
Jane Austen and the great outdoors
Sally Minogue considers the risks Austen’s heroines take when they venture outside.
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Sep
14
Sep
17
There were three Yeatses. And three other Yeatses.
And then three
more. And Yeats was so vast and various,
there may be three more, and again three more.
1.
The first three Yeatses are young, middle-aged, and old. The young Yeats published his first book of poems 1889, when he was twenty-four; one of his finest poems, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” was in it. Then in 1893, a superb second book, with “The Lake Isle of Inisfree,” “A Cradle Song,” “When You are Old,” “Who Goes with Fergus?” and “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner.” Three more books in the next ten years, including “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Song of the Old Mother, “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, “The Fiddler of Dooney,” then “Adam’s Curse,” “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water,” “The Mask”—and poems that beg to be sung, like “Brown Penny” and
A DRINKING SONG
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the
eye;
That is all we shall know
for truth
Before we grow old and
die.
I life my glass to my
mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
Beginning with his 6th book, in
1914—called, perhaps significantly—Responsibilities—we
come to the middle Yeats. He is
thirty-nine now. And it’s not mythic Ireland he is writing about, but
politics and other immediate realities—and mysticism, and things occult.
He wins the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, and soon after becomes—by the time he is sixty--an old man. And he writes another one hundred and seventy poems, a lot of them about old age
The young Yeats published a little book of ancient Celtic
myths. Many of his early poems deal with
this “Romantic Ireland.” The early poems
are for the most part gentle, dreamy, beautiful.
The middle poems change. He wrote a poem about that change, called
A COAT
I made my
song a coat
Covered
with embroideries
Out of old
mythologies
From heel
to throat;
But the
fools caught it,
Wore it in
the world’s eyes
As though
they’d wrought it.
Song, let
them take it,
For
there’s more enterprise
In walking
naked.
The middle
poems—many of them—are political, and argumentative. Some are mystical, some historical.
And the old Yeats’s poems are often about old age,
about the world’s madness, about love—and about sex. Here’s a little four liner
he wrote in 1937, two years before he died.
It’s called
THE SPUR
You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was
young;
What else have I to spur me into song?
2.
There were three main women in Yeats’s life, and they all influence his poetry. So another three Yeatses.
As a young man he met Lady Augusta Gregory. Doorus House, near Kinvara, on the south side
of Galway Bay, looks out toward the Atlantic one way, and to the limestone
hills of the Burren the other way.
Robert Martin and another man were talking business, and Yeats and Lady
Gregory sat at a small table by a window and talked. Out of their talk that afternoon in 1896 grew
what was first the Irish Literary Theatre and then the Irish National
Theatre—which was the first National Theatre in Europe. And it became such twenty years before
Ireland was recognized as a nation!
Many of Yeats’s plays are about characters out of
Irish history and mythology. And they
are all poetic dramas, verse plays. It
was Lady Gregory who taught Yeats, in a way, how to write plays. And she, too, wrote plays—for their Irish
Theatre.
In 1889 the young Yeats met Maud Gonne, a beautiful
woman a year younger than he was. They
quickly fell in love. And Yeats wrote
two plays for her—plays about Ireland, and the mythic heroine Cathleen ni
Houlihan.
Yeats proposed marriage to Maud at least five
times. The first four times she rejected
him because he wasn’t serious enough about Irish revolutionary politics—and she
was a serious revolutionary.
She married a man named John McBride, who was a revolutionary. He was hanged by the British in 1916 for his
part in the Easter 1916 uprising in Ireland.
In 1917 Yeats—now fifty-two—proposed to her again. She rejected him again. So he proposed to her twenty-two year-old
daughter, Iseult, who also refused him.
Two weeks later he proposed to Georgie Hyde-Lees, whom
he had met when she was a child of ten. “George”—as he called her—was 25 now, and she accepted
his proposal. They married three weeks later.
George and Willie—as she called him—had two children. Each gets a poem: “A Prayer for My Daughter,” one of his most
beautiful poems, and “A Prayer for My Son.”
In 1918 Yeats bought a 16th century tower in County Clare, in the West of Ireland, restored it, and he and his wife and baby daughter moved in there, in 1919. He wrote a poem, entitled “To be carved on a stone at Thoor Ballylee.” And it is carved there:
I the poet, William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea green slate
And smithy work from the Gort forge
Restored this tower for my wife George.
May these characters still remain
When all is ruin once again.
On their honeymoon, George Yeats started doing
“automatic writing.” She would sit at a
table, holding a pen loosely in her hand.
And a spirit—her spirits all had names, and they gave them when they
visited her—would move her hand, and write.
So the three women are Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, and his wife George.Yeats was fascinated. Soon he decided that having to do the writing herself—as well as be possessed by the visiting spirit—was too much for George, so he took over the writing, and the spirits spoke through her. George’s “automatic writing” continued sporadically for nearly four years, from 1917 to 1921.
3.
Yeats also had three main mythic characters, who appear in his poems. The first was Cathleen ni Houlihan, sometimes
a beautiful young woman with yellow hair, sometimes “the poor old woman.” She was played on stage by Maud Gonne.
Then there was Cuchulain, the great mythic Irish hero who
fought against the sea. “Cuchulain’s
Fight with the Sea” is a poem that appears in 1893, in Yeats’s second
book. He wrote “On Baile’s Strand,” a
play about Cuchulain and his fight with the sea, in 1904. Then two more plays about Cuchulain in 1910
and 1919. Then his last play, completed
just before he died, in 1939. It is
called “The Death of Cuchulain.” And the
poem he wrote two weeks before his own death, is called “Cuchulain Comforted.”
And then there is a wonderful old woman—Yeats’s
creation—called “Crazy Jane.” He writes
seven “Crazy Jane” poems for his 1933 book, The
Winding Stair, and another for Last
Poems in 1939. The finest, perhaps,
is
CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and
fallen now,
Those veins must soon be
dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’
‘Fair and foul are near of
kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I
cried.
‘My friends are gone, but
that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.
‘A woman can be proud and
stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his
mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
Yeats continued writing right up to the end of his
life. He finished what was intended to
be his last poem—“Under Ben Bulben”—in September of 1938, but then wrote one
more play and two more poems in January of 1939. A week after he finished the last of the
poems, he died.
Ben Bulben is a magnificent flat-topped mountain in County Sligo, in the West of Ireland. Yeats spent much of his childhood in its vicinity. “Under Ben Bulben” ends with what Yeats wrote as his epitaph:
Cast
a cold eye
On
life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
How many times have I stood at the foot his grave in Drumcliff Churchyard, under Ben Bulben, and recited that wonderful long poem for him! The first time was in 1961; I was twenty-six years old. It’s 2017 as I write this—and I have stood there again, and said it for him again.
Cast a cold eye
On
life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Bert Hornback
is the author of five books on Dickens, books on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, and The Ideal of Tragedy and
The Wisdom in Words. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Michigan
and Saarland University. Helives in Saarbruecken, Germany where he is the director of
the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought.