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Thursday
I continue yesterday’s post about visiting, at Dublin’s General Post Office (GPO), an exhibit about the 1916 Easter Rising and Yeats’s reflection about the event. I was struck when I learned that some of those who died were revolutionized by Yeats and Lady Gregory’s play Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
According to Wikipedia, play is
startlingly nationalistic, in its last pages encouraging young men to sacrifice their lives for the heroine Cathleen ni Houlihan, who represents an independent and separate Irish state. The title character first appears as an old woman at the door of a family celebrating their son’s wedding. She describes her four “beautiful green fields,” representing the four provinces, that have been unjustly taken from her. With little subtlety, she requests a blood sacrifice, declaring that “many a child will be born and there will be no father at the christening.” When the youth agrees and leaves the safety of his home to fight for her, she appears as an image of youth with “the walk of a queen,” professing of those who fight for her: “They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever.”
Although the play was written in 1902, it was revived many times, often to packed audiences. There was a performance just weeks before the uprising.
Given Yeats’s suspicion of violent nationalism, the play comes as a surprise. In his scholarly study Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover, Patrick J. Keanehas an explanation: it was all the fault of the more radical Lady Gregory and of Maud Gonne, Yeats’s unrequited love and one of literary history’s great muses (up there with Dante’s Beatrice and Keats’s Fanny Braun).
According to Keane, Gonne had introduced Yeats to the leader of the nationalist Sinn Fein party in the hope that he would take the Irish literary movement and the Abbey Theatre in a more politically nationalist direction. Gonne, furthermore, had played the role of Cathleen in the play, inspiring young Irish men to the cause. Keane notes that the play was considered a “sacrament” by various nationalists, and it did in fact “send out men that were shot in the Easter Rising; in fact, the first to die was an actor cast in a revival of the play.”
While pleased by the play’s popular success, Yeats years later worried that he had blood on his hands for its effects. As he noted in “Man and the Echo,”
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
As Keane puts it, along with Yeats’s pride at the play’s popular success, he felt guilt “in having produced a patriotic but propagandistic play that was, at heart, a love-offering to his own terrible beauty, Maud Gonne, and a betrayal of his own better judgment.”
In the Museum of Irish Literature I came across a humorous corrective. Thinking that Yeats was being overly dramatic, poet Paul Muldoon humorously wrote,
If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead
would certain men have stayed in bed?
Offering his own corrective, W. H. Auden wrote in his elegy on Yeats,
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen…
But while poetry can’t usually be shown to have the same concrete impact as certain non-literary forms of writing—if it could, people would pay a lot more attention to it than they do—the General Post Office exhibit did point out that Irish culture and Irish nationalism fed off each other. Frantz Fanon, the father of post-colonialist theory, would describe a play like Cathleen Ni Houlihan as “literature of combat” and see it as essential to the political project. Literature may make “nothing happen” in a vacuum, but when the times are ripe, Fanon says, it changes hearts and minds.
In “Easter 1916” Yeats has a more nuanced handling of the uprising. The poem begins with him acknowledging his personal connection with the rebel leaders. Nothing he saw in them prepared him for how (he accurately predicts) they will become legendary Irish figures. When they met, they would exchange “polite meaningless words” or perhaps a gibe—did Yeats lightly mock them for their nationalist aspirations?—but nothing prepared the poet for what happened. Instead he regarded both them and himself as nothing more than ordinary fools (we “lived where motley is worn”). All that “changed, changed utterly” with the rebellion, followed by their executions. Out of that, a “terrible beauty is born”:
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The next stanza is given over to some of the leaders, specifically to Countess Constance Markiewicz, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and James MacBride. Markiewicz’s sweet voice is the one that grows shrill through political arguments, MacDonagh was a literature teacher and poet, and Pearse was a writer and an important figure in the Gaelic League. As a sign of just how miraculous a transformation has occurred, Yeats even includes MacBride on the list. MacBride was the “drunken, vainglorious lout” whom Gonne, to Yeats’s dismay, had explicably married and who would go on to abuse both her and her daughter, so if even he can become a legend, then the uprising was indeed wondrous:
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Having described the figures in his drama, Yeats goes on to describe the fixity of purpose that characterizes many revolutionaries: they have hearts seemingly “enchanted to a stone” because they are driven by “one purpose alone.” While life for most of us flows by, a “living stream” that is altered by “the horse that comes from the road” and by the reflections in the water of the rider and of “the birds that range/ From cloud to tumbling cloud,” the stone doesn’t change:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
That this fixity of purpose is not altogether admirable is clear when we think of terrorists—and indeed (as I learned from the GPO exhibit) many Irish at the time saw the GPO rebels in this light. After all, they caused the death of innocent civilians and policemen and in fact killed some themselves. “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart,” Yeats writes, and there’s a noteworthy contrast between the stone and the life connected with the stream (“The long-legged moor-hens dive,/ And hens to moor-cocks call”). When Yeats asks, “O when may it suffice?” he may be asking, “How long will Irish conditions continue to turn hearts into stone?” Perhaps he is echoing Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?”
However Heaven may judge stone-hearted rebels, Yeats says that our human role is to murmur their names “as a mother names her child.” And to know they dreamed and died in obedience to that dream. It doesn’t even matter that the dream may have been needless as “England may keep faith”—which is to say, England may have granted Ireland home rule without the rebellion.
Indeed, the Easter uprising so polarized matters that it may have set progress back. Some even think that, without it, Ireland and Northern Ireland would not have been partitioned, although some of the historians in the videos argued that partition probably was inevitable in any event, given how vigorously unionists opposed even home rule, not to mention an independent republic.
In any event, what emerged from the uprising was a “terrible beauty”—beautiful in that it took on mythic status, terrible because of the violence. It may be that there are terrorists who regard 9-11 and other suicide missions as beautiful—or for that matter, people who see as beautiful the Confederacy’s Lost Cause or ancient Israel’s Massada rebels. The difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is often a matter of perspective. In short, Yeats shows himself to be ambivalent about the uprising as his poem comes to its end:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
I appreciate Yeats for his willingness to explore the meaning of the uprising. He is not so sure of the rightness of the cause as he appears to be in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Contra Auden, he is making something happen, but that something is expanding our understanding of dramatic political events.
I have one other thought which may undermine the poem: there are certainly those who don’t find the Easter uprising to have been beautiful. Could Yeats be guilty of being overly impressed with the event’s drama. If so, he would not be alone. Many poets and writers between the wars were drawn to fascism, in part because it seemed more beautiful—or at least more full of life—than bureaucratic welfare democracy. (I’m thinking here of T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound among others.) And such love affairs continue today with (to cite one example) playwright David Mamet, who admires Donald Trump because of his willingness to (as Mamet sees it) cut through bullshit and speak to raw emotions. That these raw emotions include racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia doesn’t faze Mamet in the slightest. (I note in passing that Mamet’s great play Glengarry Glen Ross shows itself to be wiser than its author by exposing the void at the core of sexism.) “Easter 1916” loses some of its power if one doesn’t find beauty, terrible or otherwise, in what MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse did.
But it certainly has gripped the Irish imagination, with the hundredth anniversary having been celebrated in style seven years ago. Maybe this is the beauty that Yeats foresaw.
