 Llyr Your Excellency, rha bun I am from the College of Business Economics. I am stationed here for one year to assist the director in organising all kinds of events and of course replacing her if she is not available. The College of Law which delivered a deputy director last year, so last year's theme was related to the field of law and last year we had various events in relation to the field of law. We have two other colleges who will deliver a deputy director next year, the College of Arts and Social Sciences and in the last year of the current funding cycle of the centre, the College of Asia and the Pacific will deliver a deputy director and the theme then will be Asia and the Pacific. You can guess from that that the activities of the centre are very much multidisciplinary. We engage scholars and we engage the community in a range of different areas, a range of different academic areas as well. Multidisciplinary but also interdisciplinary, for example my interest is in business studies but I also take an interest in what we are going to learn about today, the poetry of Yates. A range of activities that we organise for example our next activity following this public lecture will be next Tuesday a public lecture on the European Union's policy to combat child labour in the world. During the last two weeks the centre hosted a very successful exhibition which you see around you here to honour the Irish poet William Butler Yates. It was organised together with the Embassy of the Republic of Ireland and we are very fortunate to have the support of the embassy for this exhibition and also for today's event. The exhibition coincides with, as you may know, the exhibition that is currently ongoing on the Irish in Australia located at the National Museum and people attending that exhibition at the National Museum have been wandering in to see the exhibition here on Yates over the last two weeks. So from our perspective it has been quite successful. Unfortunately the Yates exhibition will conclude this year, sorry definitely this year but this week because we need to free up the space to accommodate other events as I mentioned next week Tuesday we have a further event. Today we will have a lecture by Ronald McDonald standing here to my right. One of our well-known colleagues in the fields of Irish studies from the University of New South Wales. This event is also organised together with the Embassy of the Republic of Ireland so we are very grateful to the embassy for its support. Ronald McDonald is from the University of New South Wales where he is a professor in the School of English, Media and the Performing Arts. He has a wide range of research interests including of course various aspects of Irish studies, Irish literature, Irish society, Irish culture and politics and most likely a few more than that. Professor McDonald will speak to us for about 45 minutes and we are really keen to see whether after that 45 minutes you will have further questions about Yates or things Irish that Professor McDonald will be able to answer. Thank you. Thank you very much Pierre and thank you all very much for coming. It's a great pleasure to be here. You're about to see the most boring PowerPoint display ever put on. You can either make a choice between giving a handout which is black and white or you can have a multimedia PowerPoint. I've kind of combined the two and had a PowerPoint which is just text possibly to avoid upstaging the wonderful exhibition as if that were possible. But thank you very much and I'd like to thank the Irish Embassy and the ANU and particularly want to thank His Excellency Mortino Fannin for coming today. Actually we have two ambassadors here. We also have Ex Ambassador Richard O'Brien, Irish Ambassador Richard O'Brien here and Orla Tunney for the Council. So thanks to them for inviting me and for taking time to come to today's lecture. As Pierre said I'm going to talk for about 45 minutes. I'm going to talk a little bit in broad terms about Yates and some of the major themes of his work and his intellectual development. In particular how we constructed ideas of Ireland and how we often pitted ideas of Ireland, not necessarily the real Ireland, but ideas of Ireland against certain aspects of the modern world. Like many modernists, Yates often disdained modernity or aspects of modernity. Certain currency saw developing in the modern world which he rebuked and reviled. Many of his positions in disdaining the modern world we would find quite conservative today even politically repugnant. Certainly the later Yates in his flirtation with fascism. But Yates was an oligarch and I believed in aristocrats and he had many political views which we might dispute or find problematic these days. And one of the interesting questions about Yates as so many of the great modernists who also had such views is the relationship between that politics and this extraordinary poetry. I also want to, in looking at some of this intellectual background to Yates, I also want to do something which maybe will complement the contextual survey that you have, these wonderful banners, by looking at some of the individual poems. So I'm going to start maybe by talking quite broadly about Yates and his intellectual formation, putting them in the context as I say of certain divisions in modernity. And then I look at some of the, a few of the quite well known poems and try to finish so we can have some questions if there are any. I'm just going to start by looking at the abstract I gave for this lecture I quoted from this poem. It's a late poem. I'm not going to spend too much time on it. But it's one of the Yates died in 1939. So this is one of his last poems marked by the hot tour. This kind of quite exhilarating hot tour I find that haughtious of the later Yates. But I wanted to quote it because it puts in opposition what is explicit opposition, what's implicit in my title, namely Yates Ireland and the modern world, where he says, I mean to complicate a poem about statues and about how humans create God. But this is the final stanza, which I've quoted here. When pierce summoned Cwcullen to his side, what stalked to the post office? What intellect, what calculation number measurement replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect, but thrown upon this filthy modern tide, and by its formless spawning fury wrecked, climbed to our proper dark that we may trace the lineaments of a plummet measured face. The line I quoted in the abstract, which I want to focus on here, is we Irish, born into that ancient sect, but thrown upon this filthy modern tide. This is the Yates at the end of his career. But that opposition, that