Another Troy

By DAVID REES

Another Troy must rise and set, Another lineage feed the crow, Another Argo's painted prow Drive to a flashier bauble yet

W. B. YEATS, Two Songs from a Play VER a quarter of a century after his death, kf we can see more clearly than ever now that Yeats's unique synthesis of the myths and realities of his own past and present make him the great poet of our time. As Allen Tate wrote in an essay in the early 1940s, an essay quoted by the editors of An Honoured Guest in their preface, Yeats produced 'a poetry which . . . is nearer the centre of our main traditions of sen- sibility and thought than the poetry of Pound or Eliot . . . Yeats's special qualities will insti- gate special studies of great ingenuity, but the more direct and more difficult problem of the poetry itself will probably be delayed.' And thus it seems only fitting that these two studies of Yeats's work* do indeed, by proceeding from the particular to the general, clarify some of the ambiguities of style and content of Yeats's work, locating it more firmly than ever 'near the centre of our main traditions of sensibility and thought.'

Take Mr Charles Tomlinson's contribution to An Honoured Guest. He discusses Yeats's treat- ment of the coming ruin of Lady Gregory's Galway home in 'Coole Park 1929':

Here, traveller, scholar, poet take your stand When all those rooms and passages are gone, When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound And saplings root among the broken stone, And dedicate—eyes bent upon the ground, Back turned upon the brightness of the sun And all the sensuality of the shade— A moment's memory to that laurelled head ...

When Yeats wrote his words, Coole was still standing, yet 'what matters, is however that a tone adequate to the subject-matter did not dis- appear with it . . . Yeats revivifies for us the language of courtesy as we know from the seven- teenth century.' Not only is the ruin of Coole symbolised, but his lines, as Tomlinson reminds us, stand at the end of the development of the English country house poem, descendants of Ben Jonson's 'To Penshurst,' Marvell's 'Appleton House,' and the fourth epistle of Pope's moral essays. It is a poetry which can survive even our age of anxiety and destruction, for the coming end of Coole is recorded in such a way that makes the most memorable use both of language and of tradition.

In much the same way, T. R. Henn's essay, in the same collection, on The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914) reminds us of the complex events that led the poet to show the 'strange, powerful and relatively sudden growth' in his technique in the years immediately before the First World War. One was the belated effect of the Parnell controversy, a second was the dispute over the presentation of Synge's Playboy, for in Yeats's words, 'There may have been reasons for opposing as for supporting that violent laughing thing, though I can see the one side only, but there cannot have been any for the lies, for the unscrupulous rhetoric spread against it in Ire- land, and from Ireland to America,' and a third seminal event was Dublin Corporation's refusal of a building for Sir Hugh Lane's famous collec- tion of pictures. In addition, the hopes of the late 1890s for the resurrection of the Irish National Theatre had been succeeded by what Henn calls 'the years of fruitful and exhausting drudgery at the Abbey,' Maud Gonne's marriage in 1905, and Synge's death in 1909, and the quickening pace of events in the nationalist movement. The result was 'rhetoric with a new fierce note, of power kept in check by volition . . . the expression of an ideal of aristocracy, this proud and tragic reticence in the face of vulgar abuse . .

Only with this transitional style in these years does the later Yeats of the 'great period' follow- ing Easter 1916 and all that stemmed from the in- surrection (which Yeats half believed was his responsibility) become possible. As Dr John Holloway remarks here in his essay on 'The Tower,' one of the greatest achievements of that final period, 'the thinking, passions and will of the poet are united in the synthesis of the world he creates.' It is a comment which is illustrated again by Graham Martin's study in this valuable collection of The Wild Swans at Coole and J. R. Mulryne's comments on the Last Poems, which the writer apostrophises as poems where 'terror is declared as well as joy, heart mysteries as well as heaven blazing into the head.'

Yet inevitably, when considering Yeats's work, we are guided back to the way in which he uni- versalised his experiences in the Irish crucible. As Professor Zwedling writes in his exemplary study of Yeats, a study written with the closest reference to the poet's work, and which outlines once again the central preoccupations of his life and poetry : 'The great tragedy of modern civilisation in Yeats's eyes, was the fragmentation of society, for the specialisation it encouraged had a direct and devastating effect on the possible breadth and significance of the heroic achieve- ment . . . Yeats admired the Irish and Homeric epics because he thought they presented a picture of the world in which the noble individual was recognised as a natural leader of society in all disciplines . . .' From Cuchulain, to Robert Gregory, he drew on the heroic in Irish history to sustain his myth—and many of the historical details of the reality of Coole, Lady Gregory's circle and the Abbey which nourished his art in this context can be read in the new revised edition of Miss Elizabeth Coxhead's study of Lady Gregoryt, which takes quite a detached view of Yeats's involvement with the group that inspired so many of his verses. And perhaps an even more revealing analysis of the back- ground to Yeats's thought may be found in Pro- fessor Torchiana's exploration of the poet's identification with Georgian Ireland:1 one will not easily forget the insight into Yeats's invo- cation of Swift, Berkeley and Burke in this volume.

