commented, here ‘Te man’s wage is the woman’s show’ (Cullingford, 87). 3.] [Gave del.] [Fashioned for the del.] ^Bred to be [some del.]^ hero’s wage MS1. 4. life] [youth del.] life MS1. 5. Would not painters] [Painters could but del.] ^Would not painters^ MS1.

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‘Such a delicate high head, All that sternness amid charm, All that sweetness amid strength?’ Ah, but peace that comes at length, Came when Time had touched her form.

8–9.] Te chiastically arranged ‘sternness’ [. . .] ‘charm [. . .] ‘sweetness’ [. . .] ‘strength’ here gives emphasis to the paradoxical in the character of the woman who is the poem’s subject. While this may refect ‘the struggle of the imagination to capture the legendary beauty of the young Maud Gonne’ (Grene, 41), it can also be read as an assertion of the poetic imagination’s ability to create paradox out of confusion. 9.] [Tat they’d change us to like strength del.] Till they[’d changed del.] ^had roused^us to [like del.] ^that^ strength? MS1; And so roused to this ^like^ strength MS1 (vertically at right in pencil); Till they’d roused us to that strength? MS2. 9.] Te riddle of Samson, in Judges 14.14, is ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of

the strong came forth sweetness’ [the solution is a lion]. While WBY would probably have come across this, he might also have encountered the verse when he sat down at the breakfast table: Abram Lyle & Son’s Golden Syrup frst employed the image of a dead lion and a swarm of bees with the tagline ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’ in 1883. 10–11.] MS1 ink hol. version of these lines is heavily del., and reads: Ah that peace should come at length | But when ^Now that ^ Time has touched ^changed^ that form. Underneath, in pencil, WBY revises to: Ah but peace that came ^comes^ at length | Came when time had touched [that del] her form.

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AGAINST UNWORTHY PRAISE Date of composition. WBY heads the version of this poem in his Journal with the date ‘May 11’ [1910]. It is likely that this poem was being composed at Colleville in Normandy at the same time as ‘Peace’ (see headnotes on Date of composition and Circumstances of composition for ‘Peace’), in early May. Some of WBY’s revisions to the text in his Journal may well come from a little later, though the text was stable by mid-Jun. (see MS2 in Textual history). Relation to ‘Peace’. Tis poem has numerous points of contact with the poem ‘Peace’, also written at Colleville, and completed probably just a little earlier. Te most obvious of these is the word ‘peace’ itself (see headnotes to ‘Peace’, MG, WBY and ‘peace’): WBY in ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ carries the word over, now making it crucial to both the frst and the last lines of his poem. Another word shared between the two poems is ‘strength’ (‘Peace’, 9: ‘All that sweetness amid strength?’, ‘Against Unworthy Praise’, 6: ‘So did she your strength renew’), while the lion images in this poem are perhaps prefgured just beneath the surface of ‘Peace’ (see note to ‘Peace’, line 9). In printed collections, the two poems were generally kept proximate to one another by WBY: in GH10, a page is turned to move from ‘Peace’ to ‘Against Unworthy Praise’, as it is also in the (otherwise diferently confgured) GH12; in R16, the two poems faced each other across opened pages. (However, the poem is included on its own, without ‘Peace’, in the 1913 Tauchnitz Selection, and there are four other poems separating it from ‘Peace’ in the Cuala Selection from the Love Poetry of the same year.) Te efect of placing poems emphatically together whilst using each poem for a diferent purpose or diferent angle on the subject was to become a mainstay of WBY’s volume-arranging technique in the 1920s and 1930s; but this may be its frst distinct instance in his oeuvre. Te main contrast between the two poems is one of mood. ‘Peace’ speaks with a measured detachment; deeply appreciative of the beloved as it is, it is not troubled by the desires or the frustrations of a love poem. ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ does not occupy the same emotional position of resignation or detachment, and in this case the frst-person voice has to rebuke its own ‘heart’, as though that emotional organ had not been pacifed, but rather had been stirred up, by the words of ‘Peace’. Te contrasting tempers of the poems are also marked: ‘Peace’ is in calm, slightly stif trochaic tetrameters; ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ returns to the iambic trimeters of ‘A Woman Homer Sung’, which now accommodate a voice that can sound irritably impatient with itself (e.g. 11: ‘What, still you would have their praise!’), and seems unable to shake of the afronts ofered by ‘dolt and knave’ (17 and 2). It may be that the efect of the two poems taken together is one of DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-58

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increased distance, rather than intimacy, between the beloved ‘singing upon her road’ (19) – there is a rhythmic spring in the step of this very line – and the speaker who is lef arguing with his heart. Critical reception and interpretation. Te Nation (31 Dec. 1910), though on the whole disappointed by the poems of GH10 (‘too ofen the thought is super-subtle, and hardly to be apprehended’), quoted lines 5–10: “A dream that a lion had dreamed’ – that is surely an excellent phrase; and underneath all these strange and remarkable songs [in the ‘Raymond Lully to his Wife Pernella’ sequence] lies the suggestion of a fercely proud, lonely spirit trying to tell its dreams of the mystery of love’: unfortunately, ‘rather too ofen the song is indeed ‘A secret between you two’; it is difcult to tell exactly what the singer would be at’. A review of the Cuala Love Poetry selection in Te Academy for 30 Aug. 1913 quoted the poem in full to demonstrate the distance travelled by WBY as a love poet since ‘Te Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart’ (1892): ‘In that early poem, he longs to re-create the world,’ while in ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ ‘it is no longer his dreams of her image: he sings of the woman herself ’. Padraic Colum in Te Dial (Oct. 1921) listed this among other poems by WBY as work that ‘gives the impression of something dimensional – a poem that one might handle like a blade’. Te startling perceptiveness of Colum’s simile was not matched by much comparable interest in the poem in the earlier decades of WBY criticism, and the poem (like ‘Peace’) has continued to be somewhat neglected. However, some critics have directed attention to the poem’s levels of conficted intensity. Seeing here ‘Yeats’s brooding contemplation of propinquity and conjunction’, B. Hardy ofers some acute observations (Te Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (1977), 75): ‘In ‘the proud and the proud’ the epithets lie close to each other, prides joined by love or likeness’, and continuing, ‘Te image of the lion will not quite do for the woman, on its own, nor directly for the poet, though perhaps for his inspiration, ‘A dream that a lion had dreamed’’. M.L. Rosenthal sees a connection with ‘A Woman Homer Sung’, though this poem ‘both completes and emphatically reorients the movement of reconciliation’, since ‘any thought of reproaching the beloved or of mourning unfulflled passion is lef far behind’, and instead it dwells ‘on the subtle, wringing struggle of a lifetime reported in ‘A Woman Homer Sung’: the poet’s struggle to have his writing mirror ‘what thing her body was’’ (Running to Paradise: Yeats’s Poetic Art (1994), 93). Te ways in which the poem processes the relationship between MG and WBY have been considered by some critics. R. Foster suggests that the poem ‘might be read in the light of the consummation of [WBY’s and MG’s] afair in 1908’ (Foster 1, 434), but more subtle remarks on this include E. Longley’s aside that the poem ‘may take sly comfort from the current unpopularity of Maud Gonne, selfstyled ‘voice [and] soul of the crowd [G-YL, 166]’’ (‘Introductory Remarks’, YA 12, 13), while D. Toomey sees ‘a buried, perhaps unconscious, confession of complicity with the knaves and dolts [. . .] who have misjudged or exploited Maud Gonne’s idealism’, claiming that this ‘lurks in the self of ‘self-same’’ (Toomey, 18). J. Ramazani writes that the poem ‘persists in its description of the beloved as a kind of mirror image for itself as ‘text’ and ‘labyrinth’, paralleling [. . .] Maud Gonne’s political dream with his aesthetic dream – both of them lofy, inscrutable to the crowd, ultimately private for all their public show’ (‘Yeats’s Ars Poetica in Te Green Helmet and Other Poems’, YA 16, 65).

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Textual history. WBY entered this poem in his Journal, immediately afer the copy there of ‘Peace’ (MS1): Burns Collection, Boston College, fol. 74r., transcribed in Mem., 246 and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 170–171. A second hol. version was inscribed by WBY on a front endpaper of Ezra Pound’s copy of P08 and dated by WBY ‘June 18, 1910’: this is in the Ezra Pound collection, Schloss Brunnenburg (MS2). Te poem was frst published in GH10, then G12; it appeared in the 1913 Tauchnitz Selection and the Cuala Selection from the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913), then in R16 and all subsequent collected edns. Copy-text: P49.

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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What’s not for their applause, Being for a woman’s sake. Enough if the work has seemed, So did she your strength renew,

Title.] No title, MS1, MS2. In GH10, this is the eighth and fnal poem in the sequence ‘Raymond Lully and His Wife Pernella’ (for note on this sequence-title, see notes to ‘His Dream’). 1. O heart,] Oh, heart, GH10. 2. knave nor dolt] WBY’s register here is an archaic one, probably intended to be suggestive of the early theatre stage; it is suggestive also of WBY’s treatment of the business of his own stage in ‘Te Fascination of What’s Difcult’ (1909), 10: ‘the day’s war with every knave and dolt’. Te positioning of ‘Against Unworthy Praise’ in GH10 means that the eye has only to travel across to the facing page to encounter ‘knave and dolt’ again in that poem, the frst of the book’s ‘Momentary Toughts’ section. Although W. Chapman claims ‘knave nor dolt’ as ‘palpably Jonsonian’ (Chapman, 151), these words are not Jonson’s (of the two titles of Epigrams cited by Chapman, Epigram 61 may at frst appear relevant (‘To Fool, or Knave’) and Epigram 30 (‘On old Colt’) seems to be instanced because ‘colt’ is a rhyme-word in

‘Te Fascination of What’s Difcult’: but the texts of neither poem have any verbal connection with WBY’s phrase.) Jonson’s ‘Fool, or Knave’ is further from WBY’s efect than Shakespeare, All’s Well Tat Ends Well, IV v 24–35 (in comic dialogue between Lafew and the Fool): Lafew. Whether dost thou profess thyself, a knave or a fool? Fool. A fool, sir, at a woman’s service, and a knave at a man’s. Lafew. Your distinction? Fool.  I would cozen the man of his wife and do his service. Lafew. So you were a knave at his service indeed. Fool. And I would give his wife my bauble, sir, to do her service. Lafew.  I will subscribe for thee, thou art both knave and fool. Deliberate allusion on WBY’s part – whether to Shakespeare or Jonson – is unlikely. 4. Being] [But del.] Being MS1. 5. if] of MS2.

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A dream that a lion had dreamed Till the wilderness cried aloud, A secret between you two, Between the proud and the proud.