idea of Ireland as to some extent a salve to some of the depredations and debasements of the modern world is something that Yates embodied quite early. Now, that might seem, from one point of view, as if he sees Ireland as always pre-modern, or as in some way an exception to what's happening in the modern world. But it's more complicated than that, because finding alternatives to modernity, to the mob, to certain habits of mind which he saw as underrating the imagination and poetry, and idealism, and religion, and those things he liked, is itself part of modernity. It is extremely modern to be anti-modern. Many of the major writers of the early 20th century were. Eliot, T.S. Eliot looked back to 17th century France. Yates at various times looked back to ancient Ireland in his younger days, and as he got older to 18th century Protestant Anglo-Ireland as kind of an alternative to what he saw as what he describes here as the formless spawning fury. But the formless spawning fury is, I mean this is written in 1939 obviously, it's a year when the Second World War is going to start. Yates himself has lived through the early decade of the 20th century marked by war, revolution and violence, and experienced some of quite close quarters in Ireland. So he has that reaction. But nonetheless the spawning fury of the modern world isn't simply political movements and mob rule and democracy which he wasn't very fond of. It also, and this goes back to very, very early, and this is where I think his Irishness comes in, characterises what we might call a materialist frame of mind. By materialist I don't just mean, you know, an interest in objects and nice cars and Manoli blannock shoes. I mean not just acquisitiveness, I mean a scientific way of looking at the world, an empirical way of looking at the world which he associated in his own mind with England and at other stages with the Irish middle classes. So against a pragmatic, scientific way of looking at the world he sought to oppose a non-empirical imaginative idealist religious in the wider sense that term, not belonging to any conventional religion, occult quite often. We must remember Yates' huge interest from a very early age and enduring interest in various occult systems, all of which fed into his poetry. But it was, if you like, an anti-enlightenment idea of the world, if we think of the English Enlightenment philosophically as Locke, John Locke, David Hume. That sort of idea which led to the surge and the dominance of science which he saw as completely overwhelming the modern world with its arid realist aesthetic, very realist in terms of the sort of aesthetic. The sort of art he tended to prize but surface orientated and dislocating people from the great reservoirs of idealism and value which he saw as still within Ireland. So his nationalism, if you like, was part of a complicated reaction to an internationalism and to currents that he saw as all around Europe, as happening all around Europe. We Irish, by the way, is a phrase he gets from Bishop Barkley, the Irish philosopher, who countered Locke's empiricism with a motive idealism and is said to have used the phrase, We Irish do not hold with that against Locke's empiricism, the phrase that Yates in complicated ways often wanted to put. There is, though, that seeing the Irish as to some extent non-English or the opposite to England as having embodying a certain national character which was the opposite to England does itself have a long pedigree. Yates was very influenced by Matthew Arnold, the great 19th century intellectual and thinker poet who wrote, who categorized the Irish in a positive sense, but in his essay on the study of Celtic literature, saw the Celt as being a salve to the Saxon, being the opposite to the Saxon by bringing the softer virtues, the feminine virtues, as he saw it. So, while the Saxon was pragmatic, rational, hard-headed, scientific, the Celt was emotional, spiritual, poetic, and he had a whole list of characteristics. He said, Arnold famously said that the Celt revolts against the despotism of fact, and he meant that as a compliment, despotism of fact. So, there is a sort of a sense in which the 19th century saw, and before, if you want to go back, saw a certain movement which is sometimes called as Celticism, which saw the Irish and the English in kind of operating in complicated oppositional way. So, when Samuel Beckett, much later, was asked by a journalist if he was English, and he responded au contraire, he was, to some extent, picking up on that sort of tendency, that sort of construction of Ireland in England, in opposition. What Yates did with it was, he took Arnold's idea, for Arnold, the Saxon and the Celt were like the ideal Victorian marriage, but there was no question who was dominant. It was the male figure who was dominant and the female brought sweetness and light into the imperial home, which is why Arnold opposed home rule. For Yates took that and used it as a reason to vouchsave Irish independence and Irish nationalism, that exceptionalism. So, I think when we're looking at Yates' nationalism and his interest in Ireland and his Irish, we need to kind of factor in some of those, some of that history. Yet, yet, yet, as always, there is much more, because when we scratch beneath the surface, we find fascinating and revealing complexity and ambivalence in Yates' own intellectual disposition. It would be severely misleading to think that Yates' opposition to scientism, to empiricism, to materialism of England is the whole story, because there's a huge strain of interest in science and observation and proof. Yates is always looking after proof. He never believes, he believes everything, apart from what's in front of the body, what he can see. He's very, very credulous, but he's always looking for proof. Even when he joins in the 1890s, all these spiritualist societies, like the Order of the Golden Dawn, he's seeking for evidence, obsessed with evidence. He gets expelled in the 1890s from the esoteric section of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which is an occult society, for trying to come up with an experiment to revive the spirits of dead flowers. So, we get this kind of, rather what we would regard maybe now is a bit Southern Californian, interesting in the occult, in horoscopes, in seonses. What George Steiner described, the critic George Steiner described some years ago, is hairdresser stuff. All this kind of belief, but yet at the same time he kind of wants to bring it back to a scientific aspect. This creates fascinating tensions in his work. And there's one word, I think, which embodies Yates' work, which gets his poetry and his