Celtic Elements in Yeats's Early Poetry and Their Influence on Irish

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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Lenka Pokorná

Celtic Elements in Yeats’s Early Poetry and Their Influence on Irish National Identity

Master‘s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Michael Matthew Kaylor, Ph. D.

2012

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author‘s signature

I would like to thank my supervisor Michael Matthew Kaylor, PhD. for his patient guidance and helpful advice, as well as support and reassurance when I most needed it. I am also grateful to my classmates and friends Petra Králová, Ondřej Harušek and Viktor Dvořák for reading the thesis and for their valuable comments. Great thanks also to my boyfriend, for helping me with the formal structure of the thesis.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 5

2. Theoretical Part...... 7

2.1. Historical background ...... 7

2.2. Self-fashioning ...... 19

2.2.1. Epic integrity ...... 20

2.2.2. Artificial Self-Fashioning ...... …...... 19

2.3. Role of Art in Ireland ...... 30

3. Analytical Part...... 42

3.1. Otherworld...... 42

3.1.1. Otherworld as a physical place ...... 45

3.1.2. Otherworld as a realm beyond senses ...... 54

3.1.3. General motifs in the poetry on the Otherworld ...... 64

3.2. Otherwordly beings ...... 68

3.2.1. Classification and description of the otherworldly beings ...... 68

3.2.2. Themes of freedom, desire and uneasiness ...... 73

3.2.3. Motifs connected the Sidhe ...... 78

3.3. Transcendence ...... 84

3.3.1. Death ...... 84

3.3.2. Kidnappers ...... 88

3.3.3. Art and love ...... 91

3.3.4. Metaphor of transcendence of the nation ...... 94

4. Conclusion ...... 96

Works cited ...... 98

1. Introduction

William Butler Yeats certainly ranks among the greatest poets of the 20th century and is closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival, as a poet, dramatist, and to an extent, as a fiction writer. Being so famous a poet, there is no doubt that heaps of books have been written on him, viewing his work from many different angles. What this thesis attempts to do is to offer a little more insight into his early work, which is paid much less critical attention to, in comparison with his mature poems he was awarded a

Nobel Prize for.

The thesis aims to present a concise picture of young Yeats set against the broader cultural context of the late 19th century Ireland and to analyse his contribution into the process of self-fashioning of the Irish as a nation. It also explores this process itself – two different strategies are employed when creating a national identity: re- creation of the ancient epic integrity; and defining the nation in negative terms, as ―not-

English‖. These two strategies overlap in the use of mythology and folklore as a cornerstone of the self-fashioning process.

Yeats, too, leaned on mythology, ancient legends and folklore, in order to avail of them in his poetry as a vehicle to lead the nation towards a metaphorical transcendence. The main question posed by this thesis is: ―How does he achieve that?‖

To answer this question, the analytical part discusses the recurring Celtic elements in his work, in particular focuses on the themes and motifs connected to these elements. Yeats employs certain motifs repeatedly and the thesis will analyse these very motifs, in order to recognize in what ways Yeats uses them to influence the Irish national consciousness.

These motifs are, the thesis argues, tied to mythological and folkloric themes, as well as to topical themes related to life in the 19th century Ireland, which enables them to influence the readers on various levels.

The late 19th century was a transitory period in general – the turn of the 20th century was at hand, Modernism was gradually replacing the Victorian period.

However, the prospect of change was in Ireland even more immediate than elsewhere;

Ireland was hoping to transcend its own colonial limitations and, in the coming century, become a free nation. For this reason, the theme of transcendence is given special attention in the thesis, focusing on motifs such as the Otherworld, fairies and the depiction of transcendence itself, as rooted in folkore and mythology.

As the thesis is focused on Yeats‘s earlier work, various poems from the period between 1886 and 1900 are analysed;1 mostly taken from the first three collections of poems: Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), Rose (1893) and The Wind

Among the Reeds (1899)2. Furthermore, the thesis deals with two plays, taking into consideration the aesthetic beauty of their language and style, they can be analysed alongside the poetry as long dramatic poems. What is, finally, necessary to say is that this thesis leans heavily on primary sources, which makes the view of the period and the ongoing social and cultural processes coloured through Yeats‘s personal accounts.

However, historic accuracy is not the primary goal; rather the depiction of the mystical world Yeats created in his poetry.

1 Unless stated differently, all the poems are taken from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Wordsworth Editions Ltd.. Pagination is not stated in the parenthetical reference, only the line numbers. 2 In the Collected Poems, The Wanderings of Oisín is set separate in the end of the book and the first collection roughly corresponds to the now known The Crossways (The 1889 Poems were republished and renamed in 1895 with some minor changes and exclusions of various poems Yeats no longer found suitable for his purposes). 6

2. Theoretical Part

2.1. Historical background

When speaking about Irish history, many people tend to see it through works of literature rather than through detached historical analyses. This may be the result of the strivings of 19th century nationalist politicians who sought to create a counter-culture that would contrast with the existing Unionist elite, by producing mass romantic literature (The Oxford Companion to Irish History - OCH 320) which, according to

Yeats, spoke ―out of a people to a people‖ (Selected Criticism 256). Further, this literature was seen as the genuine history which has a ―privileged access to Irishness‖, while history, in the strict sense, was seen as an Anglo-Irish colonial imposture (OCH

320).

Alongside the Romantic Movement throughout Europe, in Ireland cultural nationalism was also being promoted, by a group of nationalist writers and politicians who were labelled ―the Young Irelanders‖ in 1844. Among their chief leaders were

Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy, all of whom remained influential figures throughout the rest of the century. They ―resolved that it is expedient to establish Reading-rooms in the Parishes of Ireland‖ (Davis 242); and, although the intellectual activities of these societies and clubs ―were often narrow and ill informed‖

(OCH 381), some of these Young Ireland Societies survived the suppression of the

Young Ireland Movement, as such, when they attempted an unsuccessful rebellion in

1848. By the end of the 19th century, they operated as ―centres of nationalist activity‖

(OCH 381) which preserved the legacy of the Young Irelanders, whose chief merit was in passing the romantic sense of Ireland to the following generations of nationalists

(OCH 603). Thomas Davis essentially laid the foundation-stone of the later Irish

Renaissance – ―he contrasted the philistinism and gradgrindery of England with the superior idealism and imagination of Ireland‖ (Kiberd 22). In an essay published in The

Nation, a newspaper issued by the Young Irelanders, Davis states that when ―a country is without national poetry‖, it ―proves its hopeless dullness or its utter provincialism‖

(Davis 223). He understood well that a cultural colony is prone to imitate the literature of the mother country; and in order to gain independence, it was essential to ―displace the constricting environment and its forms‖ (Kiberd 115) and to create a proper national literature different from that of the English. This national form of art was to be the romantic ballad, which Charles Gavan Duffy declared ―to be the supreme form of public art‖ (Dwan, ―Ancient Sect‖ 207). Such ballads were seen as the essential and perhaps basic constituent when defining the nation:

Ballads have been among the first home-grown productions of all

countries; and their popularity here, now, is no slight evidence that the

national mind is still fresh and earnest, and has the impulses and

propensities that belong to a young nation. (Duffy, ―Preface, 4th Edition‖)

The ballads Duffy is considering are not the popular folk ballads of country peasants, but what he calls ―our Anglo-Irish ballads‖ (―Introduction‖ to The Ballad Poetry of

Ireland 15), representing Irish canonical art as set against that of the English. They were susceptible ―of this distinct and intrinsic nationality‖ (―Introduction‖ The Ballad Poetry of Ireland 23) – nobody who is not an Irishman could have written them. By making

Anglo-Irish ballads the canonical Irish literature of the 19th century, the Anglo-Irish

Ascendancy was also avowing their own Irish identity. Though still hazy and vague, the

―nation‖ started define itself through literature and art.

However, perhaps the most notable poet of the period – and the greatest influence on the young Yeats – was Samuel Fergusson, who, despite being a Northern

Ireland Unionist, was attracted by Davis‘s cultural nationalism and turned the national literature‘s interest towards mythology. He translated a few Gaelic poems and wrote his own epic poems inspired by Irish legends in which he strove to ―present a case for a form of Irish self-government‖ (Oxford Companion to Irish Literature - OCL 186). His greatest effort was to spread the knowledge of Ancient Ireland in Victorian Ireland

(OCL 186) and, thus, to enhance the awareness of Irish national identity. According to

Robert Welch, this is a usual phenomenon in colonies and former colonies:

The search for the authentic Irishness and ancient tradition is a phase of

the post-colonial experience when the native or the native‘s spokesman

asserts the continuity of racial substrate of the colony in mystical terms.

(―Introduction‖ to Writings on Folklore 34)

With this though being dominant during the nationalist era, in 1853 The Ossianic

Society was founded by Standish Hayes O‘Grady, its main aim being to preserve and publish the manuscripts of ancient Ireland (OCL 458); for these scholars believed that, to build the identity of a nation, it is important to know the history of the people‘s ancestors and to ask the question, ―How did their personality affect the minds of their people and posterity?‖ (O‘Grady, Cuchulain 2).

The effort to create a link to the aforementioned ―racial substrate of the colony‖ was not seen only in literature and art. From the ashes of the Young Ireland Movement a new movement arose – the Fenians. They were a secret nationalist organization founded by James Stephens, which later became known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood

(IRB), and which functioned from the second half of the 19th century into the 20th (OCH

189, 272). By the very act of naming themselves the ―Fenians‖, they reinforced the nationalist message they were willing to fight for, asserting their identity as a continuation of the mythological past – for, in the Fionn Cycle of Irish mythology, the

―Fenians‖ were the members of the Fianna, a group of the toughest warriors in Ireland of their time, its protectors. It was a good choice, since the Fionn Cycle was the most popular and widely known of such works (MacCana 106), and, therefore, all the better to be employed in the process of modelling a national identity. Moreover, the typical motif of mythological heroes waiting in some reclusive place until the need to save the country arises (in this case, manifested by a well known legend about mythological heroes sleeping in a cave from whence ―they will emerge to save Ireland‖ in ―the last hour of doom‖ [Tynan qtd. in Williams 306]), enabled the members of the Fenian

Movement to assert their continuity to and even their identification with their mythological predecessors.

