Sturge Moore had been instructed by Yeats to provide a cover design which could be used by the Macmillan Company of New York on all of Yeats's American editions. He sought a design of 'great beauty… better suited for my American books in general than the design for "Reveries"'93 Yeats wrote, hoping that Macmillan in London would also use it (though not for all of his books). He concluded that 'the block should be made in London & that the expense of this will not fall on me'.94

Yeats wanted something which would confer a more general symbolical autograph, even a new identity which would nevertheless provide continuity with the slowly fading icon of his youth provided by Althea Gyles's designs for *The Secret Rose*, *The Celtic Twilight* (1902), *Poems*, *1899–1905* and *Poems: Second Series*, as well as that for the much-reprinted Unwin *Poems* in the UK market, and for *The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats* and *The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays* in the United States.95 Sturge Moore provided a panelled design of a stylized rose and thorns which was to Yeats a 'fine grave design', first used upon both English and American editions of *Per Amica Silentia Lunae* (1918) and the American edition (but not the English edition) of *The Wild Swans at Coole* (1919) and upon the paper board issue of the American *Selected Poems* (1921).96 Sturge Moore had even provided for spines of different thicknesses, offering one spinal design of a single thorned stem, and another of a pair of such stems, although the double-stemmed spine was not used in the end for the thicker volumes, such as the 1921 *Selected Poems* (*Wade* 121, Plate 19). The Rose emblem also offered Yeats a way of forestalling anonymous American book designers chosen by the Macmillan Company and whose work he much disliked. *The Green Helmet and Other Poems* (1912) must stand as the volume most reviled by its

93 Nevertheless, Macmillan, New York did use the *Reveries* design on the cloth issue of *Selected Poems* (1921). See Plate 18.

94 B.L. Add. MS. 55003 f. 26. 95 Wade, *Bibliography*, items 65, 71, 73.

96 Ibid., items 120–21, 130, 128. The cloth issue of *Selected Poems* uses the rejected Sturge Moore design made for the American edition of *Reveries*. Only the book title itself has been changed. Wade implies that the cloth issue came first, which might suggest that Yeats decided to restore the Rose design on the paper issue, but evidence is scanty.

author for its cover design. This had been Macmillan New York's first new collection of Yeats's poems since 1906, and it was issued in tan paper boards with a green ornamental design which enclosed its title within a helmet absurdly reminiscent of contemporary diving suits. No doubt the designer (who is unknown, but who, from similarities of style, was also responsible for the regrettable cover image on the American 1905 John Lane re-issue of *The Wind Among the Reeds*) thought he was paying a sincere tribute to the title play, and perhaps to Yeats's half-forgotten helmets and crowns of his *Poems* (1895) period. Yeats had so loathed this 'hateful American copy decorated in my despite' as he told Robert Bridges, that he inscribed Sturge Moore's copy 'The cover is the unaided work of the American publisher. He says it is he believes the kind of cover I like', branding other copies with similar sentiments (Plate 20).97 By contrast, Sturge Moore's gold-blocked blue cloth covers on the English editions from *Reveries over Childhood and Youth*, *Responsibilities and Other Poems*, *Per Amica Silentia Lunae*, *The Cutting of an Agate* and *The Wild Swans at Coole* afforded some unity of livery, a tonal congruity with the Gyles covers, and some symbolic individuality for the various volumes. I choose but one example, the cover of *The Cutting of an Agate* (1919), an image noble in its restraint (Plate 21a).98

The design for *Responsibilities* (1916) offers the chance to watch Sturge Moore at work. Framing, panelling and boxing are a key feature of Sturge Moore's designs, one learned from the work of Charles Ricketts (Plate 21b).99 A glance at the evolution of the design for *Responsibilities* is possible, because almost all the documents for that process are in the Sturge Moore Archive, Senate House Library, University of London. Its dominant symbols are the well, tree, and hawk from *At the Hawk's Well* (the hawk of course later becoming an important personal symbol for Yeats).100

97 See, e.g., *L* 596. The presentation copy to Sturge Moore is inscribed 'December 1912' and is in the Sterling Library, University of London. Similar inscriptions showing how Yeats amusedly reviled the design can be found in other presentation copies, e.g., Allan Wade's, John Masefield's, and Lady Gregory's. See *CM* 20–21. 98 The design may be found in *YA19* Plate 25, p. 375.

99 The design for the top board and of the later *Four Plays for Dancers* (1921) offers a more severe example.

100 See Ronald Schuchard, 'Hawk and Butterfly: The Double Vision of *The Wild Swans at Coole' YA10* 111–34. See also *LTSM* 132 for Yeats's letter of 6 July

Plate 20. Design for the top board of *The Green Helmet and Other Poems* (New York, 1912) by unknown artist. © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 21a. Top board of *The Cutting of an Agate* (London, 1919), designed by Thomas Sturge Moore. Private collection, London.

Plate 21b. Top board, *Responsibilities* (London, 1916) by Thomas Sturge Moore. Private collection, London.

[1925] commissioning a book label design for use when signing books with what had become his signature motto, 'For wisdom is a butterfly | And not a gloomy bird of prey' (*VP* 337–38 and 827) where Yeats speaks of his ring, with its hawk and butterfly, in the Notes to 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', very much on his mind when writing to Sturge Moore about *The Tower.*

*Responsibilities* (1916) shows ingenious use of the top board's double outer gold frame. It breaks the illusion, obtruding into the image it supposedly encloses, in the lower left and upper right hand corners, and providing a perch for the hawk depicted above the '[d]ry stones in a well' and 'withered tree' of 'The Well and the Tree', a lyric uniquely included as such in this volume, and later published by Yeats only within the play, where it forms the closing lyric, 'The Man that I Praise' (*VP* 780; *VPl* 413–14) for the folding of the cloth at the end of the play. *Responsibilities*, however, was published on 2 October 1916, when the play was yet unpublished. As the hawk is not mentioned in the song lyric, I suggest that Sturge Moore must have been present in the audience in Lady Cunard's drawing-room, when *At the Hawk's Well* was first played on 2 April, 1916 (*VPI* 1315). Or he may have subsequently had sight of the manuscript. Sturge Moore was at the same time designing a table centre for the Yeats family, using the lion of St Mark and similar angular devices (Plate 22a). Both tablecloth and book cover have a common source in a tracing or copy Sturge Moore did in the Bibliothèque Nationale of the eighth-century boards of the Latin Gospels of St Willebrord (d. 739), an important analogue of the Lindisfarne Gospels, as Sturge Moore notes in the illegible pencilled note on the side of the drawing (Plate 22b).

Plate 22a. Table centre design for the Yeats Family by Thomas Sturge Moore, featuring the Lion of St Mark. © Senate House Library, University of London. All rights reserved.

Plate 22b. A Tracing after f. 75 of the *Evangéliaire de saint Willibrord* (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, B. N. Latin 9389) by Thomas Sturge Moore, with the title RESPONSIBILITIES blocked in on bottom r.h.s. The almost illegible pencilled note reads as far as can be made out 'From the Latin Gospels at Paris attested to have belonged to St Willibrord who died 739 the oldest of which [?] resemble [?] gospels of Lindisfarne'. The lettering in the original also reads 'IMAGO LEONII'. © Senate House Library, University of London. All rights reserved.

This is certainly insular work, but Sturge Moore went further, declaring in the note 'Irish work'. Pencilled in to the bottom right hand of the drawing is the title, 'RESPONSIBILITIES'. The further development can be traced in the finished design (Plate 21b, above). The finest of course, is the tower reflected in the stream at Ballylee, the most famous image perhaps in all of Yeats's work (Plate 23a), done from a tiny sepia and white snapshot sent by Yeats and still among Sturge Moore's papers in the Senate House Library, University of London (Plate 23b). The snapshot offers the tower at Ballylee and the stream beside it, but Sturge Moore's reconception moves quite a long way from a realistic depiction, particularly in that he gives us so complete a reflection of the tower in the water. I have often wondered whether Sturge Moore, in formulating this idea, and in using such masses of gold not have in mind Yeats's early passion for the symbolism of 'fire reflected in water', which Yeats figures under the persona of Michael Robartes as 'the pride of the imagination brooding on the greatness of its possessions, or the adoration of the Magi'.101 The volume, of course, opens with the Byzantine 'sages standing in God's holy fire | As in the gold mosaic of a wall' (*VP* 408), and if my suggestion has any merit,

101 From the Notes to *The Wind Among the Reeds*: see *VP* 803.

Sturge Moore is reading 'Sailing to Byzantium' by the light of Yeats's older symbolic system. In 'Blood and the Moon' (published in *The Exile*, Spring 1928) Yeats was to 'declare this tower my symbol', but arguably Sturge Moore had already done so, with the publication of *The Tower* on St Valentine's Day of that year.

One could of course follow through nearly every Sturge Moore design on copies in the Cantwell Collection. The sequence of designs for what became the cover design of *The Winding Stair* is recoverable, and the track of Sturge Moore's attempts is a record of both his and Yeats's changing intentions for the volume. This is collaboration in the deepest sense: Sturge Moore's dissatisfaction with 'Sailing to Byzantium' having provided the seed for the growth of 'Byzantium' out of the earlier poem and Yeats, having been told by Lady Gregory that *The Winding Stair* was a title already used on some other book, wrote to his wife on 27 September [1930] to ask if he should change his planned title to *Byzantium*, in which case he would 'send Sturge Moore the new Byzantium poem 'which will give him a mass of symbols. "Byzantium" would follow up my old "Sailing to Byzantium" which people liked'.102 By 4 October, he wrote to Sturge Moore,

I have decided to call the book 'Byzantium'. I enclose the poem from which the name is taken, hoping that it may suggest symbolism for the cover. The poem originates from a criticism of yours. You objected to the last verse of 'Sailing to Byzantium' because a bird made by a goldsmith was just as natural as anything else. That showed me that the idea needed exposition. Gongs were used in the Byzantine churches.103

Sturge Moore's preliminary sketch is a harvest of symbols from the Byzantium poems, the bird in the tree, the bird in flames, the boy on a dolphin (which seems to have large ears, rather than fins), the moon, the gyre, the dome of Hagia Sophia (Plate 24a). But there was excessive delay it the publication of the book, economic conditions worsened, its name was changed back to *The Winding Stair* after all, and the publisher's drive for economy forced the cover design (here best seen in that of the printed dustjacket) to be issued in blind stamping, except for its checker-board spine (Plate 24b).

102 *CL InteLex* 5389. 103 *Ibid.* 5390.

Plate 23a. *The Tower* (1928), top board design by Thomas Sturge Moore. © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 23b. Photograph sent by Yeats to Sturge Moore of Thoor Ballylee, to be used as the basis for the design in Plate 23a. The back is inscribed 'The cottage at back is my kitchen. The front you will see is over parapet of the old bridge. The other [parapet] was blown up during our civil war. WBY'. © Senate

House Library, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 24a. Thomas Sturge Moore's preliminary sketch for the top board of *Byzantium* (later *The Winding Stair and Other Poems*). © Senate House Library, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 24b. Thomas Sturge Moore's dust jacket for *The Winding Stair and Other Poems* (1933). © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

#### TRIBUTORY BOOKS

Sturge Moore's most elaborate tribute to Yeats's symbols came in his decoration to H. P. R. Finberg's translation of Villiers de L'Isle Adam's *Axel* (1925), for which Yeats provided a preface. Sturge Moore was a close associate of Finberg's father, A. J. Finberg the Turner scholar, and Finberg himself was a former Oxford student who had met Yeats while he was living in Oxford. *Axel* was one of the sacred books of Yeats's youth, and Sturge Moore designed a new total book as a tribute to Yeats's love for this play (which he had first seen in Paris in 1894 with Maud Gonne). The result is that *Axel*  comes adorned throughout with Yeats's leading symbols—Solomon's seal and lamp, Christ on the cross, with spear or sponge on a reed, the Janus-headed Magi, the lion and the sphinx. Many of these, the rose and thorns, also allude to Sturge Moore's own previous work for Yeats. If one compares the tower struck by lightning and unicorn bookplate for Mrs Yeats of 1918, which Yeats thought 'magnificent', and 'a masterpiece'104 with the spine of *Axel* one can see the justifiable pride in these private associations (Plates 25a & b).

Another kind of tribute is effected by the Janus-headed Magi and Sphinx, repeated from the top board in the frontispiece (Plates 26 and 27). These take their source in a pair of attendant gods (*c.*810– 800 BC) from the Temple of Nabu, god of wisdom and writing or learning, at Nimrûd, found in the lower Assyrian Transept of the British Museum, where both Yeats and Sturge Moore had regularly seen them. Sturge Moore's design for the Janus-headed statues which symbolize the 'immortality' of 'Magi, such as Axel's tutor', develop the back-and-front, hair-and-beard balance evident in the profile of this little god of wisdom and writing from the temple of Nabu (Plate 28a).105 Sturge Moore's Janus, appropriate after 2700

104 Ursula Bridge (ed.), *W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, Their Correspondence 1901– 1937* (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 31–35, 54, 91.