philosophy, it's conflict. It's always oppositional. There's always conflict. There are always poles in his positions. But I want to just have a very, very brief look at his own description, because we find in Yates, and in a number of other writers like John Maynton Singh, was an early infatuation with science. A lot of the Yates used to wander around collecting specimens, as many people of this class in the background would, collecting specimens, butterflies if he was particularly interested in, and rocks. Quite interested in naturalism and natural science. And he records in his autobiographies a kind of a deconversion experience, how he moves from this fascination with science away towards folklore, and eventually into mythology, and eventually into all types of aspects of spiritualism and the occult. Part of Yates' journey for Yates is his relationship with his father, which is hugely important. His father was an artist, if you've read that, it describes this, his father's art, but he was also very taken with Mill and Darwin, a 19th century scientific thinkers, progressive thinkers. Y Yates initially was very bound to these people, but later kind of went through this, and he describes it as kind of an edible conflict away from his father, who was scientific, not the way a number of other Victorian autobiographies describe the kind of, the story is usually a conflict with a religious father towards materialism or atheism or ethnicism. Yates had a conflict with his atheist father towards various modes of invented religion. Y Yates invented this tremendous concoction of religion and spirituality with a bit of Christianity, a bit of Eastern religion, a lot of occult, a lot of the Kabbalah thrown in, and used this as a source to write this extraordinary poetry. Rwy'n meddwl y cwethaf yw'r bwysig. Huxley a Tyndl, Tyndl Huxley a John Tyndl. Huxley was a populariser yw Darwin's Bulldog. Tyndl was an Irish scientist. Both of them Darwinists. I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, he says. Not quite true given his father. His mother was a little bit, but not quite true. And deprived by Huxley and Tyndl, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion. Almost an infallible church of poetic tradition. Of a fardle of stories and of personages and of emotions inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles around the chimney piece and in the hangings that kept out the draft. I mean, what's interesting, he wrote this in 1921, published in 1921 in the second volume of his memoir, but it's interesting the way he constructs his instinct to make a new religion. And that's really what he does all the way through his life. He invents extraordinary amalgamations of different religions, culminating in his very difficult book, A Vision, which he first published in 1925. We've revisited and reworked in 1937. But it's funny that he ascribes this to what is in effect a European crisis of faith? What he constructs was a crisis of faith. A world one. Darwin and the challenge that ideas are natural selection, ideas of science posed to conventional religion. I mean, it's an extraordinary paradox he talks about, deprived of this religion, but yet he detests it. So it has power, but it's also detested. And I think it complicates that opposition to science that we see in Yates all the way through. Elsewhere in his memoir, he describes himself going around with his net and his chisel, picking up samples. And he's a bit of an evangelist for non-religion. So just to want to quote here. He sounds a little bit like me. Hot for argument in refutation of Adam and Noah in seven days. I read Darwin and Wallace, Huxley and Hegel, all evolutionists of very sort, and would spend hours on a holiday plaguing a pious geologist who would not have done that job in Guinness's Brewery, came with a hammer to look for fossils in the Hoth cliffs. This is interesting contrast to the Yates we know now. Here he sounds, who's very anti-scientific and very anti-materialist. He sounds here like a sort of Richard Dawkins character who goes around trying to upset the faithful and the pious by showing the evidence from the fossil record and so on. And I think that in assessing the later Yates, we need to kind of bear in mind that this is where he came from. And it makes him a more modernist figure in assessing the sort of poetry he writes, rather than simply a reactive one. Later in the 1890s he moves into, as I said, folklore, Irish mythology, and the occult of various forms. That move is itself a cosmopolitan move. By cosmopolitan I mean it international. Yates' embrace of traditional Irish culture and folklore is part of a European movement, sometimes called primitivism, which happens all around Europe. So I think we need to understand Yates, yes as an Irish poet, but also as one responding to the crises and developments of the modern world. He's also very influenced by intellectual currents from Europe. He's also very influenced by aesthetic cultural poetic ones. Yates is the earliest one, which endures, is French symbolism. The poets of France from which that movement towards the concretion of the symbol and poets like Verlaine and Baudelaire, from which modernist poetic experiments sprang a generation later. One of the wonderful things about Yates and one of the really significant things about him and one of the reason why trying to talk about him is a challenge is because not just because he lived quite a long life, but because he did so much in it and he was at the forefront of so many movements. The forefront of the 1890s, Friends of Orozco Wild, a part of the Rhymors Club, moving on of the symbolist movement, Friends of Arthur Simmons, who brought the symbolist movement into English language. Part of the modernist movement. Most people, most great writers, even very, very substantial writers like William Wordsworth, write great work when they're young or maybe when they're a little bit older and then fade off. The extraordinary thing about Yates is he's one of those writers, a little bit like Grytham, who had many peaks, an extraordinary peak in the 1920s with the publication of the Tower and the Wining Stair. There's tremendous modernist volumes so he's part of all these different movements as well as being a theatre impresario, a senator, a lecturer, an essayist and a various public man, as he calls himself. So there's so many strands to Yates. But nonetheless, we must recognise a long career of various different peaks, as it were, but also a figure whose nationalism was nevertheless an internationalism, an international. Here's an example, another quote from an essay which indicates two things. The influence