Authors: Declan Kiberd
The simple answer is that Yeats's longings were for locations, whereas his pains were caused by people. It may well be that beautiful landscapes, which assuaged boyhood pain, were sanctified in the memory of later years by their association with intense early epiphanies. In his
autobiographical writings, George Bernard Shaw registered a similar discrepancy between his "devil of a childhood, rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities" and the serene settings in which some of his days were passed. He did, however, recall one moment of ecstatic happiness when his mother confided that they were to live in Dalkey. "Under its canopied skies", he recalled at the age of eighty, he learned "to love Nature and Ireland when 1 was a half-grown nobody".
15
The plaque which now stands on Shaw's cottage in Dalkey may well in its inscription speak also for Yeats: "The men of Ireland are mortal and temporal, but her hills are eternal". Behind such an aphorism lies a familiar strategy of the Irish Protestant imagination, estranged from the community, yet anxious to
identify itself with the new national sentiment. While Roman Catholic writers of the revival period seemed obsessed with the history of their land, to Protestant artists that history could only be, as Lady Gregory insisted, a painful accusation against their own people; and so they turned to geography in the attempt at patriotization. At the Godolphin School in London, patriotic English boys in Yeats's class read of Cressy, Agincourt and Union Jacks, while he, "without those memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish Catholic, thought of mountain and lake, of my grandfather and of ships".
16
In emphasizing locality, Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory were deliberately aligning themselves with the Gaelic bardic tradition of
dinn-sheanchas
(knowledge of the lore of places). Yet there was undeniably something strained about their manoeuvre, as Synge conceded in describing himself as a mere "interloper" among the islanders of Aran. Unlike most of his Irish contemporaries, Yeats spent a good part of his boyhood in England, a fact which may have allowed him, even while rather young, to reinvent his Irish childhood in a more pleasing pattern. Cynical commentators have often marvelled at just how many years Ireland's national poet managed to spend outside his native land, in keeping with the theory which has it that those Irish who live outside the island are a lot more starry-eyed about the place than those still living within it. (
Frank O'Connor remarked during an American exile that he returned at least once a year to remind himself what a terrible place it was.) So, Yeats, too, is inventing Ireland, as he employs his autobiographer's art to remake his life. He wrote in the Preface:
I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge; for I am writing after many
years and have consulted neither friend, not letter, nor old newspaper, and describe what comes oftenest into my memory.
17
Yet, no matter how much insurance he takes out against the law court, this most forgetful of autobiographers knows that the past is irrecoverable, that paradise is always by very definition lost. If each of the main characters in Yeats's book has been "reborn as an idea", then so too has the image of childhood as a sign of cultural despair.
There is so little reference to childhood in the poems themselves that a reader might be forgiven for wondering whether the poet had a youth at all. Childhood is invoked fleetingly in some lyrics, but only as a measure of the adult man's desperation.
"Among School Children" is about the suffering of being a woman, the costs of art, the sources of aesthetic and organic beauty – everything, that is, except schoolchildren, who stare in momentary wonder before disappearing out of the poem. And "momentary wonder" is all that the poet feels at the sight of them. Since communication with the children seems out of the question, the kind old nun does all the replying. The infant Yeats puts in a brief appearance in stanza five, solely as a "shape" upon his mother's lap. Similarly, in "To a Child Dancing Upon the Wind", Yeats evokes the symbol in the tide and first line, only to veer away in the second to the adult cares, of which the child is so irritatingly innocent:
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or ocean's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet.
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
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A more orthodox romantic poet might have marvelled at the adult's culpable ignorance of childish ways, but not this one. Yeats resists the temptation to attempt an exploration of the inner world of the child; and this may be to his credit, since many who expend great intensity on children do so because they feel themselves subtly unfitted for the
demands of adult life. Yeats was usually shrewd enough to play within his limits, recalling that he wrote
The Land of Heart's Desire
"in some discomfort when the child was theme, for I knew nothing of children".
19
With other people's children the poet was painfully inept. On one notorious occasion, he frightened Oscar Wilde's children out of the room with a ghost story, which got only as far as "once upon a time there was a ghost". In later years, when he had children of his own, he often gave his infant son a baffled look, as if to ask how he had got there: a curious reversal of the difficulty which some children have in believing that their parents actually went to bed and conceived them. In terms of Christian theology, Yeats's exploration of the symbolic meaning of childhood was utterly heretical. Whereas
Christianity sees the child as the living embodiment of a love which unites the parents, Yeats saw the child as the necessary physical evidence of the fact that a man and woman had momentarily tried, and failed, to be one:
And when at last that murders over
Maybe the bride bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there.
20
That same imperfection was found by Yeats in the experience of the Christian God, whose unsatisfactory and inconclusive love-affair with the world gave rise to the need for the incarnation of Jesus in the womb of Mary, a mystery summed up in the peasant adage: "God possesses the heavens, but he covets the earth". So the infant Jesus, like the child of even the truest lovers, is born out of love's despairing search for a moment of ecstasy: and this may be one of the implications behind the strange phrase "beauty born out of its own despair" in "Among School Children".
Through every phase of the poetry, one finds Yeats's lines freighted with these darker intimations from an adult world. "A Prayer for My Daughter" is less about the child in the cradle than about the kind of grown-up she might become. In "Among School Children" Yeats wonders whether the pain of his mother in childbirth is justified by the scarecrow he now feels himself to be. In a late poem
"What Then?" the self-questioning of the time-bound man is even more radical:
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
"What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?"
21
In such a painful world, only a few like Helen of Troy retain the self-delight of the child into their adult years:
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She minks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
22
The chorus makes it quite clear that the experience of being three-parts a child is unshareable, unknowable.
All of which illustrates the tragedy which Synge found in the literary vocation: youth knows how to feel but not how to
express, and by the time it has learned to express itself, it has all too often forgotten how to feel. No writer likes to admit that the unexpressed part of the life is the happy part, for to an artist expression is the ultimate fulfilment: but if expression is frustrated, that adds yet another dimension to the pain of the unrecorded life. This may explain why
Yeats balanced the pain of childhood against the assertion that he grew happier with every passing year. The later life is the life expressed.
The poet who had little good to say of his own childhood had much to remark about the prevailing systems of
education. Perhaps the pain of the one was but a further proof of the need for reform of the other. Throughout the autobiography, he is at pains to stress the comparative unimportance to the literary artist of reading and of books. "I have remembered nothing that I read", he writes, somewhat paradoxically, "but only those things that I heard or saw".
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His envy is of those, like his mother, who read no texts but whose recollection of oral narratives was flawless. John Butler Yeats had indeed praised his wife as one who pretended to nothing that she did not feel: and in this he saw her as utterly unlike the average modern reader, who derived second-hand
opinions from books. "Neither Christ nor Buddha wrote a book", wrote their (somewhat hypocritical) son, "for to do that is to exchange life for a logical process".
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Yet we must assume this statement to be sincere. From the Pollexfens, Yeats seems to have gathered the notion that books can erode the integrity of self: art, like sex, may be the activity of an aching, unfulfilled heart:
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
25
The man who saw himself faced with the rather puritan choice between a perfect life and a perfect work often wondered whether he should have thrown poor words away and been content to live. Nearing his fiftieth year, he closed the first volume of his autobiography with a repudiation of "all the books I have read", which were now dismissed as "a preparation for something that never happens".
26
That something may well have been a child, to judge by the introductory poem of the collection called Responsibilities, where the lyrical process of a book is deemed a poor compensation for the lack of better offspring:
Pardon, that for a barren passion's sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine,
I have no child; I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.
27
The book is seen as the rival and enemy of the child. No great wonder that John Butler Yeats exclaimed, on reading the son's autobiography: "Don't ever throw a book at your child. He might write his mem-ours".
28
The book had been thrown out of momentary frustration at the son's slow progress at learning to read. Even at the age of seven, he had yet to master the alphabet: and throughout his adult life he remained a poor speller, blighting his chances of the Chair of English at Trinity College, Dublin by mis-spelling the word "Professorship" in his letter of application. That reluctance to enter the world of book-learning might be construed as a kind of repudiation of the colonizing code. To the end, Yeats believed passionately in education, which valued a child for its intrinsic sake, and he despised mere schooling, which concerned itself more with producing the kind of adult the child must eventually become. In his estimate, a true culture consisted not in acquiring opinions but in getting rid of them. Life was a learning of how to
shed "civilized" illusions and a coming to terms with the desolation of reality. Many of his most remarkable poems –
"A Coat",
"Easter 1916",
"Meru",
"The Circus Animals' Desertion" – document that process, but there is a sense in which each, especially "Easter 1916", is a rewritten version of his earliest lyric of fairyland and childhood,
"The Stolen Child". It is there that he expresses most chillingly his reservations about the alleged happiness of childhood.
The notion that "
innocence" is something lost in a careless half-hour of late adolescence is risible. People either are or are not innocent to begin with, and those natural tendencies are reinforced with the passing years. Innocence is not inexperience, but its opposite. This realization led Yeats to discount much of his early work as the cry of the heart against necessity. "It is not" he wrote, "the poetry of insight and knowledge, but of longing and complaint... I hope some day to alter that and write the poetry of insight and knowledge".
29
Critics, taking him at his word, tend to describe "reality" for Yeats as a delayed but invigorating discovery, as if the mature poet caught the last bus back from Tír na nÓg just in the nick of time. Yet the critique of his own longing and complaint was actually written with exemplary self-awareness by a poet still in his early twenties: and those same reservations were built into the best early poetry such as "The Stolen Child". These texts are poised tensely between the real and the ideal, as if (in Yeats's own words about a fellow-poet) "some half-conscious part of him desired the world he had renounced".
30
"The Stolen Child" is not so much a plea for escape as an account of the claims of the real world and of the costs of any dream. The agony and strife of human hearts in a world full of weeping are cited as legitimate reasons for leaving the landscape of reality, but the child, being "human", cannot but feel the tug of that world. A tension is set up between fairyland and the warm humanity of the country kitchen, which the child must abandon in forsaking the weeping of the world. In avoiding those tears, the child may also lose the capacity to feel: innocence will indeed be blank inexperience. The vagueness of the drowsy water-rats, the waning moon, the ferns and streams, can be no match for the concrete homeliness of feeling with which the poet renders the details of a country kitchen: the kettle on the hob, the ready intimacy with calves, and the solid reality of the bobbing brown mice: