In Celebration of the life of William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)

The Irish poet, dramatist and mystic visionary  William Butler Yeats  was  born on this day June 13th 1865, in  Sandymount, County Dublin. He is widely considered as one of the most  foremost figures of 20th-century literature, and regarded by some critics as among the greatest poets in all English language. Yeats was also a significant Irish and British literary pioneer and an irrevocable figure in Irish politics, having served as a senator for two terms.

William Butler Yeats was born as the son of a famous Irish portrait painter and lawyer, John Butler Yeats. His whole family were Anglo-Irish and descended from a linen merchant, Jervis Yeats, who had served in the army of King William of Orange. Yeats’ mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, was a member of a wealthy Anglo Irish family of County Sligo that had played a role from the end of the 17th century in controlling the economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of Ireland.

The Yeats financial life was more than okay, having been indulged in trade and shipping. Although W.B. Yeats took huge pride in being from an English descent, he was also very proud of his Irish nationality and ensured that his playwrights and poems included the Irish culture within its pages.

William spent summers at the family’s house in Connaught, where he developed a close relationship with nature. These nature experiences proved to be very important for his development as a poet. John Yeats took his wife and five children to live in England but, unable to make much of a living, he was obliged to return to Dublin in 1880. William met a number of Dublin’s literary class at his father’s studio in Dublin at which he thought of producing his first poetry and an essay on the Ulster Scottish poet Sir Samuel Ferguson. Yeats found his early aspiration and muse in the prominent novelist Mary Shelley and the works of the English poet Edmund Spenser.

Yeats belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the seventeenth century. Most members of this minority considered themselves English people who merely happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats staunchly affirmed his Irish nationality. Although he lived in London for fourteen years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his adult life).,As years passed by and Yeats’s work became more specialized, he maintained his cultural roots and he drew more andhe drew more and more inspirations from the  Irish folklore and myths (specifically the one that emerged from County Sligo).

Yeats’s in‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’  draws extensively from Irish folklore, Classical Greek mythology, and occult symbolism, intertwining those influences with Yeats’s personal experiences and expressive style to create a magical hybrid of whimsical, yet sorrowful, poetry. The poem is loosely based on the legend of Aengus, the God of Love, Poetry, and Youth, and his everlasting search for his lover. However, despite the happy resolution in the myth, Yeats’s protagonist is not afforded the same happiness; not only is he unable to join his lover, he has also grown old through the fruitless years of searching, and now waits for death, hoping that it may give him the union with his lover he so craves. A unique blend of hope and resignation, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ bears all the trademarks of Yeats’s evocative verse.

 

 The Song of WanderingThe Aengus

 

 

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 a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone 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.

 

Yeats interest in the mystery and the unknown was quite unhindered from an early stage in his life. One of his school acquaintances, George Russell, a fellow poet and occultist, was an influential figure in his tendencies towards that path. Together with Russell and others, Yeats founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was a society for the study and practice of magic, esoteric knowledge and with its own secret rituals and ceremonies and elaborate symbolism. Yeats’ obsession with the spiritual world infused his poetic mind he was also a member of the Theosophical Society, but he went back on his decision and left shortly.

In 1889, Yeats published The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. Four years later, he kept shaking the literary world to its core by bringing forward his collection of essays entitled The Celtic Twilight followed in 1895 by Poems, in 1897 by The Secret Rose, and in 1899 he published his poetry collection The Wind among the Reeds.

One of Yeats’s more notable early poems, ‘The Stolen Child’ shows the extent to which he was influenced by Gaelic mythology, as well as his abiding interest in Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite verse. Narrating elegantly the attempts of a charm of fairies to persuade a boy to come away with them, ‘The Stolen Child’ is both magical and beguiling in its dreamy intensity. The refrain of the bewitching faeries is also reminiscent of the haunting siren song from Homer’s Odyssey, and its verse has often been set to contemporary music by bands like The Waterboys.