of a certain 1890s language which is wavering and dreamlike, very Walter Pater, very much part of the decadence, very much of its era, an influence of symbolism, but also the beginnings of this reaction against surfaces, against materialism and realism and naturalism that would embody many of as much of his career. So he says, Man has wooed and won the world and has fallen weary in the 1890s full of that, weary-less, that sort of sense of a culture overripe. That will not end until the last autumn when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said, These things that I touch and see are alone real, for he saw them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and moisture. So, what he's really saying is, here, he's talking about how investing reality in the evidence of the senses, the way the empiricists do, the way a certain scientific mode, the way a materialist does in England, is to disenchant them, to desacralise them, to turn them into air and dust and moisture. He's trying to get away from that sort of mentality to celebrate a deeper, more spiritual, more imaginative life. And, I mentioned Matthew Arnold before, Matthew Arnold taught that into the breach left by religion, culture would enter. And Yates is Arnoldian enough here to agree. He says, The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests. And to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things and not with things. So, the essences of things are not to be revealed on surfaces' appearances, which is why it's so necessary to renovate literature, to throw away the realist forms in fiction and, indeed, in poetry of the 19th century and find new modes to find emblems adequate to our predicament, as Heaney would have called it. I'm just going to have a quick look at one of an early poem before moving into some of the later Yates's poems, in particular his response to political crisis and changes in Irish society and, indeed, European society. The poem I want to look at is actually very well known. It's from the Winds Among the Read, his 1899 volume, which published and written, I suppose, around this time, is still very marked with that dreamy, seductive, sensuous, descriptive language of the 1890s and also with very, very intense symbols. This poem is one of the many poems at this stage, later in his career, to his muse, Maude Gaun, the woman who we met, his unrequited love and his sort of basement in front of her, but yet it is a poem about a sort of basement or an objection. But it also, I think, indicates many of the aesthetic and intellectual preoccupations which I've been talking about. It's probably been known to many of you. A poem which is itself a sort of a cloth insofar as it's written in one sentence and it kind of unfurls like a cloth, like a large cloth, it says. Had I, the heavens embroidered cloths in wrath with golden and silver light the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet, but I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet, tread softly, because you tread in my dreams. As I say, we have that opulence of the 1890s and intense sense of rich language with a very, very rich metaphor and a very unlikely metaphor such as a symbol effectively where the sky through a conceit through a conceit of the poetic mind becomes figured as a rich cloth and we have opposition between, therefore, opulence of language and a certain paucity of language which becomes very explicit in the final two lines and the final line where there's a kind of an arrest where the rich descriptive language becomes kind of arrested or pulled back where he says, but I've been poor of only my dreams and it's just one line. I think it's also significant the repetition of the word dreams at the end if he's making that word do more work or pulling back. So it's kind of, it's a poem which and I think it's proleptically modernist in this way anticipates a lot of modernist movement even though it's, in its date, it's a little bit before what we'd call high modernism enacts what it is expressing. In other words, its form reproduces what it's being said. Insofar as, the poem is like a big cloth, it unravels like a big cloth but it also pulls back at the end. It is a eight-lined poem doesn't quite pull back from being a sonor. If he did have more words he might have written the full 14 of a sonor, of a love sonor. But here he pulls back and therefore the poem is sort of indicating what it is expressing in its own form. So that's the eights of the 1890s. When he moves on as I mentioned, the multifaceted yates, the Yates of the Abbey Theatre, his collaborations with Lady Gregory and his involvement I suppose may be beginning, or most famously in his collection responsibilities with modern Irish life. Now I said at the time the Yates had a reacted against England but also the Irish middle classes which we associated with a mercantile and pinched impoverished values that he saw as antithetical to those reservoirs of idealism and community and organic connection with the wellsprings of truth which he saw as accessible still in West Ireland and rural Ireland and also through the remnants of aristocracy. So very anti-middle class. I know there are a few people in Ireland here so you will all know I'm going to give you a little brief quote from a very well-known and accessible poem which indicates that opposition to the middle class and it also indicates Yates' frustration with a certain torpor in Ireland. It's a poem which reads very ironically given what was about to happen. This is September 1913. Two stans is from it where he indicates this. Some of Yates' poems of the middle period are very angry. I think that's significant because one of the tones that you find in Yates which when it works is tremendously exhilarating is a first person, an I but also a sense of oratorical power such as we saw in the statues and such as we get in the great poems of the tower. But here he's being scornful when he says, what need you being come to sense but fumble in a greasy till and add the halfpence to the pence and prayer to shivering prayer until you have dried the marrow from the bone. For men were born to pray and save Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. It's with Olyry in the grave. Yet they were of a different kind the names that still your childish play they have gone about the whirl-like wind but little time had they to pray for whom the hangman's rope was spun and what God help us could they save Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. It's with Olyry in the grave. Olyry by the way is John Olyry an old fhenion who Yates knew in the 90s lived in France and we find here I think, I