William Butler Yeats: Notes (6)

Island of Statues (1885), published in successive monthly issues of the Dublin University Review (April-July 1885), Act. II, sc. iii being included in Wanderings of Oisin (1889) as ‘Island of Statues: A Fragment’; ‘Two shepherds at dawn meet before the door of the shepherdess Nachina and sing to her in rivalry. There voices grow louder and louder as they try to sing each other down. At last she comes out, a little angry. An arrow flies across the scene. The two shepherds fly, being full of Arcadian timidity. Almintor, who is loved by Naschina, comes in, having shot the arrow at a heron. Naschina receives him angrily. Naschina is angry with him ...’ (‘Summary of Previous Scenes’, in Wandering of Oisin, 1889.) in the ensuing parts of this account, Almintor goes on a quest to the enchanted island to demonstrate his courage to her, and is turned to stone on chosing the wrong flower; Naschina follows him disguised as a shepherd, and is not recognised by the two shepherds, whom she tells to settle their dispute over her by combat, not believing they have the courage, though one of them kills the other.

John Sherman and Dhoya (both 1891): John Sherman, living at Ballah [Sligo] with his mothers moves to a job in his uncle’s office in London, advised to go by his quiet, constent companion, Mary Carton. In London he meets a sophisticated charmer, Margaret Leland and, in a rash moment becomes engaged to her. Realising his mistake he invites a clergymen friend, Rev William Howard, to stay with him and meet his bethrothed. The two fall for each other and leave John free to return to Mary Carton, who first rejects him but finally comes to him at the end, realising that love is more than ambition. She had wanted him to make a figure in the world. Yeats’s comments to Katharine Tynan: ‘I have an ambition to be taken as an Irish Novelist, not as an English or cosmopolitan one choosing Ireland as a background. I studied my characters in Ireland and described a typical Irish feeling in Sherman’s devotion to Ballagh. A West of Ireland feeling, I might almost say, for like that of Allingham for Ballyshannon, it is West rather than National. Sherman belonged like Allingham to the small gentry who, in the West, at any rate, love their native places without perhaps loving Ireland. They do not travel and are shut off from England by the whole breadth of Ireland, with the result that they are forced to make their native town their world. I remember when we were children how intense our devotion was to all things in Sligo and still see in my mother the old feeling. I claim for this and other reasons that Sherman is as much an Irish novel as anything by, Banim or Griffin. Lady Wilde has written me an absurd and enthusiastic letter about it. She is queer enough to prefer it to my poems.’ (Letter to Tynan; Letters, ed. Wade, 187-88). Dhoya [the earlier composed], a slave from earliest childhood, has fits of passion so frequent and dangerous that his master lets him go; makes his home in cavern on west coast of Ireland, falling into furies more and more, ‘though there was no one but his own shadow to rave against’; furies stop abruptly when he falls in love with lady from fairy world, but finds she wishes to be loved but not to love; she is taken from him and he mounts and black steed and plunges over a cliff to death. John Sherman concerns a young man who prefers his native Ballah (Sligo) to every other place; wishes to marry rich woman so he can continue to dream; Rev. William Howard, High Church curate, is his opposite; Sherman lured to London to work as clerk; meets rich woman, but knows his dream life is impossible; turns his fiancée over to Howard and returns to his childhood sweetheart in Ballah where he will settle down to farming and dreaming; Howard says, ‘Your mind and mine are two arrows. Yours has got no feathers, and mine has no metal to the point.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, pp.81-82.)

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London 1892) - the first and main text is a verse play written for Maud Gonne, in which Kevin, the bard, is distraught for love of the Countess, orig. written as “Countess Kathleen O’Shea” [var. O’Connor] and based on ‘The Countess Kathleen O’Shea’, in Fairy and Folk Tales (1888), pp.232-35, and revised to convince Maud Gonne that he could write for a general audience; and performed by the Irish Literary Theatre with Maud Gonne in the title role, in the Antient Concert Rooms [Gt. Brunswick St., Dublin] 8 May, 1899; published as The Countess Cathleen [sic] (London: T. Fisher Unwin 1895, & edns. ... 1912); it contains a scene which ‘should have the effect of a missal painting’, acc. the stage-directions. Note that the bard ‘Kevin’ of the former version becomes ‘Aleel’ in the later, as in the version that James Joyce saw and which Stephen Dedalus attends in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [Chap. V]; the bard tries in vain to prevent the Countess from selling her soul to get money for her people. See also discussion of controversy of Countess Cathleen, in Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (1972), p.60ff. (for text extracts, see Quotations, supra.)

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892); revised version printed in Poems (1895); rep. as The Countess Cathleen, 1899, 1901, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1916. 1913, 1919, 1920, 1922 [twice], 1923, 1294, 1927, 1929; also in The Poetical Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. II: “Dramatic Poems”, 1907; rep. 1909, 1911. Collected Works in Verse and Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. III (Stratford 1908), Poetical Works, Vol. II (NY & London 1912, rep. 1914, 1916, 1917, 1919, 1921); A Selection from the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Tauchnitz 1913, rep. 1922); Selected Poems (NY 19221); Plays and Controversies (London 1923, 1927; NY 1924); with Land of Heart’s Desire (London 1924, 1925, 1929); The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (1934, 1952; NY 1935, 1953).