15

What, still you would have their praise! But here’s a haughtier text, The labyrinth of her days That her own strangeness perplexed; And how what her dreaming gave

7.] Te lion here (and in 20) is likely to carry symbolic meaning, though this is perhaps of more a private than an occult or mystical nature. WBY knew of symbolic lions in Blake, and was aware also of esoteric meanings for the lion, such as the alchemical ‘Green Lion’ in GD ritual. Such associations do not seem appropriate to this poem though, and it may be more useful to compare a dream which MG reported to WBY twelve years earlier, when she wrote that ‘I had a strange dream the frst night of my return to France’, and explained that ‘It seemed as if I was awakened by a loud deafening cry, ‘Te Lion of the West is rising’, ‘Te Lion is awake’, I do not know what it means’ (G-YL, 96). If the lion had one dominant meaning as a public symbol in these years, that was connected to the power of the British Empire; but this seems to be useful neither for MG’s dream of 1898, nor for WBY’s imagery of 1910. Some imperial association seems to have been in play for AG who in an article for Te Spectator of 11 Nov. 1899 gave an account of a native of Slieve Echtge who prophesied in ballad form about ‘When then Lion shall lose his strength | [. . .] Te Harp shall sound sweet at length’ – a prophecy that ended up in the play Te Unicorn from the Stars (1908) (CW 2, 227). Here, the context was explicitly that of the Boer War, so it seems clear that the Lion was to be understood as the British Empire. MG’s dream of 1898 perhaps suggests an alternative imperial power on the rise to England’s west (the USA perhaps, attaching itself to Ireland), but by 1910 this can hardly

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have been at the front (or even the back) of WBY’s mind. Given the degree to which this poem is indebted to ‘Peace’, and the likelihood that the two poems were being composed at the same time, it is possible that the lion symbol here comes from line 9, ‘All that sweetness amid strength’, and its relation to the riddle of Samson in Judges, where the solution is ‘a lion’ (see note). 10. the proud and the proud] the proud and ^the^ proud MS1. 10^11.] No stanza break GH10 (New York edn., 1911), CP33. 11.] [If you’d still have del.] their praise? MS1. In the right margin, WBY adds ‘What still you would’ (to produce the line ‘What still you would have their praise?’). What, still] What, still, GH10. 12.] [Ten choose del.]^But here’s^ a haughtier text MS1. 13. labyrinth] On this word, see Toomey, 19: ‘Labyrinth’ [. . .] does not seem to represent either such a confusion, or an impasse in personal life. It is, on one level, a reifcation of the essential part of Maud Gonne: not her beauty, but her strangeness. Were it not for Yeats’s continuing use of this image, with increasing codifcation, one could limit its use [here] to an expression of the maze-like secrecy and complexity of Maud Gonne’s life, its over-plottedness. 14. Tat] [By del] ^Tat^ MS1. perplexed;] perplexed. GH10. 15. How all ^that^ her dreaming gave MS1; (And how what her dreaming gave) right margin, MS1.

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Earned slander, ingratitude, From self-same dolt and knave; Aye, and worse wrong than these. Yet she, singing upon her road, Half lion, half child, is at peace.

16. slander, ingratitude] slander ^and^ ingratitude MS1; slander ingratitude GH10. 18. and worse] and ^a^ worse MS1. 19. upon] [upon del.] ^on^ MS1. 20. Half lion, half child] It would be wrong to take this as being a visual image: identifying ‘strange, scholastic imagery’ of a ‘sphinx-like beloved’ (Chapman, 155) results in something merely strange, not to be salvaged by any amount of scholasticism, and not to the point of the poem. Rather, the two aspects of the beloved are being given their respective half-weights: that of the ‘lion’ whose defance of opinion ranks her among ‘the proud’, and that of the ‘child’, who frets for public approval, and ‘still [.  .  .] would have their praise’. Tis is the frst point in WBY’s poetry where he mentions the (half) child he perceives in MG, but it is not the last: in ‘His Phoenix’ (1915), the beloved (‘my beauty’)

possesses ‘the simplicity of a child | And that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun’ (28–29), and in ‘A Bronze Head’ (1938) ‘I had grown wild | And wandered murmuring everywhere, ‘My child, my child!’’ (20–21). Te rhyme of ‘child’ with ‘wild’ (made in both of these later poems) is germane to the beloved’s identifcation here with a ‘half lion’. In a Journal entry of 1909, cited by the editors of G-YL, WBY records how MG ‘seems to love more than of old’, but ‘the old dread of physical love has awakened in her’, and ‘Tis dread has probably spoiled all her life’: ‘Of old she was a phoenix and I feared her, but now she is my child more than my sweetheart’ (G-YL 35). at peace] Tis recapitulation with variation of the poem’s opening line is not without rueful irony. See headnotes to ‘Peace’, MG, WBY and ‘peace’.

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THESE ARE THE CLOUDS Date of composition. Te poem was probably written in May 1910, though it is possible that it was not composed before Aug. Te version in WBY’s Journal (see Textual history) was probably entered there in Aug. 1910, but it is the third in a series of poems that WBY might well have been bringing into shape with an eye to preparing copy for GH10: the poet was already promising ECY copy for the Cuala book at the beginning of Jul. 1910 (see CL 5, 837), and the press completed work on 30 Sept. (GH10 was publ. 23 Nov.), so early Aug. seems a likely time for WBY to be fnalizing the texts of his poems. If the poem was, then, fnished by WBY in Aug., there is still evidence that most of the composition had taken place in May: it is known that WBY was writing lyric poetry at Colleville in Normandy then, and a date of ‘May, 1910’ is assigned to the poem in the carbon TS NLI 30166, a list of poems with dates prepared for R. Ellmann by GY (and used by him for Identity). It may be that, in critical terms, there is some need to decide whether the poem was composed in MG’s company in France (May) or as AG’s guest at Coole (Aug.); but frm evidence to resolve this is lacking. Speculatively, it may be suggested that had WBY worked on the poem at Coole, there would be a good chance of AG’s having preserved some hol. fair copy or draf, or a TS; but instead, what entered the Coole archive was an inscription of the poem by WBY in AG’s copy of CWVP08 vol. 1. If the inscription was made in Aug. 1910 (as seems possible), the poem was already by then in very nearly its fnished state, substantial composition having taken place elsewhere, and probably in May. Textual history. A draf of the poem is in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College), fol. 84v., which has revisions to some lines (MS1). Another fair copy was entered by WBY in CWVP08 vol. 1 in AG’s collection at Coole; this is now in the Berg Collection, NYPL (MS2). Te poem was frst published in GH10, then in GH12, the Tauchnitz 1913 Selection, and in R16. It was subsequently included in all collected edns. by WBY. Reception and critical interpretation. ‘Mr Yeats becomes more aristocratic in his attitude’, announced Te Irish Review in its review of GH10 (1/2, Apr. 1911), citing this poem in its summary of the book’s more general tendency: It is not insignifcant that symbols out of the aristocratic philosophy which Nietzsche has given to Europe constantly come into these poems – the eagle, the lion, the child. Mr. Yeats has become aristocratic, not merely in his intellectual attitude, but in his political convictions [. . .] Tis aristocratic bias goes with something that has come into the poet’s spirit – the consciousness of haughty isolation. Tis consciousness is [. . .] in ‘Tese are the Clouds’ [quotes 1–6]. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-59

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Tis early perceptiveness was not quite followed up or matched in later years, and the poem was sometimes misread (despite its having been placed in the ‘Momentary Toughts’ section of GH10) as a love-poem, something that almost happened in Te Saturday Review 11 Nov. 1916 (‘Here is a man who has felt and sufered and recaptures for us the sheer power and nobleness of love, as well as its apparent freakishness’), before accounting for the poem with ‘Mr. Yeats has, at his best, the authentic style of the poet; witness this fne beginning on the apparent failure of a friend’ [quotes 1–6]. Te mistake was made wholeheartedly by a reviewer in Te New York Times (14 Aug. 1921), for whom this was a love poem that ‘must have been written for one who rose far above the companion’. Te more accurate insights of Te Irish Review were to be seconded by another Irish writer, when Louis MacNeice quoted the same frst six lines of the poem as an example of how WBY ‘portrays the decline of Irish nationalism’ (MacNeice, 95). Te Nietzschean elements too have been noticed in more modern criticism, and O. Bohlmann writes of ‘these gently aristocratic sentiments maligning the average man’ in the poem (Yeats and Nietzsche (1982), 8). Te most alert modern reading of the poem, which takes full account of the fact that this is a piece addressed to AG, is that of J. Kelly, ‘Te Fifh Bell: Race and Class in Yeats’s Political Tought’, O. Komesu and M. Sekine (eds.), Irish Writers and Politics (1990), 153–154: Tat history belongs to the Many, that the days of the Few are numbered, is registered in the resigned conditional and future perfect tenses, as Yeats looks forward to what time must soon bring [quotes 3–6] [. . .] In this poem it seems that even the mean roofrees will hardly be the sturdier for Coole’s fall. Te second half of the poem snatches a moral and creative victory from the defeat that history and its agents, the weak, have inficted. Tere is undoubtedly an elegiac element in play here (as there had been earlier in e.g. ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’), which is especially difcult to handle insofar as it is attempting to make an elegy for things that have not as yet actually passed away. As N. Grene puts it, ‘[AG’s] death, the destruction of Coole Park, are still only potential – ‘if your great race were run’ – but the deictic force of the repeated ‘these’ brings into present time the as-yet hypothetical future’; and this exerts force on the poem’s diction and syntax: “Tese’ metaphoric clouds of present-day apocalypse blot out ‘that . . . was lifed high”, and ‘Te opposition of ‘these’ with the re-doubled ‘that’ works extra-grammatically to enforce the scale of the greatness of the past that is (about to be) lost’ (Grene, 42). More broadly, this poem’s cultural, or loosely political, bearings cannot be dissociated from its stylistic self-presentation. Formally, it is a compact (if unusual) twelve-line unit, where the same rhyme-sounds are run through three abab quatrains, and where the frst two lines are repeated exactly by the fnal two. Te diction is important for this poem’s meaning, but it is further than usual from natural or conversational diction, and features deliberately archaic elements. In critical terms, it is necessary to understand that a poem of this kind is not ofering itself as fundamentally contemporary either in idiom or in thought, but as designedly redolent of another poetic (and therefore perhaps another mental) time.

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Renaissance elements. In 1969, W.M. Carpenter ofered a reading of the poem which, noting how ‘Te initial image of disease quickly leads to an image of destruction and disharmony in society at the hands of the ‘weak’’, went on to say that ‘Yeats needed to establish the connection between disease in an individual and disease in the state, and for such a parallel the natural models are to be found in Shakespeare’ (‘‘Te Green Helmet’ Poems and Yeats’s Myth of the Renaissance’, Modern Philology 67/1 (Aug. 1969), 56–57): Yeats seems to be quite consciously selecting his images of order and chaos from those that Shakespeare [in Troilus and Cressida] gave Ulysses. [. . .] To make Lady Gregory’s illness a symbol of the decay of a unifed society, then, Yeats turned to the Renaissance and revived its tradition of ‘degree’ and its clear analogies among man, society, and the cosmic order. Tis poem so clearly uses the Renaissance tradition that it may be said to work largely through allusion, taking its strength from the reader’s recognition of the Renaissance world order which is the basis of the poem. Te presence of Troilus and Cressida has been noticed by later critics too, and clearly WBY is making use of the (well-known) speech of Ulysses in Act One, and of two passages in particular. First, I iii 89–97: The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Ofce, and custom, in all line of order. And therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye Corrects the infuence of evil planets, And posts, like the commandment of a king, Sans check, to good and bad. And second, from the same scene, 105–114: O, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder of all high designs, The enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogeneity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels, But by degree stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows.

