Irish Studies

 

As I read the poems in Heaney’s 1975 collection, North, I recognized ritual as an important topic that appears in both Yeats and Heaney’s poetry. Just as Yeats plays were influenced by the Japanese Noh theater, and his poetry by the ritualized aristocratic manner, Heaney emphasizes the importance of the ritual of violence to Ireland’s history. The poem “The Grauballe Man” recounts “each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.” The Grauballe Man was found preserved in a bog with his throat slit. This scenario is similar to the brutality occurring between Protestants and Catholics when Heaney was writing these poems. In “Punishment,” he describes this violence as “exact and tribal, intimate revenge.” This “exact” action reminds me of Yeats’ admiration of the precision of the Irish upper class, whose repeated formalities distinguish them from the lower classes. Although I first thought of these poets as fundamentally different, particularly when it comes to style (Yeats’ structured form vs. Heaney’s free verse), I am finding that they are more similar than they appear.

Tollund Man

Grauballe Man

The bog people are preserved so well due to low temperatures, very little oxygen, and acidic water that maintains the skin and hair (“his rusted hair”), but erodes the bone, as can be seen in their deflated looking bodies.

It has been suggested that the Tollund Man was executed by hanging as a sacrifice to appease the gods, which adds another interesting level to Heaney’s poem about him (“Bridegroom to the goddess”) as a possible commentary on the effects of religious extremism in Ireland.

The Grauballe Man, though executed by a slit throat (“The chin is a visor / raised above the vent / of his slashed throat”) instead of hanging, is also assumed to have been killed as a sacrifice.

Map of Denmark that marks Tollund and Grauballe

The Atlantic put out  this article on Yeats January 28 this year. Besides their shameless plug that Yeats had 3 poems published in their magazine the month of his death, their gloss of his career touches “Man and the Echo,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and “Politics,” poems that we went over in detail. It is satisfying to know that any of us could go on and on about any poem or life event mentioned here.

In class we talked about the performative nature of the men inside the house welcoming the adolescent into the adult and masculine process of  grieving, signaled by shaking his hand and saying that they were “sorry for my trouble.” While this in and of itself is a pivotal moment in the youth’s life, as he is accepted into the performative ritual o being a man. It would seem that he has no choice in this matter, as we all inevitably grow old and must come to accept it. We didn’t focus on the speaker’s father in class and I think that he adds a really important dimension to the speakers concept of masculinity in the poem. When the adolescent arrives home for the funeral, “In the porch I met my father crying.” I think this is important because as an adolescent the speaker is still trying to figure out what is is to be a man, and his father is giving him an alternative option to the performative alternative going on inside the house. It is also important that his father is essentially on the outside as he is displaying his emotions and breaking the ‘code’ of masculinity, therefore he is not a part of the inclusive masculine community on the inside of the house. This scenario creates a disconnect with the speaker’s father that has been seen previously in other poems. Perhaps this lack of leadership on how to react in a time of tragedy in a masculine fashion and leaving the adolescent boy to learn from other men how to perform is a reason for this apparent disconnect between the speaker and his father.

 

While reading “Politics” the final poem we read by Yeats, I was reminded of something Doggett said earlier in the semester: that we read Yeats for his poetry, not his politics. The speaker wonders how he can focus on politics when so distracted by a woman, “How can I, that girl standing there, / My attention fix… / on…politics.” The speaker seems to deny the importance of politics in favor of romance: “There’s a politician / That has both read and thought / And maybe what they say is true / Of war and war’s alarms, / But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms.”

This poem can be considered problematic from a political point of view; people should not simply ignore “war and war’s alarms” for the sake of romance. Actually, much of Yeats’ politics (in regards to women, class, etc.) that we have read in his poetry prove problematic. However, I think there is a time and place to be politically conscious, and a separate time and place to indulge in romance and art and that place is poetry. Yeats may have been right in some respect that people can lose their artistic beauty to political fanaticism, like Maud. If you get too caught up in the politics of poetry, you might lose out on its aesthetic beauty. Though, that is not to say that politics in poetry should be ignored. Rather, I think political criticism and aesthetic appreciation should be held separate.

When talking about “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” today, we identified the gazebo at the end of the poem as a reference to man-made aspects of life such as Time and Death itself. This would of course make sense in relation to the fact that the speaker wants to burn these aspects down. Man should be purified from these elements to be able to really live life. The match the speaker strikes and the purifying ability of the flames then also reminds us of the flames described in “Byzantium”.

However, I thought that the gazebo can also represent Ireland itself in relation to England. England then being the larger, more powerful house or mansion. This reference to England taking on the metaphorical role of parent, and Ireland subsequently being the child, can also be related to the almost childlike rhymes the poem ends with, and with which the word ‘gazebo’ is surrounded;  ‘Time-climb’, ‘match-catch’, ‘know-blow’, and ‘built-guilt’. The match then could represent the desire to burn the present submissive attitude Ireland has towards England, and be able to grow into the fully adult and independent nation Ireland can be.

Furthermore, when thinking about gazebos, mansions and matches the reader cannot help to be reminded of the large amount of mansions which were burnt down in the Irish civil war, one being Lady Gregory’s mansion.

As my research for the paper has expanded and sprawled out in front of and beyond, research for any literary work tends to do, I’ve come across critics and authors who have looked at Yeats and other irish revivalists as contributors to a “debilitating, parasitic Irish cultural discourse.” In order to revive Irish nationalism and ultimately Irish art, the revivalists needs to create an Irish authentic, a quintessential center for  the irish identity. The building up of such a center would spill over and expand into nationalist politics,  the active use of the gaelic language, and irish art: all things that, we could argue, strengthen an Irish identity in the face of English oppression, and the preservation of Irish culture. In what way, then could this process of creating an irish authentic be perceived as “debilitating and parasitic?”