Among the most famous Fenians was John O‘Leary, who had a major influence on the Irish Renaissance of the 1880s. He was a romantic and heroic figure – a fighting

Fenian and revolutionary who had suffered hardships in an English prison, but was well read in poetry and letters at the same time (OCL 444). When, in 1885, he was allowed to return to Dublin, young emerging authors ―flocked about him to take fire from his lips‖

(Tynan 267). Katharine Tynan, one of the prominent figures of the early literary revival, described him as ―a dear, great, simple, heroic old man‖ who ―was something of a literary critic to us‖ (Tynan 267). O‘Leary, in a way, initiated Yeats into nationalism and was responsible for his development as a national poet; by giving him Young Ireland poetry to read, by influencing his ideas on nation and literature, by urging him to join the Young Ireland Society and introducing him into the Irish Republican Brotherhood

(Foster 43, Jeffares 100), and, most importantly, by serving as an ―example of a man without hope of success whose service was none the less devoted to a romantic, idealised conception of nationalism‖ (Jeffars, Man and Poet 30). Yeats himself acknowledges this in his Reveries over Childhood and Youth:

From these debates, from O‘Leary‘s conversation, and from the Irish

books he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hand to since.

(Autobiographies 125)

O‘Leary became the centre of nationalist cultural life in Dublin in the late 1880s, where meetings were held on a weekly basis in clubs and societies, such as the Young Ireland

Society (a continuation of the Young Ireland Societies of the 1840s), whose ethos was, under O‘Leary as its president, ―distinctly armchair Fenian‖ (Foster 42); and the

Contemporary Club, a place where ―Unionist and Nationalist could interrupt one another and interrupt one another without the formal and traditional restraint of public speech‖ (Yeats, Autobiographies 115). At these meetings, ―the social, political and literary questions of the day‖ were discussed (Yeats qtd. in Foster 41), with young men and their older mentors mostly constituting the core of these societies (OCH 380). Apart from O‘Leary, the other famous attendees of these meetings included Douglas Hyde, the future founder of the Gaelic League, whose ―Irish songs were made as independently as though no Anglo-Irish writer had come before him: as though none should come after him‖ (Tynan 267); Katharine Tynan, a young poet and Yeats‘s close friend, whose

―impassioned and instinctive Catholicism was a permanent part of Irish literature‖

(Yeats qtd. in Foster 55)3; George Russell, writing under the penname Æ, who was, in

Tynan‘s words, ―the dreamer of dreams [and] seer of visions‖ (267); Michael Davit, a former Fenian; as well as T. W. Rolleston, J. F. Taylor, and the Yeatses, both father and son. Especially in the Young Ireland Societies, apart from discussing political opinions, many young, unknown poets – ―men whose names,‖ Yeats‘s admits, ―you have not heard‖ (Ideas of Good and Evil 1) – continued in the tradition of looking for their national identity through a literature which would be autonomous:

3 However, by the 1890s they drifted apart, and Yeats considered her poetry ―uninteresting‖. The positive opinion he had had of her in the 1880s had changed. 11

If somebody could make a style which would not be an English style and

yet would be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire

from him, and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in

Ireland. (Ideas of Good and Evil 2)

The goal was not only to create national ballad poetry, but also to nurture a national identity which would unify all the people of Ireland, ―catching fire‖ one from another.

In this spirit, ―Unity of Culture‖ would become the binding force to achieve the unity of the nation – in the words of Thomas Carlyle, they would become men ―animated by one great Idea‖ (Whitaker 326). The kind of outlook coloured the nationalism of the late

1880s and 1890s with a tint of mysticism, as well as interconnected the two (especially for Yeats and Æ), which further promoted concerns for acquiring and crafting Celtic material.

Yeats might have adopted some of these ideas from Standish O‘Grady, who became known as the ―Father of the Literary Revival in Ireland‖ (Boyd 18). Described by Lady Gregory as a ―Fenian Unionist‖ (Boyd 17), he was attracted to Irish legends, which, being part of the people‘s history, could serve to unite the Irish. His attitude to these legends was, however, not that of a sober scholarly academic, but rather that of a novelist. He attempted to popularize these legends, and ―adopted a style at once high flown and graphic to convey the grandeur, as he saw it, of the [mythological] cycle‖

(OCL 434). Most famously, he wrote the two-volume History of Ireland: Heroic Period

(1878) and History if Ireland: Chuchulain and his Contemporaries (1880). Through these books, he ―filled a fruitful generation of young writers with the proud consciousness of nationality divorced from mere politics‖ and directed them back to the roots of ―national thought‖ (Boyd 18). His ―multifarious knowledge of Gaelic legend and Gaelic history and a most Celtic temperament have put him in communion with the

12 moods that have [always] been over Irish purposes‖ (Yeats qtd. in Hirsh, ―Irish Peasant‖

1121). In the same way that, in Davis‘s era of the 1860s, national ballads were seen as a touchstone of nationalism, in the late 1880s and 1890s mythology and supernatural

Celticism became the basis of national thought, and the focus was moved more towards writing that could be dubbed ―mystical.‖

While societies and clubs flourished on the cultural scene, the political scene was dominated by the Land War and the Home Rule Movement. Home Rule was the aim of constitutional nationalists, and it entailed having the same ruler, executive and council for state affaires, while home affaires would by solved by each country‘s own parliaments. The leader of the Irish parliamentary party since 1880, Charles Stewart

Parnell, who was often seen as ―the solitary and proud‖ leader (Yeats, Autobiographies

241), led the movement with extreme success and, by 1885, ―Fenianism seemed the heroic past and the Parnellite constitutionalism the hopeful future‖ (Foster 41).

However, his plans for Ireland, despite seeming promising, were thwarted in 1889 by the public revelation of his lengthy affair with Cathy O‘Shea, a married woman. His reputation suffered greatly: Gladstone refused to proceed in his dealings with ―an adulterer‖; and, consequently, Parnell lost the by-elections, being ―denounced as a public sinner unfit for leadership‖ by the Roman Catholic Church (Kiberd 23). Catholic

Ireland, in particular, campaigned against Parnellism, which was labelled ―simple love for adultery‖ (Kee 202). As a result, his party split. Even though the reality was less black and white, traditionally he was assessed as a man with a ―brilliant career brought to a tragic end‖ (OCH 431). This is also what Yeats and his circle thought about Parnell;

O‘Leary, Tynan and Yeats firmly adhered to the Parnellite camp, claiming that Parnell

―has driven up into dust and vacuum no end of insincerities‖ (Yeats qtd. in Foster 113).

Yeats himself saw Parnell as a martyr, perhaps even an incarnation of the proud, stern

13 heroism of old. Yet after the failure of Parnell‘s politics and his death in 1891, with the political hopes for achieving Home Rule being shattered, it was the cultural movement which took up the mantle of upholding and developing nationalism. Yeats expressed this stance in the end of his Four Years:

―It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment had come

for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the imagination of young

men would turn from politics.‖ (91)

That fact that many of the Irish intellectuals who had taken Parnell‘s side had grown disillusioned by contemporary political events provided fertile ground for a ―mission to create a national literature from 1891‖ (Foster 115). This is, however, not exactly true; national literary societies as well as the broader ―Cultural Revolution‖ cannot be considered as only the result of political activism being squelched – these societies abounded already in the 1880s, and were originally intended to support Parnellite constitutionalism (Foster 43). Still, it is a common claim, whether myth or not, that

Parnell‘s fall enhanced the Literary Revival. Later in his life, Yeats liked to present it this way, which can be seen in his Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1923:

The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which

prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in

1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from

parliamentary politics; an event was conceived and the race began, as I

think, to be troubled by that event‘s long gestation. (Selected Criticism

195)

Thus, the Literary Revival per se – seen as an Anglo-Irish effort to revive Irish literature written in England through the use of ―Gaelic material‖ – began in the 1890s with the fall of Parnell, though this revival was firmly rooted in the literary societies of the 1880s

14 and its precursors, reaching back to Standish O‘Grady and even to Samuel Fergusson. It was soon dominated by names such as Yeats, Augusta Gregory, Synge and Hyde (OCH

319)

Yeats was definitely the moving force of the Revival; in the words of George

Moore, ―All the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and return to Yeats‖ (qtd. in Reid

150). However, in the 1890s his prospects did not seem particularly promising. The

Revival was not a homogenous movement; there was ―no consensus on how identity was to be defined or preserved‖ (OCH 319); and, for a young author, it was extremely difficult to win recognition as the future national poet whose art was meant to unite the country. In his Autobiographies, Yeats bitterly remembers the Dublin ―after Parnell‖:

… picking and dropping men merely because it likes, or dislikes, their

manners, and their looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and

all is hatred and bitterness: when biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or

iron tackle, a mill of argument grinding all things down to mediocrity.

(285)

Yeats had a particular reason for this bitterness, for he strove to establish a national literature canon, based on an Irish style that would make Ireland ―beautiful in memory‖

(Autobiographies 126), that would be non-English and yet not provincial and restricted.

However, in an environment too influenced by the ―Young Ireland images and metaphors‖ (Autobiographies 251) – which Yeats criticized as not being good poetry

(Selected Criticism 256) – he was doomed to failure, and was ―accused of being under

English influence‖ (Jeffars, Man and Poet 77). He was forced from the national literary scene by older and more distinguished authors such as Charles Gavan Duffy, who returned in the 1890s from Australia and, as the incarnation of the famous Young

Ireland Movement, gained control over the literary circles in Dublin. Duffy was taking,

15 however, a backward step – what he wanted, according to Yeats, was to ―complete the

Young Ireland Movement‖ (Autobiographies 279), republishing and publishing unpublished works by the generations of the 1840s and 1850s (Autobiographies 281).

Some of this nationalist literary activity, as represented by the younger and fresher generation, moved to London, where Yeats lived from 1887 to 1891, the year he founded the London Irish Literary Society, ―which soon included every London Irish author and journalist‖ (Yeats, Four Years 92). However, the precursor of this society was likely the already well-established Rhymer‘s Club in London, one of whose members and co-founders was Yeats himself. The club had a Celtic flavour and orientation (Foster 107), with a predominance of Irish membership, including the likes of Yeats, Rolleston, Todhunter, Wilde and Lionel Johnson (Welch, Companion 274).

Johnson, who was neither born nor raised in Ireland, but who was the son of an Irish officer, felt drawn to the Revival, and is often seen as one of the Revivalists writing poetry for the Irish cause (OCL 274).

Subsequently, Yeats returned to Dublin, where he founded the National Literary

Society and placed O‘Leary in its presidential chair. He was full of ambition: he was busily planning a series of public lectures about national literature to be delivered by his lifelong love, Maud Gonne (Jeffares 75), who could ―draw great crowds out of the slums by her beauty and sincerity‖ (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 5); he launched a project for editing a series of books to be called ―The Library of Ireland‖ (Foster 117).

However, while bringing these plans to realization, he found opponents not only in

Gavan Duffy, J.F. Taylor and the older generation – who must have seen him as a young man too rude to follow tradition (Yeats, Autobiographies 279) – but also in his contemporaries, who turned against him because, according to O‘Leary, they ―were jealous‖ (Autobiographies 282).

