Module de cours de l'Université Rennes 2
UE2A Irish Literature : "Yeats
and the Revival" - Anne Goarzin
Auteur(s)
GOARZIN Anne
Date de création du document
26/09/2009
Tous droits réservés - Université Rennes 2
2
TABLES DES MATIERES
PRESENTATION .......................................................................................................................................... 8
William Butler YEATS.................................................................................................................................. 9
1 YEATS : CORPUS OF POEM FOR COURSE.................................................................................... 10
1 . 1 THE HUGH LANE CONTROVERSY......................................................................................... 10
1 . 1 . 1 "TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO
DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED
PICTURES"....................................................................................................................................... 10
1 . 2 POLITICAL UPHEAVAL............................................................................................................. 10
1 . 2 . 1 “SEPTEMBER 1913” ......................................................................................................... 10
1 . 2 . 2 “EASTER 1916” .................................................................................................................. 10
1 . 2 . 3 “MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR” ............................................................... 10
1 . 3 THE IRISH REVIVAL AND THE POET’S PLACE IN TRADITION.................................... 10
1 . 3 . 1 FOLK THEMES & BALLADS........................................................................................... 10
1 . 3 . 1 . 1 "Excerpt" From The Celtic Twilight (1893)............................................................ 10
1 . 3 . 1 . 2 A Teller of Tales.......................................................................................................... 10
1 . 3 . 1 . 3 “The Stolen Child”...................................................................................................... 10
1 . 3 . 2 THE POET’S LITERARY LINEAGE............................................................................... 10
1 . 3 . 2 . 1 “To Ireland in the Coming Times”............................................................................ 10
1 . 3 . 2 . 2 “Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain…”.............................................................. 10
1 . 3 . 2 . 3 “Among School Children”.......................................................................................... 10
1 . 4 Yeats AND HISTORY.................................................................................................................... 10
1 . 4 . 1 THE CYCLES OF HISTORY AND THE IRRUPTION OF VIOLENCE..................... 10
1 . 4 . 1 . 1 “Leda and the Swan”.................................................................................................. 10
1 . 4 . 1 . 2 « The Second Coming ».............................................................................................. 10
1 . 4 . 2 THE BIG HOUSE AND THE ASCENDANCY................................................................. 10
1 . 4 . 2 . 1 “The Wild Swans at Coole”........................................................................................ 10
1 . 4 . 2 . 2 “In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz”.......................................10
1 . 4 . 2 . 3 “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”................................................................... 10
2 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................................... 10
2 . 1 Studies on Yeats’s poetry................................................................................................................ 10
2 . 2 Irish Literature : Before and After the Literary Revival of the 1880s....................................... 10
2 . 3 Yeats and History, Politics and Nationalism................................................................................. 10
3 THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT : IRELAND IN THE 19TH CENTURY..........10
3 . 1 BIOGRAPHICAL LANDMARKS................................................................................................ 10
3 . 1 . 1 THE ANGLO-IRISH BACKGROUND.............................................................................. 10
3 . 1 . 2 EDUCATION AND INTELLECTUAL FORMATION.................................................... 10
3
3 . 2 HISTORICAL AND STYLISTIC LANDMARKS FOR YEATS’S OEUVRE......................... 10
3 . 2 . 1 GEOGRAPHICAL AND STYLISTIC PERIODS............................................................. 10
3 . 2 . 1 . 1 Geographical location................................................................................................. 10
3 . 2 . 1 . 2 In Dreams Begin Responsibility................................................................................. 10
3 . 2 . 2 NON-COINCIDENCE OF HISTORICAL AND AESTHETIC MOVEMENTS...........10
3 . 2 . 2 . 1 Modernism and nationalism?.................................................................................... 10
3 . 2 . 2 . 2 Yeats and Modernism................................................................................................. 10
3 . 2 . 3 BITTERNESS........................................................................................................................ 10
3 . 2 . 3 . 1 The Hugh Lane Controversy..................................................................................... 10
3 . 2 . 3 . 2 The Playboy Riots....................................................................................................... 10
3 . 3 DISAPPOINTMENT WITH IRELAND AND POLITICS......................................................... 10
3 . 3 . 1 YEATS ’S MOVE TOWARDS COMMITMENT............................................................ 10
3 . 3 . 2 THE NEED FOR A SYSTEM.............................................................................................. 10
3 . 3 . 3 DESPISE, DECLINE, CHAOS AND HOPE...................................................................... 10
3 . 3 . 3 . 1 “September 1913” ..................................................................................................... 10
3 . 3 . 3 . 2 The tragedy of “Easter 1916”.................................................................................... 10
3 . 3 . 3 . 3 Chaos and decline........................................................................................................ 10
4 THE IRISH SUBJECT MATTER.......................................................................................................... 10
4 . 1 THE LITERARY REVIVAL......................................................................................................... 10
4 . 1 . 1 DEANGLICIZING IRELAND............................................................................................ 10
4 . 1 . 2 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL : POLITICS AND THE REVIVAL....................... 10
4 . 1 . 3 THE LITERARY REVIVAL............................................................................................... 10
4 . 1 . 3 . 1 Yeats’s main contribution to it was his collection of essays entitled The Celtic
Twilight (1893)............................................................................................................................... 10
4 . 1 . 3 . 2 “The Stolen Child”...................................................................................................... 10
4 . 2 YEATS’S IRISH SUBJECT MATTER........................................................................................ 10
4 . 2 . 1 YEATS AND ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE.................................................................. 10
4 . 2 . 1 . 1 The Ascendancy / Yeats and his fellow Irishmen..................................................... 10
4 . 2 . 1 . 2 The limits of the English tradition and the need for an Irish literature................ 10
4 . 2 . 1 . 3 The shift towards a national subject matter............................................................. 10
4 . 2 . 1 . 4 The evolution in the Irish subject matter.................................................................. 10
4 . 2 . 2 THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN (1889) AND THE CELTIC TWILIGHT 1893..........10
4 . 2 . 2 . 1 The Wanderings of Oisin, 1889.................................................................................. 10
4 . 2 . 2 . 2 The Celtic Twilight, 1893............................................................................................ 10
4 . 2 . 2 . 3 Key Words In Yeats’s Approach Of Ireland In Literature....................................10
4 . 2 . 2 . 3 . 1 Locality............................................................................................................... 10
4 . 2 . 2 . 4 The link between folklore and occultism.................................................................. 10
4 . 2 . 2 . 5 Form............................................................................................................................. 10
4 . 3 ILLUSTRATION : “TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES” (1893)................................. 10
4
4 . 3 . 1 CONTEXT............................................................................................................................. 10
4 . 3 . 2 " TRUE BROTHER OF A COMPANY / THAT SANG, TO SWEETEN IRELAND'S
WRONG"............................................................................................................................................ 10
4 . 3 . 2 . 1 The other bards........................................................................................................... 10
4 . 3 . 2 . 2 Poetic rather than political company........................................................................ 10
4 . 3 . 2 . 3 The poet’s reach for beauty and timelessness (eternity).........................................10
4 . 3 . 2 . 4 The poem stresses ambivalent issues of unity and the difficulty to achieve it:......10
4 . 3 . 2 . 5 Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 10
5 YEAT’S LINEAGE.................................................................................................................................. 10
5 . 1 FATHERS AND FOREFATHERS : BIOLOGICAL and INTELLECTUAL FILIATION. .10
5 . 1 . 1 THE GENEALOGICAL POEMS....................................................................................... 10
5 . 1 . 2 YEATS AND CHILDHOOD................................................................................................ 10
5 . 2 PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC LIFE : THE MAKING OF THE POET.............................................10
5 . 2 . 1 ACTION VS. CONTEMPLATION..................................................................................... 10
5 . 2 . 2 THE NATIONALIST STREAK : PUBLIC LIFE............................................................. 10
5 . 2 . 2 . 1 Yeats ’s commitments................................................................................................ 10
5 . 2 . 2 . 2 The limits of political commitment............................................................................ 10
5 . 3 YEATS AND THE BIG HOUSE : LADY GREGORY AND COOLE PARK........................ 10
5 . 3 . 1 YEATS’S SENSE OF THE ARISTOCRACY.................................................................... 10
5 . 3 . 2 THE COOLE PARK POEMS............................................................................................. 10
5 . 3 . 2 . 1 The house..................................................................................................................... 10
5 . 3 . 2 . 2 The people.................................................................................................................... 10
6 THE LITERARY CONTEXT : FROM ROMANTICISM TO SYMBOLISM.................................10
6 . 1 FIN DE SIECLE, NEW LITERATURE ?.................................................................................... 10
6 . 1 . 1 YEATS’S AMBIVALENCES : BETWEEN VICTORIANISM AND MODERNISM. .10
6 . 1 . 1 . 1 Yeats’s romantic mood............................................................................................... 10
6 . 1 . 1 . 2 Romantic Imagery And Metaphors........................................................................... 10
6 . 1 . 1 . 3 Against Victorian Literature...................................................................................... 10
6 . 1 . 1 . 4 “This Filthy Modern Tide”[2]................................................................................. 10
6 . 1 . 2 FIN DE SIÈCLE ANXIETY AND YEATS........................................................................ 10
6 . 1 . 2 . 1 Symptoms of the fin de siècle state of mind.............................................................. 10
6 . 1 . 2 . 2 Wilde / The Rhymers’ club........................................................................................ 10
6 . 2 SYMBOLIST POSTULATES........................................................................................................ 10
6 . 2 . 1 Disapproval of rhetoric was one of the characteristics of the Symbolists........................ 10
6 . 2 . 2 Symbolism as a quest for unity, between man and nature................................................ 10
6 . 2 . 3 Yeats, the symbol and the metaphor................................................................................... 10
7 YEATS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.............................................................................................. 10
7 . 1 “A VISION” : UNDERSTANDING YEATS’S THEORY OF THE HUMAN BEING AND
OF HISTORY.......................................................................................................................................... 10
5
7 . 1 . 1 “A VISION” : THE GENRE............................................................................................... 10
7 . 1 . 2 “A VISION” : THE METHOD............................................................................................ 10
7 . 2 “A VISION” : CENTRAL IDEAS................................................................................................. 10
7 . 2 . 1 THE CYCLES OF HISTORY............................................................................................. 10
7 . 2 . 2 THE BELIEF IN THE AFTERLIFE.................................................................................. 10
7 . 2 . 3 HUMAN PERSONALITY................................................................................................... 10
7 . 2 . 4 THE SYSTEM OF “A VISION” : THE ANIMA MUNDI, THE SPHERE AND THE
GYRES AND THE PHASES OF THE MOON............................................................................... 10
7 . 2 . 4 . 1 The Sphere................................................................................................................... 10
7 . 2 . 4 . 2 The Gyres within the Sphere...................................................................................... 10
7 . 2 . 4 . 3 The movements of the Gyres...................................................................................... 10
7 . 2 . 4 . 4 What the Gyres stand for........................................................................................... 10
7 . 3 YEATS’S LUNAR PHASES AND A SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSITIONS.......................10
7 . 3 . 1 THE LUNAR PHASES......................................................................................................... 10
7 . 3 . 2 SUMMARY : THE CENTRAL PROPOSITIONS OF "A VISION".............................. 10
7 . 4 CONCLUSION - APPLICATIONS OF THE SYSTEM IN YEAT'S POETRY...................... 10
7 . 4 . 1 WHY SUCH A SCHEME ?.................................................................................................. 10
7 . 4 . 2 NOTES ON “THE SECOND COMING” ......................................................................... 10
ANNEXES..................................................................................................................................................... 10
6
PRESENTATION
Les finalités et objectifs
Ms Goarzin’s class will focus especially on the cultural and political context for Yeats’s oeuvre,
while Ms Jousni’s will offer to locate James Joyce in the wake of the Literary revival and look into
the counter-proposals made by Joyce to the gospel of Celtic revivalism. Both intructors will provide
relevant excerpts from texts as illustrations.
Pr. Anne GOARZIN
La démarche d'apprentissage
Ce module de cours s'articule en :
●
Chapitres et corpus de textes à lire en annexe (onglet "Cours") ;
●
Glossaire des termes clé (onglet "Glossaire");
●
Ressources bibliographiques et webographiques (onglet "Ressources") ;
●
Planning d'activités pédagogiques facultatives constituant une recommandation
de parcours d'apprentissage (onglet "Planning").
Les activités pédagogiques du planning sont à réaliser dans l'espace-cours de CURSUS destiné à
l'accompagnement de ce module de cours.
Le contenu du cours
This course is divided in 2 lectures / modules :
Module 1 - Yeats and the Revival
This class will focus on the way a literary renaissance movement emerged in the mid-1880s in
Ireland. We shall show that while the Literary revival may be said to be rooted in the renewed
interest in things Celtic exemplified by the Antiquarian movement among others, it took off more
significantly with Standish O’Grady or Samuel Ferguson. Writers tended to be more committed to
recovering a national literature, which translated into a move westwards to the “origins” of Gaelic
culture and language. While the centres of the Renaissance were initially both in London and in
Dublin with literary figures such as Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats actively contributed
to shifting the movement to Ireland and was active most notably in providing the nation with its
own with its own theatre, The Abbey Theatre (as will be developed in the M2 course on Irish
drama). As a result of increased cultural and political awareness, the nation was able to claim a
literature of its own and had achieved its independence from British rule by the 1920s.
