The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume I: The Poems: Revised Second Edition

INTRODUCTION

W. B. Yeats, who was born in Dublin in 1865, drew energy from opposites, from what remained unsettled and restless.

In London, where, from early adolescence, he spent a good deal of time, he was Irish. In Ireland, on the other hand, he was a Protestant while most of the population was Catholic. He took what he needed from his ambiguous status, immersing himself in the systems of English poetry while offering his allegiance to an Ireland of the future, an Ireland that he would help imagine into being. His singularity as a writer, Seamus Heaney has written, depended upon this uniquely elaborate command of the strategies of English verse. Yeats saw that he could apply such strategies to Irish conditions and he could thrive on the tensions between the two cultures. In an essay, Literature and the Living Voice, he wrote: In Ireland today the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other in Irish imagination and intellect.

Yeats’s father, the painter John Butler Yeats, was both brilliant and indolent. A figure of great imaginative vitality, he was not concerned with the mere business of making a living. This meant that the four Yeats children were often sent to their mother’s family, merchants and shipowners in County Sligo. These sojourns helped foment Yeats’s interest in Irish mythology and folklore, and this in turn led to his interest in Irish cultural and political independence.

Yeats first met Lady Gregory, who became his closest friend and collaborator, in 1894. She was a widow, thirteen years his senior, in possession of a big house, Coole, in County Galway. Yeats looked, she noted at that first encounter, every inch a poet. For almost twenty years, until his marriage in 1917, Yeats spent summers at Coole. It was here that he and Lady Gregory drew up plans to found a national theater in Ireland, the Abbey Theatre. It was here also that Yeats composed many of his poems and plays. After his marriage, Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, whom he had met in London, restored Thoor Ballylee, a ruin close to Lady Gregory’s house.

Yeats’s tendency was to symbolize, mythologize. Thus, in a set of magisterial poems, he made Lady Gregory’s house into an emblem of abiding beauty, with a sense of order and decorum that rose above history or politics, just as he made Thoor Ballylee into a symbol of power and continuity.

In an essay, The Symbolism of Poetry, Yeats wrote, all sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.

Yeats lived his life consciously as a poet, making exorbitant raids on his own experiences—as a spurned lover, as a man who enjoyed public controversy, as a man living in a violent time in Ireland, as a father, as a restless man in old age, as someone concerned with the thin line between the conscious and the unconscious, and between the dead and the living.

Yeats relished the arguments he had with others but his poetry was nourished by the arguments he had with himself. Some of his poems are like replies to his own earlier poems or more distilled, shadowy versions of what had come before. While the original poem could be assured, filled with flourish and finish, with stanza and rhyming schemes that seemed clanging and complete, the shadow poems could be mysterious, tentative, oddly fragile or personal, like something that comes from the mind in reverie, or from a haunted shivering source.

Thus, we can see the connection and the opposition between The Fisherman and September 1913, between An Irish Airman Foresees His Death and In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, between Byzantium and Sailing to Byzantium, and between the late poem Cuchulain Comforted and the much earlier Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.

It is as though in his argument with himself Yeats had sometimes been too loud or declarative, too much like a man performing, and then in the shadow poem he was alone. Daylight was replaced by waning light, noise by silence, the speaking voice by the voice whispering. A poem written for many listeners was replaced by a poem composed for a single attentive presence.

Happiness, Yeats wrote, depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other self. As Roy Foster’s biography of the poet makes clear, Yeats came in many guises. Even on a given day, he could reinvent himself or change his mask several times. Since he had an abiding interest in the occult, he could spend his evenings in London at Theosophist meetings, having earlier in the day been in the company of Irish nationalists or fellow poets or women whom he admired.

In London, Yeats dreamed of the untamed Irish landscape. In Ireland, he dreamed of the mythological past and, in later years, of an idealized Byzantium. In some poems—The Tower, for example, or The Gyres—he sought to defy death or rise above the mere business of time and mortality. In other poems—Adam’s Curse, for example, or In Memory of Major Robert Gregory—he wrote with a numbed sadness about the ravages of time and the grimness of loss.

At the heart of Yeats’s enterprise as a poet was a powerful theatricality. Once more, however, his talent for creating drama was paradoxical. His work for the theater tended to be poetic, even, at times, static. His poems, on the other hand, were energized by conflict, by movement, by shifting light, by the power generated from action and unrest, as in the images invoked in Easter 1916 of birds that range / From cloud to tumbling cloud, / Minute by minute they change; / A shadow of cloud on the stream / Changes minute by minute.

Yeats liked dialogue, juxtaposition, dispute. Some of his poems—such as Leda and the Swan and The Second Coming—in their diction and rhythm, enact a kind of violence, relish the knotted disturbance that came with extreme force. Other poems, especially Yeats’s love poems to his early muse Maud Gonne—When You Are Old, for example, or Her Praise—are gentle and melancholy, almost poignant, wistful.

