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In 1902 Yeats published a play, Cathleen ni Houlihan,
Cathleen the daughter of Houlihan. It is heavily tinged with the
supernatural.
The action takes place in l798 in County
Mayo, Ireland, the same time 1000 French soldiers landed on the nearby Irish
coast to assist the Irish in what turned out to be an unsuccessful rebellion
against England. A poor family is around their kitchen table. Their son,
Michael, is to be married the next day. The bride's family had already paid
Michael's father #100 They hear some shouting in the village and an old
woman comes up their path, knocks on their door. She has her cloak over her
face.
The bridegroom to be says that he would
rather a stranger not come to his house the day before his wedding. But the
woman gets in, the family is friendly and soon the old crone begins talking
strangely. She claims that she's been on the road for many many years, and
some people don't listen to her, don't want her around. She left her own
house because there were too many strangers there. She starts singing in an
eerie voice:
I will go cry with the woman/ For
yellow-haired Donough is dead,
With a hempen rope for a neckcloth And a white cloth on his head.
The family offers her something to eat but
she says It is not food or drink that I want.
She asks Michael to get close to her. As
she readies herself to leave, saying she must meet some friends who have
come to help her, Michael says I will go with you. The family
is horrified. They try to get him to stay.
The old woman is in the doorway
singing, Do not make a great keening/ When the graves have been
dug tomorrow./ Do not call the white-scarved riders/To the burying that
shall be tomorrow.
The wife, Bridget, says to her husband,
Peter, about Michael their son, He has the look of a man that has got
'the touch - Meaning—he is under an enchantment, under some kind of
spell.
The bride to be arrives in tears because
Michael does not recognize her when he sees her. Patrick, a young boy comes
in and Peter asks him Did you see an old woman going down the path?
The boy replied, I did not, but I
saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
****Cathleen Houlihan was the old woman. She was a personification
of Ireland itself.****
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Another play: The Countess Cathleen
repicts Ireland at perhaps the most grave point in its
history, during the potato famine. First, a statement on Yeats' creative
muse: Throughout his creative life, Yeats grabbed onto various
persons and myths for the inspiration for his work. His magical
societies were one such fountain of inspiration. This does not mean that
he was insincere about his loves and beliefs; many artists need
inspirations from life to fire up their works. The Countess Cathleen
was written for Yeats' lifetime love, Maud Gonne. |
. This love was elusive and if it reached sexual fruition at all, it
occurred only once or twice. Yeats did however claim to have had sex with
her on the astral plane. Maud Gonne also became a public figure, and later a
member of the Irish parliament. She was politically a radical; she married
one of the figures who was hanged in the 1916 Easter uprising. Yeats
proposed to her several times, finally even proposing to her teenaged
daughter. Both women rejected him.
The play The Countess
Cathleen was set in the l840's, the time of the great famine when the
potato crop failed. In the play, unscrupulous persons or fiends are
circulating amidst the starving people, offering to give them food if they
would agree to sell their souls. (a souls for food program).
The idealistic Countess of the title sells
her soul to the devil to ensure her tenants will not have to sell their own
to buy food.. Yeats places his own idealized self in the play as a
soul-weary young bard named Kevin, who has roamed the country with a harp
with the strings torn out. He goes to the merchant and offers his soul in
place of Cathleen's, The first merchant refuses his offer. He cries out,
Is your power so small?/Must I bear it with me all my days? He is
told yes, he must carry his weary soul and torn harp with him all his days.
Cathleen's soul does get saved, redeemed by love and generosity.
Understandably, Yeats had some problems
getting this play into production because some of Dublin's literati were
scrupulous Catholics and questioned the play's religious orthodoxy.
| One of Yeats' volumes of poems is called “Michael
Robartes and the Dancer.” Michael Robartes is a made-up character by
Yeats . In this volume of poems is a short poem called An Image
from a Past Life. |
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A man and woman are
walking at night, by the water, the sky is brilliantly lit with stars.
The characters have no names, only He and SHE HE:
there comes that scream/From terrified, invisible beast or
bird...
SHE becomes terrified, grabs him, covers his eyes. He asks what
suddenly has alarmed her.
SHE: A sweetheart from another life floats there...as though
she had been forced to linger...( in final stanza): Now she has
thrown her arms above her head; Whether she threw them up to flout me,
/Or but to find /Now that no fingers bind,/That her hair streams upon
the wind,
I do not know, that know I am afraid / Of the hovering thing
night brought me. |
One gets the sense that this couple's life will never again be the same.
Another poem—here related just partly—is from a volume called The
Tower entitled All Souls' Night
All Souls' is the night that Catholics prayed
for the dead, dead who are presumed not sentenced to hell but to purgatory,
a realm of existence for people who die and required some purgation or
purification before they can get into heaven. Yeats sets the scene, and then
goes on to mention several of his former friends whom he assumes are there.