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Clearly, WBY knew and was considering these lines. Yet it may be worth noting that WBY’s own writings have nothing to say about this particular play, even though it gains a feeting mention in his ‘Irish National Literature’ essay for Te Bookman in 1895, where ‘Shakespeare [remained] an Englishman when he told of Coriolanus or of Cressida’ (CW 9, 264): the play was not included in any performance by A.C. Benson’s company in the annual Festival at Stratford on Avon, which had been running since 1886, nor was it commonly performed in the contemporary theatre. It is not so clear whether WBY intended his own version (especially that in lines 5–6) to carry a specifc allusive force. If he did, then it would be necessary to speculate on how far he understood Shakespeare’s lines dramatically, since Ulysses on stage is not engaging in disinterested propagation of ideas, but is eloquently using certain prestigious ideas in order to gain his own ends. Tis cannot now be known, but it is true that WBY was capable of interpreting Shakespeare against the contemporary critical grain. Te imagery of the sun and clouds is of course an aspect of WBY’s poem for which a good many analogues might be found in renaissance verse, e.g. in Ben Jonson’s Te Poetaster V i 44–53: Phoebus himself shall kneel at Caesar’s shrine, And deck it with bay garlands dew’d with wine, To quit the worship Caesar does to him: Where other princes, hoisted to their thrones By Fortune’s passionate and disorder’d power, Sit in their height, like clouds before the sun, Hindering his comforts; and, by their excess Of cold in virtue, and cross heat in vice, Thunder and tempest on those learned heads, Whom Caesar with such honour doth advance. D. Harris, who proposed this passage as an infuence on the poem, also went further than most critics in claiming that here ‘Lady Gregory is a symbol of universal order, a Renaissance monarch aureoled in the sun’s sacramental light’ (Harris, 53). In fact, this suggests instead a Shakespearean parallel which may well be an active infuence on Yeats’s poem – the play Richard II, and specifcally III iii 64–69: See, see, King Richard doth himself appear As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fery portal of the east When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory and to stain the track Of his bright passage to the occident. In the view of J. Allison, for whom ‘In the disillusioned bitterness of the frst decade of the twentieth century the crepuscular atmospherics of the Celtic Twilight turn [. . .] into a darkened sunset of greatness’, these lines may have ‘provided Yeats with a series

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of powerful poetic images of the decline of aristocracy which he borrowed to dignify his own sense of cultural loss’, and ‘Te fact that Richard’s crown was usurped does not confict with the mood of Yeats’s poems, which express a feeling that landed power is defeated by an adversarial democracy’ (‘W.B. Yeats and Shakespearean Character’, in M. Burnett and R. Wray (eds.), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (1997), 128). In his essay ‘At Stratford on Avon’ (frst publ. 1901), WBY wrote at length about the character of Richard in the play, at the expense of contemporary admirers of the more British/Imperial fgure of Henry V (including Dowden). WBY claimed scornfully – and already from something of an ‘aristocratic’ point of vantage – that ‘To suppose that Shakespeare preferred the men who deposed his King is to suppose that Shakespeare judged men with the eyes of a Municipal councillor weighing the merits of a Town Clerk’. On Richard, he displayed a number of attitudes that were to take solid form in the poem later (CW 4, 79–80): He saw indeed, as I think, in Richard II the defeat that awaits all, whether they be Artist or Saint, who fnd themselves where men ask of them a rough energy and have nothing to give but some contemplative virtue, whether lyrical phantasy, or sweetness of temper, or dreamy dignity, or love of God, or love of His creatures. [. . .] Te courtly and saintly ideals of the Middle Ages were fading, and the practical ideals of the modern age had begun to threaten the unuseful dome of the sky; Merry England was fading, and yet it was not so faded that the poets could not watch the procession of the world with that untroubled sympathy for men as they are, as apart from all they do and seem, which is the substance of tragic irony. It does not follow from this that the poem sees AG as a king – or projects WBY as one, for that matter – but both AG and the elegizing poet are brought closer to the cultural ‘fading’ for which Shakespeare’s lines provide the ftting series of images; and it is implied that they are able together to understand their artistic place in this general sunset. Artistic and political aristocracies blur in the process, and this may well be part of WBY’s overall design. Copy-text: P49. These are the clouds about the fallen sun, The majesty that shuts his burning eye:

Title.] No title MS1, MS2. 1. fallen] [setting del.] fallen MS1. fallen sun] Cp. A. Tennyson, ‘To J.S.’ (1832), 50–51: ‘as mournful light | Tat broods above

the fallen sun’, and his verse-play Te Foresters, I iii 22–23: ‘Te long bright day is done, | And darkness rises from the fallen sun’. 2. majesty] Majesty MS2.

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The weak lay hand on what the strong has done, Till that be tumbled that was lifted high And discord follow upon unison, And all things at one common level lie. And therefore, friend, if your great race were run And these things came, so much the more thereby Have you made greatness your companion, Although it be for children that you sigh: These are the clouds about the fallen sun, The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

burning eye] Cp. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II iii 5: ‘Now ere the sun advance his burning eye’. 3. lay] lays MS1. 4.] Till all be [trampled del.]^ tumbled^ that was [lifed del.]^lifed^ ^[builded del.]^ high, MS1; Till he be tumbled that was lifed high MS2. 5–6.] On the possible infuence here of Ulysses’ speech in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, see Renaisssance elements above. 5. follow] [follows del.]^follow (or follows)^ MS1. 6. one common level] Perhaps cp. J.S. Blackie, Messis Vitae (1886), ‘Pessimism’, 103–104: ‘Where will greatness be, when all things | On one common level stand?’ one] a MS1. 7. if your great race were run] Te phrase ‘till my race be run’ [or variants on this] was a fourishing cliché in verse of the nineteenth century and earlier: it is sometimes shocked into life by an unexpected adjective, as e.g. A. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), IX, 18: ‘Till all my widowed race be run’. WBY’s ‘great’ possesses little in the way of galvanic force, but perhaps cp. E. Arnold, With Sa’idi In the Garden: Or the Book of Love (1888), 2753– 2755 (which is in addition close to WBY’s imagery in this poem): ‘but the Sun | Puts out our gleam: till his great race is run | Our

feeble beams are nowhere manifest; | Te darkness kindles them, when night’s begun’. For the fgure itself, ultimately, cp. 2 Timothy 4.7: ‘I have fought a good fght, I have fnished my course, I have kept the faith’. 10.] Te ‘sigh’ here is not one that wishes for children, but a sigh for those ‘children’ towards whom the subject feels responsibility. In AG’s case, it is both for her son Robert and her infant grandson Richard: her labours to preserve the ‘greatness’ of the Coole estate may be the cause of the sighing, if only in a literal sense. See J. Kelly (Reception and critical interpretation, above): Te line is ambiguous. If we did not know from biographical sources that Lady Gregory was well past the menopause by the time it was written, we might be forgiven for supposing that she was a barren woman longing to bear a child. What Yeats means, of course, is that she sighs on behalf of her child and grandchildren because they must live in a world where ‘all things at once common level lie’, and perhaps themselves participate in that commonness. Although] Although ^[And though del.]^ MS1. 11. fallen] [setting del.] fallen MS1.

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THE MASK Date of composition. Composition of this poem took place substantially in Aug. 1910, but there are signifcant complications in the dating of its conception. Te idea for the poem, and several of its verbal motifs, pre-date its execution by up to two years. WBY’s compositional work on his play Te Player Queen was both extensive and protracted, and it is not possible to determine exactly when many of the MS and TS elements were composed. Some early drafs may be from 1907, but WBY was working seriously on his play in the summer of 1908, and did so regularly thereafer. An outline of the poem’s content had been present in WBY’s plans for Te Player Queen for a long time, and it was to be one of ‘a certain number of lyrics put into the mouth of one of the characters’ as early as 17 Jul. 1908 (CL 5, 258). A song for the Queen did not begin to take clear shape until at least 1909, and it was at Coole in the frst half of Aug. 1910 that the lyric was put into something close to its fnal form: this process was complete by 17 Aug. Mabel Dickinson and Te Player Queen. A close friend of WBY’s, and at this point his lover, was Mabel Dickinson, a Dubliner who practised physiotherapy successfully, and who had spent time with the poet both in Ireland and (in 1909) in London. She is one of the least-known signifcant women in the poet’s life; WBY’s letters to Dickinson survive, but he obeyed her wishes that her letters to him should be destroyed. Writing to Dickinson from Coole on 17 Aug. 1910, WBY included a fair copy of this poem, introducing it with the information that ‘I am working every day at my play and I have fnished that little lyric you gave me the idea of a couple of years ago’ (CL 5, 871). WBY had met and begun his relationship with Dickinson in Mar. 1908; in the summer of 1908, whilst engaged in selecting portraits for the frontispiece positions in volumes of his CWVP08, WBY wrote to her about how ‘Te ancient people were always actors and they could be any portrait they pleased (seem it and then become it) – and that is the heroic life’, ‘We lose all in the pursuit of ourselves – a thing that does not exist’ (CL 5, 283). Later that month, on 23 Aug., WBY told Dickinson about his work on Te Player Queen, claiming to be ‘taking refuge every morning in the only modern play I have ever written – wild gay and extravagant, full of the sound of trumpets’ (CL 5, 292). Te relevance of Dickinson to the play was a theme in a letter that WBY, elated with his success at fnishing a draf, wrote to her a week later (CL 5, 299): If you are in Dublin do please ask me to tea – I am for the moment in tolerable spirits having yesterday fnished the prose version of Te Player Queen. DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-60

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Tomorrow I shall begin to write it all in verse. You will like it, indeed I can show one scene which has been, I think, suggested by certain traits of character in yourself. You would probably not recognize them, for the mirror that refects is full of wild light, and the frame fantastic. In the prose draf referred to by WBY (probably that designated Draf 8 in Bradford PQ), an exchange, where the poem would later be placed, is likely to be related to the poet’s romantic involvement with Dickinson, seen in relation to mutual role-playing (NLI 8764, 1(b), repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 192–193; Bradford PQ Draf 8, transcribed 86): 1 Player Take of your mask of gold with the eyes of emerald that I may see what your face is. Player queen rises up in the vat and sings: I will not take of my mask of gold with emerald eyes for it is this that makes you tremble and desire. Player Take it of that I may know if you’re a friend or an enemy. Afer this, the germ of the song grew in successive drafs (see Textual history) up to the completion of the material as a lyric in Aug. 1910. Te fundamental idea of the lines, present in 1908, evidently relates in certain ways to the relationship between WBY and Dickinson. Inevitably, any detailed interpretation in these terms is essentially speculation; and WBY’s general failure to mention Dickinson in correspondence with his personal and artistic circles, as well as the fact that Dickinson’s own letters to the poet were destroyed, means that there is little actual material upon which to base speculation. What seems uncontentious is that the lyric concerns sexual love, and the relation between this and the assumption of roles by the lovers; furthermore, these roles are not to be relinquished without risk of unwelcome discovery of some kind or other: from the start, the fear that removal of the mask may disclose enmity rather than friendship is present in WBY’s thoughts. Plainly, Dickinson and WBY were not at odds, still less enemies, during their relationship; at the same time, the relationship depended upon the maintenance of particular kinds of social separation. If Dickinson was not quite a secret in WBY’s life, she was certainly not well-known in it: the contrast with MG – whose presence (and absence) in the poet’s love-life was not so much an open secret as a feature of his work’s emotional branding – is striking. R. Foster’s account of Dickinson treats her as someone who had moved into ‘the position of ‘visiting wife’’ (this phrase coming from JQ, who in Dec. 1907 had advised the poet that ‘One wants afection and friendship and sometimes love too’, adding that ‘If one doesn’t care for a legal wife

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he should be entitled to a ‘visiting wife’’. Foster’s summary of the relationship itself is that ‘it is impossible to analyse [Dickinson’s] appeal for [WBY]’: ‘But sexual fulflment and a sympathetic ear were not enough to meet his ideal – an ideal which now owed something to ideas of class as well as aesthetics’ (Foster 1, 384–385). It may be that Dickinson was present in the troubled and protracted evolution of Te Player Queen in more ways than those WBY concedes in the case of this particular lyric: although the plot changed constantly and substantially, a foundational idea of WBY’s play is one of the vicarious validity of the pretended existence – as instanced here in the profession of acting – where one person becomes another, and performs in the process perhaps better than that other might be able to do. It is suggestive that in 1908 WBY tells Mabel Dickinson, and not somebody else, how ‘We lose all in the pursuit of ourselves – a thing that does not exist’: the thought is a far-reaching one, especially pertinent to Te Player Queen, but also an idea that turns on the sexual nature of the connection between Dickinson and WBY. Is the relationship one in which Dickinson is a ‘real’ wife, or a wife in pretence? Furthermore, might the thing pretended be in some ways more fully satisfactory than the thing if it were merely real? Te character known as the Poet, present at all stages in Te Player Queen, is ofen to some extent crippled by his circumstances, sometimes celebrated and sometimes mocked by those who remember and perform his words: and this lyric is intended as an example of such variously accommodated and performed words. As such, it ofers numerous possibilities of interpretation, and these cannot easily be decided between: if the two speakers are male and female (as seems very likely), which voice (and role) is the man’s, and which the woman’s? Tat this quite basic element of the poem’s meaning is ambiguous points towards a deeper ambiguity throughout, between ‘Love or deceit’ (7). Might lovers in some ways deceive one another, by mutual agreement and acceptance, in allowing love to move onto a sexual plane? Undoubtedly, this question has resonance for WBY as regards Dickinson; but by late 1908 it also had a certain relevance in relation to WBY and MG. Time changed the text and the meanings of Te Player Queen; so much so, that by the time the play was published in 1922, only fve of the lyric’s lines were sufered to remain. Now, two women (Decima the Player Queen, and her rival Nona) discussed the work of the poet (Septimus) (CW 2, 354): Nona. You think that you have his every thought because you are a devil. Decima. Because I am a devil I have his every thought. You know how his own song runs. Te man speaks frst – (singing) Put of that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes, and then the woman answers – O no, my dear, you make so bold To fnd if hearts be wild and wise And yet not cold. Nona. His every thought – that is a lie. He forgets all about you the moment you’re out of his sight.

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By this time, the characters on stage are quoting a poem that had been kept in published circulation by WBY in editions of his poetry since 1910: for them, the mask is worn by the woman, but this was by no means so clear when WBY composed and published the poem itself. In the meantime, also, WBY’s and Dickinson’s relationship had been resolved by ending – ironically enough, it was resolved into a question of ‘deceit’ rather than ‘Love’ when, in 1913, Dickinson declared herself pregnant only to concede later that this was, in fact, not the true state of things. AG’s stern solicitousness for WBY at that time of crisis ended with the relieved refections that ‘I can’t say I am surprised’, and that ‘I had such a strong conviction at times of the ‘deception, deception, deception’’, with the admonition, ‘this unpleasant business [. . .] from beginning to the present [. . .] has not been worthy of you’ (Jul. 1913, quoted Foster 1, 489). Reception and critical interpretation. Te poem was noticed in a review of GH10 in Te Manchester Guardian (3 Jan. 1911), where it was quoted in full as an example of ‘a little string of true lyric pearls, every note ringing and round and the whole either lucid as day or as taking as moonlight in the ‘wanton heed and giddy cunning’ of its rhythmic caprice and elusive, much-meaning inconsequence’. Tere was very little further appreciation of the poem in WBY’s lifetime; and by the time modern criticism addressed the piece, its title made it inevitable that it would be approached by way of what R. Ellmann in Te Man and the Masks called the poet’s ‘doctrine of the mask’. Whether WBY ever had such a ‘doctrine’ is open to question – not least on the grounds that the word suggests a dogmatic stance entirely alien to the poet’s view of his own and others’ art – but of course masks (literal ones, on the stage, as well as metaphorical ones in various contexts in WBY’s discursive prose) were of great creative signifcance to him, in diferent ways and at diferent times. In terms of philosophy, WBY had for several years been aware of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the ‘mask’. F. Oppel relates this poem specifcally to Tus Spake Zarathustra, and Nietzsche’s announcement there that ‘Gold-lustre maketh peace between moon and sun’, as well as the statement in Nietzsche contra Wagner that ‘We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veil is pulled of it’; but the contention that this lyric is written to resolve WBY’s ‘philosophical quandary about appearance and reality’ by ‘improving, as Nietzsche and Yeats believe art should, upon the uncertainties of life by outfacing, or outmasking, them’ may claim too much whilst saying too little (Mask and Tragedy: Yeats and Nietzsche 1902–10 (1987), 210). Less philosophically, Oscar Wilde was also for WBY a writer who had both written about and in certain ways lived into the artistic uses and complexities of the mask. J. Ramazani senses this when he notes that ‘In the Wildean/Nietzschean poem ‘Te Mask’ [. . .] Yeats speculates that the truth of a work of art, whether love poem or theatrical mask, lies not in its correspondence to an inner emotional reality (‘hearts’) but in the efect it produces on its audience – reader or beloved’ (Yeats’s Ars Poetica in Te Green Helmet and Other Poems’, YA 16, 66). As a motif, quite apart from Nietzsche or Wilde, the mask was in 1910 already familiar to WBY: for a contextually wide-ranging and valuable account of the whole concept of ‘mask’ in WBY’s work in undoctrinal contexts before the elaborations of A Vision and other philosophical experiments, see W. Gould, ‘Te Mask before Te Mask’, YA 19, 3–47. Te mask ‘doctrine’, however, has inevitably coloured critical approaches to a short piece of lyric poetry that is otherwise puzzling and hard to

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contextualize. G. Bornstein in 1970 ofered a close reading in this light, but with observational acuteness (Bornstein, 164–165): Te stanza by stanza progression of this poem frst posits the central doctrine of the masks and then subsumes it into two ideas which Yeats explored in earlier plays. In the frst stanza the lady’s mask frustrates her lover’s desire to know her truly [. . .] Yeats makes the mask into the limit of the lover’s knowledge. Te second stanza couples love and deceit, the two qualities whose conjunction distressed Forgael in Te Shadowy Waters. Te proscription of union makes deceit irrelevant; the beloved should assume that mask which creates the greatest passion in her lover. Finally, the poem presents the notion of the lover as enemy [. . .] Like the desire to discover the lady’s heart or her emotions, the desire to discover if she is an enemy also becomes irrelevant in stanza 3. Te poem constitutes a catechism of Yeats’s new doctrine of love, in which the creation of passion replaces the hope of union. Yeats in efect instructs himself in the repudiation of his earlier, Shelleyan view of love by showing its basic irrelevance to his new position. Whether or not anything so substantial as a ‘doctrine’ or so ordered as a ‘catechism’ are involved here, the poem is certainly one that concerns love. Te text of course withholds any biographical resonances it may carry, but some criticism has seen WBY as formulating a general (and gendered) position based on a conviction that, as E. Cullingford puts it, ‘Passion has no need of sincerity’: ‘although love is a game played by male rules, disguise is one form of sexual freedom, power, and control [. . .] the male lover’s desire to know ‘if hearts be wild and wise, | And yet not cold’ is rebufed by the female speaker, who favours the superior eroticism of anonymity’ (Cullingford, 211). R. Cave writes that the poem ‘found a way of deploying the image [of the mask] to gain access to complexities of the erotic sensibility’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 334). Access is one thing, and understanding another; and it is probably wrong to ask of this lyric more in the way of detailed exposition that it is in a position to give. It may be worth remembering that what appears in WBY’s poetry collections, starting with A Selection of the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913), as ‘Te Mask’ has by then outgrown its frst designation as ‘A Lyric from an Unfnished Play’ in GH10 and GH12: although the poet briefy considered calling the poem at its frst publication ‘Te Mask and the Face’, it was initially part of a projected drama, and ofered as such. But the drama, whose composition the poet found so trying and frustrating over many years, put the poem under the ultimately ironic pressures of being situated on the stage, and it ended up there as little more than a snatch of song, any further content or profundity unknowable and forgotten. As a poem in WBY’s oeuvre, on the other hand, ‘Te Mask’ afer 1913 no longer needed the support of the play that had occasioned its composition. Textual history. Te multitudinous drafs of Te Player Queen reveal a good deal of the pre-history of this lyric, but its composition as a poem, which happens in Aug. 1910, displays only a couple of phases of revision. NLI 8764, 1(a) is a TS in prose for the entirety of the play, but it is not easily dated (it may in fact cover a relatively long period

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of evolution). Tis is Scenario 9 in Bradford PQ (30), described by him as ‘a late scenario, completed in Aug. 1910’. Rather than being a prose draf for the poem, the relevant passage of this may be giving a prose account of a lyric already written; it is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 182–183: Player queen puts up her head out of the vat. She sings a song of which the following is the substance. My beloved sang to me why do you wear that golden mask and eyes of emerald. I would know what you are, I would see your face. Put away that burning mask, I cannot see it without trouble. As I sang to my beloved, if I put away my mask your heart would no longer beat, beat violently, one has calm when one knows what people are. Ah you would not sigh for me any longer, I wish for the praise of your sighs. Tat is why I will always wear my burning golden mask, with the eyes of emerald. Ten my beloved sang to me I do not even know if you are a friend or an enemy. Before the lyric was composed, images and phrases were already present in WBY’s drafs. One of these is quoted above (Mabel Dickinson and Te Player Queen); others include the following, though the precise ordering of these is a matter of some uncertainty. In NLI 30385, 1r. (repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 184–185): You wear a mask of gold you sing With emerald eyes, but now that you have Taken of your mask come down [?Out] of this wine tub [for we must be del] [?beating] She sings How do I know if you are a friend or an enemy [?] In NLI 8764 (2), Bradford’s Draf 3, repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 186–187: Player Queen’s Song I would know who you are in yourself my beloved said to me Put of that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes That I may know what you are I will not put away my mask of burning gold It is the emerald eyes that make your heart beat I would be praised by the beating of your heart. In NLI 8764 (9a), Bradford’s Draf 6, repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 188–189: (Player Queen puts her head up out of barrel) I would know what you are in your self?

