(An Extract from "W. B. Yeats and the Murder of Honour Bright"
by Patricia Hughes
ISBN 0-9550978-2-7
The Poetry of William Butler Yeats
I began to look through Yeats' biographies and papers and found them very carefully prepared and edited. Reading his poetry I tried to find references and allusions to a possible relationship with a young woman, leading to the birth of a child who is brought up by another woman as if it is her own. Though I couldn't afford the "Variorum" edition, I acquired one that showed the dates on which they were written, and set about finding out what they could tell me about the man.[1]
Before I started reading I made a note of two pieces of information about the author gleaned from my reading of his biographies. Firstly, he was widely known to have made constant revisions to his poems, even after publication, so that the given dates of authorship must inevitably be approximate. Secondly, he was adept at manipulation whilst appearing innocent, as befits someone whose life is lived in the public view, so details of his private life were often deliberately obscured. Thus when he referred to events in his poetry, many details would quite possibly have been deliberately changed to avoid recognition.
The first thing I found was a mystery girl who appeared in his poem "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" in "The Wild Swans at Coole". It is dated March - April 1918 and talks of a dream vision of a girl whom he does not yet know. Michael Robartes is an alter-ego invented by Yeats to show what appears to be the youthful, sexual side of his being.
In the collection bearing this name, "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" written in 1918, the title poem is a conversation of pointed, affectionate banter between him and the eponymous dancer. While he praises her sexual beauty, she is dismissive and asserts that she wants to go to college. This poem, I learned, is usually thought to be a fatherly conversation between Yeats and Iseult Gonne. However I could not read it in that way. The poem has a sexual undercurrent, as if the two subjects are talking in a bedroom before or after the sexual act, though Yeats and Iseult never slept together and were never so deeply in love. Moreover the date of the poem is when Yeats was married to George for just one year, that is, one year since Iseult had turned down his offer of marriage and one year before she married someone else. Yeats and his wife were living in Oxford then, whilst Iseult was having an affair with Ezra Pound in London. Perhaps Yeats was aware of their affair and felt vicarious fascination?
The girl in the poem was young (hence the reference to her future) so it might have been about his wife, who was called George, short for Georgina, except that I soon discovered that he writes in a completely different style about her, far less sexual, almost like a long-married Darby and Joan, or simply good friends. Later it occurred to me that they were above all very successful business partners. His poem "Solomon and the Witch" is about George, casting them both as sooth-sayers and clairvoyants in an affectionate partnership. Yet he says "Maybe the bride-bed brings despair / For each an imagined image brings / And finds a real image there." Who might his imagined image have been?
George's experience was the root of his poem "An Image from a Past Life" written Summer - September 1919'. She had had a vision of a "sweetheart from another lifeforced to linger from vague distressher arms above her head" The spectre demonstrates that George appeared to be still jealous of his past relationship with Maud Gonne, possibly because he had remained on good terms with her in the ten years that followed. Yeats seemed always to get on well with past amours. I found myself wondering whether George was normally envious of his ex-lovers or whether she had reason at this time to be suspicious. Was he in love again, and was she trying to find out the object of his affections? In contrast, "Under Saturn", written November 1919, reveals him as very faithful to George. Or was it an equivocal plea of innocence?
Yeats' young lover could not, however, have been Maud. In the first place, his relationship with her, as revealed by his poem "On a Political Prisoner" written 10-29 January 1919, was at this time far from amorous. After the death of her husband Sean MacBride in the Easter Uprising of 1916 she had become "Madame MacBride", the martyr's wife, to the adoring Irish public, and therefore she had tried to return from her home in France to Dublin, although banned by the British authorities for her vocal support of the Republican movement. Passing through England she had been detained and imprisoned in London. Yeats, who had despised her husband and utterly disapproved of her political activities, wrote that she had been lovely once, but now she had no sexual presence. Her mind was "a bitter, an abstract thing", she was full of "enmity", "drinking the foul ditch"; she was "blind" and "a leader of the blind." He repeats this disapproval in "The Leaders of the Crowd" and it is also apparent in "A Prayer for My Daughter" written between 29th February and June, 1919, in that he wishes for his daughter the opposite of the life that Maud leads. Moreover, at this time Gonne was roughly 54 years old (about his own age) and had a grown-up daughter. She was therefore hardly a young dancer wanting to go to college as in the Michael Robartes series.