Clubs and societies associated with the National Literary Society and professing cultural nationalism flourished in this period, and, in 1892, Yeats established the Irish

National Dramatic Society (Jeffares 119). Although founded earlier, the Gaelic Athletic

Association took an openly revolutionary stance in the 1890s (OCH 212); and, more importantly, the Gaelic League was founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde, ―the greatest folklorist that ever lived‖, and one who ―was to create a great popular movement‖

(Yeats, Autobiographies 270). Although the League was not meant as a political movement, Patrick Pearse, looking back, called it ―the most revolutionary influence that has ever come to Ireland‖ (qtd. in Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1122). This demonstrates the importance of the cultural nationalism of the 1890s in defining what it meant to be Irish and in establishing national identity.

The creed of the era was ―deanglicization‖ – whether through language or through cultural deanglicization in general. Disputes arose between the Irish Ireland branch, who thought it important to build national identity on the basis of language, and the nationalists, who were mainly from protestant backgrounds and were opposed to this idea, understanding deanglicization rather on the level of confronting English utilitarianism with the Irish nobleness they believed still resided in folklore, mythology and some kind of Celtic abstract transcendence to higher values (Kiberd 136-54).

Peasants were defined by the Revivalists as ―the essence of an ancient, dignified Irish culture‖, and their ―supernatural folklore and imaginative wealth‖ were ―posed against the modern industrial and commercial British spirit‖ (Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1120). In such a context, folklore gained even greater importance than before in the creation of

Irish identity. In 1890, Douglas Hyde wrote Beside the Fire, the ―first really scientific treatment of Irish folklore‖ (Bramsbäck 12), and Yeats compiled and edited two books of Irish folk tales: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy

Tales (1892). His Celtic Twilight, ―a big book about the commonwealth of faery‖ (The

Celtic Twilight 3), appeared in 1893; it was this book that gave the Revival its popular nickname, ―The Celtic Twilight‖ (OCH 319). Yeats also befriended Lady Augusta

Gregory, a protestant aristocratic folklorist and a ―fairy godmother‖ (Russell,

Imaginations and Reveries 28) of the Revival, who, at the turn of the 20th century, translated and wrote a complete encapsulation of Irish Mythology, published as Gods and Fighting Men and Cúchalain Muirtheme. Further, she and Yeats co-founded the

Irish National Theatre, one of the main executive forces of the Revival.

2.2. Self-fashioning

Having outlined the historical and cultural development of the second half of the

19th century in Ireland, the ideas that ruled the era should be analysed in greater detail.

The term ―self-fashioning‖ is often used in connection with the English Renaissance, which brought an ―increasing self-consciousness about the fashioning of the human identity as a manipulable, artful process‖ (Greenblat 2). Ireland, however, having been bereft of its national identity in the 16th century through Elizabethan colonization, came to this point of self-fashioning much later, and the process of conscious defining of an identity did not begin until the 19th century; the parallels to the English Renaissance caused the Revival to be called, sometimes, ―the Irish Renaissance‖. Due to the fall of the Gaelic order (and the subsequent shattering of the original native culture) and the

―centuries of enforced provincialism‖ by the New English settlers (Kiberd 3), Ireland‘s natural development as a nation was suspended; and, compared to England, it was at a different stage (Yeats, ―Nationalism and Literature‖ 85) – a young nation whose identity was yet to be formed via cultural nationalism. According to Prof. Hirsch, Irish writers can be distinguished from English writers on the grounds of ―a complex national identity‖ (―Irish Peasant‖ 1121). The English, who were the conquerors – hence, had power in their hands – did not feel the need to assert their national identity in literature, whereas the Irish needed to assert some kind of national unity to get rid of the constituent element of their identity defined as ―the colonized‖—and, therefore, ―the powerless.‖

The quest of Yeats‘s generation was to renovate Irish consciousness and to

―make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish‖ (Kiberd 3). It is, of course, impossible to generalize regarding so complex a process as the building of a nation‘s identity; but, if simplified for the present purposes, it can be said that there were two main strategies

19 which merged the natural and the artificial: supporting the notion of a kind of inherent nationality rooted in the people themselves (which is unconscious); and dwelling on the idea of defining ―Irish‖ as ―not-English.‖ From both of these conceptions sprang an interest in Celticism, mythology and folklore.

2.2.1. Epic integrity

One of the two above-mentioned underlying concepts of this process was the idea presented by Yeats in his lecture ―Nationality and Literature‖, published in 1893. In this lecture, he claims that all nations and their literatures are ageing and growing from epic to lyrical, like a tree which ―grows from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity‖ (―Nationality and Literature‖ 86). A young nation that has yet to be fully formed and achieve national and cultural unity is still in the stage of an epic society, and this is reflected in its literature, which ties the nation together. This literature has a mutually affecting relationship with society:

Society presents itself through the epic, while the epic installs and

maintains that social structure. Epic art is therefore internal to the social

practice it describes. (Dwan 2004, 203)

Therefore, a society mirrors and is mirrored by the epic literature it produces. The authors, by maintaining the epic canon, were supporting the epic social structure, which led to an unconscious unity which was presumably felt by the people; an epic society is characterized by the citizen‘s ―identification with his own social basis‖ of the national unit he pertains to. This identification ―was immediate, and was not a function of reflective deliberation or individual choice or preference‖ (Dwan 2004, 208). This idea of unity in an epic society corresponds to Michael Foucault‘s theory about the character of a pre-classical episteme, which could be found in England before its Renaissance

(this could also be applicable to pre-Revival, epic Ireland). Since the pre-classical episteme (as opposed to the classical one which is based on difference) is based on similarity – it draws things together, seeks for any kind of kinship or a ―shared nature‖ of things (Cairns, Richards 2).

Yeats argued that ―alone, perhaps, among the nations of Europe we [Irish] are in our ballad or epic age‖ (Yeats, ―Nationality and Literature‖ 91): hence, the belief that

Ireland possesses an inherent unity which can be re-established through looking back to the epic legends of the past – Yeats‘s idea in the early 1890s was that ―it was by looking to the past that the poet served the present‖ because this way he reaches ―the more fundamental level‖ of the Irish people‘s spirituality (Cairns, Richards 68-69). Yeats, as well as O‘Grady, believed that Ireland‘s history is a downfall from heroic unity to modern fragmentation (Whitaker 326). Therefore, to retrieve that unity, one must look into the heroic past, where epic art can be found; this epic art will foster an epic society held together by the aforementioned epic unity. Moreover, legends were ideal for this purpose, not only because they determine the unified society, but also because they represent it, Yeats claims:

[They are] made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow

process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates,

its likes and its dislikes. (qtd. in Dwan, "Ancient Sect‖ 204)

The basic idea behind this, though, was that poetry transcends subjective human individuality and that poets are just representatives of a far greater force than themselves. Yeats saw poetry as the ―product of an anonymous tradition that operates behind the backs of poets‖ (Dwan, ―Ancient Sect‖ 205), and claimed that a people is bound together by the ―imaginative possessions‖ which it owns and by ―stories and poems which have grown out of its own life‖ (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 337).

The Young Irelanders adhered to this very principle when they wrote national ballads, though perhaps in a much less metaphysical way than Yeats and his generation did. John Todhunter‘s invocation portrays how poets of the 1880s and 1890s reached out in an attempt to grasp inspiration from the supernatural and the ancient:

O wind, O mighty, melancholy wind,

Blow, through me, blow,

Thou blowest forgotten things into my mind

From long ago. (―Mighty Melancholy Wind,‖ ll. 5-8, in Lyra Celtica

173)

In Celtic lore, wind had supernatural associations,4 so Todhunter is linking himself to the unearthly powers that will help him transcend into the world of ancient art. Ancient art, as opposed to modern, is here treated as a unifying force not only because of its epic integral unity, but also because it speaks to people‘s deeper, unconscious identity.

According to Yeats, in modern times this effect can be gained through holding to national motifs, whether folk or mythological:

If Shelley had nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some

Welsh or Scottish rock, their [his and Morris‘s] art had entered more

intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought, and had

given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of

ancient poetry. (Autobiographies 185)

Ancient poetry and poetry sticking to folklore and myths therefore enters ―more intimately‖ and ―more microscopically‖ into readers‘ thoughts, thus affecting the mentioned unconscious identity. Therefore, Yeats‘s chief concern was to ―nail‖ his poetry to some Irish ―rock‖; in his essay ―Ireland and the Arts,‖ he acknowledges that he

4 It is closely associated with the Sidhe (Yeats, ―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 79), supernatural mythological beings who will be dealt with in the subsequent chapters of the present thesis. 22

―could not now write of any other country but Ireland‖ (Ideas of Good and Evil 329).

His writings about Ireland, however, differ from the poems written by his predecessors and most of his contemporaries – poems such as Davis‘s ―A Nation Once Again‖ or

Lionel Johnson‘s ―Ways of War‖; though strikingly different from Yeats‘s poetry, these poems by Davis and Johnson, too, emerge from the same idea of ancient unity:

A dream! a dream! an ancient dream!

Yet, ere peace come to Innisfail,

Some weapons on some field must gleam,

Some burning fire of the Gael. (―Ways of War‖ 13–16)

However, while others‘ poetry usually strove to affect the readers on the more superficial level of boosting their national pride and inspiring them to embrace nationalism, Yeats‘s poetry was instead ―preoccupied with Ireland‖ (Yeats, Poetry and

Ireland 3), because he wanted his poems to penetrate deeper into the people‘s minds on the metaphysical level; and, by touching something unconscious and mystical in them, he was trying to form their conception of themselves as Irish and to revive in them the feeling of unity.

This indirect appeal can also be found in the works of Ferguson, with Duffy describing his poems as not ―suggestive or didactic, but fired with a living and local interest. They appeal to the imagination and passions, not to the intellects‖ (Duffy,

―Introduction‖ to The Ballad Poetry of Ireland 32). What Yeats admired in Ferguson‘s poetry was a kind of ―savage, primitive truth,‖ a truth which was also, in his opinion, one of the greatest values of Irish literature. Ferguson‘s work based on mythology had the essence of ―barbarous truth‖; and it was for this that Ferguson was labelled by Yeats

―the greatest Irish poet‖ (Yeats qtd. in Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1121). The importance of truth and beauty for the Irish national cause was stressed even further in a 1903 essay,

23 published in the magazine Samhain, in which Yeats proclaimed them to be the autonomous constituent of national literature:

Beauty and truth are always justified of themselves, and that their

creation is a greater service to our country than writing that compromises

either in the seeming service of a cause. (qtd. in Marcus 76)

Consistent with the 1880s and 1890s being the era of Aestheticism in Ireland as in

Britain, ―Beauty‖ was considered to be one of the touchstones holding a nation together, and serving to represent and characterize it. The notion of beauty is often connected to mythology: expressions such as ―wild beauty‖ (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 324) and

―Eternal Beauty‖ (Russel, ―Priest or Hero‖) are attributed to Irish legends and Celtic lore. Yeats‘s first poems were described in the early 20th century by Forrest Reid as possessing ―a pagan and sensuous beauty‖ (Reid 36); and, for Yeats and others, beauty, art and paganism were often connected, for the ―secret fount‖ of inspiration and the images illuminating the artist‘s brain lay in the ―ancestral beauty‖ (Russell,

Imaginations and Reveries 40). These legends, though they were set in the past, could help construct the present and the future through art and beauty – ―they contain so much of a new beauty, that they may well give the opening century its most memorable symbols‖ (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 295). The symbols installed through art would help to introduce what modernity lacked, ―a social, moral and aesthetic coherence‖

(Dwan, ―Ancient Sect‖ 201; italics added), a coherence which marked ancient Ireland.

