The Father’s Prayers: W.B. Yeats in 1919
By Ed Mulhall
On the 19 March 1919, Yeats arrived at the Abbey Theatre to see a unique performance of the play Cathleen Ní Houlihan. Playing the title role was his friend and co-author of the play, Lady Augusta Gregory. She arrived nervous and wet from the heavy rain that had poured all day. They had met earlier for lunch and Yeats had left to visit his wife George and newborn daughter in the nursing home in Fitzwilliam Street, as he had done every afternoon since her birth. The following day, Yeats, wife and baby were to move together to Dundrum, near his sisters Lolly and Lily, where they would stay before traveling west to their new home at Thoor Ballylee.
Lady Gregory had stepped into the role when the actress Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, who had played in the original production, was unable to return for the first performances from England. Rather than cancel, Lady Gregory, who had been rehearsing a production of George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, said she would play Cathleen. ‘After all what is wanted but a hag and a voice’, she wrote in her journal. She had first performed the play the previous night, hating the grease paint, ‘white, black under the eyes and red inside the lips’ but thankful that her own hair was grey enough not to need a wig. Despite feeling hoarse and miserable with a cold, she had got through with only one prompt from Arthur Shields who played Michael Gillane. She had two curtain calls from the packed pit and gallery. ‘Of course, all the patriotic bits were applauded’ she wrote, “especially ‘They are gathering to see me now’”.
In the tense Ireland of March 1919, the play had a new resonance, a new urgency. Earlier that week Lady Gregory had seen the crowds welcoming home her and Yeats’s friend Countess Markievicz. The Countess had been in prison for her role in the Easter Rising (for which she had originally been sentenced to death) and while there was elected as an MP for Sinn Féin in the 1918 election. Gregory was in mourning for her own son Robert, an airman for the British in the First World War, who had crashed and died a year earlier and in the memory of whom she had asked Yeats to write. In Ireland, raids and attacks on police had resumed. Agrarian aggression was also happening around Gregory’s land in Coole with her own tenants threatened by local activists.
It was billed as a play by W.B. Yeats, but Lady Gregory had written large parts of it. Most of the dialogue had been hers, while Yeats (who had been inspired with the idea in a dream) wrote the speeches and the songs. Even the famous last line ‘I saw a young girl, she had the walk of a queen’, was Gregory’s. But while Yeats acknowledged her help, the play was for decades attributed to him. Lady Gregory did sometimes resent this but graciously (or sardonically) remarked that she didn’t want to ‘take from (Yeats) any part of what had proved, after all, his one real popular success.’
The popularity of the play had been evident from the very first performance when Yeats’s muse Maud Gonne played the part of Cathleen. She infused it with a nationalist fervour that was at times both thrilling and troubling for the two authors. For Lady Gregory their intention was a more subtle one. The play was not just about those who went to follow the call of their country but also about those left behind.
Her performance on the 19 March was more assured. There was no need for prompts. More curtain calls were given and her friend Ruth Shine (sister of Hugh Lane) felt she had ‘never known so much put into Cathleen.’ Yeats’s verdict was a ‘cold’ one: he said ‘it was very nice but if I had rehearsed you, it would have been much better.’ The ambiguousness in his verdict and particularly the directness to an old friend reflected perhaps his own anxiety at what he was witnessing. Here was the play which would later elicit his tortured couplet: ‘Did that play of mine send out/ certain men the English shot?‘ The play was being performed at a time of great anxiety for him, politically and personally. He had just become a father. He was very anxious about developments nationally and internationally and how they would impact on the future of his family and his country. And as he watched his friend, now an older lady herself, playing the role which represented Ireland, in the audience watching was the actress who had first played Cathleen and turned it into such a potent vehicle - Maud Gonne. And beside her was her daughter, Iseult, who had so preoccupied Yeats’s thoughts a year and a half earlier as he chose to marry George. It was a time, a year, of great significance for the poet. These four women were so much part of his conscious and unconscious life, his poetry and his politics. But he had made choices and it was these choices that would be reflected in his work and in how he was to live in the years ahead. The day after that performance of Cathleen Ní Houlihan he brought George and Anne from the nursing home to their rented house in Dundrum. There he would work immediately on a new poem: A prayer - A prayer for his daughter.
George, baby and W.B. Yeats were no sooner settled in their rented home, Dundrum Lodge, than husband and wife resumed the automatic script sessions that had been so much part of their married life. It was not surprising that there was some urgency involved as the messages mediated through George had predicted a son and an explanation was required. The response as written out by George, who had now been upgraded to the role of ‘interpreter’, was that ‘one spirit cannot call another - only through special permission - I knew it was not Anne’s son - it could never be - I did not say so.’ The wish had been for the reincarnation of the lost son of Yeats’s ancestor Anne Butler, née Hyde, Duchess of Ormond. And this was to be a special birth, a fulfilment of the providence associated with their ‘Vision’ theories. The baby would be named Anne and George cast her horoscope concluding that she would be ‘good looking and lucky but not have any great talent.’