7
Module 2- James Joyce and Literary Modernism
Ms Jousni’s class will examine the move to literary modernism into Joyce’s works. After Yeats, the
second « tower » of XXth century Irish literature was indeed James Joyce. Yeats and Joyce actually
met, which prompted another writer, post-modernist Flann O’Brien, to dub the fact a few years
later : « The Filthy Modern Tide meets the Celtic Toilet », thus deriding at both literary trends
(Modernism and the Celtic Twilight, aka the Celtic Revival).
Joyce’s four major works will be introduced : Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake(1939). The purpose of this class is less to ‘study’ Joyce than
to provide you with the indispensable ‘keys’ one needs to enter his works.
Les évaluations
Rappel :
UE2A IRISH LITERATURE : From the Celtic Revival to Modernism
Coefficient : 1
MODALITES DU CONTROLE DE CONNAISSANCES UE2A et UE2B
Session 1
Session 2
Assidus : Contrôle sur table
Tirage au sort entre UE2A et UE2B, écrit 2
heures
Assidus : oral
Tirage au sort sur la partie non traitée de la 1ère
session (préparation 1 heure, passage 20
minutes)
Non Assidus : idem
Non assidus : idem
8
CHAPITRE INTRODUCTIF : William Butler YEATS
William Butler Yeats (by his brother John B. Yeats - 1900)
9
I
YEATS : CORPUS OF POEM FOR COURSE
I.1
THE HUGH LANE CONTROVERSY
I.1.1
"TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO
DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE
WANTED PICTURES"
Read the poem
I.2
POLITICAL UPHEAVAL
I.2.1
“SEPTEMBER 1913”
Read and listen to the poem
I.2.2
“EASTER 1916”
Read and listen to the poem
I.2.3
“MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR”
Read the poem
I.3
THE IRISH REVIVAL AND THE POET’S PLACE IN TRADITION
I.3.1
FOLK THEMES & BALLADS
I.3.1.1
"Excerpt" From The Celtic Twilight (1893)
Read the poem
I.3.1.2
A Teller of Tales
Read the poem
I.3.1.3
“The Stolen Child”
Read the poem
I.3.2
THE POET’S LITERARY LINEAGE
I.3.2.1
“To Ireland in the Coming Times”
Read the poem
10
I.3.2.2
“Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain…”
Read the poem here1
I.3.2.3
“Among School Children”
Read and listen to the poem
I.4
YEATS AND HISTORY
I.4.1
THE CYCLES OF HISTORY AND THE IRRUPTION OF VIOLENCE
I.4.1.1
“Leda and the Swan”
Read the poem
I.4.1.2
« The Second Coming »
Read and listen to the poem
I.4.2
THE BIG HOUSE AND THE ASCENDANCY
I.4.2.1
“The Wild Swans at Coole”
Read and listen to the poem
I.4.2.2
“In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz”
Read the poem
I.4.2.3
“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”
Read the poem
1
Précision : Cf annexe : Poem : "Pardon, old fathers...."
11
II BIBLIOGRAPHY
II.1
II.2
II.3
STUDIES ON YEATS’S POETRY
●
Bonafous-Murat, Carle, Selected Poems : WB Yeats, CNED, Paris, Armand Colin,
2008.
●
Genet, Jacqueline, La poésie de WB Yeats, Lille, Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, 2007.
●
Muller, Elizabeth, Yeats, collection “Clefs concours” Paris, Atlande, 2008.
●
Coll., Cahiers de l’Herne : WB Yeat, Paros, Fayard, 1981, 1999.
IRISH LITERATURE : BEFORE AND AFTER THE LITERARY REVIVAL OF THE 1880S
●
Corcoran, Neil, After Yeats and Joyce, Reading Modern Irish Literature, London,
Opus, 1997
●
Deane, Seamus, Celtic Revivals, Essays in modern Irish literature, 1880-90, Winston
Salem, NC, Wake Forest UP, 1985, 1987 (see Ch. 1 : “The Literary myths of the
revival” and Ch. 3 : Yeats and the Idea of Revolution”)
●
Kinsella Thomas, "The Dual Tradition", an essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland,
Manchester, Carcanet, 1995 (pp. 64-87 on Yeats and Joyce)
●
Muldoon, Paul, To Ireland, I, Oxford, OUP, 2000
●
Rafroidi, Patrick, L’Irlande et le romantisme, Lille, PU Lille, 1972 (intro) (see
Deuxième partie : « Le romantisme nationaliste » and Ch 5 : « La redécouverte
du passé, le mode irlandais »)
●
Said, Edward, "Yeats and Decolonization", Nationalism, Colonialism and
Literature, ed. Seamus Deane, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1990, pp. 67-95.
●
Vance, Norman, Irish literature since 1800, London, Longman, 2002.
YEATS AND HISTORY, POLITICS AND NATIONALISM
●
Brearton, Fran, "W. B. Yeats: Creation from Conflict", in The Great War in Irish
Poetry – W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley, Oxford, OUP, 2000, pp. 43-82.
●
Chadwick, Joseph, Violence in Yeats’s Later Politics and Poetry, ELH 55.4 (Winter
1988), pp. 869-893.
●
Kearney, Richard, "Transitions, Narratives in Modern Irish Culture", Manchester,
Manchester UP, 1988 (see Chapter 1, pp. 19-30 “Yeats and the Conflict of
Imaginations”)
●
Khalifa, Rached, “W. B. Yeats: Theorizing the Irish Nation”, in W. B. Yeats and
Postcolonialism, ed. D. Fleming, West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001, pp.
277-299.
12
●
McCormack, W. J., “Yeats and the Invention of Tradition”, in From Burke to
Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History, Cork, Cork UP, 1994,
pp. 302-340.
●
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B.
Yeats”, in Excited Revery, ed. A. N. Jeffares et al., London, Macmillan, 1965, pp.
207-278.
●
Said, Edward, “Yeats and Decolonization”, Nationalism, Colonialism and
Literature, ed. Seamus Deane, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1990, pp. 67-95.
13
III THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT : IRELAND IN THE
19TH CENTURY
III.1 BIOGRAPHICAL LANDMARKS
III.1.1 THE ANGLO-IRISH BACKGROUND
Yeats was born in 1865 to a middle-class Anglo-Irish family in Dublin. Throughout his career as a
writer he was keen to identify himself with the Ascendancy, whose aristocracy fit his moods and
literary ambitions more adequately.
His was a family of artists (father John B. Yeats (http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/johnbyeats.htm) W
was a barrister who gave up the bar to become a painter, and his mother Susan, née Pollexfen, was
born to a family of old-established ship owners and millers). The instability of John’s career as a
painter led Susan to take her children back to Ireland on vacation from England to the Pollexfen
18thc home in Merville, Co. Sligo. Brother was to become Ireland’s most talented turn-of-thecentury painter.
Theirs was thus an impoverished family, travelling to and fro between England, Dublin and Sligo in
the West of Ireland → childhood in Sligo, then Dublin (1881-87) and London (1887-90)
En savoir plus
About his brother, Jack B. Yeats, in wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Butler_Yeats ) W
Paintings (http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/irish-artists/jack-butler-yeats.htm) by his brother :
Jack B. Yeats W
III.1.2 EDUCATION AND INTELLECTUAL FORMATION
Yeats’s education was a rather bohemian one, and he did not attend university and enrolled at the
Metropolitan school of art in Dublin, where he studied painting until he chose to dedicate his life to
literature in 1889.
His years in London were formative and emotionally central in his life : he met in London, as well as
writers as Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde and William Morris.
Throughout his years abroad and in Ireland, he became one of the strongest advocates of the
restoration of Irish cultural identity. It is for that purpose that he founded the London Irish society
in 1891, followed by the creation of the National Literary society in Dublin.
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
14
Together with Lady Gregory who liked to gather Irish artists under her roof at her Coole Park
mansion (or “ big houseG ”), he was an active member of the Irish Renaissance starting in the mid
1890s, and planned the creation of an Irish National theatre with her (The Abbey).
, the two sisters are featured at Lissadell, the Gore-Booth’s mansion or “ Big houseG ”.
Con Markiewicz was among the rebels of Easter 1916, she had joined the left wing of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood. She was released from jail in 1920, on the grounds she was a woman. All
the other male participants in the rising were executed. Eva Gore Booth left the family demesne to
work for women’s trade unions in Manchester.
On the Big House as a reflection of harmony (social and intellectual),
Yeats’s life was also marked by another key feminine figure, , for whom he wrote his first plays :
Maud Gonne was his lifelong muse and the object of his ever unrequited love. She inspired a great
number of his poems and fostered his use of symbolism (the Rose, Helen and Leda) as well as his
plays (i.e. Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Countess Kathleen, both embodiments of Ireland as a woman).
Starting in The Rose (1893), most of his love poetry is dedicated to her, or alternatively to his lover
Olivia Shakespear. He eventually married a friend of Ezra Pound’s wife at the age of 52. Georgie
Hyde-Lees gave him two children, Anne and Michael (who died respectively in 2001 and 2007)
En savoir plus
For further reference, read : Jacqueline Genet, The Big House in Ireland, reality and representation,
Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
III.2 HISTORICAL AND STYLISTIC LANDMARKS FOR YEATS’S OEUVRE
III.2.1 GEOGRAPHICAL AND STYLISTIC PERIODS
III.2.1.1 Geographical location
Critics tend to divide the oeuvre into several periods, either based on geographical location or on
style
●
The London-Sligo Period, 1889-1914
●
The Ballylee Period, 1915-39 (Yeats had bought an old Norman Tower in Gort,
CO. Galway : Thoor Ballylee)
III.2.1.2 In Dreams Begin Responsibility
Style : in 1914 one starts to note important transformations in Yeats’s poetics : “In dreams begins
responsibility”
Important !
Before 1914, his poetry was dreamier and full of escapism, greater clarity and purpose after this
date. The new collection issued in 1914 was named “Responsibilities” and stressed a change in Yeats’s
G Voir glossaire
G Voir glossaire
15
political commitment (into action) and a shift from his earlier “dreamy” poetry to a more down-toearth poise.
The shift is most noticeable between two poems, namely “” (in the collection Responsibilities,
published in1914) and “” (published in Michael Robartes And The Dancer in 1921)
indicates a move from bitterness and lack of admiration for the pettiness of his contemporaries to
enthusiasm and praise for the rebels’ courage and romanticism.
The wind of independence had started to blow: 1916 was a turning point in Irish history, and in
Yeats’s perception of his contemporaries. This marked the start of his political commitment. He was
appointed at the Senate in 1921 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.
III.2.2 NON-COINCIDENCE OF HISTORICAL AND AESTHETIC MOVEMENTS
III.2.2.1 Modernism and nationalism?
The birth of the nation took Yeats and most Irishmen by surprise. While Europe was at war, the
Easter 1916 RisingG (fostered by the Irish Republican Brotherhood) occurred, a far cry from Yeats’s idea
of cultural nationalism and from the agenda / postulates of modernism. The Rising was to be
followed by the nation’s war with the British Empire (War of Independence, 1919-21), and by the
Civil War (1921-22).
Complément
Read “” (1928)
En savoir plus
BBC documentations about Easter Rising (1916)
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/) W
III.2.2.2 Yeats and Modernism
However, Yeats’s literature fails to fit in with the characteristics of the aesthetic movement of
Modernism which involves according to critic Terence Brown :
“literary and artistic exile, déraciné, cosmopolitan and metropolitan rather than national foci, a highly self
conscious eclectism and near universality of cultural forms”.
Yeats was reluctant to acknowledge modernist literary achievements, among which was Joyce’s
Ulysses in 1922, and it must be said that there are few attempts at flow-of-consciousness in his
oeuvre, or an aesthetic of waste and discarded objects not unlike TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
“” (1928) is an exception, as it is a poem in which the ageing poet depicts himself visiting a
classroom and thinking (using the stream-of-consciousness method) about his aesthetic
achievements.
III.2.3 BITTERNESS
III.2.3.1 The Hugh Lane Controversy
G Voir glossaire
W Voir webographie
16
Complément
Read “” (1914)
There is much bitterness on Yeats’s part regarding the Irish nation.
Yeats disavowed those who refused to finance the construction of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
Hugh Lane, who was Lady Gregory’s nephew, had offered to donate a large collection of
impressionist art to the city of Dublin provided the people supported the project. The project failed
to go through as the City of Dublin refused to subsidize the collection. The topical ballad is thus
based on current events, and Yeats seizes this form and the possibility for a more colloquial diction
to vent his frustration with his contemporaries’ pettiness. In the poem, Yeats quotes patrons of the
arts in the Italian Renaissance so as to show how the arts in Italy progressed in spite of what the
populace thought, thus providing an essential matrix for Western arts. “Paudeen” (Patrick or Paddy)
and Biddy (Brigid) stand for the ignorant Irish people who are not interested in promoting the arts.
En savoir plus
The Hugh Lane Gallery (http://www.hughlane.ie/about_hugh_lane.php)
W
III.2.3.2 The Playboy Riots
Yeats also resented the hypocrisy of those who took parts in riots against the staging of JM Synge’s
Playboy of the Western World in 1907 (the play gave rise to booing and rife criticism of its “foul”
language and “un-Irish” themes). The tale of an Irish village idolising a man who has killed his own
father was, wrote Arthur Griffiths, editor of the United Irishman, "a vile and inhuman story told in the
foulest language".