I had thus established that he probably did have a young lover who was not his wife or Maud or Iseult Gonne. The relationship seems to have started in 1918, a year after his marriage, and as far as one could tell she seems to have been a dancer who wanted to go to college. Of course, even if he did have such a lover, she may not have been my grandmother.
This impression of a lover is strengthened by the poem "Leda and the Swan". At some point in his reading Yeats had come across "Some moralist or mythological poet" who compared " the solitary soul to a swan" and, taking it as a description of himself, had declared " I am satisfied with that"[2] He wrote those lines in about 1920, probably before he wrote of himself as a swan in the poem mentioned.
Many people, very well qualified and also well-versed in Yeats' oeuvre, have told me that this poem has nothing to do with the act depicted, the rape of a virgin too young and innocent to resist. They tell me it is about Russia and Europe, the threat of the Revolution to western Europeans, or maybe it is about the earth goddess being taken advantage of by men. I believe that these people are living in cloud cuckoo land, because Yeats had never, before or after this poem, written about communism or the threat of external conflicts to Ireland, and the type of mystical symbolism favoured by Robert Graves in this period did not have any significance for him. In his dealings as a politician he did not normally comment on foreign policy; he was far more concerned with the development of the new Irish Free State and with building peace instead of civil war. In all his dealings with foreign places at this time, Yeats concentrated on what was philosophical and concrete, such as Japanese Noh plays and ancient Indian writings, but not on politics.
On the contrary, "Leda and the Swan" appears to me to be less about politics than a portrayal of an explicit sexual encounter between an older, more powerful and experienced man and a young virgin, in which the contrast is so strong that he feels as if he has raped her, whether or not he has actually done so. It appears to be a reflection of actual physical experience due to the intensity and detail of the text. It does not appear to reflect the sexual experiences of himself and his wife, according to his biography by Brenda Maddox. It is not credible that Yeats spent the first few years of his marriage in unrequited love, particularly since his poetry at this time is so explicitly physically sexual and unconcerned with yearning and romance; except when it is about George. Yeats did not profess publicly to have a lover at this time, no doubt because he was married.
"On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac" was said to have been written in September 1920. A centaur is a symbol of wanton male sexuality, and its blackness speaks of covert or immoral connotations such as adultery, outside the light. Indeed Yeats says "Your hooves have stamped at the black margins of the wood" which might be taken to mean that the centaur had been active outside his allotted area or involved in adultery. The "horrible green parrots" may be a reference to Republicans or to the plebeian Catholics of 1920, whose colour was green and who parroted their raucous political slogans in public. Thus when he says he is "being driven half insane / Because of some green wing" it may be a reference to a lover from that section of society. This is strengthened by his words "I knew that horse-play" which in context would allude to sexual activity outside marriage, although he ought to stay with "what wholesome sun has ripened" in other words, his legal marriage partner.
On the other hand he has "gathered old mummy wheat in the mad abstract dark". Wheat from the tombs of Egyptian mummies was said to begin to sprout after long centuries if removed from the dark and brought into the light, and in talking of this Yeats seems to be alluding to his own potency, in that his seeds have sprung into life after having been dead for an age. "In the mad, abstract dark" would refer to the timing of the sexual act, but also to the illicit nature of it His use of the word mummy' may also allude to the pregnancies of George and/or his lover. This mummy wheat has been exposed to the sun which has "baked it" and turned it into the "full-flavoured wine"of a new child. He finishes with "I have loved you better than my soul for all my words" implying that this love has been detrimental to his morality. For this reason and because of its intensity it is probably not written for George. The given date of the poem was one month before the birth of Kevin Barry O'Neill, his probable illegitimate child by Lily O'Neill.
In "Two Songs from a Room" Yeats describes Helen as "a staring virgin" who tears ""the heart out of his side" and announces "Whatever flames upon the night / Man's own resinous heart has fed." He seems to blame himself for causing passion.
