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william butler yeats the poet and ireland page 09

The Enchanted Land

The Stolen Child 18

A Faery Song 20

Lines from The Land of Heart’s Desire 21

The Hosting of the Sidhe 22

The Song of Wandering Aengus 23

The Lake Isle of Innisfree 26

The Fiddler of Dooney 27

Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland 28

The Romantic Idealist

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven 30

The Pity of Love 31

The Sorrow of Love 32

The White Birds 33

Down by the Salley Gardens 34

The Ragged Wood 35

When You are Old 38

No Second Troy 39

The Lover Pleads with his Friend for Old Friends 40

The Folly of Being Comforted 41

Never Give all the Heart 42

The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water 43

O Do Not Love Too Long 44

To a Child Dancing in the Wind 45

Two Years Later 46

Memory 47

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Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee

The Wild Swans at Coole 49

In the Seven Woods 51

My House 54

A Prayer on going in to my House 56

A Cradle Song 57

A Prayer for my Daughter 58

To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee 62

War and Politics

September 1913 64

To a Shade 66

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death 68

Easter 1916 69

Sixteen Dead Men 76

The Rose Tree 77

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz 78

Old Age and Death

Sailing to Byzantium 81

The Wheel 83

Youth and Age 84

What Then? 85

From Under Ben Bulben (Cast a Cold Eye etc.) 86

Biographical summary 90

designer’s note 93

Index of First Lines 96

illiam Butler Yeats was born in

1865, the son of John Butler Yeats,

an artist whose forebears were

Protestant churchmen in Sligo, and

Susan Pollexfen who belonged to a Sligo merchant

family. The Yeats family was to make a unique

contribution to the cultural and artistic life of

twentieth century Ireland: William Butler Yeats

became the greatest poet writing in English in the

twentieth century; his brother, Jack Yeats was one of

the most gifted Irish painters of modern times; his

sisters, Elizabeth and Susan, devoted their lives to

artistic endeavours and were the founders of The

Cuala Press.

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William Butler Yeats’s relationship with his native

county was one of the main influences in shaping his

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q e b m l b q ^ k a f o b i ^ k a

W

tfiif^j _rqibo vb^qp

future as a great poet. For the young emerging poet,

Sligo was a place of enchantment. While his artist

father, adored by his son, but mercurial and

unreliable, moved his family between Sligo, Dublin

and London, long summers were spent in Sligo, and

it was Sligo that fired William’s poetic imagination.

He filled his mind with the lore of the people of the

Sligo countryside, people who had within them, as he

wrote, ‘the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the

bottom of the Celtic heart’.

He filled notebooks with the stories and folklore he

heard from people such as Mary Battle, a local woman

who had a fund of ancient lore. The old Celtic

romances, stories of the Sídhe, the fairy hosts, the

great heroes of the myths of the Celts, CuChulainn,

Caoilte and Oisín, along with the fair Niamh were to

inspire his poetry. Yeats’s work, in turn, inspired and

influenced others during the Irish Literary Revival.

The Otherworld, the land of eternal youth

‘where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,

But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song’

was part of everyday life to the people amongst whom

Yeats spent his days as a boy. The countryside around

Sligo was the gateway to that magical Otherworld; its

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placenames, Knocknarea, Ben Bulben, Glencar;

Innishfree, the little island in Lough Gill and the

woods around it, were to be immortalised in his

poetry throughout his life, so that, together, they

make for a part of Ireland which came to be known as

‘The Yeats Country’.

Yeats’s passion for the Celtic past provided him with

a way of seeking answers to life’s endless quest for the

mystical. That same quest was to lead him to explore

the occult in the 1890s and to membership of the

Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn.

His friendship with the old Fenian, John O’Leary,

led Yeats into nationalism and he promoted the idea

of a distinctive literature so that Irish people would

realise their spiritual and cultural heritage.

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In 1889 Yeats, at the age of twenty-three, met Maud

Gonne in London, and with that meeting, as he

wrote, ‘the troubling of my life began’. He endured

a tortured and hopeless love for her for over thirty

years, during which time she was his muse, his

inspiration, the embodiment of Ireland itself in his

work. Gonne, unconventional, beautiful and

independently wealthy, was the daughter of a British

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Army major based at the Curragh, County Kildare.

Dedicated to the cause of independence for Ireland,

she threw herself into political activity. Yeats

proposed marriage to her in 1891 without success

and was to do so many times over the years.

Unknown to Yeats, Gonne had a daughter, Iseult, in

1894, by her French lover, Lucien Millevoye. He was

shocked and grieved when she married Major John

MacBride in 1903. The couple separated in 1905

and Gonne was widowed in 1916 when MacBride was

amongst the executed leaders after the Easter Rising.

Yeats proposed marriage to her again, and on being

refused, he proposed to her daughter, Iseult, who

likewise declined his proposal.

The love poems he wrote to Maud Gonne are

haunting, filled with symbolism, longing and sadness.

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Yeats’s meeting with Augusta Lady Gregory in 1896

was another momentous turning point in his life.

Born into an ascendancy family near Gort, through

her marriage she became mistress of Coole Park

estate in County Galway.