just wanted to indicate it because of Yates' the sense of disdain for a mercantile middle class who didn't have any what Yates saw as worthwhile values. Here there are also nationalist values, poetic values but nationalist ones which he would have aligned in which he calls Romantic Ireland. Romantic is a very interesting word in Yates. He describes in Cull Park he describes himself in the Irish Revivalist we were the last Romantics and he himself a huge part of his Europeanism is as influenced from by European Romantics and English Romantics particularly Blake and Shelley. Another one of his, Yates puts what he calls elsewhere the dream of the noble and the beggarman and he files an alignment between aristocratic values and folklore peasant values. So he finds a connection between the two. It's what John Millenton Sing who shared some of his very different figure but nonetheless in this respect could be compared talked about how the wild stallion and the thoroughbred are quite alike. Wildness and that which is bred to great achievements quite alike. So Yates loved annual Ireland the Irish the big house which he associated with high culture with a community which guaranteed cultural value these wonderful old houses with great paintings and not least because of his friendship with Lady Gregory where he went and spent summers for many years and wrote his collaborator Lady Gregory who he's spoken about in the exhibition here and he valorised aristocratic values and aristocratic beliefs and he does this and the politics of that are quite troubling for us sometimes. There are many poems I could look at but I'm going to look at another one of Yates's very famous poems which is an elegy for Lady Gregory's son Robert Gregory of whom Yates wrote a number of poems who died in the first world war he was an airman and he died in the first world war and Yates imagines him as a kind of a a kind of a Nietzschean ubermanch someone who was used above the normal run of the mill things he embodies a certain noble aristocratic value system which Yates is clearly very sympathetic towards and he writes this poem which is a poem which is an extraordinarily beautiful and accessible poem full of motifs of balance as he imagines this airman imagining his death it's called an Irish airman foreseas his death I'm sure many of you know it very well I'll just read it and maybe say a few words about it before moving on to another couple of poems I know that I shall meet my fate ok so the pagination has gone or the lines have gone a bit hay why here I'm afraid but nonetheless if you can imagine paragraph breaks where the big letters are or line breaks where the capitals are I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above those that I fight I do not hate those that I guard I do not love my country is Ciltarton cross my country men Ciltartons poor no likely end could bring them loss or leave them happier than before nor law nor duty bed me fight nor public men nor cheering crowds a lonely impulse of delight drove to this tumult in the clouds I balanced all brought all to mind the years to come seemed waste of breath a waste of breath the years behind in balance with this life this death a poem tremendously shot through with poise and balance in which lines we have effectively quatrains 16 line poem based upon quatrains of rhymes between love and above in love cross and last pour before alternating rhymes with loss and gain we have the years behind and the years to come and it culminates in that last quatrain I balanced all brought all to mind the years to come seemed waste of breath a waste of breath the years behind in balance with this life this death it's tremendously poetic effect poetically effecting but comes I think from a difficult politics it's difficult for us reading it because it comes from politics based upon an individual an aristocratic individual in this sense excelling transcending transcending the sort of ethic or the aesthetic of as I say a Nietzschean value system of someone who pulls themselves above there is this line my country is quatrains cross my country men quatrains pour quatrains by the way is the area around Cull Park where Lady Gregory Lady Gregory's house was and he's identifying with them sure enough but nonetheless he says no lore nor duty bet me fight nor public men nor cheering crides the impulse was if you like a self destructive impulse a lonely impulse of delight drove to this tumult in the clouds so it is if you like it actually I mean you talk about the politics it's also a sort of a poem celebrating suicide in actual fact he says the years I balanced all brought all to mind the years to come seemed waste of breath a waste of breath the years behind so there's we have this sort of strange and tremendously affecting combination of someone who is living more intensely than everybody else and their intense is intense living is becomes symbolized by the flight I know that I shall meet my fate it starts off but he's not yet ascended I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above then he's up there he's in the cloud a lowly impulse of delight drove to this tumult in the clouds but his consideration what we have here is a combination of someone who's living very very intensely and his intense living is leading to a sort of rejection of life so it's a poem which is very poetically effective but which is thematically politically troubling I don't think the two are separate I think this is a really interesting idea about all the modernist poets it's easy way to solve the problem of Yeats' politics simply to say oh the poetry is separate no I think quite often it's a little bit like cooking blowfish if it's not cooked to just the right way it's poisonous some of Yeats' poems are but out of that quite noxious politics you get an extraordinary effect of poems such as we get in later Yeats okay I think I started at about close to ten past did you say we have to finish at one or can I go a bit later please take another five minutes okay no that's fine because I started a little bit later I've got two more poems I want to look at one of them is quite long but it's very well known but I'll run through it quite quickly I think I wanted to look at it because of the mention of Pierce at the start and because of the mention of September 1913 when Yeats it's one of Yeats' really well known poems and again it's a it is a work which as what Yeats' tremendously you know is really great poems hinges between a concern with history politics a response to politics and myth something outside poetry something outside the everyday he doesn't simply retreat to his tower he wouldn't be a great poet if