The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats: The Anglo-Irish Heritage in Subject and Style

149 Pages·1974·10.62 MB·English

by  Colin Meir (auth.)

'THE BALLADS AND SONGS OF W. B. YEATS
THE BALLADS
AND SONGS
OF W. B. YEATS
The Anglo-Irish Heritage
in Subject and Style
COLINMEIR
Macmillan Education
© Colin Meir 1974
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 197 4
All rights reserved. No part of
this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, without permission
First published 1974 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in New York
Dublin Melbourne johannesburg and Madras
SBN 333 15839 3
ISBN 978-1-349-02184-0 ISBN 978-1-349-02182-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02182-6
Contents
Preface vi
I POPULAR NATIONALISM: 1885-1892 1
1 The subjects of Irish poetry 5
2 Irish forms and language 8
3 Yeats's early ballads 10
4 Yeats's 'Irish' poems 15
II IMAGINATIVE NATIONALISM 24
1 Subjects and audience 27
2 Esoteric idealism and the Irish tradition 30
3 Ballad form in The Wind Among the Reeds 36
4 The songs of Red Hanrahan 43
III THE TRUE TRADITION: TRANSLATIONS
FROM THE GAELIC 47
1 Callanan, Ferguson and Walsh 47
2 James Clarence Mangan 53
3 Douglas Hyde 58
IV YEATS'S DEBT TO ANGLO-IRISH DIALECT 65
1 Stories of Red Hanrahan 69
2 Songs in the plays 71
3 Features of Anglo-Irish dialect usage in
Yeats's Collected Poems: 78
Lexical features 78
Syntactical features 81
v BALLAD RHETORIC 91
1 The political ballads 91
2 The personal poem 95
3 The voice of the bard 99
VI PASSIONATE SYNTAX 104
1 The song sequences in The Tower and
The Winding Stair 104
2 The ballads in Last Poems 113
Notes 124
Bibliography 132
Index 137
Preface
Yeats is unavoidably a poet of two cultures, English and
Anglo-Irish. Because his native language is English his artis
tic development owes much to English literary traditions, a
matter which has been variously, if not perhaps exhaus
tively, dealt with by many hands. The Anglo-Irish heritage
has, however, received comparatively little critical atten
tion. Yet that heritage was important to Yeats, as is clearly
shown in his published prose and his early journalism.
Although he may at times be found saying one thing about
Irish literature and doing something quite different in his
own poetry, what he saw as distinctively Irish had a direct
bearing on his theory and practice between 1886 and
1900; and what his later poetry owes to his native
tradition has its beginnings in those early years when
Yeats's critical energies so exclusively served deliberate
Irish aims. This book first examines the effect on Yeats's
work of his turning in the mid 1890s from the ideal of a
popular national poetry to that of an esoteric literature
which would perform a quasi-religious function for its
people. The most important change in Yeats's develop
ment came after 1900. It was not until he had abandoned
these ideals about the poet's role in Ireland that he was
able to draw on the translations from the Gaelic which he
now recognised as the central line of his native poetic
tradition. The rest of the book deals mainly with what
Yeats learned from this tradition, and with the influence -
increasingly pervasive from 1904 onwards -of the syntax
of Anglo-Irish dialect on his verse. Yeats's lifelong concern
with the problems of subject, language and form testifies
Preface
Vll
to his vitality as a poet; and it is nowhere more evident
than in his ballads and songs. They illustrate the changes in
Yeats's view of popular poetry and its audience, and mark
predominant features in the evolution of his style.
In addition to those listed in the footnotes and biblio
graphy, I wish to acknowledge my general debt to the
following critical works which contain material relevant to
my subject: E.A. Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance
(1916); Stephen Gwynn (ed.), Scattering Branches (1940);
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941); Robin
Flower, The Irish Tradition (1947); T.R.Henn, The Lonely
Tower (1950); Robin Skelton and Anne Saddlemyer (eds),
The World of W.B. Yeats (1965); Daniel Hoffmann, Bar
barous Knowledge (1967); Phillip Marcus, Yeats and the
Beginning of the Irish Renaissance {1970).
I particularly wish to thank Donald Davie and George
Dekker, both formerly at Essex University, for their guid
ance and encouragement in this study in its initial form. I
also wish to thank the following persons for advice and/or
bibliographical information: F.J.Byrne, University College,
Dublin; Jacques Chuto, University of Paris; D.W.Cole,
McGill University; J.H.Delargy, Irish Folk Lore Commis
sion; Oliver Edwards; G.S.Fraser, Leicester University;
T.R.Henn, Cambridge University; P.L.Henry, University
College, Galway; A.N.Jeffares, Stirling University; Roger
McHugh, University College, Dublin; Thomas Parkinson;
Peter Strevens, Essex University; Thomas Ward, Irish Folk
Lore Commission; Michael B. Yeats.
Permission to reprint extracts from the following works
was given by the Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., New
York: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 'Adam's
Curse', copyright 1903 by Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.,
renewed 1931 by William Butler Yeats; 'Down by the
Salley Gardens', 'The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner',
'The Valley of the Black Pig', 'A Poet to His Beloved', 'The
Ballad of Moll Magee', 'The Ballad of Father Gilligan', 'The
Vlll Preface