This accounts for the tone of bitter sarcasm in “”, a poem in which Yeats laments the loss of heroes
and lofty ideas, all of which have been substituted by the petty Irish who “fumble in the greasy till /
And add the halfpence to the pence”.
Yeats termed his distaste for the middle-class “Whiggery”. However, the peasants seemed to be
spared Yeats’s resentment, in that he saw them as free and carefree people, whose innocence was
not unlike the artist’s
Complément
Read “”
The poem exemplifies how Yeats, as a poet, identifies with the innocent child, and envisions poetry
as a way to escape from a corrupted and aesthetically restricted world.
Yeats was eager to set aside his middle-class bourgeois origins and identified himself with the
Ascendancy, closer to his protestant origins. From 1903 onwards, when Maud Gonne married Major
McBride, Yeats became more and more attracted to conservatism and attacked his “fool-driven land”
in almost Swiftian fashion.
III.3 DISAPPOINTMENT WITH IRELAND AND POLITICS
III.3.1 YEATS’S MOVE TOWARDS COMMITMENT
“” published in 1921, contradicts Yeats’s “” (dated 1914). The human comedy has been turned into a
tragedy which fuels the nation’s mythology of heroes. The image of the stone in this poem testifies
W Voir webographie
17
to Yeats’s idea that a fixed ideal is a threat to the heart : “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the
heart”.
From then on Yeats’s commitment during the War of independence (1921-22) is active. This is
followed by his nomination at the Senate in 1922
Complément
See “”, a poem in which he questions his inaction but chooses to retire in his tower (→ section II :
“My House”)
The disorder of the time was matched by his growing conservatism and the notion that only
authoritarianism will save the nation. His references to Anglo-Irish writers from the 18th century
became more and more numerous (Swift, Burke, etc).
In 1928, at the end of his mandate at the Senate, Yeats retired progressively from public life. When
Cosgrave loses his mandate and De Valera is elected in 1932, Yeats shows acute interest in the neofascist Blue Shirts created by General O’Duffy, and whose political postulates are in keeping with
Yeats’s distaste for the people and sense of elitism. He changed sides in 1937 and supported the
Spanish Republic against the troops of Franco.
III.3.2 THE NEED FOR A SYSTEM
In “Yeats and the idea of revolutionB”, Seamus Deane showed that Yeats was “… one of that long line
of European romantic writers who combined a revolutionary aesthetic with traditionalist politics. He found
the dominant theme of regeneration in Nietzsche, Shelley and Blake. He used his eclectic knowledge to
construct a history of philosophy which was also a philosophy of history”.
Yeats, says Deane, enforced the reading that Ireland was a unique country and he offered a view of
history as crisis, which in turn became politics. – “But Irish politics enacted for him the great cultural
battle of the era between Romantics and Utilitarians.” (Deane). His sense of crisis allowed him to see the
archetypal patterns of history emerging out of the complexities of contemporary politics.
III.3.3 DESPISE, DECLINE, CHAOS AND HOPE
III.3.3.1 “September 1913”
“” exposed his dislike for the middle class’s attachment for praying and saving. Mostly, he saw the
middle class as “unredeemable from the things of the earth because of their fear of death”, which had been
neutralized as an imaginative and physical reality.
Yeats’s response to this was his belief in reincarnation : “By virtue of it, death was both contemplated
and overcome. This is why he defended religious systems which were reverential towards the notion of
reincarnation like Greece, Ireland was a holy land because the spirits of the dead were valued".
The artist, wrote Deane, “combined aristocratic form with emotion of multitude”. His role was to outface
death and to acknowledge a dimension other than the secular and the bourgeois.
III.3.3.2 The tragedy of “Easter 1916”
Complément
B Voir bibliographie
18
Read “”
The reference is to the resurrection of Christ and the sacrifice of the victims of the Rising, glorified
by sheer mention of their names and commemorated in the poem. Thus there is a shift between the
description of the protagonists of the rebellion in stanza 1 and stanza 2.
Note also the importance of naming / voicing/ speaking out loud the names of the heroes of
Ireland.
The presence of the “I” is significant : “I write it out in a verse”, says the poet, thus stressing the link
between orality and textuality. Also note the shifts in the position of the “I” (it is present on centre
stage in stanza 1, then less so in the next 2 stanzas, and back to a prominent position in the last
stanza).
The poem can be taken at face value as a meditation on sacrifice and the way in which devotion to a
cause can endow the purposeless lives of people with a tragic dimension.
The text explores the discrepancy between “the casual comedy” of life, symbolised by the “motley”
costume of the Shakespearian jester. The contrast is one between “where motley is worn” and “where
green is worn”. It sets up images of fixity (stone, etc) against images of mutability and hope (flowing
water), vitality (animals mating) and sexual energy (horses, moor-cocks and hens).
Elsewhere, Jacqueline Genet B stresses that Yeats fears that the sacrifice of the heroes might
compromise the renewal of life cycles and the movement of life. He is torn between his admiration
for the sacrifice they carried out and the fixity of their ideals, which seems to contradict the cyclical
movement of history.
The poem expresses tragic joy, as Deane points out : “The men of 1916 had offered their deaths to history.
In doing so, they had broken the cycle of eternal recurrence”.
III.3.3.3 Chaos and decline
Ireland is but the starting point of his vision of a cyclic history which takes in all of Western
civilisation and points to approaching chaos (civil war in Ireland, troubles in Europe and the coming
war).
Parnell’s death takes on cosmic value as the end of a cycle and the beginning of another. Destruction
should then be followed by renewal, and so on, endlessly, as “” points out
Complément
See “” [further comments on this poem later in course]
B Voir bibliographie
19
IV THE IRISH SUBJECT MATTER
IV.1 THE LITERARY REVIVAL
IV.1.1 DEANGLICIZING IRELAND
It is generally agreed that between 1890 and 1920 there was an Irish literary Revival or Renaissance
which accompanied the birth of the Irish nation, inaugurated with the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921.
Yeats, together with Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, JM Synge, George Moore and George Russell,
initiated this literary movement.
Hyde’s notion of an Irish-Ireland and his conviction of the “necessity of de-anglicizing Ireland” must be
seen as an incentive for such groups as the Gaelic League. Language revival had been under way for
a while, and several grammar books and manuals were published.
En savoir plus
See Hyde's Speech (http://www.gaeilge.org/deanglicising.html)
W
IV.1.2 CHARLES STEWART PARNELL : POLITICS AND THE REVIVAL
While there was some criticism of the movement, which was seen as an aesthetic diversion rather
than an authentically nationalist movement, Yeats saw the movement as a way to fill the political
vacuum after the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890-1 .
Charles Stewart Parnell
En savoir plus
See Parnell in Irish History
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/parnell_charles.shtml)
W
The head of the Irish parliamentary party and the founder of The United Ireland, a newspaper with
a clear nationalist agenda, Parnell was the most prominent supporter of the first Home Rule bill (i.e.
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
20
political autonomy) which came short of being voted in Westminster in 1896. Parnell’s death in 1891
was followed by the founding in 1892 of the Irish Literary Society in London and then of the
National Literary Society in Dublin under the presidency of D. Hyde.
On the British side, this led to an increase in the number of Irish Literary clubs in London, one of
which the Irish Literary Society developed from in London in 1892.
There is some questioning as to how much of a political vacuum there really was at the end of the
1890s in Ireland. Rather than a political vacuum, there was a spiritual vacuum as to what direction
Ireland should take, or how the national soul should be defined. Imagining the new nation was
what was at stake for Russell (AE), who acknowledged Ireland’s heroic legacy but also insisted on
the necessity to include “the average man” and not only the aristocratic elite in this new nation.
IV.1.3 THE LITERARY REVIVAL
It should also be added that much of the criticism goes to show that Yeats’s theory that the Revival
was filling a political vacuum does not hold : the interest in Irish culture largely pre-dated Parnell’s
death, which Yeats envisioned romantically as the end of an era, in the same way as he saw Parnell
as a tragic and heroic figure. The “Irish Literary Revival” may be said to be a mere blanket phrase
for the necessary reassessment of Irish literature at the time, in which Yeats definitely took part.
IV.1.3.1 Yeats’s main contribution to it was his collection of essays entitled The Celtic
Twilight (1893)
Complément
See ""
Some of his early poems thus make overt reference to Irish mythology, epics or folklore, and
insistently refer to Irish place names and settings dear to Yeats’s heart, in particular Co. Sligo where
he spent the happiest years of his childhood.
Sligo stands as the epitome of Ireland, and it comes as no surprise that this utopic Ireland should be
represented by the motif / topos of the small isle within the bigger island of Ireland.
IV.1.3.2 “The Stolen Child”
“” was published in the collection entitled The Wind Among The Reeds (1899) and relies very much on
fairy legends and otherworldly creatures. Yeats explained in The Celtic Twilight that there was a
legend which said that the wind among the reeds was but the sound of fairies mourning the
downfall of paganism)
Complément
Read
IV.2 YEATS’S IRISH SUBJECT MATTER
IV.2.1 YEATS AND ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE
IV.2.1.1 The Ascendancy / Yeats and his fellow Irishmen
21
While acknowledging his debt to English literature (Shakespeare, Spenser and Blake), Yeats was
eager to set aside his middle-class bourgeois origins and identified himself with the Ascendancy,
closer to his protestant origins.
IV.2.1.2 The limits of the English tradition and the need for an Irish literature
Yeats did not have an exaggerated esteem for Victorian poets, partly because his own father
disparaged Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sensuality as a substitute for passion, objected to C.
Swinburne’s unawareness of common experience, to R. Browning’s obtrusive attachment to his own
beliefs, and to Tennyson’s generalization of the state of the world.
En savoir plus
About Victorian poets (http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/victorian_poets) W
There was a general concern with the fact that poetry should not be too exclusively concerned with
feelings or adhere to ideas too rigorously in the Yeats household. In addition, Victorian poetry did
not see literature as a vehicle of nationality.
Yeats’s earlier work in the 1880s was self-consciously close to the traditions of the classical pastoral
and of English romanticism. He turned to an Irish subject matter as an alternative to English
literature, which he thought was too engrossed in materialism. Ireland was the antidote for 19th
century materialism (and utilitarianismG), reality was to be found among the Irish peasants and their
legends.
The revived interest in Irish folklore was also an English concern with Matthew Arnold in 1867, On
the Study of Celtic Literature, and it should be said that Yeats’s use of the Celtic material was not the
first experiment in Ireland. Standish O’Grady had previously written a series of books in archaistic
prose ("Finn and his Companions" (1891), "The Coming of Cuchulain" (1894), "The Chain of Gold" (1895),
"Ulrick the Ready" (1896) and "The Flight of the Eagle" (1897), and "The Departure of Dermot" (1913).
Seamus Deane in Celtic revivals stressed the influence of Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland :
Heroic Period (1878-80). Yeats was but the last in a long line of antiquarians, and at the time he was
writing the literature of the peasantry had been consigned into writing by the more cultivated
sections of the 19th c landlord class
En savoir plus
See Gutenberg Project : Arnold's text (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5159)
W
Sir Samuel Ferguson also made dull but finished verse based on ancient Irish tales. However,
Yeats’s The Wandering of Oisin went beyond that in that it developed a new way of handling the
old stories.
En savoir plus
See The Wanderings of Oisin
(http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_butler_yeats/poems/10252) W
IV.2.1.3 The shift towards a national subject matter
W Voir webographie
G Voir glossaire
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
22
Yeats’s decision to shift subject matters from Arcadia and India to Ireland is usually attributed to
O’Leary’s influence.
En savoir plus
John O'Leary Obituary (http://en.wikisource.org/The_Times/1907/Obituary/John_O%27Leary) in
The Times, March 18, 1907 W
John O’Leary loaned Yeats his books on the subject and helped publish Poems and Ballads of Young
Ireland in 1888. Yeats’s encounter with O’Leary was pivotal : he met him when O’Leary returned to
Dublin after five years imprisonment in Dublin and 13 years of political exile in France. He had been
convicted of taking part in an uprising against England in 1867 and his FenianG (Irish nationalist)
newspaper was active in nationalist propaganda. The Young Ireland societies he developed fostered
the Irish literary tradition and history.
While Yeats wrote several poems in the style of Young Ireland political propaganda, he was
dismissive of the movement, which failed to produce convincing poetry. His involvement was
politically neutral, and his contribution to Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland included poems based
on some aspect of Irish folklore.
While Yeats was patriotic, he disliked sentimental nationalism and he believed that poetry should
“have a local habitation when at all possible”, and that “we should make poems on the familiar landscapes we
love, not the strange and glittering ones we wonder at.”
Yeats’s use of nationality allowed him to transcend it, to reach for the universal and divine life
through national life : “One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand – that glove is one’s
nation, the only thing one knows even a little of” (James Ellman)
IV.2.1.4 The evolution in the Irish subject matter
There was an evolution in Yeats’s writings between the 1880s and the 1890s : gradually the
peasantry replaced the fairies as the major Irish subject in his poems.
By the late 1890s, the gods and heroes of ancient Ireland had replaced both the fairies and the
peasantry. Yeats had realised that the ancient wisdom he searched for in fairy more and in the
heroic passions of the peasants were both available in Irish myth and legends.
The Rose (1893) was a collection of poems which identified the fairies more clearly with ancient gods.
