Past talks at the Theosophical Society in Maryland

William Butler Yeats enjoyed a life so variable that it is an impossible life to sum up.His dates are 1865- 1939. He was Irish but from an Irish Protestant family. He was a prodigious poet and playwright. At one point in his later life he won a Nobel prize. He, along with Lady Gregory and Synge, was a founder of the modern Irish theatre. Yeats' immediate family did not have money. His father, John, was a dreamer, an artist and probably a bipolar. His mother, Susan, was generally depressed. There were 8 children. The benefactor was Susan's family, the Pollexfens. Yeats' father thoroughly disliked his inlaws because he had to take money from them.

In his early work in launching the Irish theatre, Yeats had a financial helpmeet in Annie Hornimann. To speak of Annie Horinmann is to introduce one of the major themes in Yeats' life. Yeats was a metaphysician, a mystic, a magician. As a young man, he had been admitted to the Esoteric section of the Theosophical Society in England, Helena Blavatsky's chosen inner group. Yeats, however, wanted to go a step more daring than Theosophy. He joined the recently formed Golden Dawn.

MacGregor Matthers had launched the G.D. in 1888, along with Drs. Woodman and Westcott. The group was steeped in ritual work, their members advancing in grades corresponding to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The G.D.additionally blended Masonic and Rosecrucian thought. Annie Hornimann, whose family owned the Hornimann Museum (This museum still thrives in the London suburb of Forest Hill) had long poured money into supporting MacGregor Mathers, the best known founder of the G.D.When Mathers married Moina Bergson, Annie supported both of them. Annie Hornimann was a woman of rectitude. Mathers was a man who did not like to be crossed. One gets a sense of Mathers' picking at Annie Horniman's magical work, at her independence, her refusal to subordinate herself to Mathers. Indeed, in his famous epistle suspending Annie from the Golden Dawn, he charged her with "insubordination" (to him)! His letter goes on to question her mental stability. Here was a case of Mathers' ego overriding his sense of economic self-preservation, killing the hen that lay the golden eggs. When Annie informed Mathers that she must stop financial support, he responded by heaping more verbal abuse on her.

Yeats profited from the falling out between Mathers and Hornimann. Annie now subsidized Yeats' theatrical hopes.

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.****

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.

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.

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

                           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.