 

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 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,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

The Stolen Child -The Waterboys

His poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ was critically acclaimed by its French and English audience, who praised it for its lack of conformity to poetic standards previously established by English poets. A short, 12-line poem, it expresses the narrator’s yearnings for the peace of a place ‘far from the madding crowd’ (Thomas Gray, 1751), as opposed to the chaos of the urbane environment in which he currently lives. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is both an eloquent elegy to and a celebration of the bliss that tranquillity can afford.

 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

One of Yeats’s most famous poems, ‘He Wishes For The Clothes of Heaven’ is a passionate confession of devotion that has inspired generations of readers. The speaker of the poem is Aedh, who represents the lovelorn hero hopelessly enthralled by ‘la belle dame sans merci,’ the archetypal female, who shows little regard for him or his devotion. Eloquent in the expression of yearning and thankless passion, the poem itself has become such a powerful literary symbol that it has been quoted repeatedly in a surprising range of media, from the film Equilibrium (2002) to the song ‘Delilah,’ by The Cranberries.

 

He Wishes For The Clothes of Heaven

 

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

Yeats came to maturity at the beginning of the twentieth century and his poetry stands at the turning point between the Victorian period and Modernism, the conflicting currents of which affected his poetry.

In essence, Yeats is considered a remarkable pioneer in traditional poetic forms while recognized as one of the most incredible gurus in modern verse, which unequivocally signifies the versatility in his works. As he got older in life past the youth phase, he was very influenced by aestheticism and Pre -Raphaelite art as well as the French Symbolist poets. He had a very strong admiration for the fellow English poet William Blake and developed a lifelong interest in mysticism. To Yeats, poetry was the most suitable way to examine the powerful and benevolent sources of human destiny. Yeats idiosyncratic mystical perspective drew on Hinduism, Theosophy and Hermeticism often more than Christianity, and in some instances, these allusions make his poetry difficult to grasp.

Yeats  found his first love in the year 1889 in the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, a young heiress who was heavily involved in Irish politics and specifically the Irish Nationalist Movement. Gonne was the one who first admired Yeats for his poetry, and in exchange, Yeats found a muse and a delicate symphony in Gonne’s presence that made her have an effect on his works and life.

In a shocking turn of events, Gonne rejected Yeats’s proposal when he offered to marry him the first time. But Yeats was relentless as he proposed to Gonne a total of three times in three consecutive years. Eventually, Yeats ditched the proposal idea and Gonne  went on to marry the Irish nationalist John MacBride. Yeats also decided to go on a lecturing tour to America and stay there for a while. His only other affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespeare, whom he met in 1896 and parted with one year later.

Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), Maaud remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Also in 1896, he was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn..She encouraged Yeats’s nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats consciously focused on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Along with Lady Gregory, he founded the Irish Theatre, which later became the Abbey Theatre.

Having set up a name for himself, Yeats was very much welcomed by a lot of critics and literary audience.After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays.

Yeats met Georgianna (Georgie) Hyde-Lees in 1911, and soon after fell in love with her and got married in 1917. She was only 25 years old and Yeats was over 50 at the time. They had two children and named them Anne and Michael. She was a huge supporter of his work and shared his fascination with the mystics. Around this time, Yeats also bought Ballylee Castle, near Coole Park, and promptly renamed it Thoor Ballylee. It was his summer residence for much of the rest of his life until nearly his death. After his marriage, he and his wife dabbled with a form of automatic writing, Mrs Yeats, contacting a spirit guide she called “Leo Africanus.”

Yeats’s poetry was adopted into a Celtic Twilight  mood in his earlier work, but soon enough it became heavily affected by the surrounding livelihood and turned into a mirror of the struggle of the classes in Britain and no longer became about the mystics. Thrown in the plethora of cultural politics, Yeats’s aristocratic pose led to an idealization of the Irish peasant and a willingness to ignore poverty and suffering. However, soon after, the emergence of a revolutionary movement from the ranks of the urban Catholic lower-middle class made him reassess his attitudes.