2.2.2. Artificial Self-Fashioning

However, this idea of inherent nationality embedded in an epic society was not nearly enough to build a solid national identity upon, an identity which would be able to inspire the fight for Ireland‘s liberation. Although Yeats claimed that Ireland was in ―her

24 epic or ballad age‖, by the late 19th century Irish national identity could no longer be based only on the pre-classical episteme of similarity, and the notion of difference came increasingly to play its role. National consciousness had to be created and Ireland had to be defined somehow; and the definition of Ireland closest at hand was ―not-England‖.

The roots of this tendency to ―pattern‖ Ireland as ―not-England‖ reach back to the Elizabethan era, when these conquered people were seen as ―the very antithesis‖ of their English rulers (Kiberd 9). At that time, the English were going through the process of Renaissance self-fashioning, for which ―a continued presence of ‗an other‘‖ was required, so that ―the maintenance of subtle points of differentiation‖ would support and sustain their ―superordination‖ (Cairns, Richards 10). In the 19th century, however, Irish nationalists availed themselves of this concept of otherness and used it to support their nationalist cause. They ―embraced […] the clichés of the Anglo-Saxonist theory‖ and reinterpreted them in ―a more positive light‖ (Kiberd 32),5 and ―innate Irish virtues became defined against English vices‖ (Cairns, Richards 63). Therefore, the Irish found their own singularity on the basis of its difference from ―Englishness‖.

This concept created a set of dichotomies. Mathew Arnold, drawing on Ernest

Renan, ascribed to Ireland a feminine quality: he presented the ―notion of the Teuton as the energetic, brutal warrior completed by Celt, the producer of civility and culture‖

(Cairns, Richards 45). From the basic dichotomy masculine vs. feminine, sprang a number of other dichotomies – emotional vs. intellectual, traditional vs. modern, artistic vs. practical, natural vs. industrial (Cairns, Richards 44-50; Kiberd 31-32). The Irish were seen to have, as opposed to the English, ―the Celtic genius, sentiment as its main brains, with the love for beauty, charm, spirituality for its excellence‖ (Arnold qtd. in

5 This, however, sometimes led to the reinforcement of the stereotypes which the Revivalists sought to dismantle, but according to Declan Kiberd, this ―was an inevitable, nationalist phase through which they and their country had to pass en route to liberation‖ (32). 25

Cairns, Richards 48).6 All these qualities defined here as purely ―Irish‖ were encompassed in ancient legends, which, moreover, were something that English culture, to a large extent, lacked.7 Ireland assumed the mystical role in direct opposition to secular England; the Irish are here associated with the Celtic race, which was seen as having something magical about it, something which Renan described as ―a love of nature for herself, a vivid feeling for her magic, commingled with the melancholy a man knows when he is face to face with her, and thinks he hears her communing with him about his origin and is destiny‖ (qtd. in Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 270). The mystical role assigned to Ireland predetermined building Irish identity via turning to a heroic past, mythology and the supernatural – which was seen as something singularly

Irish, or perhaps Celtic. Through the legends they promoted, on one hand, all the positive elements of their identity which were defined by dichotomies such as traditional, natural, poetic; on the other, they breached the concept of Ireland being feminine – thus, subjected and passive – by depicting the heroic past with its warriors and gods: the ancient warriors are characterized ―as symbols of a once-independent

Ireland. The gods similarly represent the unpolluted Soul of Ireland, free from foreign influence‖ (Marcus 318). Mythology enabled the Irish to combine the supposed positive qualities inherent to the Celtic race (such as being poetical and artistic) with the rougher features – for example, Oisín, one of the most famous heroes of the Fionn Cycle, was described as ―the warrior-bard‖ (O‘Grady Selected Essays 109); and, more generally, to be accepted into the Fianna warrior group, one had to be skilled in poetry as well as fighting and hunting (Lady Gregory 123).

6 Arnold, however, did not consider the Celts as capable of achieving freedom, or even autonomy. Nor was it desirable from his point of view (Cairns, Richards 47-8). The role of Celticism was, in English eyes, to sustain the subordinate position of Ireland – it was England‘s Victorian middle-class wife. 7 At best, ―English rulers appropriated Welsh origin stories, e.g. in the form of Arthurian mythology‖ (Stroh 27).

The main enemies of the Irish at the turn of the 20th century were ―English ideas and English culture rather than English soldiers‖ (Marcus 314). Clinging to legends and folklore was felt to be the best weapon for fighting the so-called ―West Britonism,‖ a term used by Douglas Hyde to denote the Irish people‘s acceptance of English values and culture (Hyde, ―Necessity for De-Anglicising‖). The fairies and mythical heroes were expected to save the Irish from becoming overly similar to their colonizers – as already mentioned, the ―supernatural folklore and imaginative wealth of the Irish peasant‖ were used as a weapon ―against the modern industrial and commercial British spirit‖ (Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1120). This identity based on mythology and folklore often had nothing to do with political preferences, but instead with cultural pertinence to a certain tradition. Samuel Fergusson, from the political point of view a conservative unionist, wrote epic poetry based on Irish legends, which strongly opposed all that Yeats associated with West Britonism and what he derogatively terms the ―leprosy of the modern‖ (Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1121).

According to Cairns and Richards, English materialism, which was creeping into

Ireland, was fought, on the part of the Anglo-Irish, by trying to establish a society which would be parallel to the Celtic social order: ―Industrialism and materialism are enemies to Ireland and will be fought via the concept of Ascendancy as the chieftains and their people‖ (56). From the ideological point of view, modernity, too, became the enemy; for in a nation defined ―in terms of the past‖, modernity poses ―a threat to its ancestral integrity‖ and therefore might undermine the idea of national identity (Cairns, Richards

65). The past was something the nation could cling to, and, moreover, ―in these first centuries the Celt made himself‖ (Yeats, Writings on Folklore 51), so it was to serve as an example for re-creating the nation in the coming times. At the turn of the 20th century, in his essay ―Poetry and Tradition‖, Yeats claimed that the Revivalists were

27 forging ―in Ireland a new sword on our old traditional anvil for that great battle that must in the end re-establish the old, confident, joyous world‖ (Poetry and Ireland 5).

However, historical accuracy was not the goal in this process. In the same essay Yeats admits that it is ―perhaps from this out an imaginary Ireland‖, in whose service he labours (Poetry and Ireland 1; italics added). It was important that history and tradition were depicted in an appealing manner; being presented via myths, O‘Grady claims, the ancient legends can become ―kind of a history a nation desires to possess‖ (O‘Grady,

Selected Essays, 41; italics added). The Irish identity was incomplete, and people lacked certain virtues, because Ireland ―lacked models for the development of its identity‖

(Marcus 81). The nation needed myths in order to create the desired history, upon which they could built their Irishness. According to Æ, mythical characters ―begin to stir us with their power,‖ and ―Angus, Lu, Ossian, Deirdre, Finn etc, will be found to be each one the symbol of enduring qualities‖ (qtd. in Williams 315).

Poets, who, in the late 19th century, brought these personifications of ―enduring qualities‖ back to life, posed as bards of the nation. Bards had a special rank in Celtic society, being the conservers of tradition and rulers of knowledge. In pre-Elizabethan

Ireland there were two types of poets: praise-poetry oriented bards, and the filidh – a professional class who had the status of ―seers, teachers, advisors of the rulers and prophets.‖ (MacCana 14-15). These two classes of poets merged; and, consequently, the figure of a bard, performing all these functions, gained an extremely powerful position in the society, and assumed a nation-forming character. Yeats, in an article from the

1890s, observes that ―this power of the bards was responsible, it may be, for one curious thing in ancient Celtic history – its self-consciousness‖ (Writings on Folklore 51). If the

19th century poets wanted to recreate the Irish ―self-consciousness‖ once again, they had to model themselves upon the example of the Celtic bards; hence the tendency of

Yeats‘s to pose as a bard, which can be seen, for example, in his self-modelling into the role of ―the Celt‖ who is returning from London to Ireland to fulfil the dreams of the

National Literary Society (Yeats, Selected Criticism 17). Even though Yeats had no

Celtic ancestors whatsoever, in his essay ―The Irish National Literary Society‖, (which is, in fact, a manifesto of his plans for Ireland in the early 90s), he refers to himself as

―the Celt.‖ He defines himself as Irish by drawing a link to his ancestral race, to which he, however, does not belong from the ethnic point of view.8 He renounced the ethnic delimitation of the Celtic race, and sought for their identity in ―more nebulous terms‖

(Cairns, Richards 67). Within these ―nebulous terms‖ he, and other authors of the period, assumed the role of the bard, which is reflected in the use of heroic and mythical themes in the late 19th century poetry.9 The poetry of the 19th century bards often had the character of a manifestation, and, although it spoke about the past, it was looking towards the future – this stand is taken in Yeats‘s manifesto poem ―To Ireland in the

Coming Times‖ (Campbell 11) where he establishes the poet as a link in the continuum of the nation‘s history; in the older Yeats‘s words from 1927, the poet is singing ―of what is past, passing or to come‖ (―Sailing to Byzantium‖ 32).

8 Both his paternal and maternal ancestors came to Ireland from England in the 18th and 19th centuries and belonged to the middle class protestant Ascendancy (Jeffares Man and Poet). 9 It can be seen also in the diction of certain poems, which sometimes attempt to approach the style of the Celtic masters of old; a good example of this adoption of poetic diction can be found in Ferguson‘s poems, who ―was nearer [than young Yeats] to the epic tradition of the Gaelic poetry (Jeffares 38). 29

2.3. Role of Art in Ireland

Having touched upon the importance of art in the process of self-fashioning, the principles underlying this important role should be elaborated. The process of re- establishing Irish self-consciousness and national identity through history and mythology, using art as a vehicle, is rooted in the idea, already briefly mentioned, that art forms the society.

Yeats was influenced by Oscar Wilde‘s reversion of the commonplace formula

―Art imitates Life‖ into ―Life imitates Art‖; Wilde draws an example from classical

Greece, explaining that ―they [the Greeks] knew that Life gains from Art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art‖ (Marcus 73). This conception gives grounds to Æ‘s idea that through depicting mythical characters that embody the very virtues that Ireland lacked these virtues will actually be created. (Williams 315).