The Countless Kathleen (1892) - Yeats’s comments: ‘[Ireland would] probably draw her deepest literary inspiration from this double fountainhead [i.e. pagan and Christian legend and feeling] if she ever, as is the hope of all her children, makes for herself a great distinctive poetic literature’. Further, ‘an attempt to mingle personal thought and feeling with the beliefs and customs of [Christ]ian Ireland’ (Prefatory declaration, pp.7-8.)

For Maud: “She [Maud Gonne] spoke to me of her wish for a play that she could act in Dublin ... I told her a story I had found when compiling my Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, and offered to write for her the play I have called The Countess Cathleen. [...]” (Unpub. autobiog. [pres. Memoir], quoted in A. N. Jeffares & A. S. Knowland, Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan 1975, p.1.)

The Countless Kathleen (1892) - ‘The play is not historic, but symbolic and has little to do with any definite place and time as an auto by Calderón. One should look for the Countess Cathleen and the peasants and the demons not in history, but as Mr Johnston has done, in one’s own heart, and such costumes and scenery have been selected as will preserve the indefinite.’ (Beltaine, No. 1, May 1899, p.8.) ‘It was indeed the first performance of The Countess Cathleen when our stage pictures were made out of poor conventional scenery and hired costumes, that sent me writing plays where all would depend on the player.’ (Collected Works, 1908, III, rep. Russell K. Alspach, Variorum Edn., Macmillan 1966, p.1291; quoted in Flannery 1976, p.149).

The title: Jeffares and Knowland call the title-character ‘a symbol of Ireland’ and document Yeats’s various spellings of the name: Cathleen ny Houlihan (Samhain version), Cathleen Ni Hoolihan (printed title, 1902); Cathleen ni Houlihan, in The Hour Glass and Other Plays (1904); Kathleen Ni Hoolihan in his reply to queries in The United Irishmen (4 May 1902). Michael Yeats wrote that the title was inspird by a song written by the poet Blind William Heffernan. (M. Yeats, “W. B. Yeats and Irish Folk sons”, in Southern Folk Lore Quarterly, XXXI, June 1966.) See A. N. Jeffares & A. S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, London: Macmillan 1975, p.32.)

The Countless Kathleen (1892) - ‘The Countess Cathleen could speak a blank verse [524 ] which I had loosened, almost put out of joint, for her need, because I thought of her as medieval and thereby connected her with the general European movement. For Deirdre and Cuchulain and all the other figures of Irish legend are still in the whale’s belly.’ (“General Introduction for My Work”, 1935; in Essays and Introductions, 1961, 524-25; rep. in Richard Finneran, The Yeats Reader, Scribners 1997, p.414.)

The Countless Kathleen (1892): A. N. Jeffares [& A. S. Knowland] Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (1975, rev. edn. 1986) writes that there does not appear to be an Irish folklore precedent for the plot of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen. However, the first story of T. Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825-28; rep. 1834, 1859, &c.), entitled “The Legend of Knocksheogowna”, concerns a character Larry Houlihan who makes a bargain with a farmer whose cattle and goods are being pilfered by fairies to the detriment of his capacity to pay his rent. Larry braves the fairy mound and makes a treaty with the Queen of the Fairies, which results in free substenance from the farmer. Yeats certainly knew the story as he included others from that book in his own Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888).

[ See comments and quotations on Cathleen Ni Houlihan under Notes (1) - as supra. ]

The Celtic Twilight (1893) - Yeats’s Preface: ‘Many of the tales in this book were told to be by one Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyeed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed caibin in the village of Ballisodare. [...] These poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things, than are our men of learning.’ (Mythologies, p.28).

Note: T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions [... &c.] Part II (1828), contains a precedent for Yeats’s use of the term ‘twilight’ - as in ‘Celtic twilight’ - in a context charged with the suggestion that superstition - and particularly the belief in changelings - may be dangerously allied with social violence: ‘[...] my aim has been to bring the twilight tales of the peasantry before the view of the philosopher; as, if suffered to remain unnoticed, the latent belief in them may long have lingered among the inhabitants of the wild mountain and lonesome glen, to retard the progress of their civilization.’ (Op. cit., Pt. II, p.vi.) [For longer extracts, see under Croker - as infra.]

