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q^ _i b l c ` l k q b k q p william butler yeats the poet and ireland
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The Enchanted Land The Stolen Child
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A Faery Song
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Lines from The Land of Heart’s Desire
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The Hosting of the Sidhe
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The Song of Wandering Aengus
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The Lake Isle of Innisfree
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The Fiddler of Dooney
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Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland
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The Romantic Idealist He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
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The Pity of Love
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The Sorrow of Love
32
The White Birds
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Down by the Salley Gardens
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The Ragged Wood
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When You are Old
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No Second Troy
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The Lover Pleads with his Friend for Old Friends
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The Folly of Being Comforted
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Never Give all the Heart
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The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water
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O Do Not Love Too Long
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To a Child Dancing in the Wind
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Two Years Later
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Memory
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Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee The Wild Swans at Coole
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In the Seven Woods
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My House
54
A Prayer on going in to my House
56
A Cradle Song
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A Prayer for my Daughter
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To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee
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War and Politics September 1913
64
To a Shade
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An Irish Airman Foresees his Death
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Easter 1916
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Sixteen Dead Men
76
The Rose Tree
77
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
78
Old Age and Death Sailing to Byzantium
81
The Wheel
83
Youth and Age
84
What Then?
85
From Under Ben Bulben (Cast a Cold Eye etc.)
86
Biographical summary
90
designer’s note
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Index of First Lines
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W
illiam Butler Yeats was born in 1865, the son of John Butler Yeats, an artist whose forebears were Protestant churchmen in Sligo, and Susan Pollexfen who belonged to a Sligo merchant family. The Yeats family was to make a unique contribution to the cultural and artistic life of twentieth century Ireland: William Butler Yeats became the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century; his brother, Jack Yeats was one of the most gifted Irish painters of modern times; his sisters, Elizabeth and Susan, devoted their lives to artistic endeavours and were the founders of The Cuala Press.
qeb bk`e^kqba i^ka William Butler Yeats’s relationship with his native county was one of the main influences in shaping his 9
future as a great poet. For the young emerging poet, Sligo was a place of enchantment. While his artist father, adored by his son, but mercurial and unreliable, moved his family between Sligo, Dublin and London, long summers were spent in Sligo, and it was Sligo that fired William’s poetic imagination. He filled his mind with the lore of the people of the Sligo countryside, people who had within them, as he wrote, ‘the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart’. He filled notebooks with the stories and folklore he heard from people such as Mary Battle, a local woman who had a fund of ancient lore. The old Celtic romances, stories of the Sídhe, the fairy hosts, the great heroes of the myths of the Celts, CuChulainn, Caoilte and Oisín, along with the fair Niamh were to inspire his poetry. Yeats’s work, in turn, inspired and influenced others during the Irish Literary Revival. The Otherworld, the land of eternal youth ‘where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song’ was part of everyday life to the people amongst whom Yeats spent his days as a boy. The countryside around Sligo was the gateway to that magical Otherworld; its
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placenames, Knocknarea, Ben Bulben, Glencar; Innishfree, the little island in Lough Gill and the woods around it, were to be immortalised in his poetry throughout his life, so that, together, they make for a part of Ireland which came to be known as ‘The Yeats Country’. Yeats’s passion for the Celtic past provided him with a way of seeking answers to life’s endless quest for the mystical. That same quest was to lead him to explore the occult in the 1890s and to membership of the Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn. His friendship with the old Fenian, John O’Leary, led Yeats into nationalism and he promoted the idea of a distinctive literature so that Irish people would realise their spiritual and cultural heritage.