December 1921 was the given date of creation of "A Prayer For My Son". In strong contrast to his usual thoughtful demeanour, this poem talks of his terrible fear that his son will be killed. In the second line he names Michael, the recently-born first son of his marriage, and the poem does appear at first sight to be focussed on this son, for in 1921 the civil war in Ireland was in full flow. However at this point in their lives the Yeats family lived in peace in Oxford, England. Yeats talks here of knowing some people "Who have planned his murder, for they know / Of some most haughty deed or thought / That waits upon his future days / And would through hatred of the bays / Bring that to nought. " Could the "haughty deed or thought" have been disputed inheritance due to the prior birth of a son? This first-born son outside marriage might conceivably have been able to inherit by law under specific circumstances. However the simple claim of paternity could have been seen as outrageous, given extreme social and political differences between the parents, if the mother was Lily O'Neill.
In the last verse he refers to the civil war in Dublin when he says to God"when through all the town there ran / The servants of Your enemy" and compares the tale of the birth of Jesus to the birth of his son, where "A woman and a man, /Unless the Holy Writings lie, / Hurried through the smooth and rough / And through the fertile and waste, / Protecting, till the danger past, / With human love. " Had he and George been in Dublin and had they felt actually threatened by the violence and disorder of the time, this poem might have referred to the infant Michael. On the other hand the infant Kevin, son of Lily, was actually in Dublin during the Civil War and was actually threatened by random acts of violence because he lived in the city centre. Moreover he may have been threatened by different factions, such as perhaps Anglo-Irish friends of British rule or Republicans, for daring to be the product of a merger seen in those days as anti-social. The names Kevin and Michael both have two syllables with stress on the first, so one name could possibly have been substituted for another in the poem. The woman and man in the poem could have been Yeats and his wife mingling with the academics in Oxfordshire, or they could have been Margaret Magill and James White who were by then raising Kevin as a brother to James's son in a Dublin tenement at street level. Whether the poem refers explicitly to Michael, as the title suggests, or to Kevin, or to both of his sons, Yeats was indisputably very afraid for his male offspring. Michael later wrote that during his childhood he was very embarrassed by the extreme passion of this poem, which seemed to him to have no possible basis in fact and was an occasion for many taunts at school.
Yeats' fear of what would happen next to his own property and family is similarly present in "Meditations in time of Civil War", also written in 1921, in which he imagines his home, representing the powerful and rich world of leisure and opulence taken over by "some marvellous empty sea-shell flung / Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams, and not a fountain" which (or who?) purports to be "the symbol which / Shadows the inherited glory of the rich." The title of the poem sets it "in time of civil war" and may plausibly refer to worries about legal claims of inheritance of his property by an illegitimate child, rather than violence by marauders.
The Tower
The poems of "The Tower" were astonishingly explicit about his young lover. I was very interested to read them because they were written within 18 months of the death of Lily O'Neill.
The name of the first poem is the same as the title of this book, "The Tower". It is the name of his romantic, ambitious but seasonally uninhabitable house, Thoor (Tower) Ballylee, but it is also an image from the Tarot that speaks of a collapse, a disaster, the ruin of one's ambitions. With his previous occult interests Yeats would have been aware of both connotations.
In it Yeats' mood is dramatically changed, and one gets the impression that he has suffered deep, prolonged depression, a sense of failure and old age. He makes no attempt to talk in depth about the politics of Ireland but focuses on things that are gone. He talks for the first time of himself, "this absurdity" his body, and his "troubled heart". He says that he "must bid the Muse go pack" because he has lost his ability to deal "in abstract things" and dare not express his feelings because he will "be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel", in other words he has become a laughing stock. He who had once been so proud had somehow been knocked from his pedestal, and it had caused him to suffer physical and mental pain. Yet there is nothing in his biography to show what had affected him so deeply.