Yeats’s concern with style is expressed in “ ALL THINGS CAN TEMPT ME W” : he explained that he
was torn between the tradition of Irish literature and its spontaneity or ability to stand aloof from
the formal demands of style which had been initiated by Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent in 1800
and the French symbolists
IV.2.2 THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN (1889) AND THE CELTIC TWILIGHT 1893
IV.2.2.1 The Wanderings of Oisin, 1889
W Voir webographie
G Voir glossaire
W Voir webographie
23
Yeats’s first collection of poetry in 1889 The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems W included poems
whose subject matter mostly had to do with fairies or peasants. Most critics are in agreement that
Yeats did not know much about the traditional form of the Irish folk ballad and his articles evince
his own disappointment with the literary conventions of the 19th century Irish poets. Ultimately he
rejected much of what he had found in the Young Ireland poetry of the 1840s and in the artistic and
rhetoric mannerism of the 19th c Irish ballad tradition.
IV.2.2.2 The Celtic Twilight, 1893
The Celtic Twilight, published in 1893, introduced some of the distinctly Irish features. W. B. Yeats
introduced references to Celtic mythology in his writings : the epic cycles of Cuchulain, the Tuatha
de Danaan, tribes of the Goddess Danu, the Fenian cycle with The Wanderings of Oisin W(the son of
Finn, who followed the beautiful Niamh to the realm of the Sidhe, only to come back three centuries
later) ; references to the Tir Na Nog, the land of eternal youth.
Yeats also mixed pagan and Christian elements into his poetry, such as in “The Secret Rose” or “
” ). Ireland is often represented as a lady wearing a dress embroidered with red roses, a symbol of
beauty and eternity, and of the necessity for the nation to develop the cult of beauty, an important
step in national liberation.
In The Celtic Twilight (1893), Yeats hoped for a general rebirth of Irish culture and language, and
aimed at self respect for the nation. This involved collecting ad reporting oral evidence of Irish
popular culture and translating it ; and it also stimulated the creation of works (drama, poetry, etc)
which were folklore-related.
Russell’s idea that the future would be democratic translated into Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s
interest in peasant lore and customs, since the surviving speakers of the language were country
people. The anti-modern romantic ruralists thus tended to avoid issues of urbanisation, urban or
industrial workers. The irony of it all, Vance stresses, is that what started as a protest against the
Anglophone modern world was materially assisted by books which were mass-produced. In 1895 he
published an Anthology of Irish Verse, which controversial introduction alleged a lack of poetic
voice until the 19th century, in spite of the fading Irish Celt tradition.
Yeats was responsive to what was “racy of the soil” in the words of the Young IrelandG (MOT A
DEFINIR MANQUANT)slogan. His publication in 1899 of an important collection of pre-famine
rural life stories and a prose anthology of Fairy and Folk Tales were both commercially viable on the
late-Victorian literary market and the volume were mass-produced.
The full title is “The Celtic Twilight :Men and Women, Dhouls and Faeries” → human personalities had
precedence over any depiction of the fairies
Yeats recorded the visions and beliefs of the countryside (e.g. apparitions of the recent dead or of
people of history and legend), which resulted in this collection.
The collection also embodies many development and changes in Yeats’sconception and depiction of
Irish folklore : the first edition collected legends rather than myths , because he enjoyed the simpler
and anecdotal form of the material he found in the Sligo region. The fact that he spoke no Irish also
meant that his Irish informants were more likely to give him fairy legends and folktales even if he
had preferred folktales and tales from ancient Irish mythology.
Although Yeats may have been criticised for “embellishing” the legends, one has to realise that he in
fact juxtaposed the two materials : the collected peasant stories as well as his own visionary
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
G Voir glossaire
24
experiences and his own vivid, immediate voice. This was also in keeping with the notion that the
ancient poet was someone who was prone to having visions and whose poetry was a verbal
manifestation of occult knowledge.
IV.2.2.3 Key Words In Yeats’s Approach Of Ireland In Literature
Irish folklore combined a world grounded in history and geography, the temporal, and the
supernatural world of fairies.
IV.2.2.3.1 Locality
Locality was key to his approach: local customs, characters, songs and expressions were his
material. He assumed that the more primitive a person or an expression, the more certain to be
universal.
IV.2.2.4 The link between folklore and occultism
Yeats’s enthusiasm for the occult in the shape of theosophy coincided with his deep commitment to
Irish nationalism. Its founder, Mme Blavatsky, “discounted recent theories of evolution and had argued in
her first book, Isis Unveiled (1877), that ancient man, rather than having been an ape, had been in touch with
spiritual realities and had possessed a secret wisdom now known only to an ancient brotherhood in Tibet.”
Her Theosophical Society aimed at transmitting some of these truths to the world. After Mme
Blavastky’s, whose occult powers Yeats questioned, failed to accomplish miracles and Yeats
resigned, he joined a similar society name the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn in 1890.
Occultism and folk-lore pursued similar aims, and theosophy accepted ghosts and fairies in their
system of belief. Yeats described in letters to O’Leary how they had succeeded in invoking fairies
and summoning them in sessions with the Golden Dawn. Yeats turned to Irish folklore in the hope
of finding universal matters and proof of the existence of spiritual beings. Blavatsky also claimed
that this secret knowledge which was common to all religions was to be found in the oral, rather
than the written tradition. However his knowledge of folklore extended well beyond Ireland and he
associated Irish folklore with Near-East beliefs? He obviously also had extensive knowledge of
Greek and Celtic mythology.
The Celtic Twilight is also filled with what folklorists now call “memorats”, i.e. narratives of first or
second hand encounters with supernatural creatures.
Yeats’s aesthetic stance followed by “”, about a peasant whose stories are transcribed by Yeats.
IV.2.2.5 Form
●
There are three types of traditional narratives : Myths / Legends / Folktales
Yeats was always keen on using traditional form and had a hard time using free verse as Pound or
Eliot did. What was new to the approach was the fact that Irish folklore provided a new subject
matter and a new poetic diction and syntax → the idiom and content of Irish oral tradition was
unknown to most of Yeats’s readers.
The form he used in his earlier poems was the ballad form, which he hoped to rescue. He wanted a
personal, specialized, local language to go with his local setting. Yeats would compose poems to
remembered airs from the Gaelic folksong tradition.
Cf.
25
See for example “”
●
Characteristics of Folklore Tradition : orality, tradition, tension
Yeats’s lifelong interest in Irish folklore was consistent with his conviction that great literature was
both oral and traditional.
Citation
“There is no poem so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater or that a bad ear cannot make
it nothing” (Yeats, “Literature and the living voice”, 1906). This oral quality, he said, distinguished
Irish literature (or even Greek literature) from English literature.
“Write for the ear” (an intro for my plays, 1937).
Dynamic tension between stability and variation is also another characteristic of folklore. Folklore
is an oral process of continual creation rather than a static piece of literature frozen in print. Yeats
did the same with his poems, which he rewrote constantly (the same was true of his father the
painter Jack B. Yeats, who never completed his portraits).
Let us note that Yeats is mainly interested in exploring the tension between the world of nature and
the supernatural, and the thresholds between these two worlds, which are often embodied by very
tiny creatures (fish, worms, trout, mice…) Thus the drama that is played out should be seen as one
of cosmic proportions → mise en abyme / mirror effect : the tiny reflects the universal.
●
Stylistically, another characteristic of folklore is also visible in Yeats’s works :
Note his reliance on formulas for its literary structure and style : “even what I alter must seem
traditional”, he said.
He also referred to his material as legendary rather than mythological: he considered legends as
historically grounded in heroic personality, as a matter both of passion and vision. LEGEND was
passion + vision + historical reality
Writing about the legendary involved the use of impersonal writing in Crossways (1889) : gesture
and physical description are rare and the figures appear in an abstract pattern, like the impersonal ,
stylized figures of the fairy tale.
It also meant immediacy : Yeats’s style in The Rose became even more dramatic, more immediate in
time and place, thus achieving the aura of historical reality which distinguished legends from myths
and folktales, folklorists argue. For Yeats the meaning of history resided in the motifs and patterns
of oral legends rather than in the facts of written history. He believed that legends acquired
symbolic truth over the centuries.
Yeats usually identifies by name his informants, but remained rather vague about the locale. : this
allowed him to retain some mystery and to enhance the feeling that the narratives were universal,
but he always created the impression that the experiences and beliefs could be related to real people
in real places.
Much of the literary effect also came from the lack of coherence and intellectual understanding.
There was an enigmatic value to his writings, which functioned much in the way the audience
background did in oral tradition.
●
Uncovering meaning
Yeats’s method was to assume that the shape of any tale of great antiquity was not accidental but
that it reflected, even if imperfectly, a hidden and significant theme. The poet’s task was to uncover
26
concentric circles of significance, and the basic wisdom the tale contained could thus be applied to
his own past as well as the present.
He used Irish legends as a means of self-expression : while folklore was anonymous by definition
Lady Gregory and Yeats were aware of the role of the creative artist. His writings were often based
on the memory of personality and of place. The process of celebrating noteworthy personalities had
an impact on his works.
Yeats perpetuated the memory of his friends by celebrating their personalities in legends and
anecdotes. And this reduction of personality to its simplest form rather than, a highly structured
format is also a characteristic of folk legend.
IV.3 ILLUSTRATION : “TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES” (1893)
Complément
See " To Ireland in the Coming Times1 "
IV.3.1 CONTEXT
The poem, published in The Rose (1893) sums up Yeats’s indissolvable relation with 19th-century
Irish poetry and his ambitions. It is written in italics because it an apostrophe and addresses future
generations.
The “Red rose” here is a symbol of spiritual beauty, and in this group of poems represents Maud
Gonne, to whom the song is dedicated (“While still I may, I write for you / The love I lived, the dream I
knew”), and the spirit of Ireland.
IV.3.2 " TRUE BROTHER OF A COMPANY / THAT SANG, TO SWEETEN
IRELAND'S WRONG"
IV.3.2.1 The other bards
In this poem, Yeats places himself in eminent poetic company (Davis, Mangan, Ferguson) which
led to criticism of his arrogance. When he realized that Irish ballad writers had actually been writing
in a middle-class style rather than in a living folk tradition, he set out to know Irish peasantry for
himself.
Mangan is one of the most satisfying poets before Yeats, Bloom says, although he did not mean as
much to Yeats as the more conventional and English Ferguson and Allingham. Yeats felt uneasiness
regarding Mangan : he feared his rhetoric – although Anglo-Irish poetry is to be rhetorical if it is to
be itself (→overstatement as a prevalent mode in O’Casey and Synge).
Thomas Davis was a member of the Young Ireland movement, a poet and a founder of The Nation, a
journal which stance was openly ultra-nationalistic.
O’Leary’s influence is particularly acute here; with W. B. Yeats focussing on the idyllic, fanciful
tradition. In addition to this, other literary popularisations were available at the time : Mangan’s
adaptations, Ferguson’s restoration of the tales and heroes of Ireland, Standish O’Grady’s History of
Ireland (1878-80)
IV.3.2.2 Poetic rather than political company
1
Cf annexe : Poem : "To Ireland in the Coming Times"
27
Yeats describes his position as member of an ancestral bardic tradition (“True brother of a company”).
His “brotherhood” is not political (cf Irish Republican Brotherhood (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/
british/easterrising/profiles/po17.shtml) W) but poetic, and he asserts that his role as a poet should
not be overviewed. He sees his “rhymes” as deeper than their mere “rhyming”
Their rhetoric is ponderous while his poetry is rooted in the depths of the human mind and in the
Great Memory (“My rhymes more than their rhyming tell / Of things discovered in the deep …”).
IV.3.2.3 The poet’s reach for beauty and timelessness (eternity)
Yeats sees his poetry as reaching for deeper values : eternal spiritual values or spiritual
quintessence as embodied by eternal (i.e. pre-Christian) Ireland (“the red-rose-bordered hem / Of
her, whose history began / Before God made the angelic clan”) or by the elements (“the elemental
creatures go / … That hurry from unmeasured mind / To rant and rage in flood and wind”) and
folk tradition (A Druid land, a Druid Tune !”)
He contrasts the immeasurable power of imagination and the mind with the limitations of time
and everything corporeal. The poet is able to seize the irrational and look at these “elemental
creatures” in the eyes, he is the one whose “measured ways” allow him to “barter gaze for gaze”
with the fairies and be ushered in their spiritual universe, and to be at one with them and with
what they symbolize : eternal beauty, eternity, immortality. Thus the poem is a statement about
the value of poetry.
IV.3.2.4 The poem stresses ambivalent issues of unity and the difficulty to achieve it:
Unity with tradition and themes ; with poets (“one with…”) → the bards sang for Ireland and
provided “ a measured quietude” that compensated for the “wrongs” done to her. Poetic creation
involves transcending what is/was shapeless, violent or ugly (“when time began to rant and rage”)
into beauty and form. In other words it means transforming “unmeasured minds” into “measured
ways”. The poem achieves beauty and unity as well as immortality, while the individual is
subjected to mortality and the passing of time.
This is shown with the failure to be united with a lover (Maud : “love/dream):
In stanza I, Yeats states he writes about Ireland, and in stanza III the equation between love of
Ireland / love of Maud is made clear. (“her”/Ireland becomes “you”/Maud). Man cannot escape
from his human condition : the passing of time and impossible immortality.