When a time of real violence began—the 1916 Rebellion in Dublin and the War of Independence and the Civil War in Ireland—Yeats responded in a tone of ambivalence in a poem like Easter 1916 or horror in a poem such as Meditations in Time of Civil War. In his elegy for W. B. Yeats, Auden wrote: Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. But there were times when Yeats’s poetry rose above the madness, finding a tone that was both wounded and wise, that dealt in precise images and then offered a culminating aphorism, as in the first two lines of the final stanza of The Stare’s Nest by My Window: We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

In old age, Yeats wondered if he, in his early work, had helped to create the soil in which the violence between the 1916 Rebellion and the Irish Civil War took root. In a late poem, Man and the Echo, he asked: Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot? The question may indeed have troubled him, but it was also part of a process of self-mythologization. Although the play was advertised with Yeats as the author, much of the dialogue was, in fact, written by Lady Gregory. (In a diary entry in 1925, she wrote that Yeats’s failure to credit her as co-author was rather hard on me.)

The play was called Cathleen ni Houlihan, which was one of the mythical names for Ireland. It told the story of a family preparing for a wedding being visited by an old woman, an emblem of Ireland, who is transformed into a young woman with the walk of a Queen. The woman was played by Maud Gonne, known not only for her beauty but for her fiery nationalist opinions. In April 1902, when Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin, one critic wrote: I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot.

Yeats could put his name to this nationalist play, close to propaganda, and also himself perform the part of the dreamy poet of the 1890s, some of whose poems—The Stolen Child, for example, or Down by the Salley Gardens or The Lake Isle of Innisfree—were close to ballads and were known by heart in the Ireland in which I grew up. Yeats was famous in houses like ours not for the grandeur and complexity of his late poems, but for his evocation of Irish mythology and the Irish landscape and his poems of lost and forlorn love.

Had Yeats died in 1895, with just two books of verse published, two plays and some essays written, he could have been the lost poet Ireland would have treasured.

Instead, he became a difficult if enriching presence, skilled at embracing and embodying opposing forces. His tone, at times, could be haughty, as though he himself were some kind of aristocrat. Toward the end of his life, in a poem called The Municipal Gallery Revisited, he wrote that he, Lady Gregory, and the playwright John Millington Synge thought / All that we did, all that we said or sang / Must come from contact with the soil. But it was never the soil of land reform or the soil in which potatoes grew. It was soil as symbol. And when he invoked the dream of the noble and the beggarman, Yeats made clear he had little time for the world in between.

He had other dreams, apparent in his late poems, that eschewed Irish questions or matters of the heart. He played the loftiest, most abstract terms against things that were real. He teased out questions about memory and mythology, about art and permanence, about the soul and the aging body, about occult vision against what is palpable and visible. While he insisted on the primacy of the imagination itself, on artifice, his poems glittered in the upper air and feasted also on the base things of the world. He was intent on exploring both the discernible world and a transcendent realm, his language molded and controlled so that its unconstrained energies were all the more forcefully released.

Colm Tóibín

PREFACE

to the Second Edition

This edition supersedes The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, first published in 1989. Some minor corrections and additions were made in reprintings of that edition, but the present text offers more substantial changes. Most of these derive from James Pethica’s study of the manuscripts of [Last Poems] for his forthcoming edition in the Cornell Yeats series. In particular, his discovery that a holograph version of the final stanza of part III of Three Songs to the One Burden almost surely postdates the final corrected typescript has resulted in several changes to the text. I have also accepted his arguments that the revisions to John Kinsella’s Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore for a projected new series of Broadsides were not intended for the text of the poem to be included in [Last Poems] and that certain typescripts of Cuchulain Comforted and The Black Tower are probably posthumous.

An attentive reader of the Cornell Yeats edition will notice several places where the archival material offers alternative readings to those provided here, such as the possibility that The soul’s perfection is from peace; should be added between lines 55–56 of Under Ben Bulben. As I argued in Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (1990) and my chapter in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. George Bornstein (1991), the notion of a final or definitive text of Yeats’s poems is fundamentally illusory. This is especially true for those works which were not published in his lifetime. Among the many problems one might

mention is the difficulty of distinguishing between the hands of Yeats and of his wife, as well as our further uncertainty about the date and authority of revisions in his wife’s hand. An electronic edition of the poetry in progress, edited by myself and several others, will be able to present both the alternative texts and the manuscript materials from which they derive.

I am of course indebted to James Pethica for numerous discussions about the textual problems in [Last Poems]; and to my collaborators on the electronic edition, particularly George Bornstein and William H. O’Donnell, for continued advice. I am also grateful to Scott Moyers of Scribner for his care in seeing this edition through the press.

R.J.F.

Mandeville, Louisiana

January 29, 1996

PREFACE

This edition is essentially a reconstruction of the expanded version of The Collected Poems (1933) which as of June 22, 1937, Yeats had planned to publish in about two years’ time. To the 1933 volume have been added the poems published in the section Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems in A Full Moon in March, 1935 (except Three Songs to the Same Tune, later revised as Three Marching Songs); the poems from New Poems, 1938; and the poems included on a manuscript table of contents for a volume of poetry and plays Yeats had projected during the last few weeks of his life (published posthumously as Last Poems and Two Plays, 1939). The notes from the Collected Poems and the music from New Poems have been included as appendices. The only comment from the Preface to A Full Moon in March relevant to the poetry is quoted in the editor’s Explanatory Notes. Last Poems and Two Plays did not offer any ancillary materials.