105 One of the pair of limestone statues of attendant gods dedicated to Nabu by Adad-Nirari III and Sammuramat (BM.118888–89). Nabu was the god of learning, in the temple of Ezida at Calah. Sammuramat was probably the original of the legendary Semiramis. They came to the Museum in 1856. In Yeats's time and Sturge Moore's, both little gods stood at the lower end of the Assyrian transept

years of writing, has a double-aspect and is 'four-eyed, two unbaffled by the veiling past, two unduped by the seductive future'.106 The Sphinx is just as evidently based on the colossal winged lions, also found at Nimrûd (Plate 28b). These huge portal deities, ten ton sphinxes also with 'crowns' or horned helmets which signify sacred character or supernatural stature in ancient Assyrian art, had been unearthed in the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrûd 1845–51 by Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817–94), husband of Lady Gregory's close friend Enid Layard, with whom she and Yeats stayed in Venice in 1907. Sturge Moore had no textual authority for these Assyrian sphinxes in *Axel* itself.107 But in bringing them into his designs, he gestures openly at Yeats's iconographical source for the 'brazen winged beast' of the play *Where there is Nothing*, '[a]fterwards described in my poem "The Second Coming"', as Yeats indicates in his note to *The Resurrection*. 108

on the way to the old readers' tea room, adjacent to the monolithic wingèd lion temple doorway guardians. Their collation perhaps suggested to Sturge Moore their combination into his Janus figure.

106 *Axel*, 12–13.

107 British Museum curators comment that a pair of guardian figures that flanked one of the entrances into the throne room of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC). Lamassu, or stone mythological guardians 'sculpted in relief or in the round, were often placed at gateways to ancient Mesopotamian palaces, to protect them from demonic forces. This winged lion has five legs so that when viewed from the front it is standing firm, and when viewed from the side it appears to be striding forward against any evil. It wears ropes like other protective spirits. Between the legs is inscribed the 'Standard Inscription' of Ashurnasirpal which is repeated over many of his reliefs. It records the king's titles, ancestry and achievements…. [Layard] suggested that these composite creatures embodied the strength of the lion, the swiftness of birds indicated by the wings, and the intelligence of the human head'. (http://www.britishmuseum.org/visiting/galleries/middle\_east/ room\_6\_assyrian\_sculpture.aspx). The arrival of the monoliths in 1850–52 caused immense public interest among classes not accustomed to visit the British Museum. Layard's discoveries fired the minds of those who built the Nineveh Court in the Crystal Palace. Less remarked, however, is the impact on poets and designers. 'The Burden of Nineveh', for instance, finds Dante Gabriel Rossetti leaving the Grecian galleries and seeing a 'wingèd beast from Nineveh' being hoisted into the building. See the illustration in the *Illustrated London News*, 28 February, 1852 (184).

108 See *The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats*, edited by Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catharine C. Alspach (London: Macmillan & Co., 1966), 932, 1102, 1099; *VP* 402.

Plate 25a. Proof of design for Book Plate for Mrs Yeats, by Thomas Sturge Moore. © Senate House Library, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 25b. Design for top board and spine of Villiers de L'Isle Adam's *Axel* by Thomas Sturge Moore. © Senate House Library, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 26. Top board and spine of published *Axel*. Image © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 27. Frontispiece and title page of Villiers de L'Isle Adam's *Axel* by Thomas Sturge Moore. © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

Plate 28a (left). Attendant God of Wisdom and Writing from the Temple of Nabu at Nimrûd, *c.*810–800 BC. British Museum, London. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

Plate 28b. Colossal statue of a winged lion from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC), excavated by Austen Henry Layard *c.*1845–51. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

I shall end with a different kind of tributary book, one occasioned as a tribute to an artist in whom Yeats had placed enormous faith in his project of bringing Byzantine imagery back into contemporary Irish art. In turn, the artist and designer, Norah McGuinness, produced an artist's book decorated wholly as a tribute to Yeats. *Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose* (1927), a fine copy of which is in the Cantwell Collection.109 The illustrator and decorator is Norah McGuinness (1904–80), painter, illustrator, costume-designer, born in Derry, and married to Geoffrey Phibbs. She went to the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, 1921, and was long connected with the Abbey Theatre. She designed costumes and masks for *The Only Jealousy of Emer*, directed by Lennox Robinson under Yeats's supervision and presented by the Dublin Drama League at the Abbey on 9 and 10 May, 1926 (in which production McGuinness danced the part of the Woman of the Sidhe).110 In 1969 she designed *Waiting for Godot* for the Abbey.

On 4 January, 1925, Yeats wrote a letter of introduction to Sir Frederick Macmillan for Norah McGuinness, 'one of the most promising Irish artists of the younger generation'.111 Sir Frederick replied seeking a Yeats title for her to illustrate, having summoned her and inspected samples of her work on 22 January.112 Yeats parried, replying 'I don't want any of my own work done for I have always refused illustrators and would give offence if I made an exception', but went on to suggest that Macmillan let her illustrate Sheridan Le Fanu's *In a Glass Darkly*, as he thought it

Le Fanu's most famous book… and I have often tried to get a copy. It has long been out of print and so I may exagerrate [*sic*] its merits. I am confident

109 My account of it is drawn from my Appendix on 'The Illustrations and Cover

Designs', in *The Secret Rose: Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition*, 278ff. 110 Liam Miller, *The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats* (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1977), 246–47. Norah McGuinness's own memories of the occasion, on which a droll remark by Yeats about her gold body paint led to her poor performance, are vividly retold in her 'Young Painter and Elderly Genius' in *W. B. Yeats, 1865– 1965: A Centenary Tribute*, Supplement to the *Irish Times*, 10 June, 1965, vi. See also Miller, *op. cit.*, 247–48 and Plate xxiii. 111 B.L. Add. MS. 55003 f. 85.

112 B.L. Add. MSS. 55613 f. 600; 55614 ff. 258–59.

however that it would suit the talent of that particular artist and there has been a revival of interest in Le Fanu of late.113

#### Gradually the real reason was drawn from Yeats: he had

always objected to having my work illustrated… because I was in dread of having my tales emptied into some very British nursery…. I suggested to Miss McGuinness the other night that she might, if you cared for the idea, illustrate some stories of mine in the style of Byzantine wall-pictures—we spent the evening looking through photographs of Sicilian mosaics and the like, and she went away full of the idea.114 The reason why I want Byzantium is that there was great Byzantine influence upon Ireland*.* 115

Yeats then cited wooden crucifixes in the Byzantine style in Irish private collections, and gestured to what he called a North Connaught

113 B.L. Add. MS. 55003 f*.* 87; see also f. 130.

tradition of such art down to 'about 80 years ago' before suggesting that 'a little book containing RED HANRAHAN and THE SECRET ROSE stories' might 'suit admirably for a first experiment'.116 Sir Frederick's response to Yeats's suggestion was to consult Norah McGuinness, before offering Yeats one shilling per copy in royalties. The published price was 10/6d net. Norah McGuinness's fee was a handsome £100, and she retained ownership of the original drawings.117 No formal agreement through A. P. Watt was made, nor did Yeats stipulate that he must see proof, nor did he express any interest in revising the text of the stories.

*Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose* is thus a second attempt at the 'total' or 'talismanic' book, in the same tradition as Yeats's work with the Cork artist Althea Gyles, and it grows directly out of the writing of 'Sailing to Byzantium', which was, as we shall see, to be fittingly dedicated to Norah McGuinness.118 Yeats preferred to keep himself in the background, and did not directly communicate with Sir Frederick about the volume until 23 August, 1927, when he sent a manuscript of 'Sailing to Byzantium' to be used as a 'prelude' to this Byzantine experiment in integrated book design.

116 B.L. Add. MS. 55003 ff. 95–96. He also suggested as alternatives either *The Celtic Twilight* ('better known but not so suitable for illustration') or a book made up from that volume, together with the next two sections of *Early Poems and Stories*, 'The Secret Rose' (1897) and 'Stories of Red Hanrahan'. Yeats does not seem to have entertained the idea that the section headed 'Rosa Alchemica' and including 'The Tables of the Law' and 'The Adoration of the Magi' should be included in this 'first experiment'. The implication is that after so much rearrangement of his text, he had come to see each of these sections as discrete entities, and had ceased to view the three last-named stories as a part of an entity called *The Secret Rose.*

However, the 'experimental' nature of the project should also be emphasized. 117 B.L. Add. MSS. 55645 f. 482; 20 December, 1926; 55646 ff. 28, 222, 30 December, 1926 and 6 January, 1927. Many of the drawings remained in her collection until the end of her life. They are now in a private collection in Dublin. I remain grateful to the late Norah McGuinness who, in 1975, wrote to me about her work with Yeats, and provided through Anne Yeats copies of some of her original drawings for *Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose.*

118 The two typescripts of the poem are dated 26 September, 1926, and it was published first in August 1927, when the Cuala Press *October Blast* (finished in the first week of June, 1927), was finally published. Yeats submitted copy to Macmillan for *Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose* on 23 August, 1927 (B.L. Add. MS. 55003 f. 99).

He has 'thought first of doing a preface to explain why I put it there' but then thought that 'the dedication to the maker of the pictures' was 'a better explanation'.119

Norah McGuinness was, from the outset, anxious about the 'total' effect of the book. She tirelessly but unsuccessfully sought a paper of weight and finish rather better than the 'machine' finish paper which the printers insisted was necessary to bear the 'solid' blacks and fine lines of her designs.120 It was McGuinness who insisted on the basic 'arrangement of the text and the illustrations' so that each story was furnished with half-title, two vignettes on the next opening, with initial design on the verso facing the first full recto of text, and a closing design on the final recto of each of the book's two sections.121 Again, she was careful to the point of obsession about getting her work exactly as she wanted it, and Sir Frederick was patient and accommodating of changes, even when designs had been proofed.122 She also consulted Yeats over such matters as the colour plates and cover designs. As early as 4 May 1927, McGuinness had asked Sir Frederick about the possibility of using gold in the coloured plates, and had been assured that, provided she limited herself to two coloured plates, gold could indeed be used.123 The implication perhaps is that at first she entertained an ambitious plan for the effect of the 'gold mosaic of a wall' (*VP* 408). The two coloured designs do not in fact employ gold.124

McGuinness had requested flat colours, doubtless in search of the finish of frescoes or of dulled, ancient mosaic. This had necessitated reproduction *not* (as Yeats apparently thought) by the 'ordinary three colour process' (which would have resulted in a 'spotty' finish),

119 B.L. Add. MS. 55003 f. 99. Norah McGuinness's letters to Macmillan have been preserved in the firm's archive, and were presented to the British Library at the end of 2004. They are at present unavailable.

120 B.L. Add. MSS. 55646 ff. 437, 643, 13, 20 January 1927; 55647 f. 86, 24 January 1927; 55653 f. 428, 1 June 1927; 55654 f. 528, 27 June 1927. 121 B.L. Add. MSS. 55653 f. 614, 8 June 1927; also 55654 ff. 132, 204; 13, 15 June

1927. 122 B.L. Add. MSS. 55653 ff. 428, 614, 1, 8 June 1927 55656 f. 355, 28 July 1927.

123 B.L. Add. MS. 55652 f. 83.

124 They were submitted on 24 June 1927 (B.L. Add. MS. 55654 f. 528, 27 June 1927).

but by 'separate super-imposed blocks'. Toning down the colours necessitated the return of the originals, but Sir Frederick was quite willing for his printers to continue experimenting.125 At about this time, Yeats, in Dublin, saw the proofs of the coloured plates. He feared that the 'method' of colour-reproduction had 'destroy[ed]' McGuinness's 'excellent' work.

The effect of your colour designs depends upon the variety of tint in the colour masses. Had you worked for this three colour process you would have had to break up the flat colour with patterns, or in some similar way—I have seen Dulac spend days on a pattern made by the scales of a fish—but your method is different. You work by suggestion not only in your colour but your design. Your hand & finger convention, for instance, would not go with pattern which by its very nature is the opposite of suggestion. A tudor rose, in decoration, for instance, must be completely realized in its convention like a letter of the alphabet.