qeb olj^kqf` fab^ifpq In 1889 Yeats, at the age of twenty-three, met Maud Gonne in London, and with that meeting, as he wrote, ‘the troubling of my life began’. He endured a tortured and hopeless love for her for over thirty years, during which time she was his muse, his inspiration, the embodiment of Ireland itself in his work. Gonne, unconventional, beautiful and independently wealthy, was the daughter of a British
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Army major based at the Curragh, County Kildare. Dedicated to the cause of independence for Ireland, she threw herself into political activity. Yeats proposed marriage to her in 1891 without success and was to do so many times over the years. Unknown to Yeats, Gonne had a daughter, Iseult, in 1894, by her French lover, Lucien Millevoye. He was shocked and grieved when she married Major John MacBride in 1903. The couple separated in 1905 and Gonne was widowed in 1916 when MacBride was amongst the executed leaders after the Easter Rising. Yeats proposed marriage to her again, and on being refused, he proposed to her daughter, Iseult, who likewise declined his proposal. The love poems he wrote to Maud Gonne are haunting, filled with symbolism, longing and sadness.
` l l i b m^ o h ^ k a q e l l o _ ^ i iv i b b Yeats’s meeting with Augusta Lady Gregory in 1896 was another momentous turning point in his life. Born into an ascendancy family near Gort, through her marriage she became mistress of Coole Park estate in County Galway. Like the much younger Yeats, Lady Gregory had
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immersed herself in the lore and culture of the locality, Kiltartan, where Coole Park lay. Though belonging to the landowning class, her life was dedicated to furthering the literary revival in Ireland. Her home was a centre for writers of the day, and it was at Coole that the idea of a National Theatre was developed. The estate, with its Seven Woods, the great house and its lake, was to be immortalised in Yeats’s work and provided him with an inspirational environment over many years. Recognising Yeats’s genius, Lady Gregory gave him the stability and encouragement that he needed and was his friend and supporter until her death in 1932. In 1917, Yeats bought Thoor Ballylee, a ruined medieval tower-house close to Coole Park. In the same year, he married a young Englishwoman, George Hyde-Lees, who was twenty-five years his junior. A scholarly and resourceful woman who recognized the genius in the man she married, she applied herself to managing his life and restoring Thoor Ballylee. Like Yeats, she was interested in the occult, and in this phase of his life, assisted by his wife, Yeats discovered automatic writing, a mediumistic script that provided material for poems that convey his ideas on the nature of historical change and decay. The medieval tower itself provided the setting for many of his poems and took on a powerful symbolism in his work.
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qÜÉ p í ç ä É å ` Ü á ä Ç 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 berries 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 grey 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 is 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.
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Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce 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 Round and round the oatmeal-chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than he can understand. The places mentioned in ‘The Stolen Child’ were known to be the haunt of fairies (Sídhe in the Irish) who were wont to carry off the souls of mortals while they slept.
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^ c ~ É êó p ç å Ö Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania, in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech
We who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, It all were told: Give to these children, new from the world, Silence and love; And the long dew-dropping hours of the night, And the stars above: Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then: Us who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, If all were told.
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E xt r ac t f r o m
q ÜÉ i ~ åÇ ç Ñ eÉ ~ ê í Ûë a É ë á ê É A VOICE [close to the door] The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away, While the faeries dance in a place apart, Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring, Tossing their milk-white arms in the air: For they hear the wind laugh, and murmur and sing Of a land where even the old are fair, And even the wise are merry of tongue; But I heard a reed of Coolaney say, ‘When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung, ‘The lonely of heart is withered away!’
These lines come from Yeats’s verse drama The Land of Heart’s Desire in which a young bride is enticed away to fairyland by the Sídhe on May Eve.
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qÜÉ e ç ë í á å Ö ç Ñ íÜ É p á Ç Ü É The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart; And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart. The host is rushing ’twixt night and day, And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away.
The Slua Sídhe or the fairy host were believed to travel in the whirling wind as it swept through the countryside. Niamh was the fairy princess who enticed Oisín of the Fianna to spend three hundred years in Tír na nÓg, the Otherworld.
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q Ü É p ç å Ö ç Ñ t~ å Ç É ê á å Ö ^ É å Ö ì ë I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire aflame, But something rustled on the floor, And some one called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. Aengus was the mythical God of Love who resided at Brú na Bóinne or Newgrange. 23