As the demand for the political separation of Ireland from Britain grew, Yeats became more involved with fellow nationalist literati such as Seán O’ Casey, J.M.Synge, and Padraic Colum, and Yeats—among these others—was one of those responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the “ Irish Literary Revival ” (otherwise known as the “Celtic Revival”). The Revival was an important uprising in the fields of literature for the Irish. The movement had a big and substantial role in the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Abbey Theatre (or Dublin theatre) was then established in 1904 and It grew out of the Irish Literary Theatre. Shortly after, Yeats worked together with William and Frank Fay, two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, and Yeats’s formidable secretary Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, to establish the Irish National Theatre Society.

 In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907, he managed the theatre’s affairs, encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge), and contributed many of his own plays. Among the latter that became part of the Abbey Theatre’s repetoire  are The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The Hour Glass (1903), The King’s Threshold (1904), On Baile’s Strand (1905), and Deirdre (1907).

Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notably Poems (1895) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and legend.  But in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats slowly discarded the Pre-Rahaelit colours and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic and esoteric influences. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared, and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line, a more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections.

Although strongly nationalist in belief, Yeats was not able to participate in the violence of 1916 Easter Rising. He did however reflect on that violence in the following  poem.

 Easter, 1916

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what of excessive 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.

His concern was to commemorate the individuals who suffered and died in the struggle to bring about what he calls 'A terrible beauty', and in his Nobel lecture he drew attention to the 'monstrous savagery' perpetrated on both sides of the conflict.

 In 1917 Yeats published The Wild Swans at Coole. From then onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement—a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without parallel in the history of English poetry.

In 1922 the Free State Government appointed him senator in Dáil Éireann, He went head to head against the Catholic Church on many occasions over the subject of divorce. He imposed that the position of the non-Catholic population on such subject and many others were disregarded by the Catholic community. He feared that the Catholic attitude would run rampant and consider themselves the supreme religion in everything. During his time as a senator,Yeats warned his colleagues, “If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North [the Protestants] … You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation.” As his fellow senators were virtually all Catholics, they were offended by these comments.

Yeats kept on learning and perfecting his trade, and I  have  to admire anybody somebody who stays the course and improves with time. He probed right through his life, constantly and ceaselessly – whether it was Maud Gonne's hair, the cliffs of Sligo, Cú Chulainn or whatever. 

In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman to win this prize and be honoured for what the Nobel Committee citation described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

The Tower (1928), named after the castle he owned and had restored, is the work of a fully accomplished artist; in it, the experience of a lifetime is brought to perfection of form. Still, some of Yeats’s greatest verse was written subsequently, appearing in The Winding Stair (1929).

I am an outspoken admirer of Yeats and will forever maintain that his work stands among not only the best of Irish verse, but the best English language poetry period. It is precisely for this reason that I reject the squeaky clean image of him as many  who write  about him fail to mention is his sympathy for Fascism.

Fascism today is an ideological bogeyman, a word that conjures images of some of the most brutal regimes to ever wield an iron fist over countries and peoples; images of purges and secret police and genocide. Yeats lived at the dawn of the 20^th century when Fascism had none of the grime and bloodstains that it wears now and when it seemed to many like an ascendant utopian ideology that would defend countries from the evils of modern decay and act as a bulwark against the spectre of communist regimes. 

Yeat’s closest intellectual peers, modernists such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, were no strangers to fascist sympathising and Pound especially was well known for his extolling the virtues of Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy even up to the end of the second world war when the horrors of fascism had been laid bare for the world. For a  young, romantic, nationalist like Yeats, Fascism with its talk of the “national spirit” and “national myths”, would of course hold a great deal of appeal. The rituals, ceremony and elaborate symbolism so beloved of Mussolini and Hitler were reflective of and inspired by much of the same esoteric and occult work that Yeats was such a great admirer of.