Yeats went on to suggest that she insist on only the one coloured plate, of the design which became at his suggestion, made also in this letter, the frontispiece. He was more ready to compromise with expense than was necessary, given Sir Frederick's accommodating attitude to Norah McGuinness. The frontispiece design (with Hanrahan and the hounds, Cathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan and the four women with the four sacred objects, cauldron, whetstone, sword and spear,) 'need[ed] colour greatly'126 (Plate 29).

On the matter of a suitable cover design, both the publisher and the designer took endless pains, and were not always in agreement. The initial suggestion from Sir Frederick, made on receipt of the front cover design, was for a design in gold on blue boards, the eventual choice.127 By 21 June, four specimen cover colours were sent to the artist with a dummy copy (which McGuinness needed before knowing the dimensions within which she had to work for the spine design); Sir Frederick still preferred the 'dark purply blue' cloth.128

125 B.L. Add. MS. 55656 f. 292, 27 July 1927.

126 Sligo County Library [n.d.]. 127 B.L. Add. MS. 55653 f. 428, 1 June 1927. After the first issue, some copies were bound in red cloth, with the design in blue on the front cover, and the design and lettering in blue on the spine. See *Wade*, item 157, pp. 159–61.

128 B.L. Add MS. 55654 f*.* 385.

Yeats was consulted by Norah McGuinness and on 25 June, Yeats wrote from Thoor Ballylee, about the cover design. He had seen the trial bindings, and wrote to praise McGuinness's 'fine design' which would do 'a great deal for the success of my book'. He and George Yeats preferred (and got) a binding of 'the darkest blue… a fine colour in itself ' and one which 'shows up the gold' (Plate 30).129 Macmillan tried to economize, with a further weakly expressed try, with

three more pulls of the cover—one in green with gilt side, and one each in green and purple with the side design in blind instead of gilt. We have the idea that the blind is less staring than the gilt one; but we will leave you to decide, as we have no strong feeling either way.130

Plate 29. Frontispiece and title page by Norah McGuinness for *Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose* (1927). Image © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

129 Sligo County Library, June 25 1927. 130 B.L. Add. MS. 55658 ff. 98–99, 7 September 1927.

Plate 30. Top board design by Norah McGuinness for *Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose* (1927). Image © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

On 13 March 1928 Yeats wrote from Rapallo, ill and conscious of his own delay, but eager to thank her for the 'great pleasure' her designs gave him. They were 'exactly right [in]... their powerful simplicity', and he 'like[d] them all'. He 'especially like[d]' the designs for 'The Death of Hanrahan and the vignettes for 'The Wisdom of the King', but found the 'best of all' to be the two opening vignettes for 'Proud Costello…', which 'made me think of some old carved stone on "Insula Trinitatis"'. These were the two vignettes of the lovers and the two mingled ash trees on Insula Trinitatis in Lough Key (Plate 31). Norah McGuinness had done him 'a great service', and the young Michael Yeats had said 'I like those pictures—they are not too like anything so I can tell myself stories about them'.131

George Russell writing in the *Irish Statesman*, considered the illustrations irrelevant, but what he had perhaps not seen was that the Byzantine decoration of *Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose* was the imposition of an Irish visual concomitant to Yeats's new iconography, one announced in the textual changes which introduced

131 Sligo County Library, March 13 [1928]. Yeats's last comment of course alludes to the ending of 'Proud Costello, MacDermot's Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue': see *VSR* 81*, Myth (2005)* 137.

Byzantium into 'Rosa Alchemica' in *Early Poems and Stories* (1925).132 The composition of 'Sailing to Byzantium' completed, Yeats had come back, as it were, *from* Byzantium to Ireland, and, with Norah McGuinness, now undertook the revisionist task of bringing Byzantium itself back to Ireland. Through the medium of a young artist whose work in the theatre he had admired, he had come to feel that he might inspire a new generation of Irish art and design. Insisting upon that affinity between Byzantine and Celtic art, and sealing that insistence by the deployment of the poem and its dedication, Yeats was determined to demonstrate the living or recently deceased affinities between Byzantine and Celtic Art. It was an old enthusiasm, as 'Rosicrux' he had strongly endorsed such a connexion in 1899, in his review entitled 'High Crosses of Ireland'.133 Moreover, it was to continue: as late as 1932, he added the opening Byzantine frame-tale to 'The Old Age of Queen Maeve' (1903) (*VP* 180).

Plate 31. Final vignette of the two woven ash trees over the graves on Insula Trinitatis, Lough Key, for 'Proud Costello, MacDermot's Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue' in *Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose* (1927). © private collection, London. All rights reserved.

132 See *VSR* 128 (lines 48–49).

133 In the Dublin *Daily Express* (28 January, 1899), 3. See John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (eds.), *Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats Volume II: Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose 1897–1939* (London: Macmillan Press, 1975), 142–45. ('Rosicrux' was a transparent pseudonym in the Dublin of the late nineties). His 'passion for the mystic rose... [had] saddened my friends' Yeats wrote, before proposing Behmenist and Blakean interpretations of the ground plan of a mediæval Irish monastery which he (and Margaret Stokes) read as a 'mystical symbol'. Praising her interpretation of Irish antiquities by means of Byzantine studies, he yet hoped that some future scholar 'as well as visionary... having mastered the mysticism of the middle ages' would 'tell us how much of it is reflected in the crosses and illuminated missals of this country' (*ibid.*, 144–45).

#### CONCLUSION

Publishing itself forced renewal onto Yeats. From 1903 he had an established publishing system or cycle—Dun Emer or Cuala edition, trade edition, revised collection and, endlessly deferred but always in prospect, a collected works. Such was the uniform Macmillan edition which began with *Later Poems* in 1922. 'You have perfect books at last' George Yeats said, when she saw the first volumes with their Charles Ricketts binding and unicorn end-paper motif. Yeats himself recalled that

at 17 there is an identity between an authors imagination & paper & bookcover one does not find in later life. I still do not quite seperate Shelley from the green cover, or Blake from the blue covers & brown reproductions of pictures, of the books in which I first read them. I do not separate Rossetti at all from his covers.134

As we can see in Eamonn Cantwell's copies, Ricketts had chosen green boards! After 1922, Yeats concluded that such symbols as the colour green and the harp (if not the shamrock) had 'ascended out of sentimentality', for obvious reasons.135

Lecturing in America, Yeats was once asked what reading he would recommend, and told how Lionel Johnson said that a man should read all books until he was forty, and thereafter be satisfied with six. When asked what were his six, Yeats chose such authors as Balzac and Morris and *The Arabian Nights*, and when I thought I would offer just six books to introduce Eamonn Cantwell's library I did not foresee that the books I originally chose would lead into multitudinous pathways. I think with regret of so many other avenues: the books he wrote to keep Dun Emer and Cuala alive, which became not merely collectors' items nor even coterie publications for friends and critics, but a vital part of his publishing economy, a rolling dress rehearsal for his trade publishing; *A Vision* 'for my schoolmates only', most of all, perhaps, the great story of the *Collected Works in Verse and Prose* with its obsessive self-portraiture.

My inspiration has been Eamonn Cantwell's passion for collecting, and his taste. In mentioning some books which eluded him I am offering an unsubtle hint to the Boole Library. We cannot read Yeats in any depth today without study of these unique and precious objects, which bear continuing witness to what it was to read Yeats in his lifetime. No amount of literary theory or postcolonial discourse can help us do that. To examine these books tells us something new every time. Every one of them tells us a story of collaboration: author, agent, publisher, designer, plate manufacturer, publisher's reader, sub-editor, blurb writer, printer, binder, salesman.

Introducing a bibliography appended to *The Works of Max Beerbohm* John Lane remarked, 'It is impossible for one to compile a bibliography of a great man's works without making it in some sense a biography—and indeed in the minds of not a few people I have found a delusion that the one is identical with the other'.136 Similarly, Yeats's books are not only central to the biography of the man of whom T. S. Eliot said that his history was the history

136 London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896, 163.

of his 'own time',137 they have a life, or lives, and a contingency of their own. Yeats knew this. His textual field has about it all the contingency that is implied in a remark to Florence Farr in 1914: 'I have brought my memoirs down to my twentieth year. I will carry them no further… partly because when one begins to write ones books are a sufficient history'.138

137 'The Poetry of W. B. Yeats', the first annual Yeats Lecture, delivered to the Friends of the Irish Academy at the Abbey Theatre, June 1940, and reprinted in *Purpose* (xii:3–4, July-December 1940), 115–27 at 127.

138 W. B. Yeats to Florence Emery, 4 October [1914] (private collection).

### 'Philosophy and Passion': W. B. Yeats, Ireland and Europe

### **R. F. Foster**

My title1 comes from one of Yeats's volumes of autobiography—of which there are such beautiful editions in the Cantwell Collection of the Boole Library. In the passage I have chosen, he is recalling his early ambitions around 1890 for the revival of Irish culture—and, indeed, a distinctively Irish civilization.

I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilization, its elements multiplying by division like certain low forms of life, was all-powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. Today I add to that first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction, long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity.

1 This was delivered as the second lecture in the series, on 3 June 2004. Further information may have been gathered since this article was prepared for publication. If you would like to find out if any further information has been discovered that may help your own research, why not write to the author at Roy.Foster@hertford. ox.ac.uk? Quite apart from anything else, feedback is always welcomed.

A powerful class by terror, rhetoric, and organized sentimentality may drive their people to war, but the day draws near when they cannot keep them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O'Connell's generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell as to her anti-self, buskin followed hard on sock, and I had begun to hope, or to half hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomize all human knowledge, but find it we well might could we first find philosophy and a little passion.2

'Philosophy and passion' were the qualities he tried to bring both to creative and political endeavour, and I want to look at how he did this. But first I must point out that the passage above was written in the autumn of 1920. He had first revisited these years of his apprenticeship around 1890 in a draft written in 1917, too frank for publication; but the section called 'Four Years: 1887–1891', from which this passage is taken, was written in Oxford in 1920, as events in Ireland worsened. The Black and Tans were terrorizing the countryside around his Tower at Ballylee and the Anglo-Irish war was in full swing. He was writing his early life with this knowledge of contemporary dissolution, and was deliberately placing the thoughts and ambitions of his youth as a prelude to the Irish revolution which he wanted to be a revolution in consciousness too, towards 'unity of being'. In the late 1880s, 'philosophy and passion' were intended to provide the key to a political annunciation. But by the time he was writing in 1920, Ireland was in the throes of guerrilla war while Russia and Europe had been turned upside-down by war and revolution. Yeats wrote his recollections of these years with great excitement. But, he privately admitted, 'One thing I did not see, the growing murderousness of the world'.3

2 This is the closing passage of 'Four Years: 1887–1891' (*Au* 194–95). In early versions (as in NLI 30, 536), 'Four Years' continues with what is now the opening passage of the next section, Ireland After Parnell': but Yeats clearly decided that the impact was greater if the section ended on the words 'philosophy and a little passion'.

3 See *Life 2*, 180.

'The world', it should be noted: not just 'Ireland'. And these reflections of Yeats's on the roots of the Irish revolution were also inspired by the close attention he had been paying to European history, since the Russian revolutions of 1917, and the upheavals after the Great War ended a year later. Since then, too, Yeats had been assembling his own strange philosophy of history, published in 1925 as *A Vision*, which tried to interpret the phases *o*f Eur*o*pean history and civilization—constantly returning to the idea that around 1920 a new era was dawning. This would be a new era for Europe as well as for Ireland. I want here to try and show how his ideas about the two were connected, and how they relate to his doubts about the efficacy of democracy, and his belief in artistic freedom.

John Stuart Mill said long ago that Ireland was part of Europe, whereas England was isolated in some kind of tributary stream; recent developments in the history and politics of both countries may seem to bear this out. But when Mill wrote this, Ireland was part of a political Union with Britain; that was the historical and cultural reality which Yeats was born into, and in some ways he remained enmeshed in it all his life. Yet he has been enlisted as the voice of liberationist nationalism in the years when Ireland was moving towards independence in the early twentieth century, a process which he himself saw as Ireland assuming its rightful place in Europe. He begins his public and publishing life as a radical nationalist, a member of the revolutionary Fenian brotherhood, preaching the rejection of British domination in political as well as cultural terms; he moves to a stance of disillusionment with conventional nationalism, then emerges once more as the voice of national self-determination when politics radicalize after the 1916 Rising; he takes a leading part in the public life of the independent Irish State from 1922, but this too leads to disillusionment; and the work of his last ten years, in the 1930s, has been closely connected with an interest in fascist politics and the dark pseudo-science of eugenics. By then he had been indicted as the advocate of elite culture in Ireland in effect, the culture of the colonizer—and this seems to trouble some critics more than his attitude towards reactionary politics in Europe.4

4 See e.g. Seamus Deane, 'Heroic Styles: the tradition of an idea', in *Ireland's Field Day* (London: Hutchinson, 1995), 45–58; reprinted in Claire Connolly (ed.), *Theorizing Ireland* (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 14–26.