The buiIding of a cultural center requires raw materials, and Yeats, along with Gregory, Hyde, Synge, and many others,  looked to  the irish peasantry for a return to “true ireland.” As discussed in class, nationalism seeking a “true anything” can never exist in the present, but draws heavily on the past in order to create symbols and meaning from prior experience. For their newfound nationalism and literary revival, Yeats and his contemporaries drew upon the countryfolk for Irish symbols and customs that could operate as a kind of cultural synecdoche. Within his article on “The Imaginary Irish Peasant,” Edward Hirsch addresses the process by which the revivalists aestheticized the Irish peasantry so as to turn them into literary objects. This reductive centering of the Irish country people simultaneously homogenized various economic gradients and glorified poverty: as Hirsch notes, the revivalists didn’t seem to care so much about what peasants were, but rather what they represent. Regardless of economic clime, the revivalists sought to create a unified, undifferentiated entity of peasantry: Yeats drew on the peasantry as literary art Cathleen ni Houlihan, while Synge manifested the wandering tramp. Irish country folk, as it turns out, were the hosts of what many critics call “the parasitic Irish cultural discourse.”

In the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole”, Yeats is staring at and meditating on the nature of swans, which we judged in-class to  symbolize a combination of eternal love and the representation of the anti-self. I believe that the number fifty-nine has significance, beyond the idea that Yeats himself is represented by the 59^th swan that doesn’t have a paired lover; instead of this reading, which contextualizes the swans in fundamental absence, Yeats himself is visualizing himself as the other part of that  59th swan’s love.  In this reading, the swans, with Yeats added into their number, come to sixty entities within the text. This number draws obvious connections to seconds and minutes, playing on the idea of time which I believe to be the main theme of this text.

The swans are objects that Yeats looks at, hears, and senses – but he enjoys them perhaps most when he can externalize his own feelings of desire for companionship, which in the 4th stanza, he judges to be the antithesis of weariness and old age. Additionally, Yeats admires the swans’ power of choice, between “passion or conquest” and the ability to “wander where they will,” impassioned by their agency over the world and their Selves. These traits are the antithesis of what Yeats has been feeling recently in his old age, adding to his construction of the shadow-self as the 60th swan.

However, in the final stanza, Yeats asks where the swans will be, and whom they will delight, when he awakes one day to see that they are gone. This implicit sadness is not necessarily from remarking upon Yeats’s own death and removal as the 59th swan, but upon the lack of control that he has over these creatures that he wishes to identify with. They will continue on, outside of time, and Yeats knows that they will bring the same degree of happiness to other men – later, in other settings – as they do to him, as they are a symbol of the externalization of his desires. This final realization distances Yeats even further from uniting with his anti-self, as he knows that his desire to externalize is commonplace in humans – adding to his connection to the human race and thereby undercutting any potential to join the natural world.

Yeats poems are full of raptors, full of birds in general, really. There are so many bird moments and bird poems that it’s easy to forget just how much these collections use bird images or symbols.  It can be tough to see if one never had the interest to look into nictitating membranes or how falconers tame hawks, but Yeats is surprisingly accurate in his portrayal of hawks and falconry.

There are many diverse instances where birds are used as huge images or symbols or for an aesthetical impact, like the tundra swan’s mournful locator call, or the swallow’s uncanny agility in the air, or the fierce maternal instinct of the gallinule, or moorhen, or the hypnotically iridescent plumage of the peacock and its freakish scream. However, raptors are almost always mentioned in relation to falconry. Falconry has a great bank of images for Yeats to draw on, especially that of the spinning gyre and the unblinking eye of the sitting hawk. It doesn’t hurt that falconry also puts him in the aristocratic lexicon and the image of privilege can resonate or contrast with other images.

Yeats clearly knows that hunting raptors ride slowly upwards in a spiral, or gyre, pattern, and uses hawks and falcons a few times to conjure his vision of cosmic gyres. In “The Second Coming,” this is a core image. He knows that hawks and eagles moisten their eyes with a transparent nictitating membrane, though he, as most people, would not call it that. He is at least aware that they appear not to blink while they’re awake. As symbols for logic and reason, physiological rigidity does indeed lend them an air of intense dispassion, besides unnerving everyone in the room. Their nictitating membranes are also the foundation of the myth that hawks and eagles can stare unblinkingly into the sun, a myth that appears in “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation.”

Yeats also knows enough about falconry to know which hawks are used by the highest aristocracy in Europe for hunting. It is disappointing that he doesn’t cash in on some incredible puns in their names. Case in point, the gyrfalcon, named for exactly the spiral shape it symbolizes, is the most prized of hunting birds and is the species most likely to be used, say, by the highest aristocracy of Egypt. The falcon in the opening of “The Second Coming” is most likely a gyrfalcon, since a peregrine or a lanner would be too cheap for a prince hunting within sight of the sphinx.

“The Hawk” is a small poem right after “The Fisherman” on page 149 of the Finneran. “Let [the hawk] be hooded or caged / Till the yellow eye has grown mild,” Yeats says, apparently aware that hawks become more and more complacent as they age in a falconer’s care. He also seems aware that young accipiter, or woodland hawks, if indeed this is one, have yellow eyes when they are young. Though he doesn’t explicitly say it, the eye turns red as the hawk becomes fully mature. After this age, accipiter hawks really are quite mild. Some can even be handled without a glove. As Yeats implies in his poem, a pacified hawk has lost a lot of its fierce dignity.