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The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), in which Fr. Hart promises a young woman to way to Heaven, but a child says to Mary: ‘But I can lead you, newly-married bride, / [to the land of Faery / Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, / Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, / Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue. (p.55; cited in part in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.103.) Note that Yeats later renounced The Land of Heart’s Desire: ‘We possess nothing but the will and we must never let the children of vague desires breathe upon it, not the waters of sentiment rust the terrible mirror of its blade [...] Let us have no emotions, however abstract, in which there is not an athletic joy.’ (Letter to “AE”, 1904). Further, Mary: ‘Father, I am right weary of four tongues: / A tongue that is too crafty and wise, / A tongue that is too godly and too grave, / A tongue that is more bitter than the tide, / And a kind tongue too full of drowsy love, / Of drowsy love and my captivity.’ (p.61.)

“The Tables of the Law” (1897) - for information about Joachim Abbas of Flora, see under James Joyce > Notes > Joachim - supra. We know that the Latin phrases in the story were supplied by Lionel Johnson from Yeats’s prose because of the inscription of 1901 on John Quinn’s copy - viz., The Tables of the Law. The Adoration of the Magi (1897). See George J. Watson, ed., Short Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Penguin 1995), p.261 [n.17.]

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The Speckled Bird (1896-1903; being four versions of an autobiographical novel): ‘My chief person was to see all the modern visionary sects pass before his eyes, as Flaubert’s St Anthony say the Christian sects, and I was as helpless to create artistic, as my chief person to create philosophic order’; the hero, Michael Hearne, is son of Catholic landowner in West, sharing backgrounds of Moore and Martyn; starves himself like old peasant to induce visions; includes comic portrait of Mathers as Maclagan, and further indications of growing scepticism about Gold Dawn (‘I think [...] they are the people of unbalanced mind’). Further, The Speckled Bird was named from the biblical verse, ‘Mine inheritance is as the speckled bird, all the birds of heaven are against it.’ [Cited in Richard Ellmann, Yeats, the Man and the Masks (1948), p.25.]

At the Hawk’s Well [1916], a play in the Noh manner, to Pound, at Stone Cottage (Ashdown), Jan. 1916; performed in Lady Cunard’s drawing room and next in Lady Islington’s in the presence of stone-deaf Queen Alexandra and with T. S. Eliot among audience, March [var. April] 1916, to designs by Edmund Dulac and with a dance of the hawk by Michio Ito, a former Noh actor discovered by Pound living in poverty in a back room in London, while Pound replaces the non-literary actor Henry Ainley in rehearsal.

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A Vision (1925; 1937): The new edition (1937) dispenses with the dedication to “Vestigia” (Moina Mathers), and substitutes a group of three meditations on the origin of A Vision itself, collected as “A Packet for Ezra Pound” - who had called the original edition very bughouse [see also under Commentary, supra]. Following the letter to him, however, the introductory material reverts to the fictive version of the text’s genesis involving characters from Yeats’s earlier writings and some new ones [i.e., Michael Robartes and Friends (931). The body of the work itself (in five “books”) involves overlaps and displacements amount to an open-ended system of revisions. Book I explains the 28 lunar phases and interlocking gyres (with diagrams). It then describes the corresponding character-types. Book II introduces a larger gyre dealing with life and death (where the gyre in Book I dealt only with life). Book III gives an account of what happens to the soul in death before its cyclical return to life (the “dreaming back”). Books IV and V outline the cycle-wheeling pattern of history relating particular phases of Western civilisation to the interpenetrating movement of the gyres. The Visions [both] ends with the poem “All Souls’ Night”, written in 1920. (See Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Vision, Michigan UP 1995, pp.7-8.) Yeats assigned himself to Phase 17. [For text and Yeats’s comments, see under Quotations, supra.]

A Full Moon in March (1935), a play about a Stroller (or swineherd) who reaches physical and spiritual fulfilment only when he has his ideal lady beheaded, and based on Wilde’s Salomé; printed in a volume of that name with Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems; Yeats regarded Salomé’s dance as ‘part of the old ritual of the year: the mother goddess and the slain god’ (Variorum Poems, p.840.) note also that the young Yeats considered ‘Salomé is thoroughly bad’ (Letters to Sturge Moore, p.8; Albright, ed., Poems, 1992, p.755).

Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 (1936): On the rejection of Wilfrid Owen: Dorothy Wellesley noted, ‘On this point he remained adamant, holding that “passive suffering was not a subject for poetry”, even as a passive attitude towards nature did not make fine poetry. The creative man must impose himself upon suffering, as he must also upon Nature.’ (Letters to D. W.; Warner Notes).

Purgatory (1938), printed in Last Poems and Two Plays (1939), a play of 223 lines (Abbey 10 Aug., 1938), ande set in Castle Dargan - a place associated with Col. Richard Martin and a famous case of arson - hence: ‘To kill a house / Where great men grew up. married, died, / I here declare a capital offence.’ The play deals with the universal hatred between the generations and the power of the dead over the living. In it The Old Man says after killing his own son: ‘He would have struck a woman’s fancy, / Begot, and passed pollution on.’ (Quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats, NY: HarperCollins 1999, p.361.). The play ends: ‘O God, / Release my mother’s soul from its dream! / Mankind can do no more. Appease / The misery of the living and the remorse of the dead.’ (Idem.)