His early career did not prophesy this. Thanks partly to his influential book *The Celtic Twilight*, Yeats became the voice of the Celtic Revival in Britain during the 1890s, and it branded his image for many years after that.5 If we are to explore the inheritances of Yeats, then this is one of the longest-established: the marketing of fashionable Irishness. And it is a theme uncomfortably familiar to us today. But it is also a European kind of identity. Celticism has its French dimension, and French literary fashion was vital to the young Yeats—not only the *Symbolistes* and Ernest Renan, but the lectures of Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville at the Sorbonne (which Maud Gonne translated for him) and occultist Jacobite groups in 1890s Paris. Yeats spent a lot of time in Paris as a young man, and had an uncanny instinct for seeking out the latest thing; he differs greatly from Joyce and Beckett in being a hopeless linguist, but like those other Irish writers, he found what he needed there. (One of the most marvellous passages in his autobiographies concerns his visit to Paul Verlaine, and it should be mandatory reading for anyone who denies that Yeats has a sense of humour.6 )

He was well aware of the European and avant-garde implications of Celticism—paralleled in our own day, in France as well as in America, though the concept looks more and more problematic to ethnologists as well as historians. (I refer you to a literary gathering in France in 1996 under the title 'L'imaginaire irlandais' where, according to one observer, 'Parisian intellectuals raved about *celtique* spirituality while Irish writers objected coarsely on the sidelines'.7 ) Yeats remained in touch with French literary developments, even after the shift of cultural energy back to Dublin in the early 1900s. This coincided with the period when he determined that Ireland take its part in the European avant-garde. His own work, especially his dramatic work, looked in this direction; and when considering his own London apprenticeship, he used a quintessential European

5 On the uses of literary Celticism, see Terence Brown (ed.), *Celticism* (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996) and Edna Longley, 'The Politics of Celt and Saxon', in *Poetry and Posterity* (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), 52–89.

6 *Au* 341–42. 7

Longley, *op. cit.*, p. 59.

literary image, comparing himself to Lucien coming to Paris in Balzac's *Lost Illusions.* I think this receptiveness to European events, ideas and parallels conditions much of his political thought.

But I also want to look at the implications—political and aesthetic—of his apparent turn away from this role, and the significance of his return to Ireland when his country gained a kind of independence in 1922. This is a central theme of the second and final volume in my biography of the poet. Again, this involved a change of direction. Through the early 1900s, Yeats had in fact been moving away from conventional Irish nationalism. For one thing, Maud Gonne abandoned him; for another, the language of Irish nationalism began to express something alarmingly like a *Kulturkampf* between Catholic and Protestant (a European echo here too, perhaps); for another, the nationally-minded theatre which Yeats founded, was itself the object of attack from conventional nationalists, particularly when it put on the avant-garde plays of J. M. Synge. Yeats, like Synge, had a strong sense of Ireland's European identity, and direct experience of Parisian intellectual life. In the Abbey, he invoked Antoine's Theatre Libre, and Lugné-Poe's Theatre de l'Oeuvre, Wagner's Bayreuth, the stage designs of Edward Gordon Craig, and Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre; while Ibsen and Maeterlinck are deeply influential on the first Abbey generation. Norway, Russia and Germany could provide dramatic models, no less than Celtic myths. The inclination towards European models and the necessity to bring foreign masterpieces into the Irish orbit remained through Yeats's life.

It is true that by the time of the First World War, Yeats had retreated from his advanced nationalist posture; he supported constitutional Home Rule, but spent most of his time in England. Meanwhile the War was convulsing Irish politics, and radical nationalism was on the rise. He was by then nearly fifty, a member of the establishment, and indeed refused a knighthood in 1915. But I think his European sense helped him avoid what's called 'internalised colonisation' and enabled him to fly by the nets of exclusive national definitions. Certainly the Easter Rising of 1916, and the subsequent radicalisation of Irish political opinion, brought about Yeats's own repositioning in his relationship with Britain. In one of his first letters after the news of the Easter Rising, though, he reflected that it was time to go back and 'begin building again'.8 I have traced how his poems, plays and public manifestoes in the period from 1916 to 1922 followed a cautious path between endorsing Irish revolution and calling for an accommodation with Britain.9 Most significantly, he wrote his autobiography—with which I began. And he altered and re-shaped the pattern of his earlier life to fit with the story of his emerging country—changing perspective and even chronology to make the point. His public statements were equally careful. He tailored his speeches in the USA and elsewhere very cautiously; he withheld from publication poems and plays that seemed to take up the rebel cause; he stayed living (now in Oxford) with his new young English wife and their small children; he did not take part in political initiatives set up by friends, such as the Irish Convention of 1917.

It should also be noted that, though he was indeed writing poems and plays which carried a nationalist message, and circulating them in *samizdat* fashion at this time, he also wrote a strangely bitter poem about his old friend the revolutionary Constance Markiewicz, whom he had first known as a beautiful and aristocratic girl in her family's great country house, Lissadell. She was now imprisoned for her revolutionary activities, and (as a letter to her sister Eva of 1916 shows) Yeats was deeply struck by the contrast between her past and her present: 'Your sister & yourself, two beautiful figures

8 To John Quinn, 23 May 1916, *CL InteLex* 2960; *L* 614.

9 "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashioned now. It seemed true in 1913, but 1 did not foresee 1916. The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one can say of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism. 'They weighed so lightly what they gave', and gave too in some cases without hope of success. July 1916'. I am grateful to Eamonn Cantwell for pointing out this early salute to the 'heroism' of the 1916 Rising, which survived into the 1917 reprinting of that volume, and thereafter disappeared from Yeats's notes: see *VP* 820. He also pointed out that Ernest A. Boyd printed the first stanza of 'Easter, 1916', in *The Irish Commonwealth* (March 1919), a year before its first full printing in the *New Statesman.* Boyd's article was entitled 'The Drift of Irish Literature' (20–28), and the quotation came on p. 24. See also 'Yeats at War: Poetic Strategies and Political Reconstruction, 1916–1922', in my *The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland* (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 58–79.

among the great trees of Lissadell, are among the dear memories of my youth.10 That memory, as we'll see, persisted and was built into a great poem eleven years later when both sisters were dead. But the poem he wrote about Markiewicz at the time of her imprisonment in 1918 poem demonstrates an unequivocally contemptuous view of the company she kept. It also indicates the way that, at the end of World War I, he was already doubtful about the new democratic politics.

On a Political Prisoner

She that but little patience knew, From childhood on, had now so much A grey gull lost its fear and flew Down to her cell and there alit, And there endured her fingers' touch And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing Recall the years before her mind Became a bitter, an abstract thing. Her thought some popular enmity: Blind and leader of the blind Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

When long ago I saw her ride Under Ben Bulben to the meet. The beauty of her countryside With all youth's lonely wildness stirred. She seemed to have grown clean and sweet Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:

Sea-borne, or balanced on the air When first it sprang out of the nest Upon some lofty rock to stare Upon the cloudy canopy. While under its storm-beaten breast Cried out the hollows of the sea. (*VP* 397)

10 Letter to Eva Gore-Booth, 23 July [1916], *CL InteLex* 3008.

This poem, written in January 1919, was not published until November 1920, though he read it on an American lecture tour earlier that year. A certain caution in releasing his political poems may be evident here (as, famously, with 'Easter 1916'). Ambiguity about endorsing extremist republicanism remained, along with his mounting anger at the government's actions against the insurgents and the Irish population at large. When he did 'come out' as a supporter of Sinn Fein, and condemned British policy in Ireland, he did it (after careful preparation) in an Oxford Union debate. And he expressed his horror at the doings of the British military mercenaries in Ireland by invoking Gladstone and Salisbury, and aligning himself with them and with the outmoded notions of honour that the nineteenth century represented. A contemporary witness has left a description.

In twelve minutes of bitter and blazing attack on the English in Ireland he ended pointing at the busts of the Union's Prime Ministers. "Gladstone! Salisbury! Asquith! They were Victorians. I am a Victorian. They knew the meaning of the words "truth" and "honour" and "justice". But you do not know the meaning of them. You do not know the language I speak, so I will sit down".

'No-one who heard that speech', added this witness, 'could question his sincerity as an Irish nationalist'.11 We may also be struck in it by the anticipation of a bitter quatrain he would put into his great poem 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen':

> We who seven years ago Spoke of honour and of truth Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth. (*VP* 431)

But he also claimed to be 'a Victorian'. This may seem a surprising identification for a figure seen as not only the poet of national liberation but as one of the founders of modernism; however, there is much about other aspects of Yeats's life that bears it out. (Long

11 James O'Reilly, 'Memories of W. B. Yeats and Undergraduate Oxford', TS, HRHRC. See also *Life 2*, 188, 703 and 'Yeats at War', 75.

ago I interviewed Frederick Ashton, the great choreographer who had known Yeats in the 1930s; I described Yeats as 'avant-garde', and Ashton retorted, 'Avant-garde? My dear boy, he was *pure 'nineties'*.). The basic matter of his age might be kept in view.

Yeats was in his fifties when the European world was transformed by the Russian revolution and the upheaval of the old world order in the aftermath of World War I. His own world view often tended to the apocalyptic, and this was such a juncture. It is well known that 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' began as 'Thoughts on the Present State of the World'; it seems to me, looking at its evolution, that it originated as a poem about the European crisis, and was only later turned into a commentary on Ireland. This might be borne out by other writings around this time, which show similar misgivings: notably an ominous essay called 'If I Were Four and Twenty'. Written in 1919, it responds directly to the Russian revolution. It should, I think, be directly related to apocalyptic poems like 'The Second Coming'. In this essay Yeats considers the motor of history, driven either by struggles of individual against individual, or family against family; he reviews the economics of egalitarianism *versus* traditional hierarchies, and stresses the family unit as the basis of civilization, and the need to privilege it.

Thus in 1919 he was already absorbed by the ideas which would emerge, ominously, in the 1930s. And he wrote at this time to a friend that he had decided 'the Marxian criterion of values in this age [is] the spear-head of materialism and leads to inevitable murder'.12 He put some of his thoughts about political authority into 'If I Were Four and Twenty', where he discussed the primitive idea that 'ordinary men had no immortality, but obtained it through a magical bond with some priest or king' (an idea that would recur in his powerful poem about Irish politics, 'Parnell's Funeral').

12 *CL InteLex* 3603, to George Russell [? 5 May 1919]: 'I consider the Markian criterion of value, as in this age the spear-head of materialism & leading to inevitable murder. From that criterion follows the well known phrase "can the bourgois be innocent?"'. See also *L* 655–56.

Perhaps it may be possible in a few years to apportion the values of idleness by a science that traces the connections of thought and by a religion that judges the result. With Christianity came the realization that a man must surrender his particular will to an implacable will, not his, though within his, and perhaps we are restless because we approach a realization that our general will must surrender itself to another will within it, interpreted by certain men, at once economists, patriots and inquisitors. As all realization is through opposites, men coming to believe the subjective opposite of what they do or think, we may be about to accept the most implacable authority the world has known. Do I desire it or dread it, loving as I do the gamingtable of Nature where many are ruined but none is judged, and where all is fortuitous, unforeseen? (*Ex* 279–80)

These are also the years when he was writing the first version of *A Vision*, eventually published in 1926. While scholars have struggled with its philosophical and historical schema, not many have noted the implicit political prophecy offered in its final section—written, as it happens, in Mussolini's Italy. Here, he prophesies the end of an era in 1927. 'It is as though myth and fact, united until the exhaustion of the Renaissance, have now fallen so far apart that man understands for the first time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, myth—the *Mask*—which now but gropes its way out of the mind's dark but will shortly pursue and terrify' (*CV[A]* 212, *CW13* 175)*.* (This is clearly the rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem in 'The Second Coming'.) In another passage, later dropped, he questions the utility of democratic forms of government, faced with anarchic violence. A new era is coming, bringing its 'stream of irrational force'. All this is closely connected with his revulsion from the Soviet revolution, and his interest in the new Italian politics.