Like the much younger Yeats, Lady Gregory had

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immersed herself in the lore and culture of the

locality, Kiltartan, where Coole Park lay. Though

belonging to the landowning class, her life was

dedicated to furthering the literary revival in Ireland.

Her home was a centre for writers of the day, and it

was at Coole that the idea of a National Theatre was

developed. The estate, with its Seven Woods, the great

house and its lake, was to be immortalised in Yeats’s

work and provided him with an inspirational

environment over many years. Recognising Yeats’s

genius, Lady Gregory gave him the stability and

encouragement that he needed and was his friend and

supporter until her death in 1932.

In 1917, Yeats bought Thoor Ballylee, a ruined

medieval tower-house close to Coole Park. In the same

year, he married a young Englishwoman, George

Hyde-Lees, who was twenty-five years his junior. A

scholarly and resourceful woman who recognized the

genius in the man she married, she applied herself to

managing his life and restoring Thoor Ballylee. Like

Yeats, she was interested in the occult, and in this phase

of his life, assisted by his wife, Yeats discovered

automatic writing, a mediumistic script that provided

material for poems that convey his ideas on the nature

of historical change and decay. The medieval tower

itself provided the setting for many of his poems and

took on a powerful symbolism in his work.

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qÜÉ píçäÉå `ÜáäÇ

Where dips the rocky highlandOf Sleuth Wood in the lake,There lies a leafy islandWhere flapping herons wakeThe drowsy water-rats;There we’ve hid our faery vats,Full of berriesAnd of reddest stolen cherries.Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glossesThe dim grey sands with light,Far off by furthest RossesWe foot it all the night,Weaving olden dances,Mingling hands and mingling glancesTill the moon has taken flight;To and fro we leapAnd chase the frothy bubbles,While the world is full of troublesAnd is anxious in its sleep.Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery hand in hand,For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

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Where the wandering water gushesFrom the hills above Glen-Car,In pools among the rushesThat scarce could bathe a star,We seek for slumbering troutAnd whispering in their earsGive them unquiet dreams;Leaning softly outFrom ferns that drop their tearsOver the young streams.Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand

Away with us he’s going,The solemn-eyed:He’ll hear no more the lowingOf the calves on the warm hillsideOr the kettle on the hobSing peace into his breast,Or see the brown mice bobRound and round the oatmeal-chest.For he comes, the human child,To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

The places mentioned in ‘The Stolen Child’ were known to be the haunt offairies (Sídhe in the Irish) who were wont to carry off the souls of mortalswhile they slept.

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Sung by the people of Faery over Diarmuid and Grania,in their bridal sleep under a Cromlech

We who are old, old and gay,O so old!Thousands of years, thousands of years,It all were told:

Give to these children, new from the world,Silence and love;And the long dew-dropping hours of the night,And the stars above:

Give to these children, new from the world,Rest far from men.Is anything better, anything better?Tell us it then:

Us who are old, old and gay,O so old!Thousands of years, thousands of years,If all were told.

.

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Extract from

qÜÉ i~åÇ çÑ eÉ~êí Ûë aÉëáêÉ

A VOICE [close to the door]

The wind blows out of the gates of the day,The wind blows over the lonely of heart,And the lonely of heart is withered away,While the faeries dance in a place apart,Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,Tossing their milk-white arms in the air:For they hear the wind laugh, and murmur and singOf a land where even the old are fair,And even the wise are merry of tongue;But I heard a reed of Coolaney say,‘When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,‘The lonely of heart is withered away!’

These lines come from Yeats’s verse dramaThe Land of Heart’sDesire in which a young bride is enticed away to fairylandby the Sídhe on May Eve.

qÜÉ eçëí áåÖ çÑ íÜÉ páÇÜÉ

The host is riding from KnocknareaAnd over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;Caoilte tossing his burning hair,And Niamh calling Away, come away:Empty your heart of its mortal dream.The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;And if any gaze on our rushing band,We come between him and the deed of his hand,We come between him and the hope of his heart.The host is rushing ’twixt night and day,And where is there hope or deed as fair?Caoilte tossing his burning hair,And Niamh calling Away, come away.

The Slua Sídhe or the fairy host were believed to travel in the whirlingwind as it swept through the countryside. Niamh was the fairy princess whoenticed Oisín of the Fianna to spend three hundred years in Tír na nÓg, theOtherworld.

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qÜÉ pçåÖ çÑ t~åÇÉêáåÖ ^ÉåÖìë

I went out to the hazel wood,Because a fire was in my head,And cut and peeled a hazel wand,And hooked a berry to a thread;And when white moths were on the wing,And moth-like stars were flickering out,I dropped the berry in a streamAnd caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floorI went to blow the fire aflame,But something rustled on the floor,And some one called me by my name:It had become a glimmering girlWith apple blossom in her hairWho called me by my name and ranAnd faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wanderingThrough hollow lands and hilly lands,I will find out where she has gone,And kiss her lips and take her hands;And walk among long dappled grass,And pluck till time and times are doneThe silver apples of the moon,The golden apples of the sun.

Aengus was the mythical God of Love who resided at Brú na Bóinneor Newgrange.

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