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My beloved said to me Put of that mask of ^burning^ gold With emerald That I may [see your face del.] I will not put away my mask It is the mask of burning gold With emerald eyes that makes Your heart beat so quickly I would be praised by your beating heart. Also in Bradford’s Draf 6, NLI 8764 (9b), repr. and transcribed Cornell ISWGH, 190–191: She begins to sing about mask again My beloved said ‘Why do you [wear] that burning mask With emerald eyes? But I said to my beloved ‘O better, better than the love that is care and envy and considering O I shall die with my burning mask. NLI 8764 (3a), Bradford’s draf 12, is not in WBY’s hand (nor in that of AG); it is transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 194: I would know who you are, My beloved said to me, Put of that mask of burning gold, That mask with emerald eyes, That I may know who you are. I will not put away my mask, It is the mask of burning gold, It is the mask with emerald eyes, That makes your heart beat so quickly, I would be praised by the beating of your heart. But my beloved answered me, ‘I do not know if you are a friend or if you are an enemy.’ NLI 8764 (3b), Bradford’s Draf 15, is probably the last state of the drafing for the projected lyric before its substantial composition as recorded in WBY’s Journal. Bradford’s dating of this draf to early 1909 is likely to be too early. It is transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 195: Sings I would know what you are in yourself

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My beloved said to me Put of that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes That I may know what you are I will not put away my mask It is the mask of burning gold With emerald eyes that makes your heart beat so quickly I would be praised by the beating of your heart. But he answered to me I do not even Know if you are a friend or an enemy. In all of these versions, it will be seen that WBY is moving slowly through a small number of verbal motifs that solidify by degrees into lines of verse; however, no poem, properly speaking, has as yet taken shape. Te earliest record of the composition of a full lyric is preserved in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College) fol. 84r., transcribed in Mem., 258–259, and repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 196–197: this hol. version shows much evidence of revision, and is in the nature of a frst or very early draf (MS). Although the lyric features next in further Player Queen texts (e.g. Bradford Draf 16, NLI 8764 (1c-d)), it was sent to Cuala Press soon afer the MS version, and is present in the GH10 proofs (Berg Collection, NYPL), with a variant title (Proofs). Te poem was next printed in GH12, A Selection of the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913), the privately printed Nine Poems (1914), R16, and all subsequent collected edns.

Title.] Te Mask in A Selection of the Love Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1913) and all subsequent printings. Te Mask and the Face Proofs. A Lyric From An Unpublished Play GH10, GH12. 1. of burning gold] Te phrase is commonplace, but WBY would be especially aware of Blake’s verses in the Preface to Milton (And did those feet. . .’), 7: ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’. Tis may or may not amount to an allusion; and certainly the purpose of any deliberate allusiveness here is not immediately obvious. Te issue was noticed in 1922 by St. J. Ervine in the Observer (26 Mar.): ‘We

cannot believe that Blake wrote Mr. Yeats’s poem, nor that Mr. Yeats wrote Blake’s, and we are driven to the common sensible conclusion that Mr. Yeats remembered the words ‘burning gold’, and either used them in the belief that he had thought of them before anyone else, or boldly used them, knowing well where they came from, because he liked the sound of them’. Less certainly, WBY may also be remembering Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act I, 208–209: ‘He, the supreme Tyrant, on his throne | Of burning gold’. 2. emerald eyes] WBY here turns a fairly common fgurative expression in poetic

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Copy-text: P49

5

‘Put of that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes.’ ‘O no, my dear, you make so bold To fnd if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold.’

10

‘I would but fnd what’s there to fnd, Love or deceit.’ ‘It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what’s behind.’

15

‘But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire.’ ‘O no, my dear, let all that be; What matter, so there is but fre In you, in me?’

descriptions of eyes (ofen including cats’ eyes, in both T. Gray and R. Southey) into something literal, to striking efect. For the more usual fgurative use in writing about lovers, cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1884) VIII, 638–640: ‘he turned | Back from her emerald eyes his own, and yearned | All night for eyes all golden’. G.B. Saul (86) drew attention to an observation in Henn (56) that ‘Beatrice in the Purgatorio had emerald eyes’ (Canto xxxi, 116–117: ‘we have set thee before the emeralds from which love once shot his darts at thee’), but allusion to Dante on WBY’s part here seems relatively unlikely. 3.] [But O my dear, you make ^are made so^ thus bold del.] MS. 4. hearts be wild and wise] [I be dull or wise del.] MS.

5.] [Kind or del.]^And yet not^ cold MS. 6. what’s] [whether del.] ^what’s^ MS. 8. It was] But ’twas MS. 11–15.] MS has a draf of the fnal stanza fully del.: ‘For it may be you’re my enemy I must enquire’ O no my dear let the mask be [So that del.] ^What matter [if del.] so^ there but burn fre In thee and me. 11.] [How if you were del] ^But lest you [be del.] are my^ enemy MS. 13. all that] [the mask del.] ^all that^ MS. 14–15.] What matter so there burn but fre | In thee and me. MS.

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[‘BUT EVERY POWERFUL LIFE GOES ON ITS WAY . . .’] Date of composition, and textual history. In his Journal (following a draf version of ‘Te Mask’ of Aug. 1910), WBY wrote half a dozen lines (including deletions) that could be the start of a poem, possible lines for verse drama, or quickly versifed thoughts. Te context of the Journal makes these lines difcult to date, except insofar as they are likely to be composed afer ‘Te Mask’. It is possible that they are later than Aug. 1910, but they must be from before May 1911, which is the date of the next prose entry in the Journal. Over a few pages, WBY drafs ‘Te Mask’, then these lines, followed by a version of ‘Tese are the Clouds’ (frst composed in May), and then ‘A Drinking Song’ (composed in Feb.): it is likely that he was assembling pieces for GH10, copy for which had been promised to ECY since early Jul., and which was probably sent to the Cuala Press by the end of Aug. Although these lines might of course have been composed earlier, they are clearly still in the process of composition (and, indeed, on the verge of being abandoned), so seem likely to come from Aug. 1910, when WBY was composing busily at Coole. Te lines were claimed by D. Donoghue in his edition of Mem. as a possible revision to the poem ‘Reconciliation’. However, that poem had reached what was to be its published form more than a year earlier, and it is difcult to see how these lines might have constituted a revision of it – Donoghue was perhaps led to the thought by ‘Too blinded by the sight of the mind’s eye’ and ‘Too deafened’ (2, 3) and their resemblance to ‘Reconciliation’ 3: ‘the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind’. If this is a revision, though, it is more of a thoroughgoing rewriting, or at least a start on such a thing; for ‘Reconciliation’ is in rhymed couplets, whereas the lines here are without rhyme. More likely, these lines were jotted down by WBY for further use or development (whether in lyric poetry or drama), and then simply lef behind. Te original MS is in WBY’s Journal (Burns Collection, Boston College, fol. 84 v.); a transcription is in Mem. 259, and it is repr. and transcribed in Cornell, ISWGH, 206–207.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-61

[‘BUT EVERY POWERFUL LIFE GOES ON ITS WAY . . .’]

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Copy-text: MS. But every powerful life goes on its way Too blinded by the sight of the mind’s eye, Too deafened by the cries out of the heart Not to have staggering feet and groping hands.

1. But] [Every del.] ^But every^ MS. 1^2.] [As if with blind eyes and wild groping hands | Too deafened by the cries within the mind del.] MS. 4. staggering feet] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 1904: ‘cleaves unto the ground with staggering feet’.

groping hands] Perhaps cp. J. Gray, Silverpoints (1893), ‘Femmes Damnées’, 3–4: ‘Foot stretches out to foot, and groping hands | Have languors sof’.

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BROWN PENNY Date of composition. Tere is no frm evidence to provide a date of composition for this poem. However, a likely time for the piece to have been written is in Aug. 1910, when WBY was working steadily at Coole. It is likely also that the copy for GH10 went to ECY at Cuala Press before the end of that month. GH10 was published by the Cuala Press on 23 Nov. 1910, but was in production throughout Sep. Although WBY had written to ECY on 1 Jul. 1910 that ‘I will let you have MSS in a few days and let you know when you can publish’ (CL 5, 837), a number of the poems that appeared in GH10 had still not been written or fnished at this time. ECY told SMY on 19 Jul. that ‘Willy’s next book’ would feature ‘almost 14 new lyrics’: in the event, there were nineteen poems in the volume. In the colophon to the book, ECY wrote that its production was ‘fnished on the last day of September, in the year nineteen hundred and ten’ (though WBY was able to send MG a copy by 27 Sep., when she wrote him a letter of thanks). Textual history. No draf material for this poem survives. Tere is a signed hol. fair copy on a single sheet of paper (once pasted into a book or album, and now separated from it) in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (MS); this is repr. and transcribed in Cornell ISWGH, 214–215. Te poem was frst published as the fnal lyric in the ‘Momentary Toughts’ section of GH10, then in G12, in the privately circulated Nine Poems (1914), and in R16 and all subsequent collected edns. Te text and title remained stable until LP31, but in 1932 WBY revised the title to ‘Brown Penny’, frst in his proofs for the projected Edition de Luxe with Macmillan, and then for CP33. In 1937, while preparing copy for the projected American edition of his works to be published by Scribner’s, WBY rewrote lines 9–14 (see note). No matching changes were made to the poem for the projected Edition de Luxe, nor were they notifed to Macmillan in connection with this; nevertheless, WBY’s intentions in 1937 are clear, and are unlikely to have been made simply to render the Scribner’s text distinctive. R. Finneran, who adopts these revisions in CW 1, regards this as evidence of WBY’s latest intentions: it may be so, but in terms of editorial decisions it needs to be weighed against the decisions to maintain the previously established text in P49 and CP50 (where GY had direct

DOI: 10.4324/9781003360407-62

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involvement), and the artistic damage done by the revision itself. Accordingly, the present edition does not incorporate WBY’s revised version of these lines, instead reporting them in the notes to the poem. Critical reception and interpretation. Te Spectator in its review of GH10 (3 Jun. 1911) picked out this poem and quoted the frst stanza, though the book in which it was included was ‘not a very serious efort of Mr. Yeats’: still, ‘there is one reader who will not easily get ‘Te Young Man’s Song’ out of his head’. A brief (but acid) notice of GH12 in the New York journal Current Opinion (Jan. 1913) quoted the poem in full as ‘one of the most engaging of the lyrics’, although the other poems in the book would ‘add nothing to [WBY’s] laurels’, being ‘Short and very cryptic’. Even F. Reid in 1915 thought that the lyrics in GH10 ‘show a marked falling of ’, and chose to salvage only the ‘delightful refrain’ of this poem (Reid, 328). Modern criticism has not paid much attention to the poem, and sometimes echoes the register of very early contemporary responses, as when D. Albright writes how it concludes GH10 ‘in a spirit of wise simplicity and smiling ease’ (Albright, 516). Te poem is not a complex one (though WBY did his best to complicate it in 1936–1937: see note to 9–14), and it is even in some ways untypical of his writing in the years running up to its composition. Te title which it bore for most of the poet’s lifetime, ‘Te Young Man’s Song’, usefully places it both in terms of genre and of quasi-dramatic distance; and this is lost with the later title of ‘Brown Penny’. As a song, the refrain of lines 7 and 16 is an important structural feature, one which suggests strongly the movement of some imagined music. As the speech of a ‘young man’ (where so many of the lyrics in GH10, and especially in the ‘Momentary Toughts’ section which this poem brings to a close, are voiced for a man of disillusioned experience), the frst stanza especially points to a hopeful and even a successful romantic youthfulness. Here, a fortune teller delivers (for a penny) the desired news of amatory adventure, which events seem to be making good as the lover fnds himself wholly involved in his beloved’s curling hair. With this, the intense and troubled eroticism of many poems in Te Wind Among the Reeds, where the beloved’s long hair enfolds the helpless lover, is replaced by a musically expressed and relatively simple happiness. Te second stanza (at least before the pondered revisions of WBY in 1936–1937) chooses to ignore the problems of a philosophy of love in favour of direct immediate experience: ‘thinking of love’ (12) is emphatically not the same thing – for the speaker anyhow – as being in love. Te poem brings to a close in GH10 a lyric portion of the book which had begun with the difcult and haunted love-poems of the ‘Raymond Lully and His Wife Pernella’ series, and continued with the decidedly middle-aged registers of the ‘Momentary Toughts’ poems: its dramatic voice is a poignant reminder of what can now be expressed only dramatically, and so its simplicity, in this context, may be a pointed one.