“Measurer Time” sees the birth and passing of passion, but man is doomed to die. On the other hand,
eternity, symbolized by “the red-rose-bordered hem” figure of eternal, pagan, or pre-Christian Ireland,
is out of man’s reach.
In the human world, all things of the mind, of beauty and perfection are doomed to disappear : they
“pass on to where may be” there is “no place for love and dream at all”. The poet is aware of his own
human finitude and laments it.
For man (as a bodily thing) lives not in a world where the light “Trails” and “flying feet” of Ireland
that beat the measure of eternity may be heard, but in a finite world where “God goes by with white
footfall” → “God” here should be interpreted as opposed to the “Before God” mentioned in stanza I.
God’s pace is not light nor ethereal, it is slow and all too obvious (“white footfall”).
IV.3.2.5 Conclusion
W Voir webographie
28
The poem’s final lines indicate the mission of the poet : his “rhymes” make him a messenger of
perfection and unity, one who can testify to beauty because he has gazed into the eyes of eternity
and beauty (the fairies, eternal Ireland represented by the image of the “red-rose-bordered hem”). The
“benighted things that go / about my table to and fro” shall thus be put into rhyme and survive the
passing of time, disorder, obscurity (“the dim coming times”). He is a torch-bearer, one whose poetry
bears light on eternal truths : love and beauty.
29
V YEAT’S LINEAGE
V.1
FATHERS AND FOREFATHERS : BIOLOGICAL AND INTELLECTUAL FILIATION
V.1.1 THE GENEALOGICAL POEMS
Complément
“ [“That for a barren passion’s sake / I have no child, I have nothing but a book”]
This is an instance of the “genealogical poems” in which Yeats lists his male family members on his
mother’s and his father’s side, who have made the poet what he is. Yeats’s protestant forefathers
were merchants, scholars, soldiers, merchant skippers (the grandfather on his mother’s side : “You
most of all, silent and fierce old man”). However the poem strikingly links these ancestral figures with
other figures in Irish history and important events.
led a rebellion against England in 1803. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he joined
the patriotic society, the Society of United Irishmen who had initially campaigned for parliamentary
reform and an end to religious discrimination against Catholics (though Emmet and many United
Irishmen were Protestants)
En savoir plus
See Society of United Irishmen in Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_United_Irishmen)
W
The Protestant King William of Orange is mentioned as another forefather
King William of Orange
He mentions “The Dutchman’s victory” over the Catholic James II at the battle of the Boyne, 1690
rather than connecting them directly with himself (through a “blood” relationship).
The poem does not openly name the ancestors but resorts to the device of the synecdoche : it
mentions the general class of things (the professions, the functions) to refer to a smaller class of
things. There is a kind of transfer of meaning or of significance from the great events of History to
the private narrative of the poet’s ancestry. This problematises the relationship between the grand
narrative of events and that of the private narrative of Yeats’s life : his “barren passion” with Maud
Gonne, his childlessness at nearly 50. His books are a substitute for generation
W Voir webographie
30
Note that the approximate rhyme between “loin” and “mine” “establishes a distinction between two
parts of society and two kinds of genealogies : one that proceeds by accretion of wealth, be it
material, spiritual or symbolical wealth, and one that proceeds by substraction and loss” [“wasteful
values…barren passion… nothing but a book to claim his place in the line]. (cf. C. Bonafous-Murat B)
V.1.2 YEATS AND CHILDHOOD
Declan KiberdB focuses on Yeats’s treatment of childhood in the poems : it is a period of life
surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of nostalgia and escape. It is a world neither of change nor of
growth : intense, unpurged feelings for childhood are not submitted to the test of adult life., or of
childhood itself.
Yeats views childhood as a state of unspoilt nature, and the equation between the unselfconscious
peasant and the child is often to be found. : it is a zone where the older forms of culture are
preserved in oral tradition and which led to the development of the image of « the child-like
Hibernian ».
Kiberd also notes that there is so little reference to childhood in the poems that one wonder whether
the poet had a youth at all : childhood is evoked fleetingly in “ ”, “but only as a measure of the adult
man’s desperation”.
The children’s presence dwindles out of the poem from “momentary wonder” into nothing as the old
nun does all the replying (communication with children seems to be out of the question), while the
infant Yeats appear briefly as a “shape” upon his mother’s lap. All the references to the children in
the classroom bring the poet back to his love for the woman who once was a little girl too. (“I dream
of a Ladean body”/ “I… wonder if she stood so at that age” / “she stands before me as a living child” / “her
present image floats into the mind”
En savoir plus
See Helen Vendler’s LECTURE ON THIS POEM
(http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/vendler/) . W
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland, Harvard UP, 1997 .
Table of contents (http://books.google.fr/books?
id=EFwcAKR3MqcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0)
V.2
PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC LIFE : THE MAKING OF THE POET
V.2.1 ACTION VS. CONTEMPLATION
All of Yeats’s life thus spans a very agitated time in Irish history, which appears in many of his
poems. His life alternated between periods of commitment / action and contemplation : after a
phase of nationalist enthusiasm, he marked his discontent with his fellow Irishmen in “” before
coming back to political life after 1916 (and becoming a senator in 1922), and withdrawing again
from it later in life.
B Voir bibliographie
B Voir bibliographie
W Voir webographie
31
However, the poet was always torn between political commitment and private issues, between
public and private life, politics and literary creation. The self is torn between the individual and the
nation, and Yeats is constantly seeking a way to reconcile his self and his anti-self.
En savoir plus
See The Abbey Theatre's website (http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/about/history.html) W
V.2.2 THE NATIONALIST STREAK : PUBLIC LIFE
V.2.2.1 Yeats’s commitments
Yeats’s nationalist streak runs through all his works : as a boy in London, the young W. B. Yeats
longed for holidays in Sligo, a place which testifies to his ambivalent feelings. His interest in peasant
culture is undeniable, yet he has an attraction for the aristocrats of the Big Houses.
O’Leary drew Yeats to the Irish national society debates on politics and culture, and he lamented the
fact that there never was a great poet in Ireland. It is also through O’Leary that he came to meet
Maud Gonne, a revolutionary who toured England and Scotland to talk to the Irish abroad.
Yeats derived his taste for action and commitment partly from her, and became a member of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians, named after the warriors of Celtic mythology, the Fianna).
He stood against the visit of Queen Victoria to England in 1897, and became involved in the creation
of a monument to Wolfe Tone, the leader of the failed 1798 revolution (also mentioned in “16 dead
men”).
His literary involvement began in London as early as 1892 with the '"Southwark Irish Literary club”,
which opened the way for the creation of the Irish national Society in London. Yeats is convinced
that literature was key to the creation of a national soul/ spirit. In 1899 he founded the Irish literary
theatre, The Abbey W.
Yeats’s Ireland was one of turmoil and historical upheavals He was only 26 when Parnell died in
1891 : Parnell remained a symbol of romantic Ireland in “”. Parnell’s death and the suspension of the
Home Rule debate and process indirectly led to a diminished interest of the population in politics,
and a twist towards cultural nationalism. The death of the fatherly figure of the leader was followed
by the creation of the Gaelic league in 1893 (founded by Douglas Hyde), and was also the year Yeats
published The Celtic Twilight.
He “benefited” from Parnell’s death to some extent, as his article “Mourn and then Onwards” was
published in United Ireland on the day he died.
Remarque
The bill was to be enacted in 1914, but was suspended when WW1 began.
V.2.2.2 The limits of political commitment
However, Seamus Deane is critical of Yeats’s heroes : « they were embodiments of individuality, …
aristocrats, not democrats. Three of them, Parnell, Synge and Lane, were at the centre of three great
controversies -- the O’Shea divorce case, the Playboy riots and the Lane bequest. In each instance,
Yeats viewed them as heroic and aristocratic figures attacked by the plebeian mob.”
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
32
Events like this, the carnage of World War I lessened his faith in the sense of a new beginning and
revived Ireland, and so did Edwardian predictions of the end of civilization from about 1913
onwards.
V.3
YEATS AND THE BIG HOUSE : LADY GREGORY AND COOLE PARK
V.3.1 YEATS’S SENSE OF THE ARISTOCRACY
Deane also argues that Yeats distorted history to fit his myth of the revival : he was so eager to
discover an aristocratic element within the protestant tradition and to associate it with the spiritual
aristocracy of the catholic and Celtic peasantry – defining aristocracy in each case as a mark of
Irishness and Irishness as a mark of anti-modernism – that he distorted history in the service of
myth.
Deane argues that Yeats fosters a romantic-aesthetic heritage, which “harbours the desire to obliterate
or reduce the problems of class, economic development; bureaucratic organization and the like, instead
concentrating upon the essences of self, community, nationhood, racial theory, Zeitgeist".
One should note that Yeats’s suggestion that the conversion of politics and history into aesthetic
carries with it the obligation to despise the modern world and to seek refuge from it seems to
confirm Deane’s argument.
V.3.2 THE COOLE PARK POEMS
They are written in elegiac mode and they are poems in praise of the big house and of their owners
and descendants (Lady Gregory, her son, Major Robert Gregory, etc).
V.3.2.1 The house
Yeats visited the place for the 1st time in 1897, and the Kyle-na-no mentioned in “ ” is that of one of
the “seven woods” in Lady Gregory’s estate. THE HOUSE implies a dual meaning in Yeats’ poems :
it is the dwelling place but also the people, the ancestors and descendants in a family. Due to the
context, the big estates of Ireland were to be sold and Lady Gregory’s Coole park house was taken
down.
En savoir plus
See The Coole Park web site (http://www.coolepark.ie/) W
V.3.2.2 The people
A formidable woman, Lady Augusta Gregory was a widow older than Yeats, an aristocrat whose
role in the literary renaissance of the 1900s and in Yeats’s personal development was undeniable :
she helped him establish The Abbey Theatre, and she was his friend and supporter. She is always
discreetly alluded to, as “my friend” “one that is always kind”, etc.
The people associated with these estates : Maud Gonne, Sean McBride (her husband), Major
Gregory, etc, came to symbolize certain values, such as those mentioned in “A prayer for my
daughter” : ceremony (“How but in custom and ceremony / are innocence and beauty born ?”)
The following two poems turn Robert Gregory into a symbol of the ideal figure of the aristocrat, a
modern “honnête homme”.
W Voir webographie
33
Complément
See “ ” (1919)
34
VI THE LITERARY
SYMBOLISM
CONTEXT
:
FROM
ROMANTICISM
TO
VI.1 FIN DE SIECLE, NEW LITERATURE ?
VI.1.1 YEATS’S
AMBIVALENCES
MODERNISM
:
BETWEEN
VICTORIANISM
AND
VI.1.1.1 Yeats’s romantic mood
His works sits across at least two period:, the end of the Victorian era and the heyday of Modernism.
In many respects, his oeuvre was written in reaction to the main tenets of Victorian Literature and
Yeats defined himself as a post-Romantic, someone who had been born at the wrong end of the
century. The adjective is often conflated with “decadent” or “symbolist” in the late 1890s.
Yeats had started writing in imitation of Shelley and Spenser, and only with The Wanderings of Oisin
did he reach a more personal level in his writing. The style of The Wanderings of Oisin is in keeping
with the romantic mood : the ballad, or the narrative poem such as The Wanderings of Oisin create a
melancholy style; and so do the use of leitmotifs (as in “”).
His distaste for modern free verse was also very outspoken and it therefore comes as no surprise
that he should be faithful to romantic melodies and themes.
VI.1.1.2 Romantic Imagery And Metaphors
The imagery and metaphors of the early poems have also much to do with traditional romantic
imagery. The depiction of the environment reflects the poet’s state of mind : light and darkness,
sunset and twilight, uncertainty , intermediary moments of contemplation.
His romantic pose is not unlike the Romantics’ in so far as he easily refers to personal nostalgia and
frustration (due to exile in London for instance). The “Stolen child” of the poem thus bears obvious
resemblance with the young poet, his childhood and the more antiquity of Ireland are but one
idealised past.
Thus the references to the Irish subject matter allowed him to intermingle nationalism and
romanticism : this meant being more specific regarding location of the ballads or poems he was
writing, and accuracy in the names and portraits of the characters he drew on.
Complément
See “” : “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”
VI.1.1.3 Against Victorian Literature
We have noted that Yeats’s true context was the English romantic tradition from Spenser through
Walter PaterW and the “Tragic generation” of artists such as Symons, Johnson and Dawson who all
termed themselves “Decadents”
En savoir plus
W Voir webographie
35
See Website about Walter Pater (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/pater/index.html)
W
Walter Pater was the main influence on Yeats’s poetry : he exposed the excessive didacticism of
Victorian poetry and encouraged the doctrine of “art for art’s sake”, a form of aesthetics also
developed by Théophile Gautier.
Pater was fascinated both by the decadence of Rome and by the Italian Renaissance, which offered
the foundation for the renewal of form, and the definition of a modern art which was to replace
Victorian literature. Decadence was to be followed by renewal. This is why the Renaissance painter
Botticelli epitomized the refusal to choose from one single form of the spiritual life : to accept
Christianity would call for a renunciation of the imagination’s possibilities.