The second stanza repeats this expression of social "ruin" and failing "foundations" with the "tree, like a sooty finger" pointing accusingly at him under the day's declining beam. The blackness of the soot and the twilight emphasise that he feels dirtied by recent events. He mentions a well-to-do neighbour whose servants carried out on her behalf (possibly without her explicit knowledge?) illegal cruelty, and a peasant girl who inadvertently caused death. (I speculated that these images he projected seemed to reflect the actions of Dillon murdering Lily O'Neill in contravention of his role as a police superintent, and Madge, Lily's friend, a working class girl who may have caused death by taking Lily to meet Dillon.)
"The tragedy" he said "began with Homer who was a blind man / And Helen has all living hearts betrayed." Was he referring to himself as the blind man and Lily or Madge as the betrayer, whose death had betrayed all the living? Moon and sunlight, he wrote were "one inextricable beam" so that light and dark, good and evil were indistinguishable. He accuses himself and says "I myself created Hanrahan". This character in his drama, a red-haired school-teacher of passionate intensity, was unable to rest after his life was blighted by a fairy queen. Like Hanrahan, Yeats saw himself as a "half-mad rhapsodic poet, a failed seducer of real women and a great curser of old age"[3] He was "an old lecher with a love on every wind", chased by "hounds", a "man drowned in a bog's mire/ When mocking Muses chose the country wench." All these references are to ruin brought about by a younger woman, whether by her design or not. Lily was of course a country girl from County Carlow who had mocved to Dublin.
He eventually tries to decide on whether his most intense love is "a woman won or a woman lost", that is, his wife or his lost lover. He considers "If [you decide] on the last, admit you turned aside / From a great labyrinth out of pride, / Cowardice" He had refused to become involved, "And if that memory recur, the sun's / Under eclipse and the day's blotted out" so that all is darkness, evil and shame. In his own mind he is therefore culpable for the loss of this lover and is grieving intensely. The guilt and profound grief so apparent in this poem are much at odds with his acid relationship to strident, independent, middle-aged Maud Gonne, who is normally chosen as the other woman referred to here.
This grief is partly caused by the ageing of his body, as detailed in many poems particularly in the early part of "The Tower". However the grief is also directed at a specific young woman after June 1925, as can be seen in stanzas I and II of "Two Songs from a Play", "Among Schoolchildren" and "Colonus' Praise". This young woman comes to the fore in "A Man Young and Old", the title of which, according to the number of times he uses the word "I", refers to himself.
In the first poem of the series, "First Love" this same grief is apparent for a girl who is now dead, who "blushed awhile" and was as beautiful as "the sailing moon" She was "In beauty's murderous brood" so that she suffered as a result of her beauty, or her beauty had been the cause of her downfall. The most likely event to happen to girls who were too beautiful in early 20th century Ireland was a pre-marital pregnancy that would rob them of respectability, future marriage and career, turning them into "fallen women". Beauty was often a lifetime's curse. In this poem and the next, "Human Dignity", Yeats refers to the girl as a "stone", "a scene upon a painted wall" as if she is now merely an image in his mind, as if she is in the past, or dead. He continues this image of grief by describing his own severe depression and longing to shout his grief abroad, "but I am dumb / From human dignity". Here he could have been referring to extreme emotion which robbed him of the power of speech, or to the need to keep his mouth shut in public to preserve his dignity. Or to both.
The "human dignity" that prevents him from uttering his grief may be his defence against "the yelling pack" he describes in the fourth poem, "The Death of the Hare". The hare - a young woman who is his lover - is a hunted, vulnerable creature, and the pack of hunting dogs finds its quarry at the end of the poem. He avers that he has alerted the hare to the pack and to the safety of the wood (perhaps anonymity?), but remembers "her distracted air". Now he has been "swept from there" and is no longer in contact with her, and is "set down standing in the wood / At the death of the hare." It seems that he had warned his lover about those who could harm her, but she was killed anyway.
Poem five, "The Empty Cup" is vaguer in its subject-matter because it does not explain what is symbolised by the water that had assuaged his thirst to the point when "his beating heart would burst". The lack of it has affected his health since "October last". The poem appears to refer to his sex life, now "dry as bone", an image that conjures up death.
