Discuss Yeats’ changing attitude to ‘Romantic Ireland’

It is one of the dualities in Yeats work that a poet renowned for the everyday forlorn drive in lyric should be so inextricably bound to the particular identity, struggle and destiny of the Irish nation. However, on closer examination, Yeats poetic modal value proves that seeming conundrum is easily let offed when the true nature of Yeats idealism is taken into account. This essay shall argue the apparent political new commitment seen in the 1910s was something of an aberration, in a transitional period of his career. To locate this transition, it is necessary to start at the beginning and terminal of his life, and work inwards, tracing the changing portrayal of Ireland in his verse.The aboriginal Yeats was part of a strong romanticist tradition. Its liking for the emotional authenticity of folk-lore found a ready place in Yeats work, as he exploited the rich Irish mythological tradition his long narrative works all date from this first stage. The first collection parts the b allad form frequently, and the simplicity of poems like To An isle in the Water shy one, shy one/ shy one of my kernel / she moves in the firelight recalls traditional Irish poetry.Perhaps archetypal of Yeats former(a) romantic pieces is To The rosaceous Upon The Rood Of Time. His treatment of Ireland and formal technique come together under the auspices of traditional Romanticism he is unapologetic about drawing from onetime(a) Eire and the ancient ways. The poem is populated by mythic and shadowy figures from Irelands Gaelic past the warrior-king Cuchulain, a druid, and Fergus, sometime King of Ulster. Despite coming from an Irish Protestant family, Yeats still paints Ireland as a Celtic idyll, and evokes it using traditional Romantic imagery stars, the sea, woodlands, flowers. The use of the rose as a motif throughout his early work is indebted not only to the Order of the Golden Dawn, but to Blake in particular. Both shared a mystical tendency beyond Christianity echoed b y Yeats own wish to be a seer-poet in the Irish tradition the keeper of the narrative of identity.Formally and technically, it shows the clear legacy of Romanticism alike. The opening line, in solid iambic pentameter, runs as a stylized invocation a common technique of traditional lyrical verse. The repetitions echo prayer, further intensifying the eldritch dimension of the piece. The vocabulary, whilst not necessarily archaic, is certainly that of traditional poetic diction thine, whereof, boughs. There is a similar stylization in the syntax I would, before my time to go and personification of eternal beauty wandering on her way.This phase of his poetry, known as the Celtic twilight period, is rich in similar poems their set being Irish themes and myth married to Romantic style and concerns such as unrequited love, heroism and mystical union with nature. Other pieces which use Irish mythology are The Hosting of the Sidhe, The Song of Wandering Aengus, but the idea of a Celti c idyll (derived from the Romantics radical reshaping of pastoral idealism) runs throughout.This early work is a strong bank line to his final collections, some three or four decades later. It is impossible to characterise such an extensive body of poetry with few examples, but the progression is distinctive. His ethnic frame of reference seems far wider, drawing on such diverse sources as a Quattrocento painters throng / A thoughtless image of Mantegnas thought1 to the famous symbolism of Byzantium, representing imaginative unity and the highest form of culture. Formally, the uniform elegiac tone of the early verse (broken only by simple ballads and refrains) is replaced by much great variety. Yeats background in theatre comes through in many pieces relying on the dialogue form. There are also the unique and iconoclastic Crazy Jane poems, as well as series of lyrics and fragments of a few lines. The tone is far less stylised and less self-consciously Romantic Crazy Jane represe nt the acme of a far more open and natural diction.The portrayal of Ireland in these poems mirrors the new progression in style. Under Ben Bulben sees Yeats rather desperately asking youthfulness writers to learn your trade and pat your mind on other days. This strikes a more resigned tone than the early To Ireland In The Coming Times where Yeats affirmed I cast my heart into my rhymes and evoked faeries, dancing under the moon / A druid land, a druid tune Parnells Funeral is not so much resigned, as starkly cynical, with Yeats stating all that was render / all that was said in Ireland is a lie / bred out of the contagion of the throng. It is an attitude shared in the acerbic The Great Day and also Nineteen coulomb And Nineteen which describes the traffic in mockeryWe, who seven years agoTalked of honour and truth,Shriek with pleasure if we showThe weasels twist, the weasels toothThe poems in The Tower and The Winding Stair, particularly, portray sadness despair which sees Yea ts retreating, whether it be to the symbolic Byzantium, or his own watchtower at Coole Park. The everyday chaos of Ireland is left behind as Yeats surrenders to reflection. Yet this also marks a continuation between the deuce periods in the figure of a solitary, reflective artist a man in his own secret meditation / is muddled amid the