These possibilities lay in the flux of sensations, and may only be saved through the exercise of the
arts. His aesthetic statement is as follows:
Citation
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. … that the mere matter of a poem … should be
nothing without the form, the spirit, or the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an
end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter.” (Harold Bloom)
For Pater, the truest art of the 19th century was necessarily a renaissance of the Renaissance. His
Renaissance is a historical vision, not unlike Yeats’s “Byzantium”.
What is the most striking feature of Pater that may have influenced Yeats is his excursions in
historicism : this is also the common denominator between the major influences upon WBY : all
these writers formulated patterns of history. They were also attracted to late Roman and Byzantine
history and literature.
They advocated devotion to the religion of beauty and drew imagery from the rituals and
refinement of high art and Catholic iconography. Praise of the loved one was to be expressed
through these images.
VI.1.1.4 “This Filthy Modern Tide”[2]
[2]1
●
The refusal of modernity
Deane points out that Yeats’s statements against modernism (i.e. empiricism, science and
parliamentary democracy) is not uncommon and dates back to the charge by the romantics that
Europe’s political problems should be blamed on Voltaire and Rousseau.
Yeats’s aesthetic is one which offers an a-temporal and universal vision of art.
The beautiful is deemed to be an “objective” reality, which imposes itself on the reader . modernity,
both a as an artistic phenomenon and as a historical period, is a negative idea : it is opposed to the
transcendence of beauty and leads to the degeneration of art.
Yeats, by defining himself as one of “the last romantics” situates himself in an age that favours
tradition and shuns the passing of time which leads to inevitable decay and degeneration of art. He
thus views his works in the context of a continued tradition, that of Berkeley, Swift, Goldsmith and
Burke, the Irish philosopher. He advocates seeking inspiration in one’s literary forefathers.
According to Yeats, modern poetry has forsaken the “Anima Mundi” (Spiritus Mundi in“ " and
“Great Memory” elsewhere) although remembering is key to writing universal literature.
W Voir webographie
1
Note : Quoted in the poem « The Statues »
36
However, he is ambivalent as to the distance which one should keep with former writings :
imitation is not the key to good literature, yet doing away with one’s forebears also entails the risk
of less satisfactory poetry. Filiation does not mean that the poet may control the evolution of art, and
there is a certain fatalism in Yeats’s approach : the circular pattern enhanced by Yeats cannot resist
the urge of the linear pattern of change, and art is bound to be oriented by the period one lives in.
VI.1.2 FIN DE SIÈCLE ANXIETY AND YEATS
VI.1.2.1 Symptoms of the fin de siècle state of mind
They are:as follows decay, decline, use of images referring to a special range of colors (autumn),
decline of the body
The 1890s are termed “fin de siècle”, and they are characterized by provocation and nostalgia.
Baudelaire initiated the fin de siècle spirit: he was part of a generation of writers who cherished
sensations, strangeness, the search for artificiality, “spleen”. They favoured escapism from the ennui
of ordinary life, through legends, or the exploration of the unconscious (Freud).
“” as well as “” are fraught with images of death and brutality, and offer an apocalyptic vision of the
world. Yet both poems are also love poems, which suggest the possibility of change and hope. This
constant play between decadence and renaissance accounts more generally for Yeats’s conception of
history: opposites are at the heart of the individual and of history.
VI.1.2.2 Wilde / The Rhymers’ club
Wilde was a central figure of the “decadent” movement, itself an offshoot of romanticism. His
Salomé (1893) was the epitome of this fin de siècle spirit which challenged Victorian conventions by
introducing and enigmatic, amoral and even morbid feminine character. The play theorized
symbolist drama. Artifice and masks were among the tools of these writers : the symbolists
(Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in France) deemed it impossible
to walk in the steps of their Victorian forebears.
En savoir plus
See more about Oscar Wilde (http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/) W
The Celtic Twilight (1893) partook in the same spirit, Yeats and his friends at the Rhymers’s Club had
the feeling they were reaching the end of an era. Symbolism was the means of expression for the
supernatural from “The Wanderings of Oisin” W to “The wind among the reeds” (1899).
En savoir plus
see The Symbolists in Literature (http://www.site-magister.com/symbolis.htm) W
see The Symbolists and Paintings (http://julien.gadier.free.fr/main.htm) W
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
37
His interest for theosophy and the Golden dawn subsequently fostered the search for symbols, and
so did his work on Blake. (1889-92)
En savoir plus
See more about William Blake (http://www.online-literature.com/blake/) W
By the end of the 1920s, Yeats had devised a symbolical system of his own with the tower and the
moon at the centre of it. Yeats’s theory of history was represented by the geometric shapes of the
gyres : two opposite cones turning in different directions symbolise the movement of history, which
is perturbed every 2,000 years when the rotation within the cones changes, and this matches a
period of disruption in history.
VI.2 SYMBOLIST POSTULATES
VI.2.1 Disapproval of rhetoric was one of the characteristics of the Symbolists
Yeats saw it as an instrument of propaganda, but he was not able to avoid it altogether. While
Yeats’s unconscious employments of rhetoric is to be observed in the recurrence of balanced
structures : balance and repetition was part of his Renaissance inheritance and was in keeping with
his views on the antithetical principle in the self and in history.
His use of symbols in the writings makes him departs even further from the Victorian tradition : the
poet, he declares, works with a series of concentric circles, starting from the village to end with the
universe.
The universe can only be approached through the clothing of familiar symbols; thoroughly known
objects take on universal meaning. When dealing with a tale of great antiquity, Yeats assumed that it
reflected a hidden and significant scheme. By uncovering the hidden meaning of every detail, the
poet was able to make the myth apply to his own time as well as the past.
VI.2.2 Symbolism as a quest for unity, between man and nature
Yeats hoped to reconcile the demands of intellect with the imagination, to pull the external world
back into the mind, by establishing correspondences between natural and mental states →
connecting the national, the personal and the natural.
VI.2.3 Yeats, the symbol and the metaphor
Metaphors are relatively sporadic and accidental images, while symbols are a continuous weave, a
system which requires a mystic’s aptitude. Symbolism interconnects correspondences and holds the
cosmos together. Everything is related to everything else. The impact of Yeats’s symbolism has a lot
to do with the use of similar symbols and variations on them.
W Voir webographie
38
VII YEATS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
VII.1 “A VISION” : UNDERSTANDING YEATS’S THEORY OF THE HUMAN BEING AND
OF HISTORY
Complément
About of "A Vision (http://www.yeatsvision.com/Yeats.html) " W
VII.1.1 “A VISION” : THE GENRE
Helen Vendler sees “A Vision”W as an account of aesthetic experience, a poetics, rather than an
esoteric philosophy in its own right. The text offers a theory of the origin of the universes and of the
laws that rule it. Yeats calls it “a philosophy of poetry”.
Yeats’s postulate is that man has fallen into division and takes up the task to restore him to unity.
Bloom calls it “a considerable if flawed major poem”.
“A Vision”W is an “apocalypse” ; i.e. a technical genre which purpose is to announce the truth and so
help stimulate a restoration of men to an unfallen state.
VII.1.2 “A VISION” : THE METHOD
“A Vision”W originates in Yeats’s wife Georgie’s gift of “automatic writing” and self-hypnosis
(married Georgie Hyde lees in 1917), and Yeats’s claims he is reporting the words of the daimons
talking through his wife: the thematic basis encountered there is much the same as that developed
in his youth.
“There are the cycles, the reincarnating souls, the possible escape from the wheel of time to a timeless state, the
millennial reversal of civilisations that corresponds to the rebirth of individuals, the heroic, unconventional
ethic, the unknown and problematic god, the battle between the spiritual and material worlds.” (James
Ellman)
VII.2 “A VISION” : CENTRAL IDEAS
VII.2.1 THE CYCLES OF HISTORY
Yeats takes up a tradition which most notably present in Hinduism : his cycles are represented
through the paradigm of the gyres, and are cycles of 2000 years and 1000 yrs. This philosophy is also
close to Hegel’s and Vico’s. In keeping with the System of “A Vision”W, the cycles themselves go
through alternatively antithetical and primary movements.
* The year 1000 BC starts the cycle of ancient Greek civilization
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
W Voir webographie
39
●
The birth of Helen is a Greek annunciation which forecasts the beginning of
Greek civilisation. (cf “”); It is an antithetical annunciation which is set in
contrast with Mary’s in the New Testament.
●
The Athens of (Pericles, Phidias) follows Homer’s phase
* It is followed by the second cycle, that of ancient Rome and the Caesars
* The birth of Christ marks the beginning of the Christian era (2000 years)
The civilization of Byzantium which encompasses the 1st five centuries of the Christian era, is one
which brightly conjugates the unity of being and unity of culture. It is a privileged period, and the
degeneration of the Christian period only starts after the 5thcentury, according to Yeats.
* 1000 AD is the beginning of the great moments of medieval literature
* It is followed by the Italian renaissance (Michael Angelo) which deals with all these figures
successively (Caesar, Helen, Michael Angelo)
* The cyclical nature of Yeats’s conception means that there will be another antithetical annunciation
in the near future, the second coming not of Christ but of His antithetical opposite, the focus of one
of Yeats’s most celebrated poems " "
The beast in that poem initiates the beginning of a new contemporary, apocalyptic era, the
beginning of a post-Christian civilisation. Regeneration is to be achieved by violence.
VII.2.2 THE BELIEF IN THE AFTERLIFE
It is also concerned with the afterlife, “and the proposition that during it the soul “dreamed back” its
lifetime experiences” (James Ellman)
VII.2.3 HUMAN PERSONALITY
There is also a classification of the types of human personality, an ingrained habit in Yeats. What
Yeats writes about Blake’s works is interesting in this regard
Citation
The mind or imagination or consciousness of man may be said to have two poles, the personal and the
impersonal, or as Blake preferred to call them, the limit of contraction and the unlimited expansion. When we
act from the personal we tend to bind our consciousness down as a fiery centre. When, on the other hand, we
allow our imagination to expand away from this egotistic mood, we become vehicle for the universal thought
and merge in the universal mood.
The personal is the antithetical and the impersonal is the primary.
in Yeats’s system, the thrust toward individuality is countered by the movement toward unity.
VII.2.4 THE SYSTEM OF “A VISION” : THE ANIMA MUNDI, THE SPHERE AND
THE GYRES AND THE PHASES OF THE MOON
40
The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can
be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be
expressed by a mathematical form’ and this form is the gyre.
Above all, Yeats was hoping to develop a system of thought “that would leave (his) imagination free to
create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of the one history, and that the soul’s”.
(Quoted by Bloom 226)
Yeats bases his aesthetic on the Anima Mundi, or “Great Memory”. The ANIMA MUNDI (or Spiritus
Mundi, or Great Memory), as opposed the individual “Anima Homini”, is as a kind of collective
unconscious where the poet may reach for ideas which are likely to represent his reality. However,
this involves dealing with what may not be reached “without the embrace of the shadow, without
putting on Satan” (Bloom 221)
VII.2.4.1 The Sphere
The root symbol of “A Vision”W is a sphere inside of which whirl a pair of interpenetrating gyres or
cones, or […] vortexes” (Ellman id p. 152). “With the sphere Yeats represents the unified reality beyond
chaotic appearance or the experience of that reality. On consideration we realize that the sphere is the mature
equivalent of the rose”. [The idea of the vortexes comes from Blake]
Yin and Yang
Légende :
Yin yang image
VII.2.4.2 The Gyres within the Sphere
While THE SPHERE represents unity, the agitation and movement within it is best represented by
the double cone and the representation of these ongoing conflicts may also be visualized by the yinyang symbol of opposite polarities :
Citation
“Yeats visualizes the process of life as a double cone, moving in just one direction at a time, yet always
containing the opposite direction within itself. As the directional thrust gains momentum, the countermovement begins within it, starting from the base of the fisrt cone and going back through it. The rotation of
W Voir webographie
41
this double cone produces a circular movement; or cycle, divided by Yeats into 28 phases, governed by the
moon […]” (Ellman)
They represent a thrust towards individuality and a counter-movement towards unity.
VII.2.4.3 The movements of the Gyres
The gyre starts at its origin and moves progressively wider in a spiral, while time adds another
dimension, creating the form of the vortex or funnel.
The gyres in Yeats's system
Once the gyre reaches its point of maximum expansion it then begins to narrow until it reaches its
end-point which is also the origin of the new gyre.
Another way of seeing the same thing, if time is not taken as being fixed in one direction, is that
once the maximum is reached, the gyre begins to retrace its path in the opposite direction.
VII.2.4.4 What the Gyres stand for
The gyres represent the flux and reflux on all levels of existence, and the system is based on the idea
of change and progression. They “stand for the world of appearance”, and “symbolize any of the
opposing elements that make up existence. Their cyclic movement is held by Yeats to be present in
every human conciousness.
Yeats believed that every thesis had its antithesis, or that every movement holds the seeds of its own
decay, which translated into his poetry by the principle of containment of the utmost passion by
the utmost control. (Ellman 153)
VII.3 YEATS’S LUNAR PHASES AND A SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSITIONS
VII.3.1 THE LUNAR PHASES
Bloom notes that “as far back as we can trace him, Yeats decided in favour of the lunar movement toward
heightened subjectivity and individuality as opposed to the solar movement toward intensified objectivity and
unity with others” (224) These contraries are called the two “Tinctures” by Yeats (Bloom 226)
42
In his poetry, he was always torn between “the lonely ecstasy of the artist” and the “communal wisdom
of society” (224).
in Yeats’s system the Solar principles includes things of the spirit, and the lunar faculties things
of the psyche
Yeats presents his Great Wheel or Cycle of lunar phases as at least a double allegory : every
individual life ; and all of Western history.