However, drawing Irish identity on Celtic art poses a problem, formulated by

Lionel Johnson in his lecture ―Poetry and Patriotism‖ when he asks: ―After all, who is to decide, what is, absolutely and definitely, the Celtic and Irish note?‖ (Johnson, Poetry and Ireland 31). According to the popular opinion, based partly on the Renan /

Arnoldian Celticism, Celtic poetry is ―drenched in the dew of natural magic‖ (Sharp 23) and possesses a ―strange, remote, far-away beauty in the music and in the colour

(Johnson Poetry and Ireland 31), ―dream-like music‖ (Sharp 44); further, the Celtic genius is characterised by a ―strange melancholy‖ (Sharp 49). Therefore, art, to be considered Celtic, had to have a certain transcendental value which would reach beyond the crude reality into the supernatural and imaginary world of dreams and magic.

The art of the Young Ireland movement strove to represent the essence of

Irishness. They ―had provided some simple images‖ to help build up models necessary

30 for the development of the Irish identity, which were lacking in Irish culture before,

(Marcus 81) and did ―much to the credit of Irish nature‖, even if not availing ―wholly to the advantage of Irish literature‖ (Johnson, Poetry and Ireland 28). The Young

Irelanders‘ poetry came to be treated as the canon and the one and only truly Irish art; in the words of Lionel Johnson, who shared many opinions on art with Yeats, ―in the poetry of the Nation and of ‗Young Ireland,‘ … we have a fixed and unalterable standard, whereby to judge all Irish poetry, past and present and to come‖ (Johnson,

Poetry and Ireland 21). This, however, led to certain rigidity and Yeats, having in mind the future of Irish literature, was vigorously attacking their poetry, claiming the Young

Ireland writing to be exceedingly vague and propagandistic – the verses were full of

―vague, abstract words such as one finds in a newspaper‖ (Autobiographies 126). In his opinion, this kind of popularity was but ―fleeting‖, as it was united ―with politics and economics‖ (Yeats qtd. in Marcus 75). Moreover, from the literary point of view, these poems seemed to him and his followers written carelessly; composed in a ―rush of sentiment‖, without paying much attention to ―delicate graces of art‖. Yet this very quality made them be considered great art in the eyes of the nationalists because, by

―being unfettered as the Irish winds‖, the verses could best express the nature of the

Irish nation (Johnson, Poetry and Ireland 23).

Yeats opposed the commonplace thought of the era that poets ―should hiss at the villain‖ and that ―the greater the talent the greater the hiss‖ (Autobiographies 254); this hissing often turned melodramatic:

Who fears, with cause so holy,

The pirate Dane, the pirate Dane?

Although the Saxon, lowly,

Now brooks his chain! now brooks his chain! (―The Dalcassians‘ War-

Song‖ ll. 17-20 in The Spirit of the Nation 43)

These verses are trying to provide the aforementioned models for the development of national identity, which would be based on heroic deeds of old – the poem referrs to the battle of Clontarf where the Gaelic tribe of Dalcassians, led by Brian Boru, beat the

Danes (OCH 100, 135). There is nothing individual about the poem; it is a voice of a nation heated by battle in times long ago. Through the use of questions and exclamations the writer means to appeal directly to the reader and the general choral tone is supposed to enable any reader to identify with the heroic warriors of old; which can be seen as an example of the pre-classical episteme, mentioned in the previous chapter, and the togetherness of an epic society based on similarity.

Yeats, however, found mere identification deficient, and so he aspired to affect the people in a more metaphysical way through the arts; in Ideas of Good and Evil, he looks back to the past and claims that ―in very early days‖ arts were ―almost inseparable from religion‖ (321). The artist ―alone can know the ancient records and be like some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of time‖ and he is ―the Creator of the standards of manners in their subtlety‖ (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 10); these standards being necessary for self-possession, which arises from ―deliberate shaping of all things, and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion, into confusion or dullness‖ (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 9). Drawing on Kiberd, self-possession was a predisposition to freedom of mind and, consequently, the freedom of the Irish nation –

―personal liberation must precede national recovery‖ (Kiberd 124). The Irish ―self‖, according to Yeats, was supposed to be created and shaped through truly good and noble art, which would be deliberately crafted by the ―Artificers of the Great Moment‖ (Yeats,

Poetry and Ireland 18), and through mastering the style – a notion which Yeats understands in much broader terms than is usually implied by the word (Kiberd 120).

Poems such as the one quoted above lacked these qualities professed by Yeats, who, therefore, struggled to ―substitute for that melodrama a nobler form of art‖

(Autobiographies 254). His own movement actually continued in providing models which the Irish nation lacked, ―but in a more profound and enduring way‖ (Marcus 81).

Wanting to affect people‘s spirituality, Yeats, being a descendant of the middle class protestant Ascendancy, could not stake upon Catholicism, as his friend Katharine

Tynan did; but he rather fell back upon ―esoteric symbolism as a direct communion with his fellow countrymen and via Celtic ‗Otherworldliness‘, by-passing the influence of

Catholicism by reaching out to what he supposed to be a more fundamental level of their spirituality‖ (Cairns, Richards 68). With the support of Æ,10 who was named ―the spiritual inspirer of the Irish Literary Movement‖ (Graf 57), Yeats created a ―kind of mystical nationalism‖ which combined theosophy and paganism (Graf 53). According to Æ, paganism was the one and only true religion of the Irish, and thus a force through which one could best strike the right note with the people‘s national identity; in his own words ―national sentiment seems out of date here [in Ireland], the old heroism slumbers‖ because ―alien thought and an exotic religion have supplanted our true ideals and our natural spirituality‖ (Russell ―Priest or Hero‖). Paganism and fairy-lore is seen as something native, rooted deep in some hereditary identity11:

The faery tales have ever lain nearer to the hearts of the people, and

whatever there is of worth in song or story has woven into it the imagery

handed down from the dim druidic ages. (Russell, ―Priest and Hero‖)

10 Yeats together with Æ had an ambition to create an Irish magical order, The Castle of Heroes. A few other Golden Dawn members, particularly Yeats‘s uncle George Polexfen, and MacGregor Mathers were involved; the rituals of the Castle of Heroes were parallel to those of the Order of the Golden Dawn, but based on Celtic mythology and neopaganism (Greer 89). 11 This thought corresponds to the passage on the epic integrity dealt with earlier in the previous chapter – the legends and folklore, being handed on from generation to generation, form a continuous thread linking the 19th century Ireland to the past; and, therefore, apart from creating the nation‘s ancestral line, they retrieve the mentioned ―epic ballad age‖ (Yeats, Nationality and Literature 98), with its unconscious adherence to this ancestral line. 33

However, Yeats was not interested in simply parroting old legends and folk tales; therefore he shaped mythological material as he found suitable. National literature, as he imagined it, could be created ―only by a free use of what was at hand‖ (Alspach 886); which meant that he was mingling old legends with other Celtic elements, creating his own mystical Celtic Order and endowing it with individual poetic beauty, in order to make it nobler art.

In Irish literature on mythology and folk beliefs –whether written by Yeats and his circle, or by earlier writers – two leading themes can be discerned: the heroic and the transcendental. Both these strains serve to build different values necessary for self- fashioning a national identity. Heroic motifs would obviously give Ireland a ―history which a nation desires to possess‖ (O‘Grady, Selected Essays, 41) and break the widespread commonplace that the Irish are a feminine race who have ―nothing masculine in the character‖ (Moran qtd. in Cairns, Richards 50). As was mentioned before, the heroic aspect of legends breaches the undesirable aspects of Celticism (the alleged subordinate femininity of the Celtic race); but, at the same time, the supernatural, which abounds in the heroic age, would support the claim that the Irish nation is metaphysical, artistic and connected to nature (the positive qualities brought about by Celticism). Following O‘Grady‘s legacy, mentioned in the previous chapter, that Irish history is a downfall ―from a unified heroic age‖ to the contemporary fragmented nation (Whitaker 326), Æ, too, exalted the heroic character of Ancient

Ireland:

It has been so from the beginning, from the time of the cursing of Tara,

where the growing unity of the nations was split into fractions, down to

the present time. (Russell, ―Priest or Hero‖)

With this perspective, it was only natural for the nationalists to turn the attention of art to motifs which would evoke ancient history. The very names of ancient heroes became symbols of free Ireland which were supposed to ―stir‖ the reader ―with their power‖

(Russell qud. in Williams 315) – to name but a few, Cuchullain12, the main hero-warrior of the Ulster cycle and according to Æ ―the most complete ideal of Gaelic chivalry‖

(Russell, Imaginations and Reveries 30); the warrior and king Fergus; the leader of the

Fianna, Finn McCoill, and the members of the Fianna, Oisín, Osgar, Caoilte, Goll; gods

Lugh or Nauda, who in times of old were warriors and heroes too. However, especially at the turn of the 20th century, the heroic theme was more restricted to prose than to poetry – O‘Grady‘s multivolume Histories of Ireland (1879-81), alongside Lady

Gregory‘s Cúchulainn Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904), are a fine example of the popularization of heroic myths in prose. In poetry, though, heroic motifs are present (primarily through Ferguson‘s poems and translations), but later on in the 19th century, the heroic theme is almost always entwined with transcendental motifs.

This can be noted in Yeats‘s poetry in particular: his heroes always get, or try to get, to some other level of being; perhaps experiencing a different kind of life to what they had experienced before, whether through connection with supernatural powers, or, less directly, through love, madness or wisdom. With Oisín and his journey to the land of the

Everliving, this transcendental theme is most obvious; but also in such poems as

―Madness of King Goll‖, ―Fergus and the Druid‖ or ―Cuchulain‘s Fight with the Sea‖, the warriors and kings are dealt with from a non-traditional perspective; Yeats stresses a change that has come upon them, or perhaps they are depicted as overcoming certain

12 In the early 20th century Cuchulain became a role-model and in many ways was a symbol of the Easter Rising in 1916; a continuous line was drawn from the ancient hero through Christ to the revolutionaries of the 18th century (Kiberd 196, 212). Cuchulain was the personal hero of P.H. Pearse – in Æ‘s words, during the Easter Week there was an imagination in Pearse‘s soul and ―that of a hero who stood against the host‖ (Kiberd 196) and in a poem of Yeats‘s, ―Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side‖ when fighting at the Post Office in Dublin (―Statues‖ 25). 35 boundaries of their hitherto lives – they are ―drifting like a river / from change to change‖13 (―Fergus and the Druid‖ 31-2). Yeats also combined folk beliefs and fairy- lore with the ancient myths, dissolving the border between what is considered a heroic legend and what living folklore; in the words of Edward Hirsch:

The contemporary (living) folklore of the Irish countryside and the

ancient Gaelic literature (revived by archaeologists and translators)

served as dual sources for a new Irish literature. It was Yeats‘s typical

move to bring them together. (Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1121)

Yeats tried to stress both the transcendental and heroic themes in mythology, intertwining various influences of his predecessors; while taking from ―Ferguson his pleasure in heroic legend‖, ―from Allingham and Walsh‖ he took ―their passion for country spiritism‖ (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 4). The theme of transcendence, side by side with the heroic theme, served to provide the lacking models for the development of the national identity, but in a less direct way – instead of imitation, symbolism is the driving force here. The turn of the 20th century was a transitory period in general and for

Ireland all the more – writers were looking from the ―nineteenth century to the coming times of the last century of a millennium‖ (Campbell 10); and the very depiction of transcendence in arts could symbolize the step the Irish people, as individuals and as a nation, were about to take. In real life they were striving to transcending the limits of life as it used to be, walking towards personal liberation and accordingly towards a complex national identity; and too, the transcendence of Ireland as a province into

Ireland as a self-conscious nation.