Yeats’ political interests began with Irish nationalism and the struggle for Irish independence and that is where many  would have you believe his political thoughts ended/ but at the time nationalism was on a continuum with fascism and  sadly in my opinion Yeats found greater sympathy with the ultra nationalism of fascists than he did with left wing thinkers of the time. However Yeats lived in uncertain times and reacted to them without the benefit of our hindsight. but despite this managed in his poetry to find a central humanity unfettered by ideology.Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Gonne, he never expressed anti-Semitic views, and his friendship with Pound was strained by Pound’s increasing fanaticism. and thankfully Yeats  distanced himself from Nazism and fascism in the last few years of his life and kept his stances to his own in his later life,

Yeats was at the same time, such were his paradoxes  an anti-war poet who did  not admire war. fought under any pretext. In his last years, he wrote poems dealing with the crumbling of modern civilization due to war. He believed that a revolutionary change is in the offing. In “The Second Coming” written in 1920   he described what lies at the root of the malady; The poem simply begins with the image of a falcon flying away from its human master in the fear of being shot. In medieval times, people would use falcons or hawks to catch animals at ground level. In this image, however, the falcon has gotten itself lost by flying too far away. This lost falcon is a reference to the collapse of the traditional social arrangements in Europe at the time Yeats was writing. The poet uses symbolism; the falcon getting lost is a symbol for the fall of civilization and the chaos which will follow.

There is one more strong image of The Second Coming: it is Sphinx. The poet takes the violence which has taken over society as a sign that “the Second Coming is at hand.” He imagines a sphinx in the desert; we are to think that this is a mythical animal. This animal, and not Christ, is what is coming to fulfil the prophecy from the Biblical Book of Revelation. The sphinx here is a symbol for the beast; the devil who will come to our world to spread chaos, evil, destruction and finally death.

 

The Second Coming - W B Yeats

 

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 Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in 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?

 

Dominic West Reading the Second Coming

 

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Yeats’ later poetry is typified by a stark, naked brutality and bluntness. His poems present the truth about the human state and he does not hesitate to use blunt and brutal terms to express it. He called spade a spade. He calls the world “the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch”. He says that a man is:

'All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.'

In 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee for the last time. Much of the remainder of his life was outside Ireland, but he did lease a house, Riversdale in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham from 1932. He wrote prolifically through the final years of his life, publishing poetry, plays and prose.

One of Yeats’ many concerns was old age which is seen as a symbol of the tyranny of time. Rage against the limitations of age and society upon an old man occurs frequently in his poetry. In “Among School Children” he considers himself a comfortable scarecrow. The heart becomes ‘comprehending’, unfortunately attached to a ‘dying animal’. In “The Tower”, Yeats calls the aged body an ‘absurdity’. A powerful expression of Yeats’ agony facing old age appears at the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium”:

'That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the tress
Those dying generations – at their song.'

Yeats attitude to old age cannot be typified. Old age is certainly a handicap to the still strong sensual desires He talks of the limited choices available to an old man who is simply a torn coat upon a stick:

'An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,'

He was both romantic and modern and so talks about balance. In the age of industrialization, man was losing the equilibrium between science and religion. They were destroying their physical beauty by injuring it for the elevation of soul. The balance was lost.

'O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance? '

Yeats’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry, drama, and prose; and from his spiritual growth and his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom, which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology.

In 1938 he attended the Abbey for the last time to see the premiere of his play Purgatory. The Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published on that same year.

After suffering from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on January 28, 1939, at age 73.

Yeats’s wished to be buried in Drumecliff at his hometown in County Sligo. He was first buried at Roquebrune but then his body was exhumed and moved there in September 1948. His grave is considered a famous attraction in Sligo where many people come to visit. The epitaph written on his tombstone is the last line in one of his poems titled Under Ben Bulben and reads “Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horsemen, pass by!”. The County is also home to a statue and memorial building in Yeats’s honour.

I can''t claim I understood  all  that Yeats wrote but he  left us with so much great poetry to read, learn, apply ourselves to, reread, never forget, and subsequently  he made the world larger for it. His inspirational legacy continues to nurture the creative impulse not only in writers but in historians, artists and musicians.