Here are the possible antitheses :
●
sun and moon, day and night, life and death, love and hate, man and god, man
and woman, man and beast, man and his spiritual counterpart or “daimon”.
●
On a more abstract level these oppositions might be between : permanence and
change (fixity an mutability, cf ), the one and the many, objectivity and
subjectivity, the natural and the supernatural worlds.
En savoir plus
See The Map of the Lunar Phases (http://www.yeatsvision.com/PhW500.html) W
Yeat's System : main Idea
Remarque
Neither of these options is more valid than the other, but if the being tries to get real in an antithetical Phase
or to follow its dream in a primary Phase, Yeats’s System sees this as being ‘out of phase’, and doomed to
frustration and disappointment.
THE PERSONAL
SUBJECTIVITY :
WHAT IS IT ?
“Binding one’s consciousness down as to a
fiery centre.”
Under the term subjective can be taken all that
is individualising, separating, pluralist and
which involves the individual being
differentiated as itself.
THE ANTITHETICAL and the characteristics
of the “antithetical quester”
Characteristics :
- Develops individualistic tendencies and a
delight in one’s own self.
- Accepts the fate which is imposed upon him
(Chance)
- Self-surrender (as advocated by the Soul,
who suggests surrender to God in “A dialogue
of Self and Soul”)
→ individu : intellectuellement timoré et
malléable
→ civilisations : sont le jouet de forces externes
et se délitent
W Voir webographie
43
Climactic moon phase : PHASE 15 : THE
FULL MOON
- L’existence est soumise exclusivement aux
pressions du monde interne : subjectivité totale
/ pure créativité / la pensée se résorbe
instantanément en images
Idéal inaccessible / pas d’incarnation possible
→ an antithetical incarnation is to liberate the
Mask, the self-made ideal values and sense of
inner truth, from the claims of the mundane and
oppressive Body of Fate, by the help of the
Creative Mind’s sense of the universal and its
realism. In short, to ‘follow its dream’.”
Ex of subjective types : → “Those who belong
to the highly lit phases of the moon will be
individualistic and creative (the hero, the great
antithetical artists)” (Muller 111)
LUNAR MVT
Phases 8-22 Sun dwindles Subjective instincts
CREATION
The death-in-life of the world without
imagination
Entre les phases 1 et 15, pas d’équilibre possible. Pas d’incarnation possible en 1 et 15. Entre les
deux phases, l’énergie de la civilisation et de l’être humain croît et décroît tour à tour.
THE IMPERSONAL
OBJECTIVITY: WHAT IS IT ?
Imagination becoming the vehicle for the
universal thought and mood.
Under the term objective can be taken all that is
collective, unifying, and which involves the
individual being absorbed in something
greater than itself, be that nature, society, God
THE PRIMARY : characteristics of the
primary man
SOLAR MVT
- Makes his own destiny (the world of Choice)
- Glorification of the self.
- A new vision of eternity and perpetual
reincarnation.
- Ex of “primary” types : “Those who belong to
the darkening phases of the moon will accept to
lose themselves and save the world (saint,
philosopher, reformer)” (Muller p. 111).
Phases 23-7 Moon darkens Objective or
primary instincts
44
Climactic solar phase Phase 1
- la pensée est soumise exclusivement aux
pressions du monde externe. Objectivité
totale / pure passivité
→“a primary incarnation is to liberate the
Creative Mind, its sense of universal values and
apprehension of objective truth, from the selfmade ideals of the Mask, through the help of
external reality in the form of the Body of Fate.
In short, to ‘get real’.”
- Idéal de la vie humaine (unité d’Etre) comme
de toute civilisation (Unité de Culture)
creative imagination
UNITY
VII.3.2 SUMMARY : THE CENTRAL PROPOSITIONS OF "A VISION"
1. All things are subject to a cycle of changes, which can be regarded as bi-polar,
passing from a state of objectivity to one of subjectivity before returning to
objectivity again. This can be seen as a form of oscillation, or a circuit around a
wheel, and divides experience into the two halves of objectivity and subjectivity.
2. Between the two poles, there are stages which represent varying proportions of
objectivity and subjectivity, and directions of movement towards either
objectivity or subjectivity. Human life falls between the poles, since the extreme
states are abstract.
3. The System is fundamentally humanistic and amoral. It deals almost
exclusively with human experience and the human condition. The divine
features, but is marginalised and seen as relevant only to part of the objective
half of the Wheel. The individual soul is the focus, but more in terms of earthly
experience and the series of reincarnations, which are the basis of the System,
than in terms of spirituality. The spiritual is largely the province of the after-life.
4. Human life is intrinsically subjective, the after-life intrinsically objective.
However, the soul passes through a series of objective lives, then a series of
subjective lives, then again objective and so on.
5. Within the System completeness of experience is seen as the goal and the
fortune of a subsequent life is determined by having exhausted experience in a
given incarnation and the after-life that follows it, rather than by good or evil
deeds.
6. The order of incarnations is largely immutable, with the nature of contiguous
incarnations changing gradually; there may be repetitions, because of
incompleteness, and small jumps, if a life has been lived and understood very
fully.
7. In a given incarnation the nature of the goal in life is determined first and
foremost by whether it falls in the objective or subjective part of the cycle. If it
is objective, then the purpose is to recognise reality and to conform with the
45
external world. If it is subjective, then the purpose is to sustain the inner dream
and to follow it regardless of external pressure.
8. All humanity must pass through the same Phases, if you are in an objective
incarnation you have been and will be in subjective ones at the appropriate
stage, and vice versa. Therefore individual self-expression is important, but so is
tolerance and allowing others to fulfil their own expression. Imposing what is
right for you on others is tyranny, and imposing the values of others or of
previous lives will lead to failure: if objective principles are retained during
subjective lives then the life will not be lived adequately, and vice versa.
9. The role of the after-life is to reach an understanding of the previous incarnate
life, to absorb the understood experience on a spiritual level, and then to
prepare for the following life.
10. The world goes through cycles as well as the individual soul. There are several
cycles of varying length in operation at any one time. Since the progress around
the Wheel of Incarnations is more or less predetermined, and we should expect
to go round the Wheel a dozen times, we will all sooner of later have gone
through many variations of both of these movements.
VII.4 CONCLUSION - APPLICATIONS OF THE SYSTEM IN YEAT'S POETRY
VII.4.1 WHY SUCH A SCHEME ?
It is not used very directly and only a few poems require the understanding of the details of the
System. Yeats’s system may be compared to other modernist innovations, Yeats says, and his
“circuits of the moon” as an “experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to
the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.”
“The System helps Yeats to reconcile justice with reality because it enables him to fit his perception of the
world into an intellectual structure” and, in a 1926 review of A Vision A, George Russell (AE) remarked
on how ‘the metaphysical structure [Yeats] rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with the precision of
Chinese puzzle boxes into each other’, though Russell was less certain that it related ‘so well to life’ for
anyone apart from Yeats.”
Although many readers find it uncongenial; it remains a justification for Yeats’s attraction to the
world of action and creation rather than contemplation or spiritual concerns. As a poet, Yeats’s
commitment is to the world of phenomena as much as to the world of ideas, and as an antithetical
(http://www.yeatsvision.com/Terminology.html#Antithetical%22) man, to the world of action and
creation rather than to that of contemplation or spiritual concerns. His System predicts that within a
few more lifetimes his emphasis will shift towards the impersonal and collective, but that for the
moment his poetic focus on the creative and the personal, and his attachment to the sensuous world
are entirely appropriate.
VII.4.2 NOTES ON “THE SECOND COMING”
Complément
see ""
46
Esoteric symbolism abounds in this poem, which rests on the cyclical theory of history and
succeeding civilisations. The power of the poem derives not from the systems but from the taut,
urgent rhythm, visual particularity and the nightmare sense of historical crisis.
The study of these poems allows us to examine how Yeats envisions history : in his eyes, the great
changes that occur in history are marked by some form of violence. How is this violence
represented ? This is done by using symbols (the swan that is raped, the beast in “”) : the only
representations of violence are indirect, and are a way for the poet to distance himself from
intolerable events (rape, war, death).
As a man who lived through many conflicts in his own land (The War of independence, the Civil
War, WW1) and died just before the beginning of WW2, Yeats was attempting to understand a
violence that went beyond the comparatively rather “simple” events like he Rising of 1916 and to
make sense of such eruptions of violence.
To Yeats, violence is to be found in various forms and guises : unrequited love and passion are
forms of violence on the individual scale ; political violence affects the community, but he also tries
to provide a “system” of history that may account for the fact that violence occurs again and again.
The “patterns” or cycles that Yeats describes are a way to retain some control over dramatic changes
in history. History, he believes, is marked by wars, conflict, whether military of cultural. Yeats, as a
writer and an intellectual (and as a man who was interested in things of the spirit and mysticism),
felt the need to understand the meaning of life and death and to account for them in his poems by
using a very personal set of images, such as in “ ”.
The poetic form or the system Yeats defines in “A Vision” are ways to control and contain meaning.
Lack of form is lack of meaning for the poet, hence the need to structure his poems, or to introduce
elements that perturb the initial form of the sonnet as in “Leda and the Swan” as an illustration of
the ways form/ meaning is threatened by violence.
One might add that art is always a means to pin down / contain / deal with events (specifically
violent ones), whatever the form (poetry, painting, sculpture, etc).
* What is the « second coming ? »
In Christianity, the Second Coming is the anticipated return of Christ from Heaven to Earth, and it
fulfills a messianic prophecy: the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the establishment of
the Kingdom of God on earth.
In Greek, this « second coming » is called a « parousia »: the coming of Christ as judge of the world.
The first coming is the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth.
En savoir plus
see Poets.org Website (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15527) W
* Form
The poem is made of 2 octaves (8 lines x 2) and one sestet (6 lines), which technically means we have
one sonnet and a half (14 lines + 6 lines), in other words; a form which is unsettled.
The sonnet is typically composed of 4 lines + 4 lines + 3 lines+ 3 lines (8+6)
* Images
The poem tries to write itself without an identified speaker or first-person « I ». It is thus a symbolic
narrative that employs successively unrelated images (the falcon, the center, the tide, the ceremony).
W Voir webographie
47
These images break into helpless abstractions, such as « the centre », « anarchy », « the best ».
As a result, the poem does not seem to ever reach a coherent vantage point.
Its very form conveys and expresses a hiatus between present instability and tension and the
violence of changes a-coming.
48
ANNEXES
ANNEXE : Poem : "In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz"
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
49
ANNEXE : Poem : "The Wild Swans At Coole”
Poem reading : "The Wild Swans At Coole"
Ce média est disponible sur la version en ligne du module de formation.
THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
5
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
10
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
15
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold, 20
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water 25
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away? 30
50
ANNEXE : Poem : "EASTER 1916"
Poem reading : "EASTER 1916"
Ce média est disponible sur la version en ligne du module de formation.
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
51
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
52
ANNEXE : Poem : "SEPTEMBER 1913"
Poem reading : "SEPTEMBER 1913"
Ce média est disponible sur la version en ligne du module de formation.
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, 'Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.
53
ANNEXE : Poem : "MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR"
I. Ancestral Houses
Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.
Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master’s buried mice can play.
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.
O what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?
What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?
II. My House
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
54
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing Stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;
A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and written page.
Il Penseroso’s Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rageImagined everything.
Benighted travellersFrom markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.
Two men have founded here.
A man-at-arms
Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
His dwinding score and he seemed castaways
Forgetting and forgot;
And I, that after me
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity.
III. My Table
Two heavy trestles, and a board
Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato’s house,
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous
It lay five hundred years.
Yet if no change appears
No moon; only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.
Our learned men have urged
That when and where ’twas forged
A marvellous accomplishment,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword.
Soul’s beauty being most adored,
Men and their business took
Me soul’s unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor,
Knowing that none could pass Heaven’s door,
That loved inferior art,Had such an aching heart
55
That he, although a country’s talk
For silken clothes and stately walk.
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno’s peacock screamed.
IV. My Descendants
Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there’s but common greenness after that.
And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless min that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.
The primum Mobile that fashioned us
Has made the very owls in circles move;
And I, that count myself most prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl’s love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.
V. The Road at My Door
An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm.
I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream.
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.
VI. The Stare’s Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
56
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the state.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
VII. I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s
Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.
‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,
‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.
Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes.
No prophecies,Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.
I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
57
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.
58
ANNEXE : Poem : "AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN"
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
59
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
60
ANNEXE : Poem : "To A Wealthy Man Who Promised A Second Subscription To The
Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures"
YOU gave but will not give again
Until enough of Paudeen’s pence
By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain
To be ‘some sort of evidence,’
Before you’ll put your guineas down,
5
That things it were a pride to give
Are what the blind and ignorant town
Imagines best to make it thrive.
What cared Duke Ercole, that bid
His mummers to the market place,
10
What th’ onion-sellers thought or did
So that his Plautus set the pace
For the Italian comedies?
And Guidobaldo, when he made
That grammar school of courtesies
15
Where wit and beauty learned their trade
Upon Urbino’s windy hill,
Had sent no runners to and fro
That he might learn the shepherds’ will.
