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Confronting YeatsAuthor(s): Richard MurphySource: Irish Pages, Vol. 4, No. 1, The Media (2007), pp. 217-223Published by: Irish Pages LTDStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30057381 .

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CONFRONTING YEATS

Richard Murphy

Love and hate.

(This address was delivered at the Opening of the Yeats International Summer School,

Sligo, on 29July 2007. It has been revised slightlyfor publication.)

I do not remember him then, but I must have met MichaelYeats, when he came with other guests to take part in a game of cricket in one of the pastures at my grandfather's place on the Mayo-Galway borders in 1936. He was fifteen years old and I was nine. My older sister still remembers that at thirteen she was almost in love with him. Thistles and ragwort in the Pigeon Park had to be cut with a scythe to make the pitch. Alan Browne was also there, who knew Michael at Baymount Preparatory School in Dublin. Alan was the hare in our

paper chase around St Anne's and the Bull Island in the thirties. He was to become Professor of Gynaecology at Trinity College, Dublin and Master of the Rotunda.

I also met Michael with his wife Grainne on a musico-literary lecture tour

they were giving inVirginia in 1965. And at the AbbeyTheatre in 1973, Michael

generously approved my translation of the lines thatYeats had omitted from his version of Sophocles's King Oedipus - a kind of invisible mending I did to

please Michael Cacoyannis who was directing the play at the Abbey. From Michael Yeats's autobiography, Cast a Cold Eye, we learn that he

became a supporter of de Valera at the age of 14, when his father was ranting for the Blue Shirts. The poet was famously tone-deaf. Could that be why Michael became well known as a music critic? I'd like to read you an

astonishing story by Yeats concerning musicians, published by the Cuala Press in 1931, when Michael was ten years old. Sixty years ago I bought this copy of Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: an Extract from a Record Made by His

Pupils. It shows howYeats could make fun of the spooks he almost believed in; and indirectly vindicates the argument of Joseph M. Hassett in his book Yeats and the Poetics of Hate, that hate was an even more poetically inspiring emotion forYeats than love.

Here is theYeats extract from Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends:

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My name is Daniel O'Leary, my great interest is the speaking of

verse, and the establishment some day or other of a small theatre for

plays in verse. You will remember that a few years before the great war the realists drove the last remnants of rhythmical speech out of the theatre. I thought common sense might have returned while I was at war or in the starvation afterwards, and went to Romeo and Juliet to find out. I caught those well-known persons Mr _ and Miss at their kitchen gabble. Suddenly this thought came into my head, what would happen if I were to take off my boots and fling one at Mr.... and one at Miss . . . ? Could I give my life such settled purpose that the act would take its place not among whims but among forms of

intensity? I ran through my life from childhood and decided that I could. "You have not the courage," said I, speaking aloud but in a low

voice, "I have,% said I, and began unlacing my boots. "You have not," said I, and4,,fter several such interchanges I stood up and flung the boots. Unfortunately, although I can do whatever I command myself to do, I lack the true courage, which is self-possession in an unforeseen situation. My aim was bad. Had I been throwing a cricket ball at a wicket, which is a smaller object than an actor or an actress, I would not have failed, but as it was, one boot fell in the stalls and the other struck a musician or the brassy thing in his hand. Then I ran out of a side door and down the stairs. Just as I came to the street door I heard feet behind and thought it must be the orchestra and that increased my panic. The realists turn our words into gravel but the musicians and the singers turn them into honey and oil. I have always had the idea that some day a musician would do me an injury. The street door opened on to a narrow lane, and down this lane I ran until

I ran straight into the arms of an old gentleman standing at a street corner by the open door of a big covered motor car. He pulled me into the car, for I was so out of breath that I could not resist, and the car drove off. "Put on these boots," he said, "I am afraid they are too

large but I thought it best to be on the safe side, and I have brought you a pair of clean socks." I was in such a panic, and everything so like a dream, that I did what I was told. He dropped my muddy socks out of the window and said "You need not say what you have done, unless

you care to tell Robartes. I was told to wait at the corner for a man

without boots." He brought me here; all I need add is that I have lived in this house since that night some six or seven months ago, and that it is a great relief to talk to people of my own generation. You at any

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CONFRONTING YEATS

rate cannot sympathise with that horrible generation that in childhood sucked Ibsen from Archer's hygienic bottle. You can understand even better than Robartes why that protest must always seem the great event of my life.

My first encounter with Yeats was critically hostile. Aged seventeen, in November 1944, I was challenged in a scholarship exam for Oxford to identify the period if not the author of a wishy-washy world-weary lyric which I guessed was written in the 1890s, and to comment on the style, which I sternly criticised. The poem, I later discovered, was "The Sorrow of Love" in the form in which it

appeared in The Rose (dedicated to Lionel Johnson) in 1893. In the 1930s Yeats modernised the poem and perhaps made it worse. Here are the two versions:

(First Version) The quarrel of a sparrow in the eaves, The full round moon and the star-laden sky, And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves, Had hid away earth's old and weary cry.

