The Great Hunger aka The Irish Potato Famine
Roughly 1845 – 1852
Three Main Factors of Irish Poverty:
•Burgeoning poor population with no means for improvement
•Until the early 19th C, it was illegal for Irish Catholics to vote, be educated,
live in industrial towns, or to own land
•Absentee Landlords / Aristocracy
•Anglo-protestants were the land owners, most of whom lived in England
and their estates were run by agents who broke land up to very small lots
(allowing more rent but making profitable farming impossible)
•Irish goods were exported for British consumption, hence 1/3 the
population reliant on potato as staple
•The Church
•80% of the population was Roman Catholic
•No population control
•At odds with Irish Independence [refer to Parnell]
And of course, British Prejudice…
Estimates are that roughly 1,000,000 –
1,500,000 died from starvation and
disease over about five years.
And at least another 1,000,000 emigrated.
Q: how does a country deal with such a cultural trauma, especially in the midst of ongoing
oppression?
Q: how does a country deal with such a cultural trauma, especially in the midst of ongoing
oppression?
A: A cultural revolution.
The Gaelic Revival
The Three Yeats:
The Romantic, The Revolutionary, The Mystic
1865- William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin
•Family is Protestant Ascendency.
•Father an artist
•Mother from Sligo in Rural Ireland (Yeats raised there, link to Irish Myth and folklore)
•Family moves between Ireland and England
1885- He wrote his first poem and essay The Poetry of Samuel Ferguson
•Greatly influenced by Shelley and Blake
1889- Yeats met Maud Gonne, his “Muse.” Proposes three times, turned down.
•Publishes Wanderings of Oisin, heavily influenced by Irish mythology
•Becomes increasingly interested in mysticism (the Golden Dawn)
•Goes on to publish three more books of poetry involved with Irish Myth: Poems (1895), The
Secret Rose (1897), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
1899- Yeats co founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin
•Involved with Lady Gregory in the Gaelic Revival/Irish Renaissance.
1903- Gonne marries John MacBride, a military man, converts to Catholicism. Separates in ‘05
1904- The Abbey theatre opened, dedicated to plays by and about the Irish.
1907- Abbey puts on Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which results in riots [refer to the
dilemma of representation].
1908- consummates love w/Gonne.
•With the rise of the national revolutionary movement, Yeats reassesses his attitudes
1909- Meets and collaborates with Ezra Pound (a relationship that would last until 1916)
1916- Easter Uprising
1916- Proposes for a final time to MG, turned down. Proposes to her Daughter. Turned
down.
1917- Yeats married George Hyde Lees (two children).
1922- he was appointed to the first Irish Senate.
1923- Yeats was honored the Nobel Peace Prize.
1925- With A Vision, Yeats enters into his most symbolic (and reflexive and creative) stage
1939- William Yeats passed away on 28 January.
Early Yeats and the Gaelic Revival
The Gaelic Revival is marked by:
Return to “lost” national culture
In music, myth, folklore, art, sports
Reclaiming Gaelic as a language
Conscious effort to establish a distinct literary identity
THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
By William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
1892
Who Goes With Fergus?
WHO will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.
1893
The Abbey Theater and The Playboy of the Western World, 1907
•Synge’s topics concerned the rural Irish, often characterized as uneducated and
superstitious.
•Playboy concerns paracide, bragging, lying, flirting, drinking, etc. It sparked a
riot and extended criticism in the Irish Press
•Yeats defended it
•Points to the problem of representation of an oppressed culture:
•Is it best to represent the Irish as equal to the oppressor (professional,
educated, modern, etc.)?
•Or to show the plight of the oppressed, as products of a broken culture (yet
natural)?
Yeats’ first stage is marked by:
•A conscious attempt to build a canon of literary symbols
based upon Irish Folklore
•A celebration of the life of the mind over a life of action
•A creeping dissatisfaction with this methodology, especially
in the face of growing unrest
Yeats’ Second Stage:
•Personally reflexive
•Politically Conscious
•Replaces Irish Myth with the Irish as Mythic, especially those
fighting for Irish freedom
A Coat
Made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
1916
September 1913
Notice Yeats’:
• rancor against class and religion
•His immortalization of political and Irish figures
rather than mythic figures
Charles Stewart Parnell
Easter, 1916
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.
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 winged 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.
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.
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.
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
http://www.yeatsvision.com/twelvefold.html
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Sailing to Byzantium
THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
1926
The Circus Animals' Desertion
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
1939 (Yeats Dies January 28th, 1939)