In the first verse of poem six, "His Memories", he refers to himself and another person or persons (probably his wife) as "holy shows", that is, public displays or painted ceremonial statues of "bodies broken like a thorn / Whereon the bleak north [wind] blows." Like "buried Hector" of Greek mythology he and she have been (figuratively) slain after the public shaming of being dragged by chariot wheels around the tomb of his enemy. He sees himself in the same position of humiliation and defeat as his lover, "the first of all the tribe" of the third verse, though she is dead and he is still alive. In both cases the image is not the same as the reality. Yet "none living knows."
In the seventh poem, "The Friends of his Youth" the "laughter" in the first four lines is not mirth, it is the uncontrollable laughter of madness or extreme grief, of someone who cannot come to terms with reality. He "gets a laughing fit" "when the moon's pot-bellied", when the moon is full or when he thinks of his dead lover. He sees "that old Madge come down the lane, / A stone upon her breast, / And a cloak wrapped about the stone" and she "thinks the stone's a child" The woman in question has never been mentioned previously in his poetry and no commentaries to date have known who or what she was, but I identified her without doubt as Margaret Magill, the foster-mother of his child. She was aged 48 in 1926 when the poem was written, and as a poor woman she would have looked old. In Greek myth Rhea, wife of Chronos, pretended to carry a stone rather than a baby under her shawl, in order to confuse her husband who would have killed their child, believing that, when grown, the child would challenge and overcome him. The trick of deception or deliberate confusion of images was something practised not only by the ancient Greeks, but also by Yeats. Was he laughing at the death of his lover or the loss of his child, who had to be kept secret?
The last stanza of this poem starts with the mockery of Peter, who is not identified by previous editors but may be Father Peter Finlay S.J., with whom Yeats had had bitter altercations in the Senate House over various policies. Finlay, an upholder of the Catholic religious status quo, attacked Yeats mercilessly for his astrological activities which he believed emanated from the devil, and had little respect for his political role within the Irish government. He would have been appalled if he had known of Yeats' adultery with a young Catholic girl and the illegitimate child, but very glad to see his downfall. But Dublin was a fairly small community and rumours were abundant. Peter was triumphant, so Yeats thought, but his shrieks were of vengeful jubilation, in contrast to those that had emanated from his lover, which were shrieks of love.
The next poem "Summer and Spring" describes a meeting between two people who were in love and eventually slept together. It describes a rural or park location, but does not mention the passing of seasons, so the title can be taken to refer to the spring and summer of life, a meeting between partners who are disparate in age. At the time of the birth of Kevin, Yeats was 55 and Lily was 20. As in the last poem, Peter disapproves of the union, and he seems to have been acquainted with Lily. At the time of her murder a rosary was discovered in her pocket.
Poem nine, "The Secrets of the Old", mentions two women called Madge and Margery. None of the current or previous critics of this poem have been able to supply any explanation for this poem or identify events or persons who could be referred to here. As in poem seven, it is obvious to me that Madge is Margaret Magill, and the second character, Margery, is Madge Hopkins, who had known Lily for five years (and therefore knew about her son who was four years old when she died) and lived at the same address. Yeats has deliberately mixed up the names . He explains that he has "old women's secrets now, / That had them of the young." It appears that Lily had told Margaret who was the father of her child. Margaret obviously knew Yeats as well, for she had told him "what I dared not think / When my blood was strong". One of my father's (Kevin's) youngest and least explicable memories occurred when he was aged about four. One day Margaret made a special effort to dress him well. She gave him a bath in front of the fire, cut his hair and nails carefully and dressed him in a smart new suit with the unprecedented luxury of new shoes and socks he normally went barefoot - before taking him to a very big house in the posh part of town. In an enormous room he answered questions delivered by some grand and well-dressed people, after which he and Margaret went home. According to my mother, this happened every year, and money was given to Margaret after she had answered questions about the boy's health and well-being. Could this have been when Margaret told him what she thought? Margaret and Lily's child were never alluded to once during the investigation and trial of Lily's murderers.