At the same time, from about 1920 Yeats had been repudiating the British dispensation, endorsing the Irish claim of independence, and planning to place his stamp on the cultural life of the new state. He was a firm supporter of the Treaty which established twentysix counties of Ireland as an autonomous Dominion within the Commonwealth and felt no difficulty about the partition of Northern Ireland, telling Maud Gonne that if such unpleasant neighbours slammed the door in your face, it was better to turn the key in the lock. The Irish Free State would later negotiate its way to the status of a republic, but at the time of the Treaty there were those who believed that Dominion status and an oath of fidelity to the King as head of the Commonwealth was an unpardonable betrayal of the Revolution. A minority of irreconcilable republicans, led by Eamon de Valera, precipitated the brief and brutal Civil War of 1922–23. The forces of the Irish civil war seemed to fulfil many of Yeats's fears and prophecies. It also inspired one of his great poem-sequences, 'Meditations in Time of Civil War'. This deals with violence, aristocratic descent, and the creation of a new order. The ambivalent and retiring poet/observer comes up against the ruthless clarity of action, and the forces of hatred behind Irish—and world—history.

I have not time to explore it all, but one might look at the opening poem in the sequence, 'Ancestral Houses'. It begins as a country-house idyll, almost Arcadian in tone, but ends by raising the question of degeneration, and unworthy inheritors—which, again, would resurface in his very late work of the 1930s. The conclusion of 'Ancestral Houses' revolves around an uncomfortable question. Are violence, bitterness, and grandeur inseparable? Is the decline and destruction of inherited greatness and achievement not only inevitable, but somehow encoded within the qualities that founded an aristocratic culture in the first place? And if so, can it really be regretted?

> 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? (*VP* 418)

Yet he opposed the anti-Treaty forces who sustained the violence and anarchy of revolution in Ireland. Yeats was in no doubt that the Treaty was the best deal possible; and while he felt that Irish cultural independence of English models was essential, he represented the Free State Government on several secret negotiations about the terms of the Oath of Allegiance. His political ambitions went further; he hoped to be made Minister for Arts in the new Government, which did not happen. But he became a Senator, speaking often and influentially; he was an organiser of cultural jamborees such as the Irish Race Congress, held in Paris just after independence, and the Tailteann Games (a sort of cultural Olympics). But he used occasions like his speech welcoming foreign visitors to Ireland for that occasion to declare gloomy expectations about the dawning post-democratic age, and to draw attention to Mussolini's Italian experiment, even quoting the Duce's call to 'trample upon the decomposing body of the Goddess of Liberty'.

Nonetheless, by the 1920s the poet of liberation has apparently become the father of his country: permitted—unlike, say, Adam Mickiewicz—to see the Promised Land which he has sung into being. But beware of answered prayers. The Free State rapidly became, in Yeats's view, prey to the wrong kind of pieties and restrictions, especially in the imposition of Catholic social law upon the constitution, outlawing divorce and contraception and imposing literary censorship in the interests of conservative Catholic standards of 'purity'. From the early 1920s Yeats took a deliberate and leading part in opposing such restrictions, mounting, for instance, a longrunning campaign to have James Joyce recognized as the great Irish genius of his generation, as well as being a great European writer, as great as Tolstoy or Rabelais. If it is true, as Denis Donoghue has said, that Joyce made himself a European to get out from under Yeats's shadow, we see a nice irony here as Yeats tries to reclaim him for Ireland. He had already tried to interest the writers of the new state in French poets like Péguy and Claudel—whom he had discovered with Maud Gonne's daughter Iseult in France in 1916–17. We encounter once again that European preoccupation, with a right-wing twist.

For it should be pointed out that this did not make him a political radical. Alarmed by threatened unrest in the new Irish Army which produced a near-mutiny in 1924, he was also entering discussions with like-minded people about the need for a new conservative Irish Party—which was privately described as a 'Unionist' party. What Yeats meant by this is not entirely clear, but it seems that he was interested in the status which he thought Ireland enjoyed in the late eighteenth century, with its own parliament and autonomy, and with the English monarch king of Ireland too—rather than a federated association within the Commonwealth. He clearly did not realise the extent to which the late eighteenth-century arrangements reserved vital executive powers over Ireland to the British government of the day, but he was not alone in this. And it seems equally clear that this in turn was associated with his ideas about political authority, and where it should properly reside. It is incorrect to label these ideas as 'totalitarian', because Yeats was preoccupied with the free development of the creative individual—and, indeed, with the necessity of a leisured and cultured class. But his political ideas certainly tended towards the oligarchic, and increasingly—in the Irish context—to the idea of inherited authority as epitomised by the Ascendancy class of the pre-Union period, whom he idealised to an almost ludicrous level, revolving around his (highly partial) reading of Swift, Berkeley and Burke.

This is hardly new, but perhaps these inclinations have not been sufficiently mapped against his quarrels with the Catholic *demos* in the 1920s. (Nor have his subversive sexually frank 'Crazy Jane' lyrics been sufficiently related to the political and moral conflicts raging when he wrote them.) His ideas about aesthetic models for the new Irish state in the 1920s owe much to current European examples, such as the architecture of the Stockholm City Hall. His scheme for an Irish Academy of Letters, to recognize writers and bind them together into a body that would set standards and preserve intellectual independence, was much influenced by the French Academy. I believe that several of his most apparently visionary or cerebral poems of the late 1920s are firmly rooted in the socio-political arguments of the day—'Among School Children', for instance, is deeply infused with his readings in Italian educational treatises, the philosophy of Croce and Gentile, and his preoccupation with ensuring the free creative development of the individual in the increasingly repressive atmosphere of the Irish Free State. And 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz' stands for far more than an elegy to lost youth: I read it as another instalment in the great fantasy of Ascendancy culture, which he had begun in poems like 'The Tower' and 'Blood and the Moon'. Moreover, I think that he is placing himself, with his ascendancy ancestors, against the levelling wind epitomised—now—by these two radical Anglo-Irishwomen.

Yeats wrote this marvellous poem in 1927, after hearing that Constance Markiewicz, his old friend and adversary, had died in the public ward of a poor Dublin hospital, worn out by years of frantic campaigning for republicanism and socialism; her sister Eva, also a committed radical, had died a year before. Like his earlier poem about Markiewicz, Yeats kept it unpublished for two years; but he eventually placed it first in his great 1933 collection, *The Winding Stair*, so it strikes the keynote for that collection. In fact, it is far more than an elegy for lost friends of his youth: it is an interrogation of the Irish propensity to hatred. It doesn't begin like that, but with a lovely evocation of a double portrait, like a painting by Sargent or Lavery.

> 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.

The beauty of the sisters is clearly sacrificed to their opinions as much as to the passing of years. And the second stanza takes this further, opening with a compassionate but despairing invocation to the ghosts of the dead girls, and ending with an enduringly mysterious image, which demands examination.

#### II

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.

*October 1927* (*VP* 475–76)

If the poem simply expressed his wish to burn away the years and restore the girls to the innocence and beauty of their youth, it would be clear enough. But note the last couplet. It is possible to read the 'we' as uniting Yeats and the two sisters in the dreams of their youth, building a 'great gazebo' of hopes; while 'they' are faceless critics, modern Irish philistines, so-called sages. However, I think it means something different. A first draft, cancelled, reads 'I the great gazebo built | They brought home to me the guilt'.13 The Georgian image of a 'great gazebo' suggests the fragile achievement of the eighteenth-century Irish ascendancy which Yeats now took as his own inheritance, and compared modern Ireland with, to the latter's detriment. So I think the 'we' in this couplet, the builders of the gazebo, are Yeats and his Ascendancy ancestors; while 'they' are the rebel girls themselves, who denounced the Anglo-Irish world whence they came. It is, therefore, another statement aligning himself with the forces of reaction against revolution. The abstract bitterness he had identified in his earlier poem, 'On a Political Prisoner', was now taken further. And I could quote, too, a letter he wrote to Olivia Shakespear at this time. 'In England you have never met the hatred that is a commonplace here. It lays hold upon our class, I think, more easily than upon the mass of the people—it finds a more complicated & determined conscience to prey upon'.14 I think Constance Markiewicz was in his mind here: the nationalist and socialist hero whom he now placed among the phantoms of hatred, the innumerable harpies with their clanging wings, who haunt the last stanzas of 'Meditations in Time of Civil War'. If this is so, it is a distinctly uncomfortable thought, which would grow in his mind, and in his work—along with his preoccupation with the hatreds arising in contemporary Europe.

From 1930, his political ideas took a more aggressive direction. The long and polemical Introduction to his play *The Words Upon the Window Pane* is, I think, a barely-coded reply to a book by Daniel Corkery, *Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature*, 15 which had denied the claims of people from Yeats's background to represent any kind of Irish culture. Yeats responded further to what he privately called

13 W. B. Yeats, *The Winding Stair (1929) Manuscript Materials*, ed. David R. Clark (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 7. See also my *Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923* (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 2014), 314.

14 *CL InteLex* 5023, 7 September [1927], partly quoted in *L* 728.

15 Cork: Cork University Press, 1931.

'Corkery's troop' in a striking essay on 'Ireland 1921–1931', and his lecture on 'Modern Ireland' to American audiences in 1932. These pursue the same theme of glorifying the Irish Georgian Ascendancy. That eighteenth-century civilization, resting firmly on privilege and exclusion though it did, was linked in his mind to successive rises and falls of other civilizations through historical cycles; it also at its Swiftian best stood out against the naive and sentimental liberal democracy which Yeats now identified as the enemy (often under the name 'Whiggery'). He saw this as quintessentially English, and his ideas about Ireland's place in the European tradition now took a new turn. Ireland must, as ever, look to Europe, not to England. Georgian Dublin equalled Renaissance Urbino, in valuing style, intellect and aristocratic authority. This assertion makes no sense historically, and it aroused furious reactions in the Irish press, but it was one of Yeats's sustaining and inspirational inventions.

His idealization of Italy accompanied and influenced his idealization of Georgian Ireland. He had been wintering in Rapallo in the late 1920s, where his chief companion was Ezra Pound: the connection to fascism might seem easily made. But it is clear that Yeats neither shared Pound's political opinions nor took them very seriously. Nor, apparently, did he take much interest in what was happening in Italy around him, as poets like Montale found when they came on pilgrimages to him. There was a lack of communication not only because of the language difficulty, but also because of Yeats's ability to construct his own historical reality and determinedly inhabit it.

It was also wonderfully at odds with the ruling ideas of the new Irish Free State. And when Eamon de Valera, the republican irreconcilable, returned to constitutional politics and was elected to power in 1932, Yeats's political position became more embattled. De Valera was determined to complete Ireland's withdrawal from the Commonwealth; though Yeats was actually involved in some of the fruitless negotiations with the British government behind the scenes, there was much about de Valera's project that seemed to threaten all he held dear. From 1933 he was lending cautious support to the developing 'Blueshirt' party, which looked like becoming an Irish variant of fascism. The Blueshirt movement quickly mustered 30,000 followers; they took an aggressive and paramilitary stance, calling for the overthrow of elections and the 'assertion of the national will'; their rhetoric would eventually become both xenophobic and anti-Semitic. This happened at a point when Yeats had severed his connection with them. But his unpublished correspondence shows that he was closely in touch with early supporters of the movement like Desmond Fitzgerald, Ernest Blythe and Dermott MacManus. After writing some obscure and banal 'marching Songs' for them, he quickly dissociated himself. This was largely, I believe, because their kind of politics rapidly tended towards clericalism and Catholic *revanche*, as well as cultivated a support base of disgruntled famers, impoverished by de Valera's policy of economic war with England. Yeats rather approved of de Valera's ideas on this issue, and was personally impressed by de Valera himself.16 On the other hand the Blueshirts and their leader, General O'Duffy, were now conjuring up the sort of demotic politics he had long ago set himself against.17

But in the first stages of their evolution, he had philosophical discussions with some of their political backers, and his unpublished letters and private notebooks show that he had a rather idiosyncratic view of the evolution of fascism as a right-wing descendant of Hegelianism (Communism being its left-wing cousin), which ensured the free development of the individual and the safeguarding of the cultured classes, unlike Communism, which stood for the elimination of those very social phenomena. He told Thomas MacGreevy that Mussolini 'represented the rise of the individual man as against what he considered the anti-human party machine', which seems to get it exactly the wrong way around. And at the height of his Blueshirt interest, he wrote in a notebook: 'What I think most important is to preserve the dynamic element of fascism, the clear picture of something to be worked for. We have to take

16 See *Life 2*, 470–71.

17 For a detailed treatment see my essay 'Our Chosen Colour is Blue', *Dublin Review* 11 (Summer 2003), 83–106.

everything we legitimately can from our opponents. Perhaps even more from communism than fascism has taken. Fascism is perhaps as much entangled with right-hand Hegelianism as communism is'. Significantly, these reflections were written at a time when he was rewriting *A Vision*, and contemplating the rise and fall of world systems through historical cycles. His personal encounters with General O'Duffy were hilariously unsuccessful; the General simply did not know what Yeats was talking about, and he never became the movement's D'Annunzio. Yeats recorded one meeting:

If the IRA attempt to seize power (& MacManus believes they will but I do not) or if the economic war brings chaos, then democratic politics will be discredited in this country & a substitute will have to be found. Talk was on the usual lines: the organized party directed from above, each district dominated by its ablest men, my own principle That every government is a tyranny but by the government of the educated classes & that the state must be hierarchical throughout'. De Valera has described himself to somebody as the autocrat expressing the feeling of the masses. If we must have an autocrat let him express what Swift called 'the bent & current of a people', not a momentary majority. I urged the getting of a recent 3-volume description of the Italian system (FitzGerald talks of it) & putting some Italian scholars to make a condensation of it. I urged also that unless a revolutionary crisis rose they must make no intervention. They should prepare themselves by study to act without hesitation should the crisis arise. Then, & then only, their full programme. I talked the 'historical dialectic', spoke of it as moving itself by events as the curvature of space was proved (after mathematics had it worked out) by observation during an eclipse (NLI, MS 30,280).