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Copy-text: P49.

5

10

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’ And then, ‘I am old enough’; Wherefore I threw a penny To fnd out if I might love. ‘Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.’ Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough

Title.] No title MS; Te Young Man’s Song GH10–LP31. WBY’s revision of the title was presumably prompted by the need not to have this poem confused with ‘Young Man’s Song’ (1929) in the ‘Words for Music Perhaps’ sequence of Te Winding Stair (1933). 1. young,] Te present text does not adopt the full-stop of the copy-text, which here reads ‘young.’ Tere is no evidence of any revision in the established punctuation by WBY himself (in e.g. the proofs for the projected Macmillan Edition de Luxe in 1932 (NLI 30262)), and it is more likely that this is a slip in P49 than a deliberate intervention on the part of GY or the Macmillan editor Tomas Mark. A comma in this position is also retained by Jefares in YP and Finneran in CW 1. 6. lady] Lady MS. 9.] WBY’s phrasing here gains force from its deployment of the defnite article. B. Arkins

writes that ‘Since Standard English would here require the indefnite article [. . .] the use of the defnite article heavily stresses the statements made’ while ‘the deviance in language, Yeats’s crooked syntax, mirrors the deviance that is ascribed to love’ (Te Tought of W.B. Yeats (2010), 174). ‘Te crooked thing’ makes love crooked rather than the expected penny – a crooked penny is one that is rendered worthless through damage, and can be cast into a well for luck. Cp. lines in the play Te King’s Treshold (in versions from P99–05 onwards), where Seanchan says ‘I cast you from me like an old torn cap, | A broken shoe, a glove without a fnger, | A crooked penny; whatever is most worthless’ (CW 2, 146). In terms of this poem, it is to be understood that the speaker has paid a real penny to discover his romantic fortune; the twist is that romance itself turns out here to be ‘crooked’, and therefore not to be known or calculated upon.

BROWN PENNY

15

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To fnd out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.

9–14.] WBY tried out a re-writing of these lines in 1936–1937. On a single sheet of paper (NLI 30409) which also carries an early draf of the poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’ (1936), he wrote out ‘alterations in Brown Penny’. Tis version of the lines reads: Ten the penny cried up in my face Tere is no body wise enough To fnd out all that is in it For he would be thinking of love Till [?he’s] looped in her [?circled] hair Till the circles of time had run O penny, brown penny Etc. In the copy submitted to Scribner’s in Jun. 1937, WBY made the revision to the poem (using the 1935 impression of CP33 as his base-text). Tis follows but develops the 1936 MS: And the penny sang up in my face, ‘Tere is nobody wise enough To fnd out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Tat is looped in the loops of her hair Till the [circles del.] ^loops^ of time had run.’

It should be noted that WBY is revising his revision even as he enters it on the copy. Would an eventual proof – which the poet would rightly have assumed he would see – have survived without further alteration? In particular, would the fnal substitution of ‘loops’ for ‘circles’ have satisfed WBY’s ear, afer the ‘looped’ and ‘loops’ of the previous line? R. Finneran has made a defence of WBY’s revised text (and enshrined it in his own edition for CW 1) by claiming that it ‘continues the dialogue already established between the speaker and the penny, in the process eliminating the awkward image of the lunivorous shadows’, and that ‘the loops of time’ ‘suggest connections with the gyres of A Vision’ (Finneran, 38). Te moon image that had stood in the poem since 1910 is by no means obviously an ‘awkward’ one; and reference to A Vision – which may indeed supply WBY’s reason for turning curls of hair into gyres – is not a sufcient artistic excuse for the creative violence to the original poem that is being ofered here.

Appendix 1

CONTENTS OF W.B. YEATS’S VOLUMES OF POETRY, 1899–1910 Poems (1899) [Te second edn. of the Unwin Poems (revising order of contents of frst edn., 1895). In subsequent edns. of 1901, 1904, and 1908, the order of contents is also that of 1899.] To some I have talked with by the fre Te Countess Cathleen [verse play] Te Rose To the Rose upon the Rood of Time Fergus and the Druid Te Death of Cuchulain Te Rose of the World Te Rose of Peace Te Rose of Battle A Faery Song Te Lake Isle of Innisfree A Cradle Song Te Pity of Love Te Sorrow of Love When You are Old Te White Birds A Dream of Death A Dream of a Blessed Spirit Te Man who dreamed of Faeryland Te Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists Te Lamentation of the Old Pensioner Te Ballad of Father Gilligan Te Two Trees To Ireland in the Coming Times

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Te Land of Heart’s Desire [verse play] Crossways Te Song of the Happy Shepherd Te Sad Shepherd Te Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes Anashuya and Vijaya Te Indian upon God Te Indian to his Love Te Falling of the Leaves Ephemera Te Madness of King Goll Te Stolen Child To an Isle in the Water Down by the Salley Gardens Te Meditation of the Old Fisherman Te Ballad of Father O’Hart Te Ballad of Moll Magee Te Ballad of the Foxhunter Te Wanderings of Oisin

Te Shadowy Waters (1900) [‘I walked among the seven woods of Coole’] Te Shadowy Waters

In Te Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefy Of Te Irish Heroic Age (Dun Emer Press, 1903) In the Seven Woods Te Old Age of Queen Maeve Baile and Aillinn Te Arrow Te Folly of Being Comforted Te Withering of the Boughs Adam’s Curse Te Song of Red Hanrahan Te Old Men Admiring Temselves in the Water Under the Moon Te Players Ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Temselves Te Rider from the North [Te Happy Townland] On Baile’s Strand [Play]

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Poems, 1899–1905 (1906) [‘I walked among the seven woods of Coole’] Te Harp of Aengus Te Shadowy Waters [1906 version] On Baile’s Strand [Play] In the Seven Woods In the Seven Woods Te Old Age of Queen Maeve Baile and Aillinn Te Arrow Te Folly of Being Comforted Old Memory Never Give All the Heart Te Withering of the Boughs Adam’s Curse Te Song of Red Hanrahan Te Old Men Admiring Temselves in the Water Under the Moon Te Players Ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Temselves Te Happy Townland Te Entrance of Deirdre: A Lyric Chorus [Songs from Deirdre: I] Te King’s Treshold [Play]

Te Poetical Works of William Butler Yeats in Two Volumes: Volume I Lyrical Poems (New York, 1906) Early Poems I: Ballad and Lyrics To Some I have talked with by the Fire Te Song of the Happy Shepherd Te Sad Shepherd Te Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes Anashuya and Vijaya Te Indian upon God Te Indian to his Love Te Falling of the Leaves Ephemera Te Madness of King Goll

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Te Stolen Child To an Isle in the Water Down by the Sally Gardens Te Meditation of the Old Fisherman Te Ballad of Father O’Hart Te Ballad of Moll Magee Te Ballad of the Foxhunter Early Poems II: Te Wanderings of Oisin Early Poems III: Te Rose To the Rose upon the Rood of Time Fergus and the Druid Te Death of Cuchulain Te Rose of the World Te Rose of Peace Te Rose of Battle A Faery Song Te Lake Isle of Innisfree A Cradle Song Te Pity of Love Te Sorrow of Love When You are Old Te White Birds A Dream of Death A Dream of a Blessed Spirit Te Man who dreamed of Faeryland Te Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists Te Lamentation of the Old Pensioner Te Ballad of Father Gilligan Te Two Trees To Ireland in the Coming Times Te Wind Among Te Reeds Te Hosting of the Sidhe Te Everlasting Voices Te Moods Te Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart Te Host of the Air Te Fisherman A Cradle Song Into the Twilight Te Song of Wandering Aengus

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431

Te Song of the Old Mother Te Fiddler of Dooney Te Heart of the Woman Te Lover mourns for the Loss of Love He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved and longs for the End of the World He bids his Beloved be at Peace He reproves the Curlew He remembers Forgotten Beauty A Poet to his Beloved He gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes To my Heart bidding it have no Fear Te Cap and Bells Te Valley of the Black Pig Te Lover asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods He tells of a Valley full of Lovers He tells of the Perfect Beauty He hears the Cry of the Sedge He thinks of those who have spoken Evil of his Beloved Te Blessed Te Secret Rose Te Lover mourns because of his Wanderings Te Travail of Passion Te Lover pleads with his Friend for Old Friends A Lover speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in Coming Days Te Poet pleads with the Elemental Powers He wishes his Beloved were Dead He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven He thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven In Te Seven Woods In the Seven Woods Te Arrow Te Folly of being Comforted Old Memory Never give All the Heart Te Withering of the Boughs Adam’s Curse Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland Te Old Men admiring Temselves in the Water Under the Moon Chorus from a Play [Songs from Deirdre: I] Te Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Temselves Te Happy Townland

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Te Old Age of Queen Maeve Baile and Aillinn

Te Collected Works of William Butler Yeats: Volume 1 Poems Lyrical And Narrative (Stratford-on-Avon, 1908) Te Wind Among the Reeds Te Hosting of the Sidhe Te Everlasting Voices Te Moods Te Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart Te Host of the Air Te Fisherman A Cradle Song Into the Twilight Te Song of Wandering Aengus Te Heart of the Woman Te Lover mourns for the Loss of Love He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved and longs for the End of the World He bids his Beloved be at Peace He gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes To his Heart bidding it have no Fear Te Cap and Bells Te Valley of the Black Pig Te Lover asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods He tells of a Valley full of Lovers He tells of the Perfect Beauty He hears the Cry of the Sedge He thinks of those who have spoken Evil of his Beloved Te Blessed Te Secret Rose Maid Quiet Te Travail of Passion Te Lover pleads with his Friend for Old Friends A Lover speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in Coming Days Te Poet pleads with the Elemental Powers He wishes his Beloved were Dead He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven He thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven

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Te Old Age of Queen Maeve Baile and Aillinn In Te Seven Woods In the Seven Woods Te Arrow Te Folly of being Comforted Old Memory Never give All the Heart Te Withering of the Boughs Adam’s Curse Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland Te Old Men admiring Temselves in the Water Under the Moon Te Hollow Wood O Do Not Love Too Long Te Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Temselves Te Happy Townland Early Poems Ballads and Lyrics To Some I have talked with by the Fire. A Dedication to a Volume of Early Poems Te Song of the Happy Shepherd Te Sad Shepherd Te Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes Anashuya and Vijaya Te Indian upon God Te Indian to his Love Te Falling of the Leaves Ephemera Te Madness of King Goll Te Stolen Child To an Isle in the Water Down by the Sally Gardens Te Meditation of the Old Fisherman Te Ballad of Father O’Hart Te Ballad of Moll Magee Te Ballad of the Foxhunter

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Te Ballad of Father Gilligan Te Lamentation of the Old Pensioner Te Fiddler of Dooney Te Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists Te Rose To the Rose upon the Rood of Time Fergus and the Druid Te Death of Cuchulain Te Rose of the World Te Rose of Peace Te Rose of Battle A Faery Song Te Lake Isle of Innisfree A Cradle Song Te Song of the Old Mother Te Pity of Love Te Sorrow of Love When You are Old Te White Birds A Dream of Death A Dream of a Blessed Spirit Te Man who dreamed of Faeryland Te Two Trees To Ireland in the Coming Times Te Wanderings of Oisin

Poems: Second Series (1909: publ. Mar. 1910) Te Wind Among the Reeds Te Hosting of the Sidhe Te Everlasting Voices Te Moods Te Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart Te Host of the Air Te Fisherman A Cradle Song Into the Twilight Te Song of Wandering Aengus Te Song of the Old Mother Te Heart of the Woman

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Te Lover mourns for the Loss of Love He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved and longs for the End of the World He bids his Beloved be at Peace He Reproves the Curlew He Remembers Forgotten Beauty A Poet to his Beloved He gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes To his Heart bidding it have no Fear Te Cap and Bells Te Valley of the Black Pig Te Lover asks Forgiveness because of his Many Moods He tells of a Valley full of Lovers He tells of the Perfect Beauty He hears the Cry of the Sedge He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved Te Blessed Te Secret Rose Maid Quiet Te Travail of Passion Te Lover pleads with his Friend for Old Friends A Lover speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in Coming Days Te Poet pleads with the Elemental Powers He wishes his Beloved were Dead He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven He thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven Te Fiddler of Dooney Te Old Age of Queen Maeve Baile and Aillinn In the Seven Woods In the Seven Woods Te Arrow Te Folly of being Comforted Old Memory Never give All the Heart Te Withering of the Boughs Adam’s Curse Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland Te Old Men admiring Temselves in the Water Under the Moon

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Te Hollow Wood O Do Not Love Too Long Te Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and Temselves Te Happy Townland Te Musicians’ Songs from Deirdre Songs from Deirdre: I Songs from Deirdre: II Songs from Deirdre: III Te Shadowy Waters [‘I walked among the seven woods of Coole’] Te Harp of Aengus Te Shadowy Waters

Te Green Helmet and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1910) Raymond Lully and his wife Pernella His Dream A Woman Homer Sung Te Consolation No Second Troy Reconciliation King and No King Peace Against Unworthy Praise Momentary Toughts Te Fascination of What’s Difcult A Drinking Song Te Coming of Wisdom with Time To a Poet, Who would have Me Praise certain bad Poets, Imitators of His and of Mine A Lyric from an Unpublished Play [Te Mask] Upon a Treatened House Tese are the Clouds At Galway Races A Friend’s Illness All Tings can Tempt Me Te Young Man’s Song [Brown Penny] Te Green Helmet, An Heroic Farce [verse play]

Appendix 2

PREFATORY MATERIAL BY W.B. YEATS IN COLLECTIONS OF POETRY, 1899–1910 Preface to Poems (1899) Te writer revised, and, to a great extent, re-wrote ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ and certain lyrics and ballads from the same volume, and revised and expanded ‘Te Countess Cathleen’ for the frst edition of this book; and he has still further revised these and other poems for the present edition. 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. He has printed the lyrics and ballads written about the same time as ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ in a section called ‘Crossways,’ for in these he tried many pathways; and those written about the same time as ‘Te Countess Cathleen’ in a section called ‘Te Rose,’ for in them he found, as he believes, the only pathway from which he may hope to see beauty and wisdom with his own eyes. Tis book and Te Wind Among the Reeds contain all of his published poetry which he cares to preserve. W.B. Yeats February 24, 1899

Preface to Poems (1901) I have added some passages to ‘Te Land of Heart’s Desire,’ and a new scene of some little length, besides passages here and there, to ‘Te Countess Cathleen’. Te goddess has never come to me with her hands so full that I have not found many waste places afer I had planted all that she had brought me. Te present version of ‘Te Countess Cathleen’ is not quite the version adopted by the Irish Literary Teatre a couple of years ago, for our stage and scenery were capable of little; and it may difer more from any stage version I make in future, for it seems that my people of the waters and my unhappy dead, in the third act, cannot keep their supernatural essence, but must put on too much of our mortality, in any ordinary theatre. I am told that I must abandon a meaning or two and make my merchants carry away the treasure themselves. Te act

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was written long ago, when I had seen so few plays that I took pleasure in stage efects. Indeed, I am not yet certain that a wealthy theatre could not shape it to an impressive pageantry, or that a theatre without any wealth could not lif it out of pageantry into the mind, with a dim curtain, and some dimly lighted players, and the beautiful voices that should be as important in poetical as in musical drama. Te Elizabethan stage was so little imprisoned in material circumstance that the Elizabethan imagination was not strained by god or spirit, nor even by Echo herself no, not even when she answered, as in ‘Te Duchess of Malf,’ in clear, loud words which were not the words that had been spoken to her. We have made a prison-house of paint and canvas, where we have as little freedom as under our own roofs, for there is no freedom in a house that has been made with hands. All art moves in the cave of the Chimaera, or in the garden of the Hesperides, or in the more silent house of the gods, and neither cave, nor garden, nor house can show itself clearly but to the mind’s eye. Besides re-writing a lyric or two, I have much enlarged the note on ‘Te Countess Cathleen,’ as there has been some discussion in Ireland about the origin of the story, but the other notes are as they have always been. Tey are short enough, but I do not think that anybody who knows modern poetry will fnd obscurities in this book. In any case, I must leave my myths and symbols to explain themselves as the years go by and one poem lights up another, and the stories that friends, and one friend in particular, have gathered for me, or that I have gathered myself in many cottages, fnd their way into the light. I would, if I could, add to that majestic heraldry of the poets, that great and complicated inheritance of images which written literature has substituted for the greater and more complex inheritance of spoken tradition, some new heraldic images, gathered from the lips of the common people. Christianity and the old nature faith have lain down side by side in the cottages, and I would proclaim that peace as loudly as I can among the kingdoms of poetry, where there is no peace that is not joyous, no battle that does not give life instead of death; I may even try to persuade others, in more sober prose, that there can be no language more worthy of poetry and of the meditation of the soul than that which has been made, or can be made, out of a subtlety of desire, an emotion of sacrifce, a delight in order, that are perhaps Christian, and myths and images that mirror the energies of woods and streams, and of their wild creatures. Has any part of that majestic heraldry of the poets had a very diferent fountain? Is it not the ritual of the marriage of heaven and earth? Tese details may seem to many unnecessary; but afer all one writes poetry for a few careful readers and for a few friends, who will not consider such details unnecessary. When Cimabue had the cry it was, it seems, worth thinking of those that run, but to-day, when they can write as well as read, one can sit with one’s companions under the hedgerow contentedly. If one writes well and has the patience, somebody will come from among the runners and read what one has written quickly, and go away quickly, and write out as much as he can remember in the language of the highway. W.B. Yeats January, 1901

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Note in In Te Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefy Of Te Irish Heroic Age (Dun Emer Press, 1903) [WBY’s note (printed by ECY’s Dun Emer Press in red) is positioned between the book’s poems and the play On Baile’s Strand: it flls the half page lef at the end of the fnal poem ‘Te Rider from the North’ (later, ‘Te Happy Townland’).] I made some of these poems walking about among the Seven Woods, before the big wind of nineteen hundred and three blew down so many trees, and troubled the wild creatures, and changed the look of things; and I thought out there a good part of the play which follows. Te frst shape of it came to me in a dream, but it changed much in the making, foreshadowing, it may be, a change that may bring a less dream-burdened will into my verses. I never re-wrote anything so many times; for at frst I could not make these wills that stream into mere life poetical. But now I hope to do easily much more of the kind, and that our new Irish players will fnd the buskin and the sock.

Preface to Poems, 1899–1905 (1906) I have gathered into this book all the poems I have fnished since I published ‘Te Wind Among the Reeds’ nearly seven years ago, and as I turn over the pages it seems to me very little to have been so long about. Te writing of them has kept me pretty busy for all that, because I have had to destroy so many lines that would have thrown one play or another out of shape. During these years, especially during the last three or four, I have been getting some practical knowledge of the stage in our Irish dramatic movement, and I have spent a good part of the time shaping and reshaping some half- dozen plays in prose or verse. Afer I had learned to hold an audience for an act in prose I found that I had everything to learn over again in verse, for in dramatic prose one has to prepare principally for actions, and for the thoughts or emotions that bring them about or arise out of them; but in verse one has to do all this and to follow as well a more subtle sequence of cause and efect, that moves through vast sentiments and intricate thoughts that accompany action, but are not necessary to it. It is not very difcult to construct a fairly vigorous prose play, and then, when one is certain it will act, as it stands, to decorate it and encumber it with poetry. But a play of that kind will never move us poetically, because it does not uncover, as it were, that high, intellectual, delicately organized soul of men and of an action, that may not speak aloud if it do not speak in verse. I am a little disappointed with the upshot of so many years, but I know that I have been busy with the Great Work, no lesser thing than that, although it may be the Athanor has burned too fercely, or too faintly and ftfully, or that the prima materia has been ill-chosen. Some of my friends, and it is always for a few friends one writes, do not understand why I have not been content with lyric writing. But one can only do what one wants to do, and to me drama – and I think it has been the same with other writers – has been the search for more of manful energy, more of cheerful acceptance of whatever arises

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out of the logic of events, and for clean outline, instead of those outlines of lyric poetry that are blurred with desire and vague regret. All art is in the last analysis an endeavour to condense as out of the fying vapour of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art’s sake, and that is why the labour of the alchemists, who were called artists in their day, is a beftting comparison for all deliberate change of style. We live with images, that is our renunciation, for only the silent sage or saint can make himself into that perfection, turning the life inward at the tongue as though it heard the cry Secretum meum mihi; choosing not, as we do, to say all and know nothing, but to know all and to say nothing. ‘Te Shadowy Waters,’ ‘Te King’s Treshold, and ‘On Baile’s Strand’ are not at all as they were when frst printed, for they have been rewritten and rewritten until I feel I can do no better with my present subjects and experience. I am the least confdent about ‘Te Shadowy Waters,’ for it is so unlike what it was when last played that it is a new play, and I have but tried it at rehearsal, and without its scenery and its costumes, and that harp which is to burn with a faint fre. It is to be judged, like all my plays, as part of an attempt to create a national dramatic literature in Ireland, and it takes upon itself its true likeness of a Jack-a-Lantern among more natural and simple things, when set among the plays of my fellow-workers. What I have done is but a form and colour in an elaborate composition, where they have painted the other forms and colours. Te extravagance, the joyous irony, the far-fying phantasy, the aristocratic gaiety, the resounding and rushing words of the comedy of the countryside, of the folk as we say, is akin to the elevation of poetry, which can but shrink even to the world’s edge from the harsh, cunning, traditionless humour of the towns. I write of the tragic stories told over the fre by people who are in the comedies of my friends, and I never see my work played with theirs that I do not feel that my tragedy heightens their comedy and tragi-comedy, and grows itself more moving and intelligible from being mixed into the circumstance of the world by the circumstantial art of comedy. Nor is it only the stories and the country mind that have made us one school, for we have talked over one another’s work so many times, that when a play of mine comes into my memory I cannot always tell how much even of the radical structure I may not owe to the writer of ‘Te Lost Saint,’ or of ‘Te Shadow of the Glen,’ or more than all, to the writer of ‘Hyacinth Halvey’; or that I would have written at all in so heady a mood if I did not know that one or the other were at hand to throw a bushel of laughter into the common basket. I have printed the plays and poems in the order of their frst publication, but so far as the actual writing of verse is concerned, ‘Te Shadowy Waters’ and ‘On Baile’s Strand’ have been so much rewritten that they are later than ‘Te King’s Treshold.’ I have put no explanatory notes to the poems and very few to the plays, for impatient readers do not read even the shortest notes, and the patient would cry out upon an arid summary, for they can read the legends in those strange and beautiful books, canonical with most of us in Ireland now, Lady Gregory’s ‘Gods and Fighting Men’ and ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne.’ W.B. Yeats In Te Seven Woods, 18 May, 1906