he did and abstract himself in symbols he's tremendously open to the forces of history and at the same time seeks a way of mythologising them and mediating this poem is a very well known poem the Partition of 1916 I'm going to look at but is a very ambivalent poem I think when I started it in school I remember doing it for the intershur as many of you probably did and I was seen as simply a tribute to the rebels it is a tribute to the rebels but it's an ambivalent response very ambivalent response and some of the lines which are taken from it will be familiar to you we talked about too long a sacrifice you can make a stone of the heart hearts with one purpose alone through summer and winter seem enchanted to a stone to trouble the living stream those lines often taken out as an indictment of fanaticism or at the same time the poem is used as a thing I think there's two strands in it but it is I think one of the great poems one of the great poems and one of the great poems in which a powerful imagination tries to consider and come to terms with an act which is a political a serious historical act but also a tragedy we find that this poem is a recognition of a growing tragedy I'll try to move through it relatively quickly I have met them at close of day coming with vivid faces from counter-desk among grey 18th century houses I have passed with a nod of the head or polite meaningless words or have lingered a while and said polite meaningless words and thought before I had done of a mocking tailor a jibe to please a companion around the fire at the club being certain that they and I would live to where mockly is worn all changed changed utterly a terrible beauty is born that woman's days were spent in ignorant goodwill her nights an argument until her voice grew shrill what voice more sweet than hers when young and beautiful she rode to Harriers this man had kept to school and rode our winged horse this other his helper and friend was coming into his force he might have won fame in the end so sensitive his nature seemed so daring and sweet his thoughts this other man I had dreamed a drunken and glorious lout he had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart yet I number him in the song he too has resigned his part in the casual comedy he too has been changed in his turn transformed utterly a terrible beauty is born hearts with one purpose alone through summer and winter seem enchanted to a stone to trouble the living stream the horse that comes from the road the rider the birds that range from cloud to tumbling cloud minute by minute they change a shadow of cloud on the stream changes minute by minute a horse who slides on the brim and a wharf plashes within it the long-legged moorhens dive and hens to Murcocks call minute by minute they live the stones in the midst of all too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart oh when may it suffice that is heaven's part our part to murmur name upon name as a mother names her child when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild what is it but nightfall no no not night but death was it needless death after all for England may keep faith for all that is done and said we know their dream enough to know they dreamed and are dead and what of excess of love bewildered them till they died I write it out in a verse McDonough and McBride and Connelly and Pierce now and in time to be wherever green is worn are changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born one of the ways this poem gets its shape is by moving from the vague to the particular from the first whatever green is worn at the end there that starts out as motley start at the at the very start we talked about being certain but they and I the last quatrain be certain that they and I would live where motley is worn motley is mixed colour that at the end becomes green and it's significant that that kind of idea of vagueness or mixed colour moves from them they are never named until the end so we get this notion of epitaph or tribute towards the end so he remembers it's quite colloquial he remembers meeting them going to his club many of them known to many of the insurgents are known because some of them are poets as he puts it in the next stanza it's four stanzas by the way it's not quite clear from this division because I had to break the second and the third stanza into two slides so he moves in the second stanza into moving a little bit more particular that woman which is Constance Markovits who he knew was a child and he energises elsewhere were spent in ignorant goodwill her knights of argument until her voice grew shrill this man had kept a school and rode our winged horse that's Patrick Pierce who were mentioned before kept a school famously Sandendas rode our winged horse is Pegasus who indicates poetry this other his helper and friend was coming into his force Thomas Macdonald he might have won fame in the end so we've moved from I've met them to having a name jet but more obvious descriptions but noticing the whole of the poem the alternating rhyme which creates a sense of momentum we've shorted parameter lines that woman's days were spent in ignorant goodwill her knights in argument until her voice grew shrill we've got this sense of momentum a sense of building up to something and how the poetic form and the choice of words indicates that sense of drive and momentum this is the second part of that second section this other man I had dreamed a drunken of a glorious lout well that's John McBride Maud Ghan's husband who was a for gates was abusive to Maud Ghan an result and Gates was not a fan but which is what he's referring to there yet I number him in my song he too and then he becomes explicit this move from comedy to tragedy the motley worn by the clown to the single colour he too has been changed in his turn transformed utterly a terrible beauty is born I have to say a terrible beauty is born a very striking line it's also I think we could say a terrible cliché is born because it has become one of the most cliché lines about our terrible beauty but that kind of I mentioned ambivalence and I mentioned conflict and I mentioned contrast and a terrible beauty is nonetheless incarnate stash Gates certainly a figure whose work embodies for all the the oratorical power of his verse poetry he says a significant quotation he said that rhetoric of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry so there is no distilling a single view from this from this poem I think we find both and that's incarnated in the terrible beauty but there is also a sense of awe recognition and humility that he has in the face of what's happened and a recognition of