labyrinth that he has made (Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.) We see, too, that Yeats had lost none of his gift for the lyric.Note the solemn mysticism of wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood (Her Vision In The Wood) or the powerful spiritual aphorism in Under Ben Bulben Many times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities.This continuity, although at odds with the progressions already noted, helps to let off them. It is the vital thread foot race through his transitional phase, unifying both early and late Yeats, and provokes fresh inquiry into the so-called political poems. Yeats was always a Romantic in the Keatsian or Tennysonian reflectiv e strain, rather than the radical political side. Hid poetry nearly always came imbued with myth, otherness he proceeded from the Late Romantic period to form a kind of Romantic Modernism more characteristic of American poets such as Hart Crane. His interest in dream symbolism and automatic write also placed him with the impressionistic side of Modernism (eg.Surrealism) rather than the harsher or more violent wings (imagism, futurism etc.)Yeats myth-making and political romanticism is lucidly apparent if the use of legend in the Celtic twilight phase is put under closer scrutiny. Without placing too much store on biographical details, Celticism (in the hands of Yeats and others) was double-edged. Although it did support issue identity and culture, it was also reinforcing imperial stereotyping of the Celts as irrational, feminine and emotional. By using the ancient myth of Ireland, Yeats was implicitly denying that Ireland had a present by glorifying the peasantry and the oppressed , he was implicitly affirming that Irelands place was as a subjugated nation.This paradox has been noted in a general sense by Edward Said to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism too willingly, to accept the very radical, religious and political divisions imposed on places like Ireland.2 Yeats is not a radical revolutionary idealism, but an imaginative idealism running along metaphysical and mythopoetic lines not historical or political ones.If this tendency the tendency to escape into myth is noted, the later pieces seem less removed from his early career. Yeats peppers his verse with references to former poets, and explicitly assumes the Romantic mantle for himselfSome moralist or mythological poetCompares the solitary soul to a swanI am satisfied with that,Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,Before that apprise gleam of its life be gone.(Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen)He revels in the symbol of the winding stair to mythologise the poets ascent to medi tate on the turbulence of the world below. Whereas before Irelands enchanted past was the myth, now Ireland is yoked to greater schemes. The obliging war representing the violence and disillusion of existence to be set against the spiritual purity of the poet in his tower. The events in Ireland are chained to Yeats elaborate visions of cyclical narrative set out in The Second Coming and The Gyres. The violence upon the roads (Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen and the rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop (Meditations in Time of civilised War) are local analogues for the universal blood-dimmed tide of The Second Coming.Yeats still does celebrate Ireland it would be fallacy to suggest that the violence of the Civil War sickened his idealism so much he could neer face Ireland again with anything but cynicism. However, his engagement was often wary, sometimes humorousal the drinking song of Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites. Neither can it be ignored that he occasionall y refashioned his old Celtic schemes, most famously in Under Ben Bulben although even here it becomes a segment of a wider abstract gyres run on / when that greater dream had gone.It is particularly interesting, although peradventure not surprising, that Yeats took the events of the civil war and immediately mythologised them. As mentioned above, the black-and-tan conflict becomes an antithetical tension in his meditative poems, or is encompassed into some larger historical cycle. In various pieces, the heroes of Irish independence take their historical place neatly alongside Wolfe smell and the Celtic warriors. Even before the fate of the Irish Free State had been decided, Yeats had abstracted the civil war and the contemporary crisis into history and myth. It seems that in his poetry, Ireland had to be romantic.Which helps to explain exactly why Yeats had a seemingly political phase. Essentially, for a brief period, the reality of Ireland suddenly became equal to the romantic i deal a struggle for an ideal and a dream, a forging of identity, a moment of historical crisis, death and beauty side by side. Yeats suddenly found that, for a moment, romantic Ireland seemed to be tentatively existent.It must be noted that the political phase coincided beautifully with the technical and stylistic transition. It would be mere speculation to try to delineate some kind of causal relationship, but it is clear that by 1914 Yeats was searching for some kind of new poetic idiom. His patchy excursions into Imagist style verse in The Green Helmet show he was