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Preface to Te Poetical Works of William Butler Yeats in Two Volumes: Volume I Lyrical Poems (New York, 1906) When I was in America two or three years ago, I lectured at the Irish College of San José, and as I went through the quadrangle to the lecture hall the moonlight fell among the palm trees. I remember how strange and foreign all that beauty seemed to me; and yet the lads I spoke to were moved, as I thought, by the imaginative tradition that would have moved them at home. It seemed to me that they knew the history and the ballad poetry as I did, and were moved as I had been at their age by Davis’s ‘Lament for Owen Roe’ or by Mangan’s ‘Ode to the Maguire.’ I was able to forget the palm trees, and to say what I would have said to young men in Dublin or in Connacht. As I am looking over the proof sheets of these two books, where I have gathered for the frst time all of my poetry I have any liking for, San José comes into my head with the thought that I also have been true to that tradition as I understand it. When I began to write, I belonged to a Young Ireland Society in Dublin, and wished to be as easily understood as the Young Ireland writers, – to write always out of the common thought of the people. I have put the poems written while I was infuenced by this desire, though with an always lessening force, into those sections which I have called ‘Early Poems.’ I read them now with no little discontent, for I fnd, especially in the ballads, some triviality and sentimentality. Mangan and Davis are not sentimental and trivial, but I became so from an imitation that was not natural to me. When I was writing the poems in the last of the three, the section called ‘Te Rose,’ I found that I was becoming unintelligible to the young men who had been in my thought. We have still the same tradition, but I have been like a traveller who having when newly arrived in the city noticed nothing but the news of the marketplace, the songs of the workmen, the great public buildings, has come afer certain months to let his thoughts run upon some little carving in its niche, some Ogham on a stone, or the conversation of a countryman who knows more of the ‘Boar without Bristles’ than of the daily paper. When like that traveller grown unintelligible in the marketplace, I would explain myself, I have not been able always to convince the hearer that I have been no farther than to the old man who brings in his creels of turf upon a Saturday. But now I am half returning to my frst ambition, for though I keep my new knowledge in my head, I am no longer writing for a few friends here and there, but am asking my own people to listen, as many as can fnd their way into the Abbey Teatre in Dublin or some provincial one when our company is on tour. Perhaps one can explain in plays, where one has much more room than in songs and ballads, even those intricate thoughts, those elaborate emotions, that are one’s self. W.B. Yeats In Te Seven Woods, July, 1906

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Note on ‘Early Poems’ in Te Collected Works of William Butler Yeats: Volume 1 Poems Lyrical And Narrative (Stratford-on-Avon, 1908) When I frst wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself, for such reasons as those in ‘Ireland and the Arts,’ that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end. I was very young; and, perhaps because I belonged to a Young Ireland Society in Dublin, I wished to be as easily understood as the Young Ireland writers, to write always out of the common thought of the people. I have put the poems written while I was infuenced by this desire, though with an always lessening force, into those sections which I have called ‘Early Poems.’ I read certain of them now with no little discontent, for I fnd, especially in the ballads, some triviality and sentimentality. Mangan and Davis, at their best, are not sentimental and trivial, but I became so from an imitation that was not natural to me. When I was writing the poems in the second of the three, the section called ‘Te Rose,’ I found that I was becoming unintelligible to the young men who had been in my thought. We have still the same tradition, but I have been like a traveller who, having when newly arrived in the city noticed nothing but the news of the market-place, the songs of the workmen, the great public buildings, has come afer certain months to let his thoughts run upon some little carving in its niche, some Ogham on a stone, or the conversation of a countryman who knows more of the ‘Boar without Bristles’ than of the daily paper. When writing I went for nearly all my subjects to Irish folklore and legends, much as a Young Ireland poet would have done, writing ‘Down by the Salley Garden’ by adding a few lines to a couple of lines I heard sung at Ballisodare; ‘Te Meditation of the Old Fisherman’ from the words of a not very old fsherman at Rosses Point; ‘Te Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’ from words spoken by a man on the Two Rock Mountain to a friend of mine; ‘Te Ballad of the Old Foxhunter’ from an incident in one of Kickham’s novels; and ‘Te Ballad of Moll Magee’ from a sermon preached in a chapel at Howth; and ‘Te Wanderings of Oisin’ from a Gaelic poem of the Eighteenth Century and certain Middle Irish poems in dialogue. It is no longer necessary to say who Oisin and Cuchulain and Fergus and the other bardic persons are, for Lady Gregory, in her ‘Gods and Fighting Men’ and ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne’ has re-told all that is greatest in the ancient literature of Ireland in a style that has to my ears an immortal beauty.

Index of Poems Page numbers for main texts and commentary are given in bold. A Bronze Head 208, 404 A Dream of Other Lives 53, 58, 373 A Drinking Song 377–379 A Friend’s Illness 341–345 A Woman Homer Sung 388–393, 398, 400, 401 [‘Accursed who brings to light of day’] 299–301 Adam’s Curse 119, 133, 175–184 Against Unworthy Praise 394, 400–404 Against Witchcraf 272–276 All things can tempt me 310–313 An Acre of Grass 286 An Appointment 78, 295–298, 339, 353 At Galway Races 314–317 At the Abbey Teatre 165

[‘I heard under a ragged hollow wood’] 201–204 [‘I walked among the seven woods of Coole’] 72–82, 298 In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz 262 In the Seven Woods 132, 146–154, 288, 330, 385 [‘Irishmen, if they prefer’] 367–368

Baile and Aillinn 11, 26, 83–103, 153, 161, 170, 238 Brown Penny 422–425 [‘But every powerful life goes on its way . . .’] 420–41

Never give all the heart 209–13 No Second Troy 150, 324–331, 388

Child’s Play’ 73 [‘Come ride and ride to the garden’] 269–271 [‘Do not make a great keening’] 108–110 Ego Dominus Tuus 153 Fergus and the Druid 5 ‘He Mourns for the Change that has Come upon Him, and his Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World’ 24, 171 He Reproves the Curlew 58 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven 360 High Talk 174, 183 His Dream 302–309, 315 His Phoenix 120, 404 Hound Voice 352

King and No King 369–376 Maid Quiet 101, 152–153, 201, 287–289 Michael Robartes and the Dancer 398 Mosada 236 [‘My dear is angry that of late’] 336–337

[‘O Death’s old bony fnger’] 290–294 O Do Not Love Too Long 197–200 Old Memory 205–208, 212 [On a certain middle-aged ofce holder] 338–340 On a Child’s Death 3 On George Moore 346–347 On those that hated ‘Te Playboy of the Western World’, 1907 380–387 Parnell 181 Parnell’s Funeral 153, 308 Paudeen 59 Peace 394–399, 400 Reconciliation 318–323 Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland 4, 135–14 She Who Dwelt Amongst the Sycamores: A Fancy 101, 152 Solomon and the Witch 244 Songs from Deirdre: I 214–219

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Songs from Deirdre: II 279–283 Songs from Deirdre: III 277–278 Spinning Song 114–118 Te Arrow 131–134, 151, 330 Te Ballad of Father Gilligan 257 Te Blood Bond 111–113 Te Cap and Bells 307 Te Cold Heaven 374 Te Coming of Wisdom with Time 348–350 Te Fascination of What’s Difcult 311, 359–366 Te Folly of Being Comforted 119–125, 134, 182, 209, 330 [‘Te friends that have it I do wrong’] 284–286 Te Happy Townland 81, 112, 185–196, 217, 269, 290 Te Harp of Angus 224–227, 170 Te Heart of the Woman 52, 268 Te Hosting of the Sidhe 140, 191 Te Island of Statues 73, 251, 369 Te Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart 401 Te Mask 411–419 Te Mountain Tomb 395 Te Municipal Gallery Revisited 208 Te Old Age of Queen Maeve 11, 26, 88, 155–174 Te Old Men Admiring Temselves in the Water 141–145, 325 Te Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and on Temselves 126–130, 217 Te Protestants’ Leap 357

Te Ragged Wood 220–223, 290 Te Rose of the World 202, 324, 388 Te Second Coming 95, 366 Te Shadowy Waters 228–268 Te Shadowy Waters (1900) 6–52, 76, 128, 214, 224 Te Shadowy Waters [1896 TS Version] 268 Te Song of Hefernan the Blind: A Translation 3–5 Te Song of Wandering Aengus 52, 101, 168, 268, 290 Te Sorrow of Love 388 Te Statesman’s Holiday 67 Te Stolen Child 73 Te Tower 137 Te Wanderings of Oisin 24, 171, 191 Te White Birds 39 Te Withering of the Boughs 53–61 Tese are the Clouds 405–410 To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine 351–352 To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-No 77 Under the Moon 62–71, 217 Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation 353–358, 406 [‘When to its end o’er ripened July nears’] 127 When You Are Old 160 Words 332–335 Yellow Haired Donough 104–107, 135, 216–217

Index of First Lines Accursed who brings to light of day 299 Ah, that Time could touch a form 394 All things can tempt me from this craf of verse: 310 Being out of heart with government 295 But every powerful life goes on its way 420 Come ride and ride to the garden, 269 Do not make a great keening 108 Edain came out of Midher’s hill, and lay 224 Has he not led us into these waste seas 228 He thinks to have set all things right 338 His face has never gladdened since he came 6 How should the world be luckier if this house, 353 Hurry to bless the hands that play, 126 I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds: 53 I had this thought a while ago, 332 I hardly hear the curlew cry, 83 I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods 146 I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde, 62 I heard the old, old men say, 141 I heard under a ragged hollow wood, 201 I ofen am in Shronehill, in Conroy is my bed, 3 I swayed upon the gaudy stern 302 I thought of your beauty, and this arrow, 131 I walked among the seven woods of Coole, 72 I whispered, ‘I am too young,’ 422

I will go cry with the woman 104 If any man drew near 388 Irishmen, if they prefer 367 Love is an immoderate thing 279 Maeve the great queen was pacing to and fro, 155 May this fame have driven out 272 Moore once had visits from the muse 346 My dear is angry that of late 336 Never give all the heart, for love 209 O Death’s old bony fnger 290 O heart, be at peace, because 400 O hurry to the ragged wood, for there 220 O thought, fy to her when the end of day 205 Once, when midnight smote the air, 380 One that is ever kind said yesterday: 119 Put of that mask of burning gold 411 Sickness brought me this 341 Some may have blamed you that you took away 318 Sweetheart, do not love too long: 197 Te fascination of what’s difcult 359 Te friends that have it I do wrong 284 Te old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand, 135 Tere are seven that pull the thread. 114 Tere’s many a strong farmer 185 Tere where the course is, 314 Tese are the clouds about the fallen sun, 405 Tey are gone, they are gone. Te proud may lie by the proud. 277 Tis sod has bound us 111 Tough leaves are many, the root is one; 348

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INDex OF FIrST LINeS

We sat together at one summer’s end, 175 Where has Maid Quiet gone to, 287 ‘Why is it,’ Queen edain said, 214 Why should I blame her that she flled my days 324

Wine comes in at the mouth 377 ‘Would it were anything but merely voice!’ 369 You say, as I have ofen given tongue 351