Pilgrim Soul

1

'Those masterful images'

Yeats's Ireland

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes?

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage, took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.1

'To engross the present and dominate memory'

In his last years, beset by ill health and often restricted to a diet of fruit and milk, W.B. Yeats's poetry became more autobiographical as he delved into his memory, looking back over his eventful life as poet, playwright, essayist and public figure. In 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' he gathered around him 'the images of thirty years', peopled by members of his personal pantheon - Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Hugh Lane, Hazel Lavery and, among the political clan, Arthur Griffith ('staring in hysterical pride') and Kevin O'Higgins ('a soul incapable of remorse or rest') - with all of whom, he insisted, you could:

Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;

Think where man's glory most begins and ends

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Another late poem, 'Beautiful Lofty Things', continues this celebration of his own inner circle - John O'Leary, Maud Gonne, Standish O'Grady and his father John B. Yeats - 'All the Olympians; a thing never known again'. They became Olympian because that was what W.B. Yeats, master image-maker, declared them to be.

'The Circus Animals' Desertion' does something different. It casts the mind back over Yeats's writing life from the 'enchanted islands, allegorical dreams' of his younger days, to the 'themes of the embittered heart' and the 'players and the painted stage' from his middle years, and on to 'the foul rag and bone shop of the heart', where the aged poet 'must lie down' now that his 'ladder's gone' and he is no longer busy climbing Mount Parnassus. That 'rag and bone shop' is a far cry from the 'crowd of stars' in which his imagination hid its face in 'When You Are Old', the early Yeats poem that contains the term 'pilgrim soul'. At the heart of Yeats's story is how he progressed with his poetry from inhabiting the late-romantic 'bee-loud glade' in 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' to being stalked by decidedly modernist images like 'a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street' that might have migrated from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Many of 'those masterful images' that run through Yeats's poetry offer insight into the Ireland of Yeats's time. And, while he believed that you could trace Ireland's history in the 'lineaments' of his friends' faces, for me Yeats's poetry possesses that same capacity. The 'masterful images' Yeats created act as signposts to Irish history. His poetic insights have shown themselves to possess the kind of permanence he hoped would attach to the words he had 'carved on a stone at Thoor2 Ballylee', his west of Ireland summer base for the most productive decade of his writing life, 1918-1928:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

This book seeks to do what Yeats did with those late-life poems. It covers biographical ground, as does 'Municipal Gallery' and the literary terrain mapped out in 'Circus Animals'. It is written with a focus on Yeats's poetry and his Irishness, the 'indomitable Irishry' he wrote about in his poetic epitaph, 'Under Ben Bulben'. I have approached Yeats's life and work with the general reader in mind, and have drawn heavily on Yeats's poetry and prose, believing that his 'words alone are certain good'.3 During my travels over the years, I have been asked to recommend a manageable, accessible account of Yeats's life and work, but often struggled to come up with an answer. This book sets out to explore Yeats through an Irish lens, drawing attention to his status as the paramount Irish literary chronicler of his age. It is written for readers with an interest in Yeats, or a curiosity about him, but who are disinclined to dip into the deep scholarly pool that wells around his literary career.

Stockholm 1923

I begin my Yeats story long before I was born, in the lifetime of my fervently republican paternal grandparents (who probably would not have cared too much for the Free State-supporting Senator Yeats), at a time when a newly independent Ireland had just emerged from a damaging, divisive civil war. The year was 1923 and the place, Stockholm.

When the Swedish Academy announced its 1923 Nobel literature laureate in the autumn of that year, it opted for a writer who had produced what the Academy described as 'always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation'. The poet's name was William Butler Yeats4 and his nation had the previous year achieved a measure of self-government as the Irish Free State, which had been formed at the end of a six-year struggle for freedom that began with the Easter Rising of 1916, an event that the poet had elegised in his magisterial history poem, 'Easter 1916'. Yeats modestly acknowledged the wider context in which he was being awarded the Nobel Prize, remarking that, 'I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State.'5

Yeats learned of his Nobel Prize one night in November 1923 when he was telephoned by Bertie Smyllie, an Irish Times journalist and future editor of the paper who was asked by the then editor, John Healy, to inform Yeats about the award and to record his response. Yeats's reaction, demonstrating that he had down-to-earth preoccupations alongside his more ethereal ones, was 'And tell me, Bertie, how much is it worth?'6 The answer was £7,000, a tidy sum in the early 1920s, which would have a current value (2023) of almost ?400,000.

Yeats later recalled that news of his success reached him between 10 and 11 p.m., after which he and his wife George celebrated with a plate of sausages, having failed to find a bottle of wine in their cellar. The following evening, during a presumably more elaborate dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel, a congratulatory telegram arrived from James Joyce, who, for the remaining eighteen years of his life, never managed to find favour with the Nobel Committee.

A few weeks later, Mr and Mrs Yeats set off by ferry for Sweden, where the coveted prize was conferred on this almost '60-year-old smiling public man' by King Gustav V at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December. It came at a time of great achievement in Irish literature. Joyce's Ulysses had been published almost two years before, while Sean O'Casey's first great play, The Shadow of a Gunman, premiered at the Abbey Theatre in April 1923. Yeats himself, who had lately returned to Ireland and been appointed to the Senate, was in full creative flow. Two years before he had published Michael Robartes and the Dancer, containing 'Easter 1916' and 'The Second Coming', and had recently written 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', containing that quintessentially evocative Yeats line, 'caught in the cold snows of a dream'. This was also a time of huge turmoil in Irish life, with the ending of the Civil War and the fraught consolidation of the Irish Free State.

At the award ceremony on 10 December, Yeats spoke about the Irish literary movement, in which he had played a leading role:

Thirty years ago a number of Irish writers met together in...