This probably confused O'Duffy sufficiently, but it is clarified by further notes made by Yeats, which emphasise his belief that in a new European order 'the family and the individual' must be given priority above governments, that creative individuals and their families deserve privilege in order to create culture and educate their children properly, and that 'structure and tradition' must be preserved. This is not much different from the oligarchic and aristocratic ideals he had been drawn to all his life, and discovered in his idea of courtly Italian culture when he first visited the country in 1907. It has very little to do with what Mussolini stood for by 1933. As MacManus later said, 'Yeats was not a fascist, but he was an authoritarian'.18

Why then did he write 'Marching Songs' for the movement, starting in November 1933, when it was already clear that the organisation was far from his own political principles? There is one extremely utilitarian reason: since Augusta Gregory's death in May 1932 he had written hardly any poetry, and was determined to galvanize his inspiration by any form of excitement possible. One of the very few poems he wrote was, significantly, the first part of 'Parnell's Funeral'.

He was also under some pressure from Ernest Blythe, in whose papers some drafts of the 'Marching Songs' have surfaced.19 Yeats's efforts are a response, in fact, to a campaign to find a new 'National Song', which the Blueshirts tried to commandeer. They are set to the Irish tune. 'O'Donnell Abu', a lilting rhythm which is very hard to fit, and they are at once strident, obscure and bathetic.

> *Those fanatics all that we do would undo; Down the fanatic, down the clown; Down, down, hammer them down, Down to the tune of O'Donnell Abu.* (*VP* 544)

Yeats knew as much, rewriting them over and over again, and progressively disclaiming the apparent political intention behind them. Lines such as 'What's equality?—Muck in the yard', for instance, rapidly become 'Troy looked on Helen, it died and adored' (*VP* 547vv.). When he printed them, it was with a long explanatory note 'offer[ing]… these trivial songs and what remains of life' to any 'government or party' which would meet his conditions whilst being sure that 'no such government or party [exists] today', and so effectively withdrawing from the contemporary political upheavals.20 Eventually he accompanied the 'Three Songs to the Same Tune'

18 Dermott MacManus, 'Notes for the Radio', W. R. Rogers Collection, HRHRC. See also *Life 2*, 475 and 744, n. 26.

19 First published in *The Spectator*, 23 February 1934 as 'Three Songs to the Same Tune' and first collected in *The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems* (Dublin: Cuala, 1934), 30–38: see *VP* 543–49. 20 *Ibid.*, 37–38.

with an ironic squib, first called 'A Vain Hope', and then 'Church and State'.21

> Here is fresh matter, poet, Matter for old age meet; Might of the Church and the State, Their mobs put under their feet. O but heart's wine shall run pure, Mind's bread grow sweet.

> That were a cowardly song, Wander in dreams no more; What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.

> > *August 1934* (*VP* 553–54)

By then he had also added a coda, 'Forty Years Later', to his great political poem, 'Parnell's Funeral', which (first published in 1932) brought together many of the classical myths and themes which had dominated his imagination since Parnell's death in 1891. It also crystallized his disillusionment with Irish politics.

> The rest I pass, one sentence I unsay. Had de Valera eaten Parnell's heart No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day, No civil rancour torn the land apart.

Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell's heart, the land's Imagination had been satisfied. Or lacking that, government in such hands, O'Higgins its sole statesman had not died.

Had even O'Duffy—but I name no more— Their school a crowd, his master solitude; Through Jonathan Swift's dark grove he passed, and there Plucked bitter wisdom that enriched his blood. (*VP* 542–43)

21 *Ibid.*, 34–38; see *VP* 553–54; 835–37.

This 'Coda' shows that, seen in the light of Parnell's aristocratic star, de Valera was a demagogue, and other politicians earthbound and uninspiring. True leadership inhabited the world illuminated by Fraser's *Golden Bough* and Dante's *Inferno*. Swift's brilliance of intellect was what should rule a nation, but never would. It might still be said that Yeats's disillusionment with the Blueshirts arose not from the fact that they became fascist, but that their commitment to fascism as he understood it did not go far enough. But one must then add at once that his understanding of fascism was not like anybody else's.22 We are back with the convulsions he had expected in the early 1890s, when 1891 ushered in a new 'phase'.

But his fascination with European politics remained, and many of his late poems—such as 'Lapis Lazuli', with its references to fleeing refugees and the collapse of elite civilizations, and 'The Statues', where the Irish appear as Europeans playing their part in a predestined drama of cultural history—reflect it

> When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon the filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face. (*VP* 611)

He is certainly looking towards the aesthetic idioms of classical European civilization as traditions which the new Irish may claim; but 'The Statues' also disturbingly evokes violence, totalitarianism and eugenics, while the anti-British politics of 'The Ghost of Roger Casement' indicate some pleasure in Germany's re-arming challenge to British military power in the late 1930s. How ominous is this?

Yeats's private writings and letters indicate his interest in the political aspects of fascism petered out—and he cannot be convicted

22 For a more detailed treatment of Yeats and right-wing politics at this time see my essay 'Fascism', in David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (eds.), *W. B. Yeats in Context* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 213–26.

either of support for the Third Reich, nor of anti-Semitism. His acceptance of the *Goethe-Plakette* from the Municipal Council of Frankfurt, when it had come under National Socialist domination, has been shown to have had no conscious political motivation; it was specifically for a performance of his ancient play *The Countess Cathleen*, and in any case the Nazi state subsequently banned Yeats's work as 'depressive art'.23 But Yeats's late writing, reading and correspondence shows that he was—like many intellectuals of both Right and Left increasingly preoccupied by eugenics, and what he conceived as the decline of the cultured classes through the unrestricted breeding of the proletariat. In fact, he used his belief in eugenic control to argue against some of the social policies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. His very last political manifesto, published as *On the Boiler*, makes this stark—so do some of his most challenging late poems, such as 'The Statues', 'A Bronze Head' and 'Under Ben Bulben'. His play *Purgatory* suggests, perhaps, that independent Ireland itself is the result of a mésalliance and a misbegotten birth, and that old patterns of hatred will be eternally repeated until social and political authority returns to its proper possessors. The 'great gazebo' starts to look like a very exclusive enclosure indeed.

And yet Yeats in his latter days, even as a 'smiling public man', should be remembered as the defender of important liberties in independent Ireland, as a consistent advocate of artistic and intellectual freedom, and as a sometimes unconscious voice raised in defence of tolerance and inclusivity. On some artistic levels, he had liberated himself just as his country ostensibly underwent the same process. His poems from the mid-thirties interrogate old age, the roots of inspiration, the artistic process, and the gnawing dissatisfactions of sex. Perhaps the greatest of them—'Long-legged Fly', 'The Circus Animals' Desertion'—concern themselves with the individual impulse of creativity, rather than any collective theorizing. In its first draft the last stanza of 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' was a bombastic declaration about war, asserting that cannon

23 On this incident see K. P. S. Jochum, 'Yeats and the *Goethe-Plakette*: An Unpublished Letter and Its Context', in *YA15 Yeats's Collaborations*, 281–87.

and thunder were the gods of mankind. If it had been left like that, it would be seen to reflect his thoughts on the contemporary Spanish Civil War, the Italian adventure in Abyssinia, and German rearmament. But Yeats rejected it, and wrote, very late in his life, the substitute ending which we know, bringing artistic inspiration and creativity back to the troubled self:

> 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, 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. (*VP* 630)

Literally on his deathbed, he wrote a play and a series of poems which return to his very earliest inspirations of Gaelic legend as retold by Standish O'Grady. This had been the seedbed of his early nationalism, but now he plays it against the inadequacies of the new Irish order. His very last poem, was 'The Black Tower'. It can be traced back to a story and play by Standish O'Grady which Yeats had first encountered in the early 1890s; it portrays a band of disaffected warriors hiding out in a ruined fortress, awaiting the return of a deliverer.24 Yeats's wife, very pertinently, described it as a political poem.

Yet that is not the full story either. Biographers always find a salient piece of evidence just after their book has gone to press, and I am no exception. A short while ago I went to Cambridge to look at some papers in Churchill College and found there the diary of Yeats's friend Edith Lyttelton, kept while she was visiting newlyindependent Ireland in 1922. She was struck by the intensity of antagonism there, and wrote in a private notebook:

I have often thought of a thing W. B. Yeats said to me many years ago. I was asking how it was that he no longer went in for Revolution, nor drove about

24 See Patrick Diskin, 'O'Grady's *Finn and his Companions*: A Source for Yeats's "The Black Tower"', *Notes & Queries* (March 1961), 107–08; *NC* 409.

in crepe when any big moment came to England, as he did in the streets of Dublin at Queen Victoria's Jubilee. (This last was a silent question.) He said 'I have learned to know that nothing great comes out of hatred and bitterness'.25

Thus he contradicted the message of 'Ancestral Houses', which I quoted earlier. The tension of this contradiction is sustained through Yeats's life and work, and gives it much of its power; and it is a tension which reflects his own social and political position, balanced between two worlds, the old and the new: the Ireland he had known under the Union, and the Ireland that had the potential to be a new European country. It is also true that this could take on a disturbingly reactionary colour. But I would like to suggest that Yeats's troubled and troubling reaction to the modern Irish world should be more closely historicized; and that it represents a pattern of response as well as challenge. Yeats, as his wife once remarked, had an extraordinary sense of how things would look to people afterwards; he spent much of his life constructing exactly how posterity should see things. Even the originally conceived contents of his last book of poems, beginning, not ending, with 'Under Ben Bulben', were to convey the sense that he was speaking from beyond the grave. And he was highly conscious, in his last decade, that the 'ceremony of innocence' was being well and truly drowned, and would be carried away in an apocalyptic flood of violence—which he dreaded.

One reason for Yeats's continuing resonance, celebrated in this series of lectures, is that he wrote at the intersection of literature and politics—which in Ireland can mean, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has said, a 'bloody crossroads'. Yeats made the territory all the more sensitive by thinking aloud on all the forbidden subjects: sex, religion, class, politics. After spending seventeen years writing his biography I remain astonished at his enduring relevance, his refusal to be taken for granted, and his superb disinclination to provide comfortable reassurance. Early in his career he had remarked that the old Irish 'did not weigh and measure their hatred' but focused hatred into a pure idea; 'and from this idealism', he added, 'comes, as I think, a

25 Chandos Papers, Churchill College, CHAN 1 6/4.

certain power of saying and forgetting things, especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics, which others do not say or forget'.26 It is easy to be discomfited by a great deal of what Yeats says; and almost impossible to forget it.

26 *E&I* 181; the reflection comes from 'The Celtic Element in Literature', first published in 1897.

Yeats the Love Poet

### **Bernard O'Donoghue**

I could not imagine a greater honour than to be standing here today1 in this capacity, in University College Cork's great Boole library, for a multitude of reasons. The small-time prophet is being honoured in his own kingdom; I come from North Cork, from the edge of Sliabh Luachra, the territory of the great poets in Irish. But Cork city, with UCC where my sisters studied English and Irish at its cultural heart, was the height of our aspirations. Secondly, there is the Yeats connexion: I don't have to look far in the audience here to see several people who know a lot more about Yeats than I do, so I am setting out with some trepidation. Thirdly, it is wonderful to be here under the aegis of Eamonn Cantwell's great collection of Yeats in the library here. Nothing of course could be more appropriate to Yeats, with his yearning for patronage on the scale of Renaissance Tuscany, than that magnificent bequest. We are, all of us here, privileged to be linked with it in any way.