Of course, one of Yeats's most enduring pre- occupations, that of the aristocrat, peasant and artist in alliance against the levelling Whiggery of the modern world, is symbolised by the monu- ment of his tower at Thoor Ballylee, which as Mrs Mary Hanley tells us, he had visited as early as 1896, possibly under the influence of Mary Hynes, celebrated in Rafferty's romantic Gaelic poetry which Lady Gregory had put into English. As Dr Henn reminds us again in his pre- face to this lecture originally delivered to the Kil- tartan Society,§ Thoor Ballylee, with its violent, historical associations, its underground stream, its bridge blown by the civil war of 1922-23, was a setting which combined all his preoccupations in literature, history, politics and legend, to- gether with related associations with Shelley and Milton, Samuel Palmer's engravings for II Pen- seroso, the associations of an ascent to wisdom via that winding staircase that still survives in the tower . . . The toner was a symbol of Yeats's view of the downfall of the modern world, and his complex cyclical view of history, a view which he perpetuated with the words that lie chiselled into the slate inset into the wall of Thoor Bally- lee, 'And May these characters remain/When all is ruin once again.' Moreover, the tower, in 'The Stare's Nest by My Window,' gave him the in- spiration for what is possibly his considered judgment on the apparently insoluble contradic- tions of Ireland:

We had fed the heart on fantasies The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our cmnitics Than in our love: 0 honey bees Come build in the empty house of the stare . . .

Yet Yeats's great poems of the later years of his life, 'Easter 1916,"Nineleen Hundred and Nineteen,' The Second Coming,' Among School Children,' The Tower,' and the final testimony of 'Under Ben Bulben' amongst others, with their compelling vision, their irony and ultimately their compassion, however much rooted in Ire- land, are still the great universal poems of our time. Of course, as we well know, Yeats dis- trusted the theory and practice of democracy, and as his explicit utterances on this theme only come later in his life, it is interesting how far his position in repudiating the liberal world-view descends from his experiences before the Irish revolution in defending an unpopular, minority aesthetic viewpoint. Thus, in July 1933, we find him writing dramatically to Olivia Shakespear from Ireland that 'politics are grow- ing heroic. De Valera has forced political thought to face the most fundamental issues. A Fascist opposition is forming behind the scenes to be ready should some tragic situation develop. I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles . .

But as some recent critics of Yeats, who could conceivably be perfectly content if the poet had advocated some sort of left authoritarianism as a solution to the world's 'tragic situation,' fail to see, there seems no reason, however lamentable, why great writers should possess im- peccably progressive opinions. As Professor Lionel Trilling writes in his recently published collection of essays, Beyond Culture: It is one of the cultural curiosities of the first three decades of the twentieth century that, while the educated people, the readers of books, tended to become ever more liberal and radical in their thought, there is no literary figure of the very first rank (although many of the next rank) who, in his work. makes use of or gives cre- dence to liberal or radical ideas.

'If we name those writers,' Trilling goes on,

AN HONOURED GUI ST: Ni.w ESSAYS ON W. B. YEATS. Edited by Denis Donoguc and J. R. Mulryne. (Arnold, 30s.). YI ATS AND THE HI.ROIC IDEAL. By Alex Zwedling. (Peter Owen. 30s.)

t LADY GREGORY: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. By Elizabeth Coxhcad. Revised edition. (Seeker and Warburg, 35s.) t W. B. YEATS AND GEORGIAN IRELAND. By Donald W. Torchiana. (O.U.P., 65s.) § THOOR BALLYLEE— HOME OF W. B. YEATS. By Mary Hanley. With a foreword by T. R. Henn. (Dolmen Press, 6s.)

quoting from an earlier essay written twenty years ago, 'who, by the general consent of the most serious criticism . . . are thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Mann (as a novelist), Kafka, Rilke, Gide (also as novelist)—all of them have their own love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy, as known by our educated class, has declared respectable.'

It is as if no matter what grand designs are floated and confounded by the modern world, Yeats's poetry, with its roots in the elemental, inescapable forces of life and language, remind us, as Edmund Wilson wrote at the end of Axel's Castle over a generation ago, 'of the un- tried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.' Coole is indeed a 'shapeless mound,' the stones carted off to make a housing estate, but the wild swans still fly over the lough behind the vanished house, just as Thoor Ballylee, trans- muted in a rather more subtle way by attentive ministrations of the Tourist Board, still looks across to the Slieve Aughty and on to the stream that mysteriously vanishes in the Galway lime- stone and 'the cold Clare rock' on its way to the Atlantic:

. . . We wait until the world changes and its re- flection changes in our mirror and an hieratical society returns, power descending from the few to the many, from the subtle to the gross, not because some man's policy has decreed it, but because what is overwhelming cannot be res- trained. A new beginning, a new turn of the wheel . . .