And when they drove out Cosimo,
20
Indifferent how the rancour ran,
He gave the hours they had set free To Michelozzo’s latest plan
For the San Marco Library,
Whence turbulent Italy should draw 25
Delight in Art whose end is peace,
In logic and in natural law
By sucking at the dugs of Greece.
Your open hand but shows our loss,
For he knew better how to live. 30
Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss,
Look up in the sun’s eye and give
What the exultant heart calls good
That some new day may breed the best
Because you gave, not what they would 35
But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest!
61
ANNEXE : Poem : "THE STOLEN CHILD"
WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
62
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
63
ANNEXE : Poem : "The Second Coming"
Poem reading : "The Second Coming"
Ce média est disponible sur la version en ligne du module de formation.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
64
ANNEXE : Poem : "EXCERPT FROM The Celtic Twilight"
THIS BOOK
I
I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of
this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own
people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I
have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. I have,
however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men
and women, dhouls and faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine. The things a
man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory,
any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment
like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me. Hope and
Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field
where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope
and Memory, be with me for a little.
1893.
II
I have added a few more chapters in the manner of the old ones, and would have added others, but one loses, as
one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to
care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss per haps. In these new chapters, as in the old
ones, I have invented nothing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentences that may keep some poor
story-teller's commerce with the devil and his angels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours. I
shall publish in a little while a big book about the commonwealth of faery, and shall try to make it systematical
and learned enough to buy pardon for this handful of dreams.
1902.
65
ANNEXE : Poem : "To Ireland in the Coming Times"
NOW, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind;
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth's consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
66
ANNEXE : Poem : "A teller of Tales"
Many of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a
leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, "the most gentle"-whereby he meant faery--"place in the whole of County Sligo." Others hold it, however, but second to
Drumcliff and Drumahair. The first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next time he
was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in
his eyes (swift as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was
well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals.
And yet there was much in his life to depress him, for in the triple solitude of age, eccentricity, and deafness,
he went about much pestered by children. It was for this very reason perhaps that he ever recommended mirth
and hopefulness. He was fond, for instance, of telling how Collumcille cheered up his mother. "How are you
to-day, mother?" said the saint. "Worse," replied the mother. "May you be worse to-morrow," said the saint.
The next day Collumcille came again, and exactly the same conversation took place, but the third day the
mother said, "Better, thank God." And the saint replied, "May you be better to-morrow." He was fond too of
telling how the Judge smiles at the last day alike when he rewards the good and condemns the lost to
unceasing flames. He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he
ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, "Am I not annoyed with them?" I asked too if he had ever seen the
banshee. "I have seen it," he said, "down there by the water, batting the river with its hands."
I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbal alterations, from a note-book which I almost filled
with his tales and sayings, shortly after seeing him. I look now at the note-book regretfully, for the blank pages
at the end will never be filled up. Paddy Flynn is dead; a friend of mine gave him a large bottle of whiskey, and
though a sober man at most times, the sight of so much liquor filled him with a great enthusiasm, and he lived
upon it for some days and then died. His body, worn out with old age and hard times, could not bear the drink
as in his young days. He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty
heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world,
but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like
bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of
moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory,
and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall
find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or
even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us
go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists,
everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet
67
ANNEXE : Poem : "Pardon, old fathers...."
Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story's end,
Old Dublin merchant „free of the ten and four“
Or trading out of Galway into Spain;
Old country scholar, Robert Emmet's friend,
5
A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;
Merchant and scholar who have left me blood
That has not passed through any huckster's loin,
Soldiers that gave, whatever die was cast:
A Butler or an Armstrong that withstood
10
Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne
James and his Irish when the Dutchman crossed;
Old merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay;
You most of all, silent and fierce old man, 15
Because the daily spectacle that stirred
My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say, „
Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun“;
Pardon that for a barren passion's sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine, 20
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.
68
ANNEXE : Poem : "In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory"
1
NOW that we’re almost settled in our house
I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in the ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stair to bed 5
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night, being dead.
2
Always we’d have the new friend meet the old,
And we are hurt if either friend seem cold, 10
And there is salt to lengthen out the smartIn the affections of our heart,
And quarrels are blown up upon that head;
But not a friend that I would bring
This night can set us quarrelling, 15
For all that come into my mind are dead.
3
Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind,
Though courteous to the worst; much falling he
Brooded upon sanctity 20
Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed
A long blast upon the horn that brought
A little nearer to his thought
A measureless consummation that he dreamed.
4
And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
30
Towards nightfall upon a race
Passionate and simple like his heart.
25
5
And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how purebred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline
35
69
By opposition, square and trine;
Having grown sluggish and contemplative.
40
6
They were my close companions many a year,
A portion of my mind and life, as it were,
And now their breathless faces seem to look
Out of some old picture-book;
I am accustomed to their lack of breath,
45
But not that my dear friend’s dear son,
Our Sidney and our perfect man,
Could share in that discourtesy of death.
7
For all things the delighted eye now sees
Were loved by him; the old storm-broken trees
That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;
The tower set on the stream’s edge;
The ford where drinking cattle make a stir
Nightly, and startled by that sound
The water-hen must change her ground;
55
He might have been your heartiest welcomer.
50
8
When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride
From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side
Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;
At Mooneen he had leaped a place 60
So perilous that half the astonished meet
Had shut their eyes, and where was it
He rode a race without a bit?
And yet his mind outran the horses’ feet.
9
We dreamed that a great painter had been born 65
To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,
To that stern colour and that delicate line
That are our secret discipline
Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, 70
And yet he had the intensity
To have published all to be a world’s delight.
10
What other could so well have counselled us
In all lovely intricacies of a house
As he that practised or that understood 75
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone?
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
70
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone. 80
11
Some burn damp fagots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare
85
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?
12
I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved,
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome; but a thought 95
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
90
71
ANNEXE : Poem : "LEDA AND THE SWAN"
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
72
ANNEXE : His brother : Jack B. Yeats
His brother : Jack B. Yeats
73
ANNEXE : Maud Gonne
Maud Gonne
74
ANNEXE : Robert Emmet
Robert Emmet
75
GLOSSAIRE
A
Anglo Irish Treaty
The Anglo-Irish Treaty was the truce that ended the war between the Irish Republican
Army and the British army which had been raging since 1919. Negotiations began with
Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins representing Ireland. A treaty was signed on 6
December whereby Ireland became a free state, with the six counties of Ulster
remaining as part of the UK, but with full dominion status. Although the treaty was
duly ratified, the split led to the Irish Civil War, which was ultimately won by the protreaty side.
B
big house
The big house was the residence of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Many of them
were destroyed during the War of independence.
E
Easter Rising
The Easter Rising (Irish: Éirí Amach na Cásca), was an insurrection staged in Ireland
during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was mounted by Irish republicans with the aims
of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing an Irish Republic. It was the most
significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798. Organised by the Military
Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Rising lasted from Easter Monday 24
April to 30 April 1916. Members of the Irish Volunteers, led by schoolteacher and
barrister Patrick Pearse, joined by the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly,
along with 200 members of Cumann na mBan, seized key locations in Dublin and
proclaimed an Irish Republic independent of Britain. (Wikipedia; accessed July 10,
2009)
F
Fenian
The Fenians, both the Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Republican Brotherhood, were
fraternal organisations dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The name "Fenians" was first applied by
John O'Mahony to the members of the Irish nationalist organization which he founded
in America in 1858. O'Mahony, who was a Celtic scholar, named the American wing of
the movement after the Fianna, the legendary band of Irish warriors led by Fionn mac
Cumhaill. The term Fenian is still used today, especially in Northern Ireland, the
Republic of Ireland and Scotland, where its original meaning has expanded to include
all supporters of Irish nationalism, as well as being an abusive term for Catholics. Irish
Nationalists themselves, while honouring the 19th-century Fenians, commonly use
76
other designations for themselves such as "Nationalist" or "Republican", terms also used
by the Fenians themselves.
U
Utilitarism
Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its
contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as
summed among all people. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the
moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome. Utility, the good to be
maximized, has been defined by various thinkers as happiness or pleasure (versus
suffering or pain), although preference utilitarians like Peter Singer define it as the
satisfaction of preferences. It may be described as a life stance, with happiness or
pleasure being of ultimate importance.”(Wikepedia website, accessed July 10, 2009)
Y
Young Ireland
mot à définir
77
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
B
BONAFOUS-MURAT Carle
Bonafous-Murat, Carle, Selected Poems : WB Yeats, CNED, Paris, Armand Colin, 2008.
BREARTON Fran
Brearton, Fran, “W. B. Yeats: Creation from Conflict”, in The Great War in Irish Poetry –
W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley, Oxford, OUP, 2000, pp. 43-82.
C
CHADWICK Joseph,
Chadwick, Joseph, “Violence in Yeats’s Later Politics and Poetry”, ELH 55.4 (Winter
1988), pp. 869-893.
Coll.
Coll., Cahiers de l’Herne : WB Yeats, Paros, Fayard, 1981, 1999 (see chronology pp. 1115).
CORCORAN Neil
Corcoran, Neil, After Yeats and Joyce, Reading Modern Irish Literature, London, Opus,
1997
D
DEANE Seamus
Deane, Seamus, Celtic Revivals, Essays in modern Irish literature, 1880-90, Winston
Salem, NC, Wake Forest UP, 1985, 1987 (see Ch. 1 : “The Literary myths of the revival”
and Ch. 3 : Yeats and the Idea of Revolution”)
G
GENET Jacqueline
Genet, Jacqueline, La poésie de WB Yeats, Lille, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion,
2007.
K
KEARNEY Richard
78
Kearney, Richard, Transitions, Narratives in Modern Irish Culture, Manchester,
Manchester UP, 1988 (see Chapter 1, pp. 19-30 “Yeats and the Conflict of
Imaginations”)
KIBERD Declan
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland, Harvard UP, 1997 .
KINSELLA Thomas
Kinsella Thomas, The Dual Tradition, an essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland,
Manchester, Carcanet, 1995 (pp. 64-87 on Yeats and Joyce)
M
McCORMACK
McCormack, W. J., “Yeats and the Invention of Tradition”, in From Burke to Beckett:
Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History, Cork, Cork UP, 1994, pp. 302340.
MULDOON Paul
Muldoon, Paul, To Ireland, I, Oxford, OUP, 2000
MULLER Elizabeth
Muller, Elizabeth, Yeats, collection “Clefs concours” Paris, Atlande, 2008.
O
O'BRIEN Conor Cruise
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats”,
in Excited Revery, ed. A. N. Jeffares et al., London, Macmillan, 1965, pp. 207-278.
R
RAFROIDI Patrick
Rafroidi, Patrick, L’Irlande et le romantisme, Lille, PU Lille, 1972 (intro) (see Deuxième
partie : « Le romantisme nationaliste » and Ch 5 : « La redécouverte du passé, le mode
irlandais »)
S
SAID Edward
79
Said, Edward, “Yeats and Decolonization”, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature,
ed. Seamus Deane, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1990, pp. 67-95.
V
VANCE Norman
Vance, Norman, Irish literature since 1800, London, Longman, 2002.
80
WEBOGRAPHIE
About Dante Gabriel Rosseti
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/
BBC's documentation about Parnell
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/parnell_charles.shtml
Helen Vendler's Lecture on "Among School Children"
http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/vendler/
For further reference, read : Jacqueline Genet, The Big House in Ireland, reality and representation,
Rowman & Littlefield, 1991 : Table of contents
http://books.google.fr/books?
id=RKzFDNPohIAC&pg=PR1&lpg=PR1&dq=big+house+ireland&source=bl&ots=Exyk501R5&sig=GX9xgXrmDXq9q49g25MD6Q57KKw&hl=fr&ei=b0JYSr6cDYy5jAeu4MUb&sa=
X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5
About Yeat's brother : Jack B. Yeats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Butler_Yeats
About Society of United Irishmen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_United_Irishmen
John O'Leary Obituary in the Times, March 18, 1907
http://en.wikisource.org/The_Times/1907/Obituary/John_O%27Leary
About The Wandering of Oisin
81
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_butler_yeats/poems/10252
the Symbolists and Paintings
http://julien.gadier.free.fr/main.htm
The Abbey Theatre's website
http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/about/history.html
BBC documentation about Easter Rising (1916)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/
About the Irish Republican Brotherhood
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/profiles/po17.shtml
Coole Park's Website
http://www.coolepark.ie/
to read the Hyde's speech
http://www.gaeilge.org/deanglicising.html
Gutenberg's Project : Arnold's Text
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/celt10h.htm
The Hugh Lane Gallery
http://www.hughlane.ie/about_hugh_lane.php
About William Blake
82
http://www.online-literature.com/blake/
About Oscar Wilde
http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/
To "All Things can tempt me"
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/all-things-can-tempt-me/
Poets.org Website
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15527
About Victorian Poets
http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/victorian_poets
The Symbolists in Literature
http://www.site-magister.com/symbolis.htm
About his father : John B. Yeats
http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/johnbyeats.htm
About Walter Pater (website)
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/pater/index.html
Paintings by Jack B. Yeats (his brother)
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/irish-artists/jack-butler-yeats.htm
Map of the Lunar Phases (interactive)
83
http://www.yeatsvision.com/PhW500.html
Text of "A Vision"
http://www.yeatsvision.com/Yeats.html
84