moment in this rising and he moves in that this is the third stanza note well at the third section note well at the end of the first two sections a terrible beauty is born first a terrible beauty is born second third section which is one very much dwelling in the natural world of change we don't get that refrain at the end we don't get a terrible beauty is born at the end of this partly because a terrible beauty is born indicates sort of a mythic realm whereas this is about the world of change and the world of change and movement and history which he sees fanaticism or rebellion as blocking but it's ambivalent I think in those lines I quoted often taken out to indict fanaticism the trouble is the living stream so on the one hand we can read that as a stone whose fixity the fixity and as if you like the petrification in the sense of something which is frozen and moveable contrasts with plenitude movement, dynamism fecundity, fertility, sexuality as opposed to something fixed and that's one way of reading it and that's the way I think it often is read when it's seen as simply an indictment of the rebels and political action there's also a sense that troubling the living stream but the stream without stones the stream of history is inactive, is unmovable so there's a sense I think in which the ambivalence that we're talking about is incarnated in this stanza Pegasus our winged horse in stanza has become the horse it's become an ordinary cart horse the horse that comes from the road the ride of the birds that range cloud to tumble and cloud minute by minute they change a horse who slides in the brim a horse plashes within it change this is not this is very much about nature aligned with the changing moving world there's sort of a sense of amnesia here because everything's changing minute by minute but it's change it goes to fixity the poem in some ways in its meter and its rhythm is about change in terms of build everything's changing quickly and it's driving us forward in the way we read it but it's also about permanence because it's aware of itself as a poem and of course we get repetition in rhyme we get repetition in the way it's rhymed and then we move to the the final section where again much quoted too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart and then we move to I think one of Yeats' most interesting poetic devices which he uses a lot which is questions Yeats often uses questions in his poetry and the temptation of a reader is to answer them but I think that in this case they're not really answered a when made suffice because heaven's part our part to murmur name upon name as a mother name for charge pulling back I mentioned the humility he felt he doesn't want to name it and he's tempted into poetic cliché he's tempted into the cliché here of calling death sleep which is a very venerable technique from the Renaissance oh what is it that night fell and he goes no no he's not going to sweeten it his duty here his very noble duty is to bear witness is to give recognition and elegy and he says no no what is not allowed for no no not night but death was it needless death after all for England making faith a reference to the home rule bill that's been passed that would come in after the first world war for all that is said we know they're dreamed enough to know they dreamed and are dead and then he moves in the final section between these intimate images the mother naming her child excess of love to public commemoration that's one wonderful thing about this poem is the way it combines these oppositions fixity and movement private and public tragedy and comedy and we move forward into action just naming just paying recognition in this extraordinary ambivalent poem I'm going to wrap it up there because I wanted to leave it for a few minutes thank you very much for your patience well let's see whether there are any questions please one please when did Yates die 39 39 so he lived until are you in the second world war yes he lived in the second world war that's why he fought he had a bit of a feud with Ezra Pound I think most people had a feud with Ezra Pound he did I mean Ezra Pound wrote a like a a sardonic tribute under a bear by a bowman's box noise opposed twice the size of William Shakespeare this is what he writes under a bear by a bowman's box noise and OIS opposed twice the size OIC of William Shakespeare or so they say down by Lee Killey's shocking way so he's kind of writing a sardonic tribute to him but yes but he worked very closely with Pound Pound is at the centre of European right enables everybody, enables a publication of Joyce when Elliot, effectively writes the way Islam and collaborates with Yates over many years they go to Stone Cottage I said just one word in defence of Yates because I said a few things criticising him of his politics there is nothing in Yates which is anti-Semitic unlike, yeah no there is a trace of anti-Semitic who was an anti-Semitic unlike Elliot and unlike I have to say more gone there was no anti-Semitism in Yates for whatever noxious aspects of politics there exists particularly in the 30s because Yates does get some quite shocking political views in the 30s so you're just kidding around when you write the what part of that is the echo show which part are you talking about? I thought it would be a similar thing who are we talking about Yates? no it's with Pound right it's always sponsored to the like audience oh yeah it is Pound is mocking and playing and yeah they had a long relationship it was important you can talk quite a lot about that Viglord's very persuasively I'm just thinking the rebels of 1916 almost seemed to embody one side of the Yates that Viglord's now the romantic and the anti-Semitic and it was astonishing how anti-Semitic those rebels were in their preparations and their sort of strategic stupidity they would say and I wonder that he was ambivalent about them and their the results that they brought or failed to bring in so on yeah I think that's right in terms of I think he was very struck and other elegies he's written like 16 dead men he talks about blood making the tree grow so instantly left history and entered myth because it became about sacrifice and became about failure in order to create other greatness so kind of and that was all tied in with Pierce's Christian imagery and the idea of Christ and the fact that it happened to Easter and all these things so Yates is it cleaves to it because yeah I mean you're talking about scientific but we could maybe use a different word pragmatic there's sort of a different sort of pragmatism Michael Collins scorned it he said he had an hour of a Greek tragedy and he meant that as