Ballad of Father O'Hart', 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'To
the Rose upon the Rood of Time', 'The Song of
Wandering Aengus', 'The Host of the Air', 'The Blessed',
'The Secret Rose', copyright 1906 by Macmillan Publish
ing Co. Inc., renewed 1934 by William Butler Yeats; 'The
Cold Heaven', copyright 1912 by Macmillan Publishing Co.
Inc., renewed 1940 by Bertha Georgie Yeats; 'September
1913', copyright 1916 by Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.,
renewed 1944 by Bertha Georgie Yeats; 'Sixteen Dead
Men', 'The Rose Tree', 'Easter 1916', 'Under Saturn',
copyright 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., renewed
1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats; 'First Love', 'The Tower',
'My Descendants', 'My House', 'The New Faces', 'Human
Dignity', 'The Death of the Hare', copyright 1928 by
Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie
Yeats; 'Parting', 'A Last Confession', 'Blood and the
Moon', 'A Woman Young and Old', 'Crazy Jane Reproved',
'Tom the Lunatic', 'Crazy Jane and the Day of Judgment',
'Crazy Jane and the Bishop', 'Crazy Jane Talks with the
Bishop', copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.,
renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats; 'The Three
Bushes', 'The Lady's Third Song', 'The Chambermaid's
First Song', 'The Chambermaid's Second Song', 'Colonel
Martin', 'The O'Rahilly', 'Roger Casement', 'John
Kinsella's Lament', 'The Pilgrim', copyright 1940 by
Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats,
Michael Butler Yeats and Anne Yeats; The Collected Plays
of W. B. Yeats, copyright 1934, 1952 by Macmillan
Publishing Co. Inc. Extracts from Kilcash by Frank
O'Connor are reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters &
Co. and Cyrilly Abela, New York.
The publishers have made every effort to trace the
copyright-holders but if they have inadvertently over
looked any, they will be pleased to make the necessary
arrangement at the first opportunity.
I Popular Nationalism
1885-1892
The most important event in Yeats's early life was his
meeting in 1885 with John O'Leary, the old Fenian leader
who had recently returned to Ireland from political exile.
O'Leary gave a direction to the young poet'~ ambition by
introducing him to nineteenth century Anglo-Irish literature
and inspiring him to feel he had a vital role to play in
its development. Yeats attended meetings of the 'Young
Ireland' Society, of which O'Leary was President, where
literary readings were given and Irish matters passionately
debated. Years later he declared: 'From these debates,from
O'Leary's conversation, and from the Irish books he lent
or gave me has come all that I have set my hand to since. '1
Most of the poetry Yeats read under O'Leary's guidance
was published in countless ballad books which had an
enormous circulation, one of the best known being Charles
Gavan Duffy's Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845). In the
main this popular poetry came from two separate Irish
traditions: that of the patriotic verse written by numerous
literate nineteenth century Irishmen, few of whom had
any real talent; and that of a relatively small number of
translations from the Gaelic which came out of a rich and
long-established poetic tradition, oral and written, folk and
literary. Apart from the translations there was little
enough for Yeats to work on; indeed one of the most
remarkable things about Yeats's achievement is that he
became a major poet whose verse is distinctively Anglo
Irish out of a native background which, in comparison
with the mainstream of English literature, was on the
whole paltry in quality. But what is important to Yeats's
2 The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats
beginnings is that he had inherited a popular tradition,
unequal as it was; that, moreover, he believed he had an
audience he could educate. In his own work his first move
was to find the right subjects and the right language; in his
criticism he extolled the virtues of a ballad literature.
Yeats soon discovered that two Irish poets stood out
from all the rest. Mangan and Ferguson had both written a
substantial body of work which was only selectively repre
sented in the ballad books. Yeats linked his name with
theirs and with that of Davis in these frequently quoted
lines from 'To Ireland in the Coming Times':
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson.
But when he claimed in 1892 that the three writers shared
a 'community in the treatment of Irish subjects after an
Irish fashion'\ he was over-simplifying the truth about
their poetry and what he saw in it.
Thomas Davis (1815-45) was the highly esteemed leader
of the Young Ireland political movement of the 1840s. His
verse and that of his followers appeared in The Nation
newspaper, the organ of the movement, between 1842 and
1845 and was published under the title The Spirit of the
Nation, a volume which was in its fiftieth edition by 1870.
Although he did write one or two songs which, because
they were based on folk sources, avoided the political
bombast typical of that volume, and one lament which
Yeats consistently praised, Davis's characteristic style was
frequently as flatly derivative as the following:
When boyhood's fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen,
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
Three hundred men and three men.
And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain,
And Ireland, long a province, be
A NATION ONCE AGAIN.
('A Nation Once Again')