Interestingly, Yeats and his literary circle displayed a tendency to push Irish

13 There is an interesting iteration of this motif in Yeats‘s later poetry. The motif of a flowing changing river is used in his poem on the ―Easter 1916‖, where it symbolizes the ―living stream‖ of life and constant change – not only the water is moving, but even a ―shadow of cloud on the stream / changes minute by minute‖ (49-50); change and the flow of life was a very important theme in Yeats‘s later poetry. 36 people towards mysticism by depicting them in a particular way: they started a ―process of turning the peasants into a single figure of literary art (―the peasant‖)‖ (Hirsch, ―Irish

Peasant‖ 1121); remaking the Catholic peasant into a ―noble peasant‖ or a mystic Celt

(Cairns, Richards 67) was an act of transcendence, in which ―literature becomes an act of mythic recovery‖ (Hirsch, ―Hanrahan‖ 882). Moreover, by making peasants the

―essence of an ancient, dignified Irish culture‖, the Revivalists created an image they could set against the English stereotype (Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1121), and which would serve as a romantic symbol of Irish life being anti-commercial, deep, pastoral and mystic (Hirsch, ―Irish Peasant‖ 1122). This peasant figure fabricated trough art was to become the audience of the art written at that time – a noble peasant ―in grey

Connemara clothes‖ (―Fisherman‖ 4).14 In the second half of the 19th century, peasants were transcended into symbols, which were supposed to serve as cornerstones to the

Irish national identity. The poet was creating myths through his art, which would carry presence beyond the borders of harsh reality and thus, at the same time, recreate reality;

Yeats‘s idea of a poet was both as a ―solipsist and communal mythmaker‖ (Hirsh,

―Hanrahan‖ 882).

Moreover, Yeats believed that the Irish, having preserved ―a gift of vision‖

(Yeats, Introduction to Secret Rose, in Red Hanrahan 78), were still able to feel and perceive as men in times of old could, when their souls were ―naked to the winds of heaven‖ (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 51); thus possessing a character which is closer to mystical transcendence than that of the ―more hurried and successful nations‖

(Yeats, Introduction to Secret Rose, Stories of Red Hanrahan 78). Plunging into mysticism in literature was parallel to looking into darkness; and in Ireland, according to Yeats, this would be understood better than elsewhere:

14 In 1916 Yeats wrote about this fabricated peasant that he is ―a man who does not exist / a man who is but a dream‖ (―Fisherman‖ 35-36). 37

No shining candelabra have prevented us from looking into the darkness,

and when one looks into the darkness there is always something there.

(Yeats, Stories of Red Hanrahan 78)

Therefore, when employing Celtic and mystical themes in his poetry, Yeats was reaching out beyond the known reality, to find ―something there‖, make his art even more transcendental, and at the same time available particularly to the Irish nation.

Art is transcendental itself (Campbell) – culture of a nation should transcend time. The poem which is perhaps the clearest manifestation of this thought in the 1890s is ―Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days.‖ 15 This poem, written in 1892, later became the closing poem of the 1895 collection The Rose, in which Yeats first combined nationalism and occultism (Parkinson 19); the ancient Irish is blended here with the occult and cabbalistic.

The poem was written as a manifesto of Yeats‘s ambition to become the Irish bard – to be accounted ―true brother of a company / that sang to sweeten Ireland‘s wrong‖ (2-3). He places himself into the posteriority of the most famous Irish poets:

―Nor may I less be counted one / With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson‖ (17-18). The poem is very conscious of the role of art, which transcends time. Art, in general, links the past and the ―coming times‖ of the future; furthermore, having in mind the rebirth of the

Irish nation, it also brings back the ―beginnings of history of the world which, even at that time, still contained Ireland‖ (Campbell 13). Artists are those who can sing ―of things discovered in the deep, / where only body‘s laid asleep‖ (21-22), because of the power of art, which connects all, and which also transcends reality; for it brings alive the supernatural in this world – ―For elemental creatures go / about my table to and fro‖

(23-24). Art can, according to Yeats, combine various strains of thought, such as the

15 Later know as ―To Ireland in the Coming times.‖ 38 occult, folk and mythological – the ―elemental beings‖ and ―wizard things‖ are melded in one with ―faeries dancing under moon‖ and with druidic rites; as they all come out of the Anima Mundi, the racial memory which stores all the experience and thought

(Parkinson 10-11). Art enables people to reach out into the Anima Mundi, understand and interpret it. Moreover, adding a new occult dimension to the mythological and folk materials Yeats was handling in his poetry enabled him to reach ―beyond nationality into universality‖ (Jeffares Commentary 47). In his essay ―Ireland and the Arts‖, Yeats argues that arts in Ireland ―will find two passions ready to their hands, love of the

Unseen Life and love of country‖ (Ideas of Good an Evil 322); which is a principle

Yeats adheres to in his own poetry, combining the ―Unseen Life‖ – with roots in occultism as well as in folklore – and nationalism. In the ―Apologia‖ he acclaims to continue writing poetry for the Irish cause, addressing the future people of Ireland16:

I cast my heart into my rhymes,

That you in the dim coming times,

May know how my heart went with them

After the red rose bordered hem. (45-48)

Art, to be able to become great, must be personal; ―some actual man‖ has to be perceived in a beautiful piece of art (Ronsley 7). That is why Yeats must ―cast his heart‖ into his poems, often indiscernibly mingling the personal and the national (unlike the propagandist poets of the age); this tendency of combining the national and the personal in his poetry is typical of the collection following the ―Apologia‖ The Wind Among the

16 A poem which is similarly looking towards his future readers is included in the Wind among the Reeds and it is titled ―The Fish‖; the fish symbolizing Yeats‘s thoughts or words. Although now, at the moment of writing, they are not yet seen and appreciated, ―The people of coming days will know / about the casting of my net‖ (3-4). Fish are a peculiar motif in Yeats‘s work (seen as symbols of thoughts, words, or perhaps poems) and in Celtic mythology in general – they symbolize wisdom (Monaghan 196) and they can be seen as messengers to the Otherworld: in a poem by Yeats ―A Man who Dreamt of Faeryland‖ it were fish who ―sang what gold morning and evening sheds‖ (8) are in the Otherworld and aroused in the fisherman the desire to transcend the possibilities of the world he lives in. This symbolism, mythological on one hand, Yeats‘s own on the other, emphasizes the transcendental value of art – fish being works of art, which open new horizons for the reader. 39

Reeds (1899), which can be considered the most Celtic, as for imagery. The mentioned

―red rose bordered hem‖ Yeats claims to follow in his poetry alludes to the central symbol used in the whole collection The Rose. It is a vague and complex symbol which

―combines physical and spiritual, pagan and Christian‖; it was an important symbol in the Order of the Golden Dawn; in Irish folklore, Rose was the name of a female personification of Ireland (Jeffares, Commentary 22-26). Combining all these elements,

―the Rose‖ became a mystical symbol for Yeats, denoting spiritual and intellectual beauty, Ireland, love and perhaps inspiration.17

Transcendence in the art of Yeats‘s circle was manifested through themes which dwell on the brink of the supernatural: poems dealing with the fairies and their natural world, humans crossing to the Otherworld, with all the joy and sorrow it may bring, fairies and old Celtic gods serving as guides of the souls of these chosen humans; or often the transcendence can be of a less supernatural, but nonetheless mystical, value – achieving something, or perhaps reaching towards one‘s higher self through love, wisdom, art and poetry. The purpose of these poems, too, was supposed to become something new, special and transcendental which should actually bring Ireland through her ―Great Moment‖ (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 18)18; as Yeats declared in his

17 This symbol was not restricted to Yeats‘s poetry; it played a role in his prose as well – two of his prose collections, The Secret Rose and Rosa Alchemica, bear the symbol in the title and, in a number of stories, the symbol appears. Interestingly, the very expression ―red rose bordered hem‖ is mentioned in one of his short stories, ―The Crucifixion of the Outcast‖ and connected to Irish art; a gleeman, who is a modern version of a Gaelic bard, talks about his life as an artist: ―And I have been the more alone upon the roads and by the sea because I heard in my heart the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of her who is more subtle than Aengus, the Subtle-hearted, and more full of the beauty of laughter than Conan the Bald, and more full of the wisdom of tears than White-breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a bursting dawn to them that are lost in the darkness‖ [italics added] (―The Crucifixion of the Outcast‖ in Stories of Red Hanrahan 96-7). Here the ―rustling of the rose bordered dress‖ seems to be an inspiration for the gleeman, and the lady wearing the dress seems to be his Gaelic muse, more divine than all the gods and ancient heroes. 18 Which, however, a few years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, Yeats bitterly claims not to have achieved: ―Ireland's great moment had passed, and she had filled no roomy vessels with strong sweet wine, where we have filled our porcelain jars against the coming winter.‖ (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 18)

40 autobiographical Ireland after Parnell, Irish poetry was supposed to be a ―manner at once cold and passionate, daring long premeditated act‖ and the Irish people, ―bitter beyond all the people of the world‖ will get through their art ―nearest to the honeyed comb‖ (Autobiographies 255).

3. Analytical part

3.1. Otherworld

As a result of art being considered a vehicle of transcendence of the Irish nation, heading towards national consciousness, literature picked up from mythology and folklore the very motifs of transcendence in order to stress the idea. It can be claimed that poems drawing from mythology were to lead people into the world of mythology, or perhaps the Otherworld, and thus create the feeling of adherence to an ancient nation; the transcendence being literal and metaphorical at the same time.