Margaret seems to have had great presence and possibly an accusing look, for "Margery is stricken dumb / If thrown in Madge's way" There may have been some doubt about whether Madge Hopkins had contributed to Lily's death by bringing her to a meeting called by her killer. In any case, Yeats makes it clear that they all three share a secret about a love affair between two people of different social classes, "the bed of straw" and the "bed of down": "We three make up a solitude: / For none alive today / Can know the stories that we know"
"The Winding Stair and Other Poems" shows Yeats coming to terms with the events that have occurred. The winding stair, just like life, leads upwards in a spiral so that one cannot see ahead, but at the top the whole view becomes apparent. He begins to think about what will happen to him after his own death: "A man awaits his end / Dreading and hoping all" "Man has created death." In "A dialogue of Self and Soul" he contrasts My Soul' or conscience with My Self' or current personality. His soul summons him to "the steep ascent" towards the "broken, crumbling battlement" of "the tower, / Emblematical of the night" which symbolises the catastrophe of his life as he sees it, for "Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?" He is to "think of night that can Deliver from the crime of death and birth." He accuses Self of being confused about what "Is" done and what "Ought" to be done, and tells him he is guilty, for "Only the dead can be forgiven." He does not explain why he feels guilty.
Yeats' Self is however able to rise above these accusations by saying that his honorary sword with its embroidered scabbard of "heart's purple" is his emblem of daylight, of good times and good deeds. He would "claim as by a soldier's right / A charter to commit the crime once more." In the second part he goes on to say "A living man is blind and drinks his drop. / What matter if the ditches are impure?" He clarifies this in the third stanza, "That most fecund ditch of all, / The folly if he woos / A proud woman not kindred of his soul." Who was this proud woman? Surely he and his wife were kindred souls by now?
In "Blood and the Moon" Yeats looks at his tower, Thoor Ballylee, and muses about the "bloody, arrogant power" that built it, deciding "I declare this tower is my symbol" because of its long history, the solidity of its thick walls, its winding staircase and the fact that it is "half dead at the top" as his own life is. He talks of the moon, which symbolises Lily in other poems, shining down on to the floor and revealing no blood stains, as if "the blood of innocence has left no stain." Meanwhile "we that have shed none must gather there / And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon." I was glad to read that Yeats had shed no blood, because I had wondered whether he had been involved in the murder of my grandmother, but I felt that no-one that shared my own personality to such an extent could commit such a deliberate, harmful and immoral act. In any case, is it possible for a poet to be dishonest to himself? Here finally was an assertion that he had suffered from this act almost as much as my grandmother, and that in clamouring for the moon he regretted her loss and her innocence of the cause of it. "No stain," he avers, "can come upon the visage of the moon"
The image of the moon as Lily is repeated in "The Crazed Moon" which is purportedly written in 1923, though it may refer to Lily's pregnancy in late 1920. Kevin was born in November 1920. He sees the moon "staggering" after "much child-bearing" which causes her to be "despairing" whilst "we" "grope in vain / For children born of her pain". In the last line we' could be substituted for I', and children' for a child' without changing the metre. He talks of Lily as "a child herself "in all her virginal pride" and the "countryside" where she grew up. Lily grew up in rural Carlow. The moonlight however is a "malicious dream" because she is not there in reality, and it robs all semblance of life from the flesh of his fingers, making them appear like skeletal claws ready to "rend what comes in reach."
The conviction that he was to some extent to blame for what had happened to Lily, though not for her murder, remained with him for the rest of his life and re-emerges with regularity in other poems, when he speculates about his life after death. In "Algeciras - A Meditation upon Death" he compares his life to nightfall: "Greater glory in the sun" is his life of fame and success on earth, whilst "An evening chill upon the air" has come upon his later life. Both of these "Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply." In "The Choice" he answers this conundrum in saying "The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection in the life or in the work" He has chosen work and "the day's vanity " which leads to "the night's remorse."
Leaving aside other poems that may give more details of Yeats' thoughts and moods, the series entitled "A Woman Young and Old" is, like the other series with almost the same title, mostly written just after the death of Lily O'Neill. Whereas the previous series, "A Man Young and Old" was written from Yeats' own point of view, this series is written from what he perceives as his lover's point of view.