an insult but there's a certain sense in which yes that kind of I mean it's a very troubling thing I think but a kind of ethic or myth of failure is something that which failure becomes success is something that he's drawn to yeah a lady over there I'm reminded of a beautiful event in the context where failure becomes success however I wanted to ask you a question it interested me when looking into Yates's life in this exhibition and hearing you talk how did this man who is anti-materialist and middle class know the kind of values how did he support himself as a poet all that time and bring up children well I mean it's a very good question and I think a fair one and I think we the one thing we don't look for in Yates is consistency you know I don't think he can claim it he I mean look famously Yates when news came round it was a delegation that went round to his house in 23 when he won the Nobel Prize someone from the mayor's office I think came round to the repressor round and he opened the door to the house when he was told and the first question was when he got the news how much right so I mean Yates was certainly and even he could see letters back when he marries Georgie Georgie Hadlees Georgie Hadlees he kind of everyone's writing back you know she's rich of course but I'm not trying to make him into some sort of a rapacious goldier I'm just saying that he was certainly there was a lot of indigents when he was growing up it must have been hard I mentioned his father earlier his father gave up a promising law career to become an artist and move the family to London so he would have had poverty when he was you know not poverty but certainly insecurities around that front but he had a lot of benefactors certainly as he won the Nobel Prize he was facious and a very successful poet Lady Gregory gave him a lot of support he went there and lived there so for every summer she took care of him and made him hot water bottles and hot milk and you know but he was able by the time remember he got married late so when you ask how he afforded the family he got married in his ffifties and was a hugely famous international poet a lecturer senator and he was able to afford a tower to her bali li in Galway which was also became a symbol of his poems or symbol of his poems should I say Any further questions? That's a very good question I wasn't a problem for him he didn't learn Irish he was very interesting I mean this is I think unlike Sing Sing learned Irish and spoke it very well and went to Aaron and conversed at Gates's advice so Gates would have his beliefs went to Aaron and conversed Gates didn't and he kind of but I think that his attitude to the Galic League would have been very complicated other people of his class and caste like Douglas Hyde obviously Protestant leads the Galic League and would have been part of his background Gates didn't I mean Gates had certain problems with language I think he was with language generally not just the Irish language but learning languages and he was an extraordinary genius a great poet but was probably dyslexic I think could never spell if you look at his letters it's quite extraordinary psychology with an S the story goes that he applied once applied at the best of his friends probably looking for security for a chair in Trinity College Dublin he didn't really go to art college he never had a third level education like many others did like Joyce did for instance albeit in another university and he didn't get the job in this chair because he put two Fs in professor so he had there is kind of loads of stories like that about his spelling so I think that I don't think he would have been a naturally gifted linguist I don't think he was ill-disposed to the Irish language at all but he came in for a lot of criticism from a certain sort of nationalist in the early years of the 20th century who would have been hostile to the Abbey and hostile to him and his enterprise because they would have seen it as a tendency condescension and not authentic nationalism so someone like Daniel Corkery would have criticised Daniel Warren for that D.P. Moran, E.H.'s great nemesis editor of the leader would have seen him as inauthentic but I think E.H.'s would have argued and did argue for the validity of an English language Irish literature let's take one more question it's really a footnote to a question that's already been asked I had the brother Graham a decade ago of the National Wandering Historian for the Centenary of Federation and Richard O'Brien helped to get me to Ireland for a sort of lecture to it and I lectured at the Gregory Kiltarton Kiltarton Gregory Museum in Galway the museum was clear and the seeds were put in and it was filled with farmers and I talked to the farmers about an Australian politician John Glyn who's a very interesting character for lots of reasons but I asked the assembled company about Lady Gregory's patronage of Yates and there was a high level of discontent with that question but somehow the poet lived by his poetry and not by royal patronage or aristocratic patronages at work so it was interesting to see at the local level of the town of Kiltarton and pretty close to Balunin this level of hostility about Yates' actual poetry they thought it was a sort of parasite no no no I think they thought that somehow poets lived by poetry and they lived on poetry and it was wonderful Yates would have been very aware of two things the Irish tradition of the sea being associated with Chieftain he would have been associated with that in those 18th century like much older traditions in the Irish tradition he also would have been associated because he wrote about it in his poems when he's complaining about the attitudes of patrons of the arts of the Di-Medici's and of the Fuller Ancient sponsorship so I don't think Yates would have had any problem with the idea that mere business people should give their money to something as great as a great poet a lot of generous women in his life I would like to call for seeing this to an end Professor Nagomwch will be here to answer any further questions in formal setting if you would like to do that I would like to thank the Embassy of Ireland again for their support for this event and I would like to thank you all for coming of course please, if you haven't done so already please sign the visitor's book which is at the entrance of the building and you can leave your business card if you would like to be informed about future events here at the Centre for European Studies there are also flyers about upcoming events including the event that I mentioned previously next Tuesday let's thank Professor MacDonald again for his support