One of the most transcendental motifs that can be found in Irish literature is the

Otherworld. It is hard to characterize the conception of the Otherworld among Celts; and the interpretations of it in literature vary even more. There is no doubt that Celts believed in life after death (MacCana 123) and the Otherworld is sometimes interpreted as the Elysian Fields, subsuming the land of the dead (MacKillop). However, more commonly it is seen as the realm of ancient gods – the Thuata Dé Danann, or ―Tribes of the goddess Danu‖, who, according to the 11th century manuscript Book of Invasions, used to inhabit Ireland before they were defeated by the mortals and consequently withdrew to the Otherworld. This world transcends ―limitations of human time‖ as well as ―spatial definition‖ (MacCana 124); and therefore the term ―Otherworld‖ is rather vague and can be understood in many ways. Sometimes it is interpreted as a physical place, situated beyond the Western sea, as an underwater land, or a domain within hills or mounds – so called fairy raths (MacCana 124; Bramsbäck 48). Sometimes, on the other hand, it is a ―realm beyond senses‖ (MacKillop), a world existing ―beyond our immediate reality‖, but ―contiguous with our world‖ – a kind of alternative parallel

42 reality, where deities, fairies and beloved dead dwell (Monaghan, ―Introduction‖ 13;

370). It may reach into our world as a house appearing and disappearing suddenly19

(MacCana 124) or as the aforementioned fairy mounds, which are often considered to be portals into this alternative reality (Monagham 176,177). But whether as a physical place, or a realm coexisting with this world, but beyond our senses, the Otherworld is a realm of eternal bliss, peace, and plenitude, where death or old age do not enter:

―It is the country is most delightful of all that are under the sun; the trees

are stooping down with fruit and with leaves and with blossom. Honey

and wine are plentiful there, and everything the eye has ever seen; no

wasting will come on you with the wasting away of time; you will never

see death or lessening.‖ (Lady Gregory 289)

The blissful character of eternal beauty is emphasised in the other common names used for the Otherworld – Tír-na-n- og, meaning ―country of the Young‖ (Yeats, Fairy and

Folk Tales 197) or The Land of the Living.20 Also, Tír-na-n- og was in the popular culture of the 19th century sometimes identified with mythological sites Mag Mall

(Gaelic for ―plain of delight‖), where ―life is endlessly joyous and sweet‖ (Monaghan

308) or Hy Brasil, a magical island in the West:

On the ocean that hollows the rocks where ye dwell,

A shadowy isle has appeared, as they tell;

Men thought it a region of sunshine and rest,

And they called it Hy- Brasail, the isle of the blest. (Griffin, ―Hy-Brasil –

The Isle of the Blest2,‖ ll. 1-4 in Fairy and Folk Tales 209)

The Otherworld is seen as a part of Ireland, where, according to Yeats‘s essay ―Irish

19 A visit of such a house by Finn and his companions is depicted in the chapter ―Hospitality of Cuanna‘s House‖ (Lady Gregory 181-183). 20 Interestingly enough, Celts did not find any inconsistency in joining the land of the dead in the Elysian sense of an Underworld and the Land of the Living ―as two aspects of the same Otherworld‖ (MacCana 129). 43

Folklore, Legend and Myth‖, ―this world and the other are not widely sundered‖

(Writings on Folklore 58). This view emphasises Ireland‘s picture as a nation possessing a transcendental character; they are a metaphysical people, in comparison with the practical English.

In Yeats‘s work particularly, one other theme concerning the Otherworld repeatedly appears. Immortal love is depicted as inseparable from the Otherworld,

Where people love beside the ravelled seas;

That Time can never mar a lover‘s wows

Under that woven changeless roof of boughs. (―The Man who Dreamt of

Faeryland‖ 9-12)

Perhaps the importance of this theme is caused by the frustrations of Yeats‘s personal love life with Maud Gonne; unable to find love in the real world of mortals, he views the Otherworld as a place to gain it – as can be seen in the following verses from a poem written for Maud, titled ―The White Birds‖:

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan21 shore,

Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;

(9-10)

Frustrated by his unrequited love, he endows his heroes with his own desire for immortal love – they seek the ―love that the gods give‖ and which is ―the soft fire / That shall burn time when times have ebbed away‖ (Yeats, The Shadowy Waters 19); often the mortal heroes who enter the Otherworld are taken there by their fairy lover, which is a common motif in Irish mythology and folklore generally, and not being restricted only

21 ―Danaan shore‖ means the Otherworld here; as the home of the mentioned Thuata Dé Danann, the godlike nation who allegedly lived in Ireland before the Celts. They will be dealt with in more detail in the next chapter of the present thesis. 44 to Yeats‘s work.22

3.1.1. Otherworld as a physical place

In Yeats‘s work, both conceptions of the Otherworld appear. The Otherworld as a physical place is generally depicted in voyage literature as far away islands in the west

(Bramsbäck 48, Mac Cana 124) and perhaps the most typical mythological story of this kind served as a template for one of Yeats‘s first famous poems The Wanderings of

Oisín, which depicts Oisín‘s journey to Tír-na-nOg. Oisín was the son of Finn, the central character of the Fenian cycle, who entered the Otherworld by becoming the lover and husband of Niamh, one of the Ever-living who fell in love with him.23 Having spent some time in the untroubled land (in fact three hundred years, but this he does not know), but still not finding what he was looking for, he returns to Ireland to find everything changed and the heroic age gone. Here he recounts his journey to the

Otherworld to St. Patrick and from the dialogue the reader learns much about Tír-na- nOg. Yeats creates the otherworldly feeling through appealing to senses by the use of colourful images. According to Cairns and Richards, he uses colours ―to evoke moods with a repetitiveness which seems almost didactic‖ (67) and thus he creates a world about which Forest Reid claims nearly 30 years later:

―It quite frankly has nothing to give, but its beauty, and that beauty is

a pagan and sensuous beauty: its ethical, its moral significance is

22 In folklore, this motif is represented by a fairy mistress who steals away the most handsome man and most brilliant poet; or, less often, a maiden is carried away to the Fairy world by a fairy king (Monagham 175-5) or by ―the handsomest young man‖ (―Host of Air‖ 26) from the fairy folk, as happens in the poem ―Host of Air‖, based on a folk ballad Yeats heard from an old woman in Sligo (Jeffares, Commentary 55). In mythology, the most famous couples finding love in the Otherworld are Oisín and Niamh, who get married in the Otherworld and live there happily for three hundred years; and the beautiful fairy Fand and Cúchulainn, who follows her into the Otherworld, leaving his mortal wife at home. About the story of the latter couple Yeats claimed to be ―one of the most beautiful of our old tales‖, which shows how deeply influenced he was by these mythological love stories, mingling them with his personal life in his poems. 23 Sometimes she is seen as a beautiful fairy queen ruling over Hy Brasil, sometimes as the daughter of the sea god Mannamán mac Lir (Monaghan 252, 358); but in Yeats‘s version she is the daughter of the love god Angus, which sheds even more light on the importance of the role of love in Yeats‘s poetry concerning the Otherworld. 45

absolutely nil.‖ (36)

The other voyage story in Yeats‘s work which is depicting mortals in pursuit of the Otherworld is dramatic – The Shadowy Waters, a play whose first drafts reach back into the early 1880s, with many revisions until the final Acting Version from year 1911

(Bramsbäck 30). The first published version, a dramatic poem printed out as a book in

1900, will be dealt with in this work, as it is closest of all versions to Yeats‘s early poetics. The main mortal hero Forgael is also searching the seas in hope of finding the

Otherworld, which he assumes to be his destiny, after it has appeared to him as a vision in a dream. The story of Forgael displays just his unyielding desire – another motif strongly connected to transcendental themes in Yeats‘s poetry – and he never reaches the

Otherworld; the play ends in his aspirations for an endless search, while the reader never gets a direct picture of what he is searching for.

However, in The Wanderings of Oisin, the Otherworld is described in detail – the three parts of the poem correspond to the three Islands of the Otherworld. Traditionally, in mythology ―three‖ was supposed to be a ―powerful number‖ (Monaghan 447) and it is used in folklore with magical connotations. Yeats, in his compilation of Irish fairy tales, describes Tír-na-nOg as ―triple – the island of the living, the Island of victories and the underwater land‖ (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 197). The sources of Yeats‘s version of the legend were mainly translations of two poems written in Gaelic: the traditional form of the legend – the 12th century Colloquy of Old Men, which is a dialogue between St. Patrick, Oisín and yet another hero Caoilte, both of whom, owing to their adventures in the Otherworld, survived to the Christian era, creating a ―mood of nostalgic recollection of past glories‖ (MacCana 106); yet even a greater source of borrowings – the framework of the poem as well as certain motifs and images –was

Michael Comyn‘s 18th century Gaelic poem ―The Lay of Oisín on the Land of Youth‖

(Alspach 849-853). One of the major alternations Yeats made in his version of the legend is the triple vision of the Otherworld – in Comyn‘s version the third island is missing. (Alspach 851). Yeats made his hero go to three islands – first the Island of the

Living (or the Island of Youth), which is a traditional Elysian blissful Otherworld, where ―tangled creepers every hour / blossom in some new crimson flower‖ and joy and beauty are everlasting:

And here there is no Change, nor Death,

But only kind and merry breath

For joy is God and God is joy. (Book I, 284-6)

The next island Oisín and Niamh visit is the Island of Dancing and Victories. Oisín spends the next hundred years in battle and feasting – on this island they encounter a chained maiden and a demon who holds her captive. Oisín fights him for a day, rests and feasts for the next four days ―until the fourth morn saw emerge / his new-healed shape‖ (II, 220-21), causing their life on this island to be ―with no dreams nor fears / nor languor or fatigue: an endless feast / an endless war‖ (II, 222-25). The ever-rising demon can symbolize patterns of history and cycles of life in general; a theme never too old for Yeats to explore. However, in the 19th century the chained maiden could have alluded to the subdued Ireland, which, having actually been named after the female goddess Ériu (160), was often personified as a maiden; in this poem, it would be the maiden in need claiming:

And I must needs endure and hate and weep,

Until the gods and demons drop asleep,

Hearing Aedh touch the mournful string of gold. (Book II, 85-7)

Aedh is a name common in Celtic mythology, but in this poem it probably refers to the god of death, whose harp brings death to anyone who hears him play (Jeffares,

Commentary 524).24 Later, in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats uses the name Aedh as his poetic alter ego, ―a principle of mind‖, as he calls him (The Wind

Among the Reeds 73), and the poetic persona speaking through many of his poems in

The Wind Among the Reeds.25 The last verse: ―Hearing Aedh touch the mournful string of gold,‖ can, therefore, imply the power of a bard to change things and transcend the power of gods and demons; if the maiden is seen as Ireland suffering hardship, the verse could refer to the power of poetry and art to create the new and free Ireland.

The last Island of Yeats‘s Otherworld depicted in The Wanderings of Oisin is the

Island of Forgetfulness – the part missing from Comyn‘s original, and added by Yeats.