The first of the sequence, "Father and Child" is supposedly written for Iseult Gonne, and biographers of Yeats recount an incident when Iseult was a young teenager to account for the subject matter. Unfortunately this does not tally with the date of writing, 1926, when Iseult had been married for five years, and had at least one child of her own. It would however be more appropriate as a poem about Lily, who was a few years younger than Iseult. In this interpretation he is warning her that people are shocked to hear what man she is involved with, to which she "replies " That his hair is beautiful, / Cold as the March wind his eyes." Yeats may have reconstructed the earlier incident to describe the later one.
The woman in these verses is very much more direct and independent of thought than Iseult, and also more experienced in flirting, as can be seen in the second poem, where she allows herself the freedom to attract any man she pleases with a promise of the ultimate pleasure. She takes pleasure in sex, as is shown in "A First Confession", and does not allow herself to be thwarted by "questioning eyes" of others. She has the pride and defensiveness of a mistress or prostitute.
In "Her Triumph" she admits that she had thought love was "a casual / Improvisation, or a settled game that followed if I let the kerchief fall". In the poem she is addressing her real love, telling him she was the maiden among the dragons, doing "the dragon's will" until he arrived "And broke the chain and set the dragon free" as if he were "Saint George, or else a pagan Perseus". The sudden recognition of intense mutual attraction is eloquently depicted: "And now we stare astonished at the sea / And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us." In "Consolation" the sharp pain of love is consoled by its physical consummation.
The sixth poem, "Chosen" is her realisation that he does not belong to her. Although he chooses to be with her overnight, she has chosen the path she is on, of having a lover instead of a husband and watching him go as soon as the dawn appears.
Poem seven, "Parting" sees her persuading him to stay a little longer in the early morning. The first four lines are interesting because they mirror what is said in Scene II of "The Plough and The Stars" by Sean O'Casey. The second scene, which O'Casey inserted into the play just after the murder of Honour Bright (Lily's alter ego) portrayed a prostitute called Rosie Redmond who reflected O'Casey's sympathy for Lily O'Neill: young and poor, but intelligent, sensitive, and kind. In this scene she talks of having to get her lovers out of her room before the landlady wakes, otherwise she will be charged an extra shilling for the lodger. This is the same scenario depicted by Yeats at the start of the poem: "He. Dear, I must be gone / While night shuts the eyes / Of the household spies; / That song announces dawn."
The eighth poem in this series made me gasp as I read it for the first time, because it depicts so exactly the scene of Lily's murder. It is entitled "Her Vision in a Wood" and describes a woman seeing a murdered corpse of a man, instead of a man imagining a murdered woman, but, as in other poems, Yeats appears to have deliberately changed details of identity in order to obscure the fact that the rest of the poem is utterly factual.
The poem's location is the side of a wood, which is where the body of Lily was discovered. In fact she was killed in the early hours of the morning, which with poetic license could be construed as "wine-dark midnight". It was three days before his sixtieth birthday, "too old for a [wo]man's love" and on hearing the news of her death he would have "stood in rage imagining men". He seems to have injured his body until it "ran bloodthat its wine might cover whatever could recall the lip of lover." His lover is in the past tense, gone forever. "The dark turned to red, and torches shone" as the body was discovered at dawn and police and onlookers arrived, "And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop / Shouldered a litter with a wounded man" The last line could have been written: A troop / Shouldered a litter with a murdered girl' without changes of metre. He imagines the injured victim stares at him "though love's bitter-sweet had all come back" with the sight of "my heart's victim and its torturer". All of the facts he uses about the location and the activity of the officials and onlookers were described in the newspapers. He added nothing new. He probably was not there at the time of the crime, or possible even ever at the location.
"A Last Confession" is made after death by the woman whose voice is heard in this series. She confesses that she "gave my soul and loved in misery". She looks forward to the time when his soul, "its body off" finds hers, and discovers "what none other knows", her love for him. He will also be free of earthly bonds such as marriage and able to "give his own and take his own / And rule in his own right."
"Meeting" describes the differences between the two lovers. He was "Hidden by old age" and disguised "in masker's cloak and hood" They had differences of opinion, "Each hating what the other loved" and he could see no good in their union, saying that it "bodes me little good." It was no love to boast of, although they "had found a sweeter word" The major problem however was "this beggarly habiliment" of social and class constraints.
This is the note Yeats ends on in "From the Antigone" where he asks the powers that create the "Bitter sweetness, inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl" to "Overcome the Empyrean", to shake up and demolish the customary social divisions that pit people against each other because of class, occupation, location and income. "Pray I will and sing I must" he says - for he is a poet - but he cannot prevent "Oedipuss' child" the product of an alliance that is not acceptable to the world, from sinking "into the loveless dust."
The Aftermath in Yeats' Life
After the trial Yeats stopped seeing many of his previous friends like Olivia Shakespeare, Oliver Gogarty and Maud Gonne for a few years, but developed new friendships with Kevin O'Higgins, the Minister of Defence who was assassinated by Republicans eighteen months later, and Commissioner Eoin O'Duffy, with whom he later instigated the Blue Shirt army in the 1930s. He stopped seeing the moneyed friends of his youth or they avoided him and suddenly took up with those who ran the country's defence forces. What was the reason for this change in his allegiances, apart from real fear of destruction by political forces? He also wrote a poem about his dead lover and their child, composed during a visit to a school as a Senator. As my father used to say, poetry is always honest and betrays all the emotions.
In "Among School Children" he first sets the scene: I
I walk through the long school-room questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
He then pictures a scene in Lily's room one evening which reminded him of their absolute affinity with each other:
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
Having established the depth of their relationship, he remembers her mood and features and tries to find them in the children in front of him. Although she was so beautiful, her child may be indistinguishable from other children:
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
He is so moved by the image of her face in his mind and the hard life she had had, and also by the change in his own appearance, that it almost brings him to tears, but he struggles with his outward expression to make it acceptable to those around him:
Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
The thought of a young mother with a child makes him think of his own mother. Would she be happy with the result of her labour sixty years hence? Would Lily think the trials she had been through for having a son would be worthwhile, for the sake of his life and old age?
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on his head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
What was the relationship between youth and old age? Were they recognisable to one another?
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
The women in front of him were nuns who worshipped abstract images rather than flesh and blood, but both statues and children represent a higher Presence and simultaneously mock their origins:
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
The life of each human being does not have to include what their parents' lives included. The dance or blossoming of the individual does not have to encompass harm to the physical self, or destructive beauty leading to hardship, or the hours spent writing out poems at night:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
The life he has inaugurated with Lily is likened to part of a chestnut tree; if it is the leaf it will last a season and wither away; if the blossom it will have a good life and produce seed for next season; if the bole it will provide the line of descendants of his future family. He ends with a heart-rending question: how can we identify the results in flesh of our passion? How can he identify his son by Lily?
O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Thus the poem shows clearly that Yeats did suffer sexually, emotionally and morally by the absence of Lily and felt bereft at losing contact with his son, Lily's child. Moreover this suffering lasted for around three years judging from the other poems written around this period.
He also suffered socially. He lost his previous friends, who stayed away for the first few years of his grief, and he also lost his colleagues in the Senate House, which he left the following year. He was no longer a candidate for honorary degrees or Nobel prizes in Ireland, and his good relations with the Parliamentarians in London faded away. His involvement with the Abbey Theatre was ended and in Dublin he dared not look at a younger woman for fear of gossip. His children were sent abroad to boarding school to protect them from rumours or worse. Even his life was under attack, as were those of the other members of the Senate: his new friend, Kevin O'Higgins the Defence Minister was murdered by the Republicans in 1927. Was it a reprisal for the death of Lily O'Neill?
He expressed his bitterness in politics, establishing with Eoin O'Duffy the Blue Shirts to march and parade in the shadow of Hitler's Black Shirts, but soon even this became untenable, so he moved with George to the home of his friend Ezra Pound in Rapallo, Italy for a while. Even though the couple had bought a house south of Dublin, he spent most of his latter years abroad.
[1] The edition I used was Everyman: The Poems: W. B. Yeats, published by J. M. Dent, London 1990, reprinted 1991, updated 1994, edited by Daniel Albright.
[2] "The Tower: Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" by W. B. Yeats
[3] Ibid, Notes: The Tower, page 636