dissatisfied with simply creating carbon-copy Keatsian Celtic lyrics. It was also about this time that the first dialogue poems began to appear. Emotionally, the tone of the poetry is dejected too. Yeats grew weary of the sun and suggests he force have been content to live in Words. No Second Troyrebukes Gonne she filled my days / with misery, whilst the downbeat Lines written in Dejection sees him with nothing but th e embittered sun.It is seemingly with the Civil War that Yeats found a way to harness his Romanticism to both modern Ireland and to Modernism itself. The period was one of great variety in style and theme. Culminations of his wistful melancholia appear as late as The Wild Swans of Coole (notably the title poem.) Yet they lie side by side with dubious Modernist outings like The surge of the Mind and more successful sparse and clean verse like (perhaps supremely) Easter 1916.Poems like The Phases of the Moon and Ego Dominus Tuus anticipate Yeats later metaphysical and philosophical bent. And he was still glorifying the Irish peasantry in pieces like The Fisherman. As Bloom points out the two years from late 1915 to late 1917 were the most important of Yeats imaginative life.3 sure enough no accident then, that such a time frame was identical to the opening of the Irish hostilities. A longer transitional period (Responsibilities to Michael Robartes) interlocks uncannily with the end of the Home Rule, the Easter Rising and the course of the Irish Civil War.Thus it appears the Irelands revolution either spurred Yeats poetic career on to new ground, or he exploited it to facilitate the transition. In September 1913, disillusioned by the philistine and listless middle classes (symbolised by the greasy till), is among the strongest glorification of the Irish revolutionary traditionthey were of a different kind,The names that stilled your childish play,They have gone about the world like wind,But little time had they to prayFor whom the hangmans traffic circle was spun,And what, God help us, could they save?The second in the triptych of Yeats war poems (the other was Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen), was Easter 1916, where Yeats even questions the viability of art to encapsulate the glory of the revolutionaries no, no, not night but death. This is quite a reversal for an artist who is fiercely aware of the myth-making possibility of poetry, and the importance of the n arrative bardic tradition to Irish identity. Yeats is fond to contrast the everyday polite meaningless words and the bourgeois world of eighteenth century houses with the sacrifice and honour of the 1916 rebelsWe know their dreams, enoughTo know they ideate and are deadAnd what if excess of loveBewildered them till they died?I write it out in a verse MacDonaugh and MacBrideAnd Connolly and Pearse.Yet even here, perhaps at the very apex of his political phase, there is doubt too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart and foreboding of an destructive, irreversible change changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born.These two separate images remind us that Yeats was an imaginative (and not political) idealist, and evoke two of his emblematic concerns stasis, and the dying moment. Both his traditional and Modernist Romanticism are rooted in an intense awareness of time and history. The Celtic twilight poems, with their exploration of myth, unrequited love, and sorro w, demoralise and unify the tension between the Romantic polarity of eternity and transience compare with Blakes Auguries of Innocence or Shelleys To A Skylark. Whilst never fully leaving the shadow of the Romantics charter I meditate upon a swallows flight from Coole Park, 1929 he also engaged with the Modernist crisis of temporality. The Modernist project to obliterate time has an ally of sorts in Yeats.One might occupy the out of time reflections of the tower poems, the instant of rape enlarged into Leda and the Swan, the a-temporal juxtaposition of historical figures in The Statues, and of course the apocalyptic visions of The Second Coming and The Gyres. Note, too, the vast amount of material Yeats wrote on the experiences of aging and death.It is this obsession with time that reveals Yeats true image of Ireland. Ireland, for him at least, had to be romantic Ireland, otherwise it something to be rejected as inferior philistine, crude, brutal and unfriendly to the soul o f an imaginative artist. The Ireland of Yeats verse was always an Ireland of the past, an Ireland passing away, with one eye on the eternities of legend and history. The images of Ireland changed repeatedly yet the undertow of myth remained the same.For a brief period around Easter 1916 a time that fortuitously coincided with and perhaps enabled Yeats technical transition the reality of present Ireland was seemingly equal to its mythic past. It is ironic that Yeats most relevant and political poem was also his greatest act of myth-making. What was really changed, changed utterly was not the history of Ireland, but Yeats imaginative landscape. Ireland, once again, indistinct to romantic legend, and was dead and gone. Yeats slotted Pearse as heir to Cuchulain in his mythic schema, and continued his intrinsically timeless and subjective quest, fusing Modernism, Romanticism and Ireland into his own poetic idiom.