The texts in this volume are taken from the revised edition of The Poems (1989) in the Macmillan Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Volume I). The textual policy for both editions has been to present the final versions of the poems authorized by Yeats. The copy-texts therefore consist of printed editions (some with corrections by Yeats), manuscripts, typescripts, and corrected proofs. Emendation has been held to a minimum. For example, there has been virtually no attempt to regularize Yeats’s unorthodox punctuation, nor has the spelling of Gaelic names been corrected or made uniform unless Yeats himself established a standard spelling (as with Cuchulain or Oisin). Readers interested in these matters will find a list of the copy-texts and a tabular presentation of all emendations in The Poems, as well as a fuller discussion in the editor’s Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (1990).

The Explanatory Notes attempt to elucidate all direct allusions in the poems. Attention is directed to the headnote, which explains the principles of annotation.

*  *  *

Any project of this scope is of course the work not only of one individual but of various hands. I should first like to thank Anne Yeats and Michael B. Yeats, not only for authorizing me to undertake this project but also for giving me free access to their collections of Yeats’s books and manuscripts, without which its completion would have been quite impossible.

Of the many scholars who contributed to this edition, my greatest debt by far is to Brendan O Hehir, who not only provided me with much of the information on Irish materials in the Notes but also saved me from numerous errors. His combination of precise knowledge and generosity in sharing it is a rare virtue. I should also like to give special thanks to George Bornstein, whose advice on many matters I have valued, as I have his friendship. And I thank John Glusman and Robert Kimzey of Mac-millan, New York, for their support of this project and their patience, and John Woodside for his careful attention to the proofs.

I am also indebted to the following: the late Russell K. Alspach; Charles Bowen; Maureen Brown; Francis John Byrne; Edward Callan; Eamonn R. Cantwell; Andrew Carpenter; David R. Clark; Rosalind E. Clark; Peter Connolly; Kevin Danaher; Istvan Deak; Eilis Dillon; Clive E. Driver; Michael Durkan; the late Oliver Edwards; the late Richard Ellmann; Julia Emmons; Richard Fallis; T. M. Farmiloe; the late Ian Fletcher; Richard Garnett; the late James Gilvarry; Warwick Gould; Maurice Harmon; George Mills Harper; Carolyn Holdsworth; M. C. K. Hood; Walter Kelly Hood; Michael Horniman; K. P. S. Jochum; John Kelleher; John Kelly; Hugh Kenner; Dan H. Laurence; A. Walton Litz; Sean Lucy; the late F. S. L. Lyons; Phillip L. Marcus; Vivian Merrier; William M. Murphy; William H. O’Donnell; James Olney; Edward O’Shea; Mícheál O Súilleabháin; Thomas Parkinson; Edward B. Partridge; Richard F. Peterson; Elizabeth Poe; Donald Pizer; Raymond J. Porter; J. A. V. Rose; M. L. Rosenthal; Ann Saddlemyer; Charles Seaton; Ronald Schuchard; Paula Scott-James; David Seidman; Linda Shaughnessy; Colin Smythe; Gerald Snare; John Sparrow; Jon Stallworthy; Donald E. Stanford; Thomas R. Starnes; Julia Tame; Mary Helen Thuente; Donald T. Torchiana; and Karen Wilcox.

I am also indebted to the following institutions and libraries; The Berg Collection, New York Public Library; British Library; Houghton Library, Harvard University (Rodney G. Dennis); Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (Ellen S. Dunlap and Cathy Henderson); National Library of Ireland; Pierpont Morgan Library; Princeton University Library (Nancy N. Coffin and Richard Ludwig); Southern Illinois University Library (Kenneth W. Duckett); University College, Dublin, Library (Norma Jessop); William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; and the Yeats Archives, State University of New York at Stony Brook (Narayan Hegde, Lewis Lusardi, Peggy McMullen, and Arthur Sniffin).

For the financial support which enabled me to undertake my editing of Yeats’s poems, I am most grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Philosophical Society; the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; the Graduate Council on Research, Tulane University; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I would like to dedicate this edition to Richard and Catherine, my constant joy.

RJF.

Mandeville, Louisiana

September 21, 1988

LYRICAL

Crossways

1889

‘The stars are threshed, and the soub are threshed from their husks.’

WILLIAM BLAKE

TO

A.E.

Crossways

1   The Song of the Happy Shepherd

2   The Sad Shepherd

3   The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes

4   Anashuya and Vijaya

A little Indian temple in the Golden Age. Around it a garden; around that the forest. Anashuya, the young priestess, kneeling within the temple.

5   The Indian upon God

6   The Indian to his Love

7   The Falling of the Leaves

8   Ephemera

9   The Madness of King Goll

10   The Stolen Child

11   To an Isle in the Water

12   Down by the Salley Gardens