My topic is further self-indulgence. I first read Yeats when I was at Presentation College on the Western Road in 1962, learning English

1 This third lecture in the series was delivered on 18 March 2005. Further information may have been gathered since this article was prepared for publication. If you would like to find out if any further information has been discovered that may help your own research, why not write to the author at bernard.odonoghue@ wadh.ox.ac.uk? Quite apart from anything else, feedback is always welcomed.

and Irish from the incomparable Dan Donovan. In fact, I had come to Pres to do the new Maths—as we called Calculus then—from the equally incomparable Freddie Holland (later of course poached by UCC), but I was won away, permanently as it turned out, by Dan's wonderful readings of English and Irish poetry and plays. And Yeats was at the centre of all that, particularly as we listened on the new LP record-player in Miss Cahill's flat in Donovan's Road (now of course a department of UCC) to Cyril Cusack's wonderfully heart-breaking reading of the love poems (There is grey in your hair!) on that ancient Caedmon record. So here I am today, forty years on.

Yeats said himself that the occult was the great concern of his life and work, only sharing centrality on some occasions with Ireland. Certainly both of those things had immense significance in Yeats's poetry; they are the things that have had the principal emphasis in the two volumes of Roy Foster's majestic biography of the poet, the first especially prominent in the title of the first of those volumes *The Apprentice Mage*. But the surprising absentee from this statement of priorities is love: Yeats, in particular as the lover of Maud Gonne, documented the great unrequited poetic obsession of the century maybe the most intense in English since the Renaissance. We might be tempted to think that that somehow goes without saying: that love is a classic subject of poetry, like birds and religion. But what I hope to show here is that Yeats is a very particular kind of love-poet—almost unique in the language, and certainly unique in his time. Maybe it is significant that most of the best recent discussions of Yeats and love (pre-eminently Elizabeth Butler Cullingford's *Gender and History in Yeats's Love-Poetry*2 ) have been concerned with something other than love, or at least something as well as love, as in Butler Cullingford's title. This mixedness in treating love is typical of the characterization of Yeats, and it is very surprising when you think about it. A very attractive selection of the love poetry was edited by A. N. Jeffares in 1990, *W. B. Yeats: the Love Poems*; but that book too has all kinds of material in it, from 'A Prayer for my Daughter' to 'Coole and Ballylee

2 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, *Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Hereafter 'Cullingford'.

1931', in praise of Lady Gregory. I think this is surprising because it does not make clear how concentrated on the role of lover, and its object, Yeats was. He is consciously setting himself up as a medieval courtly—love poet—that is the model of behaviour and sentiment he is following. In addition, he brings something quite different to that tradition by particularizing the object of that love. Maud Gonne is Yeats's *donna*, his *innamorata*; but she is also Maud Gonne—a woman who is big and beautiful but with unbeautiful small hands. I will touch more than once on the perfect poem that celebrates this imperfection, 'Broken Dreams'.

There is another way in which love has become oddly marginalized in the discussion of Yeats. A great deal of attention, and admiration, has been given to Yeats's harsh, late quatrain 'The Spur', addressed to Dorothy Wellesley:

> You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attendance upon my old age. They were not such a plague when I was young. What else have I to spur me into song? (*VP* 355)

There is indeed a grandeur about this survival of lasciviousness into old age. And ours is an age that has a lot of time and energy for lust, which maybe explains why this wild old wicked man' (to call him nothing worse) has tended to usurp the amorous area in Yeats. For most of his life, that was not his specialism.

So what exactly is love as Yeats specializes in it? Well, everyone knows about Yeats and Maud Gonne: that his unrequited love for her was the inspiration for many of his best-loved poems, and indeed for many of his best poems. In this respect he is the classic modern version of a long-established persona: the unrequited lover has had a long innings in literary popularity. From the troubadours to the present day this lovelorn and ineffectual figure has been a dominant presence in all literatures: not only in poetry, prominent as he is there (it is 'he' almost by definition, at least until the reversal of the myth by writers like Fay Weldon late in the twentieth century); there are also central texts of fiction like Flaubert's *Sentimental Education* and, with a questioning feminine nuance, *Madame Bovary*, and the heartwrung novels of Turgenev. So Yeats's infatuation with what Thomas Hardy called *The Well-Beloved* is part of a long tradition.

It is indeed such a familiar phenomenon that it is often felt to need no explaining at all, or even remarking. Everybody falls in love. And there is a tendency for them to fall in love with the unattainable. Yet, over the past century or so, love has increasingly been felt to need scrutiny and explanation. It is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs after all. The arranged marriage works a lot better; the wife brings in her dowry to help finance the business, or the returning emigrant funds the woman's farm, in a successful economic organization. So why set out to find an object of love that is neither attainable nor, often, economically viable? I will deal later on with the view that this offering of a psychologically fulfilling alternative to more viable social arrangements was precisely what 'courtly love', so called, is: it is individual 'passion', or in more modern terms 'desire', which works against the socio-economic structures of a good political order.

It is particularly strange, given that this sounds like a matter of what we call common sense, that this familiar, unsatisfactory order of things has generally been believed to have a clear name and a definable point of origin. It is 'Courtly Love'; and, as C. S. Lewis said in 1936, 'everybody knows that it appeared quite suddenly in the eleventh century in Provence'.3 Up to then, it is suggested, people selected sexual partners on more practical grounds, or at least they stuck with the partners that their society deemed appropriate for them. But the Provençal troubadours of the twelfth century were not sensible about this, and we are told they made the absence of sense the literary fashion in love for all subsequent eras and places in the western world.

Whether or not the pain of love (and it is always recognized that, as a subject if not as an experience, *liebesleid* has more power than *liebesfreud*) was an invention of twelfth-century Provence, there is no doubt that Yeats was a major exponent, or sufferer from it. He was so in a quite explicit and conscious way. He asks in 'The Tower' 'Does the imagination dwell the most | Upon a woman won or woman lost?' The answer is so obvious that the addressee, 'impatient to be gone',

3 C. S. Lewis, *The Allegory of Love* (London: Oxford University Press 1936), 2.

doesn't deign to state it (*VP* 413). Everyone knows that love lost is the more compelling. Yeats says it over and over again: the child dancing in the wind is a figure of innocence because she has not yet known love lost as soon as won' or 'the fool's triumph' (*VP* 312). According to the traditional account, Maud Gonne herself recognized that unrequited love was good material for the poet: better than requited love with the woman won. Thus (still according to the traditional account) she responded to his proposal in 1902—thirteen years after the 'troubling of [his] life began' in meeting her—by saying

'You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry' (*SQ* 326–30).

The same view was expressed more coarsely by John Berryman:

If Miss Gonne had called Willie's bluff and gone to bed with him, she wouldn't have filled his days with misery. No misery, no poems. You can bet your life that what Yeats was after was *poems'*. 4

(As a matter of fact we now know that this might not have been literally true; it seems she did sleep with him, but this did not stop him from carefully nurturing the 'misery' as poetic inspiration.)

In any case, fairly recently this traditional interpretation of Yeats and Gonne—at least as far as his wish for love with her to be sexually consummated goes—has been persuasively contested (or refined on) by Deirdre Toomey in her 1992 essay 'Labyrinths'.5 Toomey argues that Yeats's requirement that Maud Gonne should remain unrequiting and an unattainable dream was quite literally enforced by him, and whenever she showed any inclination to marry him (in 1898 she practically proposed to him, according to Toomey), it was Yeats who backed off and reinstalled her as the unattainable. This is what Gonne was acknowledging in her observation in 1902: that he was happy in making his beautiful poetry out of their spiritual union.

4 John Berryman quoted in Eileen Simpson, *Poets in their Youth* (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 156. 5

Reprinted in Deirdre Toomey, *Yeats and Women* (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 1–40.

And as far as courtly love and the unattainable goes as inspiration, it doesn't make any difference who initiates the unattainability; the whole point is that it should be poetically productive. Indeed, part of what I will argue later on is that the Toomey view makes the Yeats-Gonne relations all the more classically courtly—*courtois—*according to the medieval definition of love. Petrarch hardly knew Laura; Dante was, it seems, relatively happily married to Gemma Donati; his transcendentalizing love Beatrice was married to a Venetian burgher until she died young, thereby making herself ready to encounter Dante when he visited Paradise. The role that the courtly love *donna*  or *innamorata* or lady was required to fulfil was not sexual compliance but quite the opposite. I don't imagine Beatrice or Laura ever set out to tempt their great poets sexually, in the way Toomey suggests that Maud Gonne, at least once, did. But it is beyond question that they would have been stepping out of line if they had. Yeats had to respond decisively to ensure that Maud Gonne remained the cold inaccessible muse rather than the initiator of sexual love which was not at all the role of the 'lady' in courtly love. C. S. Lewis said with great severity that one of its prerequisites was 'adultery' (though this is not exactly true either).6

However, the situation described by Toomey is not only a wellattested one (she links it to Gonne's 'strangeness':7 that is a word which might repay further scrutiny), but the apparently inconvenient circumstances she describes are precisely what were demanded in the case of the medieval faithful lover. One of the most famous (and now controversial) accounts of courtly love was a book written in French in 1939 by Denis de Rougemont called *L'Amour et L'Occident*: literally 'Love and the West', but translated the following year into English as *Passion and Society.*8 What de Rougemont argues—and it is historically well-based—is that love-poetry of the kind that swept through Europe in the high Middle Ages was a Middle Eastern convention, written in Arabic and taken through Spain by Arabic

6 Lewis, *ibid*.

7 Toomey's argument here is based upon Yeats's 'Against Unworthy Praise': 'The labyrinth of her days | That her own strangeness perplexed' (*VP* 259–60): see Toomey, 18–19.

8 London: Faber & Faber, 1940, translated by Montgomery Belgion.

scholars in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was the route by which the 'Love' of his title reached the West' of his title. His most interesting contention was that it was a view of love which did not suit the West and led to a permanent conflict at the core of western culture. The title of the English translation was designed to make this conflict between passion and society more explicit: Middle-Eastern love was informed by a passion which was inimical to the good operation of society. Society is made up of 'little boxes', as Pete Seeger put it, and the most indispensable arrangement of these is the nuclear family: mother, father and children who will go on to repeat the structure for ever, constructing a perfect history for the species.9 Unfortunately, people are built with a genetic flaw, recognized and institutionalised by Courtly Love. The courtly lover, like Dante, Petrarch and the rest, was a happily married individual with children; but there was something in his nature—passion, desire or whatever we call it—that he also felt the need to respond to. It is precisely the fact that the good order of society requires that this illicit, extramarital impulse must not be entertained and hence requires rules forbidding the fulfilment of that impulse that causes a frustration which is expressed in poetry. John Donne, early in the seventeenth century says:-

> I am two fooles, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining Poëtry.

The two things—love and poetry—go together. But Donne also says, in the same poem

> Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For he tames it that fetters it in verse.10

9 'Little Boxes' (1962) was composed by Malvina Reynolds. A political satire on

suburbia, it became a hit for Pete Seeger in 1963. 10 'The Triple Foole', in John Donne, *Complete Poetry and Selected Prose*, ed. John Hayward (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1929, *YL* 530), 10. The last two quoted lines may be a source for Yeats's phrase in 'Shepherd and Goatherd', 'For rhyme may beat a measure out of trouble | And make the daylight sweet once more… (*VP* 339).

Expressing misery in poetic numbers somehow 'tames' it, making it less painful.

What the followers of the troubadours progressively established was that such illicit love, which was at once a natural instinct of passion and doomed by social edict, was a fine thing, requiring disinterestedness. There was no worldly reward for this passion; so it became more and more high-minded and refined. The term used was *fin amor*, as is often pointed out, the *fin* element is not related to the word 'fine' but to 'faithful', *fidus*; this love required great fidelity because it offered no rewards. In Joyce's *Portrait*, that most Dantelike of modern young men, Stephen Dedalus calls it 'the spiritualheroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri'.11 Dante didn't invent it, but he did patent it, making it a central plank of European literature.

The second major consequence of this curious state of mind which I will argue is important for Yeats follows logically enough from its disinterestedness. Lack of interest in worldly reward is generally accounted a Christian virtue. So courtly love becomes a kind of heresy, another lack of interest in the practical, offering competition as an alternative challenge to the orthodox moral arrangements which were set up to serve society's interests and exalted monogamous marriage. The lover makes a virtue out of his frustrations; by nursing them, without physical outlet, he becomes more and more refined. The object of his love, with whom he must not have sexual relations on grounds of social utility, becomes in turn a fine and unattainable ideal, a *Beatrice*, the blessing-conferrer. As expounded by Dante and his friends, love of woman in this mode, because of its lack of physical fulfilment and its attachment to the absent, transmutes into love of God.