Yeats wrote the poem in Oxford circa 1920.
Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And many a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls' Night,
And 2 long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come,
For it is a ghost's right, His element is so fine,
Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the
wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
One of the souls he calls up is MacGregor
Matthers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, a former close friend and
a prominent occultist and ritual magician. Yeats writes of him,
He had much industry setting out, much boisterous
courage, before loneliness
Had driven him crazed; For meditations upon unknown
thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less;
They are neither paid nor praised, But he'd object to
the host,
The glass because my glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.
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The fact is that MacGregor Mathers and his wife Moina
had moved to Paris and apparently spent most of their time, in their
latter years, just behind their own walls in meditation and “astral
travel”. They were practicing magic. They were attempting to contact
various entities. But they had grown beyond the point where they needed
visual props in their work. |
Yeats concludes his poem by writing that he wants to hold these thoughts
tightly in his mind...till Meditation Master all Its
Parts../.......Such thought, that in it bound/ I need no other thing, Wound
in mind's wandering/ As mummies in the mummy cloth are wound.
We are fortunate that from earliest times to the end of his life, Yeats
kept diaries. He clearly wrote these diaries with some thought that they
would be important posthumously. Yeats did believe in a type of collective
unconscious, which he called the Anima Mundi. A world soul. Great memory
passing from generation to generation, a repository of archetypal images.
But he was mostly concerned with the archetypes of the people of Ireland,
obtained from Celtic folklure.
Lady Gregory first met Yeats in l896. He was around 30, she was older.
She had books and books of Irish folk lure and fairytales written down
herself. She took him to her home Coole, near Galway, to collect more of
these tales from the country people.
Eventually Yeats writes The Land of Heart's Desire. In this
play, the faeries, who come out in abundance on Midsummer's Night, steal
away a young woman named Mary. New to the country, she mocks at the tales of
the country folks. A priest joins the family. His crucifix appears so
distressing to Mary that he sets it aside in another room. Without this
tool, he can not rescue Mary as the faeries haul her off to a world
where
.. the fairies 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 murmur and laugh and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue.
Yeats'
lifelong unrequited love was Maude Gonne. When his proposal of marriage was
spurned, first by her and later by her daughter, he finally, with a push
from Lady Gregory, wed Georgie Lees . Four days into his marriage, he
proclaimed himself to be as miserable as he had ever been since the marriage
of Maude many years before. His misery gave birth to some poems.
At that time, however, the
new wife had a forced experience of automatic writing. Profound though
disjointed sentences spewed forth. An unidentified voice said that she was
to provide Yeats metaphors for his poetry. Yeats likewise could communicate
with the disembodied being. The communicator came to the Yeats' in sleep as
well as in wakefulness. The automatic writing and speech during sleep was
accompanied by a strange phenomena. A whistling noise alerted Yeats that a
"communicator" was ready to come while Georgie slept. Servants at the other
end of the house could hear the "whistling ghost." Yeats therefore asked
the "communicator" to announce his presence by another sign. Various scents
were then sent to announce the impending presence.Over four hundred sessions
were held between October l917 and June 1921. (See book: A Vision. Also: W.B.
Yeats by A. Norman Jeffares)
Perhaps Yeats' biggest loss in life was the
death of Lady Gregory, one of the founders of the new Irish theatre. Yeats'
marriage with George gave him two children, a boy and a girl. He seemed to
genuinely care for his children, but did grow somewhat bored with his wife.
Yeats was spending extended summers at Lady Gregory's country home, Coole.
His attachment to Gregory also extended to her house. He wrote much of his
work in his study at this country house, so that when she died, he mourned
not only her but the loss of the place where he had written much of his
great work. Yeats also viewed sexual prowess (his ability to perform but
also his having to potential to do so) as crucial for his creativity. He
underwent an operation, essentially a vasectomy, which a doctor friend
hailed as a performance enhancer. He experimented with injections of monkey
glands. (He would have made a wonderful poster boy for Viagra). He initiated
a sexual relationship with his old friend Olivia Shakespear, and later found
a young, emotionally unstable actress wannabe for a mistress.
By the late l930's, Yeats'
health was beginning to deteriorate, a kidney problem being diagnosed.
However, his mind was active and he was writing poetry the last week of
his life. On 21 January l939 he completed his poem "The Black Tower." He
was at this time in France. In the next few days signaled a marked
deterioration in his health and some wandering of speech, but by evening he
had regained his alertness and gave his wife corrections for some of his
poems. The following day he needed morphia for bouts of pain. Breathing was
labored. He died on 28 January, l939. Because of the war, the body could
not easily be transported back to Ireland and it was not until l948 that his
bones met their final resting place in Sligo, Ireland.
My fiftieth year had come and
gone;
I sat, a solitary man
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I
gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could
bless.
W. B. Yeats
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