Yeats and then George had cast horoscopes exactly two years earlier to assess their possible marriage and it had been this shared interest in the spiritual that had brought them together. The automatic writing sessions had begun at a crucial time for their relationship, just after their marriage, at a time when Yeats was questioning his choice of George over Iseult in two direct and explicit poems. George later told Richard Ellmann that she had simulated automated writing in an attempt to lift her husband out of his gloom but then felt ‘her hand grasped and driven insanely on.’ Whatever the original intention, the writing sessions began a time of great intensity for the couple. Both were already susceptible to and versed in the possibilities of such activity and fed off each other’s intuitions. The result was an extensive collection of Vision Papers (3,600 pages accumulated in 450 sittings over two and a half years). Much of the activity involved detailed questioning by Yeats to which George mediated a response as he sought to fashion a theory and philosophy of history and existence which became his book A Vision. But as well as this a central preoccupation was the relationship of husband and wife, their sex life, the prospects for children and the attachments Yeats had with other women, in particular Iseult and Maud.
This intimate exchange contributed to a new awakening for the poet in his poetic work with some of his most renowned poems charged with the imagery inspired by this dialogue. The exchanges began to be framed in a very fundamental manner by a developing theory of cyclic history, with death and rebirth but also apocalypse and renewal. Into this inner world outside events intruded, bringing their own anxieties as Yeats, the public man (despite his own inclinations) found himself drawn into the events of the day at home and in the UK. He had directly avoided writing a war poem, when asked to contribute one on the First World War, yet found himself writing three poems for the dead airman Robert Gregory. The 1916 Rising had shocked him, with many men he had known personally executed. He wrote ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ and ‘The Rose Tree’ in response. But he was only reluctantly drawn into public political controversy. He had joined the campaign against conscription and supported calls for the release of some political prisoners, but he had not yet published any of the 1916 poems though he had read them at select gatherings and distributed them to friends. Indeed, when he had been disappointed at the reception of his new book of poetry The Wild Swans of Coole earlier that year, Lady Gregory had told him it was his own fault and that the work would have had much more impact had the 1916 poems been included.
For Yeats there had always been this tension between the inner and the public man. This time of heightened intensity with major public events intruding on his most personal relationships was just a further example of this. His relationship with Maud Gonne had always had this tension, particularly as she became an important public figure herself, and works like Cathleen Ní Houlihan fed on this tension. When her husband Major John MacBride was executed for his part in the Rising, it led Yeats again to propose marriage to her. Rejected, he turned his focus to Iseult, to whom he had been protective as a father might but now considered marriage, an idea which was swiftly rebuffed. These events he relayed faithfully in letters to Lady Gregory to whom he turned for advice on all things including now his desire to marry.
When Maud was imprisoned in Britain at the end of 1918, Yeats had written a poem about her fellow prisoner the Countess Markievicz as he was too angry to write one about Gonne. (‘On a Political Prisoner’, where he sees her mind ‘become a bitter, an abstract thing, her thought some popular enmity’).
But even with these close relationships Yeats had begun to make choices. When Gonne returned from prison, disguised as a beggar and hoping to stay in her St Stephen’s Green house, that he had rented, Yeats had refused her entry. He was afraid that George, who was pregnant and ill with flu and fever, would be disturbed by any effort by the police to arrest Maud. It caused a major dispute between them that had been the talk of the town. Yeats had been shocked at how ‘ghastly’ she looked: ‘Her lung is I believe affected & there is certainly great nervous trouble, and it was this last that caused the difficulty with me. She was in an unnatural state throughout, complicated no doubt by the fact that since Easter 1916 her convictions have been fixed ideas, always making her judgement unsound.’ In March 1919 they had only recently been reconciled, mainly through the efforts of Iseult whom George had befriended.
But the external event that most perturbed Yeats was not the trouble at home but his concerns about what would happen in the aftermath of the war and in particular the spread of Bolshevism from Russia. It was this fear that informed his most apocalyptic poem ‘The Second Coming’ written in January 1919. That poem is infused with the imagery from the ‘Vision Papers’, the ‘winding gyre’, the ‘falconer’, ‘Spiritus Mundi’. But it was very contemporary. The early drafts of the poem have the line ‘the Germans are now to Russia Come /Though every day some innocent has died, Recalling the mob to fawn upon the murderer. (or Recalls the mob to face with the murder)’ Some readings of the draft have this even more explicitly as ‘German’s Marx to Russia Com’ A deleted reference to Edmund Burke and the French Revolution as a parallel supports this context. He edited the contemporary references from the final version but not the impact:
‘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.’
At the time he was writing this poem in January 1919, Yeats had challenged Labour leader Thomas Johnson about his support for the revolution, asking whether he was seeking a ‘revolutionary alliance’ with Sinn Féin ‘if they seek these allies and endeavour to create a dictatorship of Labour, as in Russia, they will split this nation into two and destroy it.’ To emphasise his point, he said that ‘Russia in the name of progress and in the name of human freedom, revived tyranny and torture of the worst description – had in fact resorted to such a medieval crime as burning men for their opinions.’
So, when Yeats sat down in Dundrum to begin work on the poem for his daughter these anxieties were not far away.
To continue reading this article or to download it as a PDF, click here.