It might be objected that, if the literature of the courtly world was so important for Yeats, we might expect to find it more fully expounded by him. Yet his references to the figures of courtliness,

11 James Joyce, *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 252.

and of medieval romance, are relatively few. The most obvious place to look is the beginning of section 5 of 'Dove or Swan', Book 5 of *A Vision*, dealing with A.D. 1050 onwards. Of course in a very evident way, the whole theme of 'Dove or Swan', *C*hristian peace *versus* the harshness of artistic beauty, mirrors exactly the opposition between quiet-life orthodoxy and transgressive passion which courtly love centres on. It is striking, too, that the second edition of *A Vision*  was being worked on, in the late 1930s, at the same time that De Rougemont was writing *Passion and Society* and a few years after Lewis wrote *The Allegory of Love.* Medievalism was in the air, especially the matter of courtly love. We might bear this in mind in reading this passage about *Parsifal*, the great thirteenth-century German epic of love and religion by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Yeats reminds us that

Throughout the German *Parsifal* there is no ceremony of the Church, neither Marriage nor Mass nor Baptism, but instead we discover that strangest creation of romance or of life, 'the love trance'.

Parsifal in such a trance, seeing nothing before his eyes but the image of his absent love, overcame knight after knight, and awakening at last looked amazed upon his dinted sword and shield; and it was to his lady and not to God or the Virgin that Parsifal prayed upon the day of battle, and it was his lady's soul, separated from her entranced or sleeping body, that went beside him and gave him victory (*AVB* 286–87).

A few paragraphs later Yeats is crediting Dante with writing 'the first sentence of modern autobiography' in the *Convito* (*AVB*, 289). But the Parsifal passage is highly revealing. Yeats's famous description of the first vision of Maud Gonne as 'the troubling of his life' is closely reminiscent of these moments of vision—the love-trance or love-potion—at the first encounter with the beloved. Dante called it his *Vita Nuova*, his 'new life'; Chaucer's Criseyde, intoxicated by her first sight of Troilus, exclaims 'who gave me drink?'

> Cryseyda gan al his chere aspien, And leet it so softe in hir herte sinke, That to hireself she seyde, `Who yaf me drinke?'

For of hir owene thought she wex al reed, Remembrying hire right thus, `Lo, this is he Which that myn uncle swerith he moot be deed,

But I on him have mercy and pitee';12

Who has given her a love-potion which acts with the irresistible potency that compels her to love, against all her economic interests and better instincts?—just as in the most famous love-story of all, Tristan and his Irish bride Iseult fatally drink the potion intended to tie Iseult and her husband King Mark together forever. The lives of Tristan and Iseult (like those of their literary relations Diarmuid and Grainne) are as a consequence both wrecked and exalted: the troubling of their lives indeed! It is one of the great literary conundrums: was it a blessing or a curse for Tristan and Iseult to have drunk the love-potion? Certainly it led to a grand Wagnerian passion and to a transcendent fidelity; but it led to their deaths at the end of a desperate career of subterfuge and flight from the social repercussions of their fated illicit love. We meet the dilemma again of course in the figures of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo in the fifth canto of Dante's *Inferno*. As punishment for their illicit love, the lovers are condemned to be never out of each other's sight for all eternity. But is this punishment or glory?

Yeats's other references and allusions to the major figures of courtly love are made with the passingness of what is casually well-known: thus one of his few references to Tristram (maybe the central figures) is thrown off in 1907 in the essay 'Poetry and Tradition': 'it is only before such things, before a love like that of Tristan and Iseult, before noble or ennobled death, that the free mind permits itself aught but brief sorrow' (*E&I* 252). Here we might note the early occurrence of the notion of tragic joy/tragic gaiety associated with the era of 'Lapis Lazuli' and the later poetry. This is important because, even though it is in the early poetry such as 'The Wanderings of Oisin' that the Medieval-Renaissance world of 'the old high way of love' (*VP* 206) is

12 *Troilus and Criseyde* Book 2, 649–55, in F. N. Robinson (ed.), *The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer* (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1957), 408.

explicitly evoked, many of the ideas mentioned there are embedded into Yeats's central concerns and are influential in the whole of his working life. The principal case I am arguing is that a framework of the grandeur and personal improvement effected by being in love is an assumption that underlies all Yeats's poetry, even where it is not spelled out. Moreover, it is not significant only in the poems of love; Yeats's whole conception of the poet is founded on the courtly social outlaw that emerged in the poetry schools of southern Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. To summarise the relevant qualities: the poet-lover was in breach of official social edicts which were constructed for the good operation of society; he was a heretic, operating by an ethic which not only contradicted the Christian norms but was in competition with them for virtue; and above all he was a figure of refinement of sensibility. He was made more virtuous by love, as Chaucer says Troilus was. Yeats wanted to make all these three claims for himself as poet-lover.

I will conclude by arguing that the first of these—the political outcast—gradually extended into all Yeats's politics and forced him into positions of increasingly perverse individuality. Maud Gonne was the founding inspiration and troubler of his life; but the logic of his courtly love persona extended far beyond her: not only into other instances of the beautiful woman (notably Constance Gore-Booth/ Markiewicz) but into political realms which were not to do with love at all. Exactly the same thing happened with the medieval poets, where the love-troubadours who wrote their *cansos* of love extended their writing outwards into *sirventes*, poems of public comment.

Next though to return to where 'courtly love' and its world may be found explicitly in Yeats's writing: this is—as they say—a surprisingly neglected topic. There is only one book-length discussion of it, by Gloria C. Kline in 1983.13 Kline begins by identifying Yeats's 'roleplaying' as a 'poet in love'. In the best courtly tradition, Yeats fell in love, not with Maud Gonne 'whom he scarcely knew, but with his own projected *anima*, the "woman within himself "' (11). Kline develops

13 Gloria C. Kline, *The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983). Hereafter 'Kline'.

this Jungian view of Yeats—and it should be said that she does it very well if you like that sort of thing. But her book is incidentally useful for its enumeration of the courtly affinities in Yeats. As early as 'The Rose of Peace' in 1892, the archangel Michael looks down from Heaven to acknowledge the glory of Yeats's beloved (Maud Gonne, according to AE) and to 'weave a chaplet for her head'. Although it is not exactly the same, we might recall that the end of the process of refinement of the beloved in the courtly love process, according to Dante and his friends, was 'Angelicization'. The idea was that the Platonic, idealising lover was refined by the process of being in love; his love transmutes and advances from love of woman to love of God. The problem, from the twelfth century onwards, was what became of the supplanted woman, the original object of the love and its material cause. The solution, as I have said, was to exalt her dignity in parallel with the increase in spiritual worth of the love she inspired. As the love, and the lover, became more refined, the beloved became so too, to the point where she was converted from a physical, sexual entity into an angel: literally, according to medieval metaphysics. (Incidentally, the controversial reputation of Maud Gonne might also be linked to this: it is linked too perhaps to what Toomey calls her 'strangeness'. The world at large has not been so ready to see her as a Beatrice-figure as Yeats was, seeing indeed a marked disparity between some of her views and actions, and the kind of claims Yeats made for her. But that is a different topic.)

Nevertheless, the bearing of the general situation of the courtly lover *vis-a-vis* the beloved on the relations and attitudes prevailing between Yeats and Maud Gonne hardly needs elaboration. The most obvious occurrence is in 'The Lover' poems of *The Wind Among The Reeds* (1899). As is often remarked, this lover in earlier versions had several personifications, as Aedh, Mongan and others. The concentration into the generic term 'The Lover' or sometimes 'He', referring back to 'the lover' as the antecedent in the title of previous poems in the series, makes it clear that this is a classic love-sequence. The best-loved of all these poems, 'He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', features an appeal to the beloved which could hardly be more unphysical and idealising. He would like to offer the lady the fabrics of which the night sky is composed, 'Enwrought with golden and silver light', but being poor he hasn't anything as material even as the night sky. He has only his dreams to spread under her feet:

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. (*VP* 176)

The refining, idealising and unconsummating service (service is the word most commonly used) demanded of the courtly lover is certainly consistent with Toomey's revising view that, when Gonne made tentative attempts to reach out to Yeats sexually (such as taking the initiative in kissing him), she was not behaving according to the poetic stereotype that Yeats required her to follow. Of course we do not have to argue that this characterization of the inaccessible, ethereal beloved came straight from the Middle Ages to Yeats; there is a good deal of intervening poetry (the Elizabethan sonneteers, the metaphysical love-poets, and the nineteenth-century Romantics, not to mention Yeats's more immediate pre-Raphaelite and Beardsleyesque predecessors) that comes in between. Examples could be taken from almost anywhere; the whole point of the argument of books such as Lewis's *The Allegory of Love* is that the motif that we find so central in all love poetry—the pain of unrequited love which we take to be a norm not only of writing but of experience, was in fact a creation of medieval poetics which became totally dominant: Lewis says with a characteristic sweeping gesture 'Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature'.14 We can link Bob Dylan's

'And only if my own true love were waiting'

to the theme of *amor de lonh*, love from afar, in the troubadours. Dylan's ending

> And only if she were lying by me And I in my bed once again,15

14 Lewis, 4.

15 "Tomorrow Is a Long Time", written by Bob Dylan in 1962 and first recorded by him in 1963, first appeared on the album *Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II*  (Columbia Records, 1971).

is almost identical to the end of the fervent sixteenth-century 'Westron Wynd':

> Christ! If my love were in my arms And I in my bed again.16

There is a perfect, brief example of the qualities and circumstances in a poem from early in Yeats's writing life, in Housman's *A Shropshire Lad* (1896):

> Oh, when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave.

And now the fancy passes by, And nothing will remain, And miles around they'll say that I Am quite myself again.17

(For the full effect you need to hear the beautiful song-version by Ralph Vaughan Williams.18) Despite its apparent artlessness, this captures the whole story of the refining power of love. The observing world is astonished by the behaviour of the poet in love; but once he falls back out of love (something of course you mustn't do in courtly love), he is 'quite [him]self again'—the same old grouch he always was.

Despite the universality of these instances, what I want to do for the rest of the time today is to look at Yeats's love-poetry in the light of medieval (and the derived Renaissance) precepts about love, and to suggest that—for whatever psychological reason—Yeats observed them, in the poems in particular but in prose and plays too, with far

16 Frequently anthologized, but available in a modernized spelling version in e.g., Arthur Quiller-Couch's *The Oxford Book of English Verse* (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900 and later editions). There are two printings in *YL*, nos. 1653 and 2954, where the poem is on p. 42 under the title 'The Lover in Winter Plaineth for the

Spring'. 17 See *The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman* (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939, 1967), 24, 'A Shropshire Lad' n. 18.

18 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwjUN0jfnIE

greater fidelity and explicitness, inspired perhaps by the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets of his father's milieu, than had been the case in European poetry since the Renaissance. There is a set of terms which was already developed as a technical vocabulary in the twelfth century that Yeats constantly returns to: words such as 'passion' and its derivatives (as famously noted by Conor Cruise O'Brien), 'trouble' and 'joy', and part of what I will do is to trace the way a few of these terms run through Yeats's love-poetry side-by-side with a terminology of his own. For a start it is clear from 'Adam's Curse' that Yeats like many of his pre-Raphaelite contemporaries thought of love as 'fine' or 'high' in this way:

> I said: 'It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring. There have been lovers who thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books; Yet now it seems an idle trade enough'. (*VP* 205)

What are learned looks'? And, a more obvious question, what are these 'beautiful old books? It is striking how closely the 'high courtesy' and the theorists of love follow on from the question of the 'fine thing'. Crucially too, what exactly does Yeats mean by the lightly thrown out last line? What exactly now seems 'an idle trade enough? Surely the implication is that love nowadays is not taken seriously enough. The argument seems to be that the ideals of 'high courtesy' ought to be revived as a 'fine thing'. 'Joy' is another term of *courtoisie*  which repays scrutiny:

> The body calls it death, The heart remorse. But if these be right, What is Joy? (*VP* 500)

What is Joy?' was originally the title of the opening section of this poem Vacillation' (of which this is the end). 'Joy' doesn't sound like a very technical word in Yeats's time (though whole books have been written about its significance for the troubadours), and Yeats uses it a great deal; from *The Wanderings of Oisin* to 'Vacillation', there are sixty-six usages.19 But the opposing of it here to remorse—the appropriate Christian moral response to sin—is highly significant; in the magnificent end of ' 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul', Yeats declares 'When such as I cast out remorse… Everything we look upon is blest' (*VP* 479). In the fourth poem of the 'Vacillation' series, the wonderful mystical experience in a crowded London shop' culminates with a priest-like sensation of power:

> It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessèd and could bless. (*VP* 501)

This is part of the extended answer to the question 'What is Joy?' It is, as it was for the troubadours, an exalted—even religious—state of mind which is the opposite of penitential remorse.