And then you came with those red mournful lips, And with you came the whole of the world's tears, And all the sorrows of her labouring ships, And all the burden of her myriad years.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves, Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.

(The Revised Version) The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, The brilliant moon and all the milky sky, And all that famous harmony of leaves, Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus- and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

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Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

As a result of my winning the scholarship, C.S. Lewis became my tutor at

Magdalen College. But I didn't discoverYeats - whose Collected Poems remained out of print throughout the 1940s - until I returned from years of schooling in

England to the west of Ireland in the summer of 1946.

By chance I was invited during Galway Race week to stay in the Weir

Cottage as a guest of the owner of the salmon fishery. Beside my bed, in which I was kept awake by the roar of the flowing water under my window, lay a copy of this MacMillan, London 1940 edition, of the Last Poems &Plays byW.B.Yeats, bound in green cloth. Reading these poems in the country of their birth and

mine, with reverent awedthat partially eclipsed understanding at the age of

nineteen, at a time wlen the study of Eng Lit up to but not later than 1830 was

beginning to pall, convinced me that I ought to look to my own mountains, lakes and waterfalls for poetic inspiration that had eluded me in Oxford.

What impressed me more than the swaggering injunction to

Sing the peasantry, and then

Hard-riding country gentlemen, was the high emblazoned rhetoric of "The Gyres," the idea of laughter in tragic joy over the collapse of civilisation, and the sound of a voice from the cavern of ancient tombs that knows only one word,"Rejoice!" Having survived by avoiding the horrors of the Second World War, I read this poem as gloriously prophetic and redeeming. And for sheer declamatory fun when drunk, I

enjoyed, and still enjoy, reciting "The Pilgrim" and "TheWild Old Wicked Man." Soon afterwards in Dublin, almost as a gift from Mr Willie Figgis of

Hodges Figgis, a friend of my father, I obtained the Cuala Press 1939 edition of Last Poems and Two Plays. This treasure came with me as a talisman when I ran

away from Oxford in the middle of the following term to a cottage beside a waterfall at the foot of a mountain above a lake in Connemara where I planned to write a verse play on the legend of Lynch who hanged his son in medieval

Galway. But I failed ignominiously. When I went back to Oxford, and tried to communicate to my awe-

inspiring tutor my excitement in discovering these poems, he admitted that he

liked the earlyYeats but not the later. When I dared to query "Why?" he brought the subject to an end by saying:

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CONFRONTING YEATS

"Yeats was a diabolist."

But I was lucky in being befriended by an older Belfast man, a war- wounded veteran Major of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, who had returned to finish his degree at Oxford after surviving the retreat from Burma with two books in his haversack - Ulysses and the Collected Poems of W B. Yeats. Charles Monteith, who later became my publisher at Faber, and thereafter published Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, gave a party for me on the eve of my mid- term departure from Oxford to write poetry beside a waterfall in Connemara, which Charles thought was a lunatic escapade. When we were all a bit drunk, Charles began to recite his favourite Yeats poems, and to this day I hear those

poems in the voice if not the accent of his reading. Charles himself was tone- deaf. To him music was unpleasant noise, but his voice carried the essential verbal musical meaning of those poems to my heart. Let me try to recapture the reverberations of "Byzantium" which I heard in the revelry at Oxford that night.

BYZANTIUM

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome distains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

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Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

1930

I began writing poetry at school in England during the war, hoping to make

something that would last about the lives of people I loved. Of courseYeats did this supremely well. At a time when the economic, social and racial transformation of Ireland is obliterating more and more of the past, poetry can hold a vision of how it was or how it appeared to be. And when we have Roy Foster's magisterial two-volume life to guide us through the history and the work of scholars such as Helen Vendler to interpret the most puzzling ideas devised by the great diabolist, the vision will remain.

I'll end with lines that affect me all the more deeply when I consider the

doubling of the number of houses on the ground in Ireland in the last ten or

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CONFRONTING YEATS

twelve years. Though "Fallen Majesty" was published by Yeats in 1914 on the eve of the Great War that devastated Europe, for me it has a timeless and universal relevance.

Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face, And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone, Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping-place Babbling of fallen majesty, records what's gone.

The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet, These, these remain, but I record what's gone. A crowd Will gather, and not know it walks the very street Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.

Richard Murphy was born in Co Mayo in 1927. He is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently In the Heart of the Country: Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2000). His

memoir, The Kick: A Life Among Writers (Granta Books), appeared in 2003. After several

years' residence in South Africa, he has now returned to Ireland.

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