On this island, whose atmosphere, with its ―spacious woods‖ and ―dripping trees‖, is probably most uncanny of all the islands, the lovers encounter a ―monstrous slumbering folk‖ (Book III, 27). These are sleeping giants with ―faces alive with such beauty‖ (III,

51), curiously possessing some bird features. In this part of the book, Yeats probably made use of the popular legend about heroes sleeping in a cave, which he was doubtlessly familiar with; he actually incorporated into his compilation of Irish fairy tales of 1888 a story ―The Giant‘s Stairs‖ in which a young man discovers sleeping giants in a cave.26 Oisín and Niamh fall asleep as well,27 and in their dream, kings of old, heroes, and demons are ―driving the dust with their throngs‖; here Yeats might be,

24 However, in connection with the national interpretation, Aedh can be seen as Áed Eangach, who was to be, according to a prophecy, a long expected king and deliverer of Ireland (CE 4). 25 In the notes to the original edition of The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats explains that Aedh, being ―the Irish for fire, is fire burning by itself . . . and he is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers continually before all that it loves‖ (The Wind Among the Reeds 73-74). 26 While in folk tales, the sleeping heroes are often giants, in mythology they are interpreted as sleeping members of the Fianna, who one day will ―rise up as strong and as well as they ever were‖ (Lady Gregory 292).The fusion of the Fenians and the giants in this meme is caused by the tendency of pagan heroes from mythological cycles to grow ―bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants‖ in folklore (Peasants 257). 27 They are lulled to sleep by the swaying of a branch with bells, which is an otherworldly motif from a different story in Irish mythology – King Comrac was given such a bell-branch by the god Mannanan and used it to lull people to sleep or soothe their sorrow - ―no one on earth would keep in mind any want, or trouble, or tiredness, when that branch was shaken for him‖ (Gregory 87). Yeats obviously found this motif very appealing, as he used a similar one in his other Otherworld story The Shadowy Waters – the hero Forgael possesses a magical harp which enables him to manipulate his companions, making them feel as he wants them to. Motifs like this emphasise the power and the importance of the bard. 48 once again, touching upon the issue of art and inspiration in general – Oisín was characterized as the ―warrior-bard‖ in the Fianna (O‘Grady Selected Essays 109; italics added). Otherworldly dreams Oisín is dreaming bring him nearer to the heroes and characters from the legendary past; in the same way otherworldly visions endow the poet with inspiration from legends and myths. They spent there another hundred years, sleeping in a mystical dreamy atmosphere:

So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of

dreams,

In a long iron sleep as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.28 (Book

III, 95-6)

The form of the poem – dialogue of Oisín and St. Patrick and the first person narration – makes the depiction of the Otherworld much more personal and credible; thus avoiding a mere narrative description, but presenting a clash of the mythical pagan world and the Christian Ireland of the 5th century – which can be also seen as a clash of one‘s dreams and memories with reality. This gives the poem a more individual voice and the hero is pursued by a modernistic feeling of alienation and estrangement from the community in which he lives. According to David Dwan, he ―is not the last representative of an epic integrity, but is the living embodiment of its demise‖ (―Ancient

Sect‖ 209), which, perhaps, enables easier identification of the hero with the Irish reader, who, too, is estranged from their country and community by not having a conscious national identity and not feeling pertinence to the Irish nation. The epic tale of The Wanderings of Oisin is interwoven with lyrical feelings of solitude and

28 Interestingly, the sleeping lovers went ―dumb as a stone [italics added].‖ Later, the stone became one of Yeats‘s favourite recurring symbols, which he used to express the futility of abstraction and abstract hatred, which took possession of Irish nationalism in the 20th century. In 1909 in his essay on J. M. Synge he compared the new middle-class nationalists to a woman whose mind has turned to stone (The Cutting of an Agate 150), but even more famously, in 1916 he claimed in connection to the Easter Rising: ―Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart‖ (53-4). 49 unfulfilled desire; in the second part of the poem, when Oisín grows homesick at leaving the Island of Dancing and Victories, he asks his fairy lover:

―And which of these

Is the Island of Content?‖

―None know,‖ she said;

And on my bosom laid her weeping head. (Book II, 248-250)

From The Wanderings of Oisin, and from other poems dealing with the

Otherworld, it can be clearly seen that the motif of an island is one of the most important motifs constituting the image of the Otherworld in Yeats‘s poetry. There is something mystical about islands, as they emerge from either a lake or the sea, both of which often hide an unknown world underneath.29 They are detached from the land and the mundane reality – in one poem Yeats describes the Fairyland to be ―upon a woven world-forgotten isle‖ (―Man who dreamt of Faeryland‖ 8). In mythology and folklore islands in general are often seen as ―liminal places‖ (Monaghan 264), which means that they belong neither quite to the Otherworld, nor to our world; they are points of contact between the worlds, and, thus, were extremely important in myths and rituals of the

Celts (Monaghan 289).

Yeats also views islands as places of refuge, which gives them even more otherworldly qualities; since the Otherworld is seen as the ultimate retreat where, if chosen, one can fly before sickness, death or change. In a letter to Katrine Tynan he wrote that in his semi-autobiographical novel John Sherman he made one of his characters always seek refuge and peace on a little island – living there alone whenever he felt troubled; which was also, as a matter of fact, a dream of the young Yeats himself

29 In The Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, there are stories mentioning an underwater land, such as ―The Soul Cages‖ or ―The Legend of O‘Donoghue‖; in Lady Gregory‘s Gods and Fighting men, for example, Diarmuit, the handsomest man of the Fianna, pursues ―the daughter of King Under-Wave‖ into an underwater land (218-223). 50

(Jeffares Commentary 34). On wild islands one could see ―what lay hidden in himself‖

(Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate 176), which makes it a symbol of inner transcendence.30

Moreover, Ireland itself being an island, this otherworldly motif has a special place among mythological motifs which were supposed to create the national consciousness – on certain levels it implicitly identifies the vision of Ireland with the

Otherworld; thus creating an imaginary vision of Ireland, which people could cling to as to an ideal, where wondrous stories are set, and where all is possible. Yeats believed that these stories and ―images once created and associated with river and mountain‖ will work as a unifying force and ―deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design‖31

(Autobiographies 240).

Islands play a crucial role in Yeats‘s early poetry in general; in his perhaps most quoted early poem ―The Lake Island of Innisfree‖, an island is the central motif, which comes to be seen as a retreat from the commercial world to the world of natural beauty; and although in this poem it is a real existing island from Yeats‘s childhood, it is described in a rather otherworldly manner, and possesses certain attributes which are, in

Yeats‘s poetry, usually connected to the Otherworld:

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning, to where the cricket sings;

There midnight‘s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of linnet‘s wings. (5-9)

30 This statement actually referred to an actual person – Yeats‘s friend, J.M. Synge; the whole quote goes as follows: ―He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself‖ (Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate 176). However, the thought of an island being a place of inner transcendence can be applied more generally, especially when taking into consideration how islands are portrayed in Yeats‘s poetry and in mythology as such. 31 The particular story Yeats had in mind when writing this statement was ―some new Prometheus Unbound‖, writing of which was his ambition at that time. He meant to tie it to the Irish countryside and mythology, from which ―all the nations had their first unity‖; it would have ―Patrick or Columbkil, Oisín or Fion, in Promethous‘ place; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben (Autobiographies 240). 51

It is described as a place of peace, which soothes the poet‘s soul, and might invoke the feeling of timeless bliss. But more interestingly, Yeats is using the very same motifs which are recurring in his writing on the Otherworld:32 drops (and generally the sound of dripping) – this motif keeps iterating throughout The Wanderings of Oisin; curious light which creates an unearthly shimmering impression – midnight‘s ―glimmer‖ and noon‘s ―purple glow‖; ―the linnet‘s wings‖ – the motif of birds carries a lot of transcendental value; and ―veils of the morning‖ – a veil of mist can conceal the unknown or it can be a passage which is yet to be drawn aside.

Seeing Otherworld as an island usually entails the motif of crossing water. The original classic voyage to the Otherworld in Irish literature is a Gaelic poem The Voyage of Bran composed in the late 7th or 8th century (Mac Cana 72; OCL 257), which established Bran as the perhaps most famous sailor in Irish literature. In Yeats‘s work, crossing the sea plays a major role both in The Shadowy Waters33 as in The Wanderings of Oisin. In the former, water is depicted as ―shadowy‖, ―misty‖ (26), ―cloudy‖ (46),

―empty‖ (32), ―waste‖ (45), (though Forgael knows there is something awaiting him) throughout the play; in the latter, the sea gets more hostile gradually: Oisín and Niamh

―galloped over the glossy sea‖ (I, 132) in the first book, whereas in the third book there was ―foam underneath us, and round us, wandering and milky smoke‖ (III, 1). The hostility and haziness of the waters the heroes have to cross to get to the Otherworld stresses the immediate unattainability of what they are reaching for. In his notes to The

Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats himself says that the sea can be described as ―a symbol of the drifting indefinite bitterness of life‖ and that he believes ―there is like symbolism intended in the many Irish voyages to the islands of enchantment‖ (Yeats, ―Notes‖ to

The Wind Among the Reeds 90). In modern times, crossing the sea may be interpreted as

32 Some of these will be dealt with later in the chapter. 33 The Voyage of Bran actually served as an inspiration for Yeats‘s The Shadowy Waters (Bramsback 33). 52 overcoming the ―bitterness‖ of the era Ireland was in.

Crossing the sea is depicted as timeless – the sailors on the ship are losing count of time and Oisín claims twice he does ―not know if days / or hours passed by‖ (19-20).

Interestingly, in both works there is a Christian motif of walking over the water, which points out to the omnipotence of the otherworldly beings, linking the Celtic Otherworld to Christian symbolism – Niamh‘s horse gallops over the sea; and in The Shadowy

Waters, the sailors claim that ―something that was bearded like a goat / Walked on the waters‖ (14) and bid their captain Forgael look for the Otherworld.34

According to James Lovic Allen, crossing the water is a predominant ―journey pattern‖ especially in connection to a trip to ―a paradise-like isle or shore‖, which is

Eden-like in certain respects (Allen 94). The Otherworld, and everything it can stand for outside the world of mythology, is somewhere beyond reach; and the water is a metaphoric division between the reality and the stage – whatever it may be – to which the character, the poet, the reader, and perhaps the whole nation are attempting to transcend. In The Shadowy Waters, Forgael is sailing across misty seas ―to seek / His heart's desire where the world dwindles out‖ (14) – the water being the barrier between his desire and the reality. When he speaks about his discontent with the real world and earthly love, he even uses the motif of water to express the distance he feels towards mortal women: ―When I hold / A woman in my arms, she sinks away / As though the waters had flowed up between‖ (The Shadowy Waters 19). The motif of a journey in

Yeats‘s work is ―the archetypal, mythic, or ritual journey, emblematic of man's course through life toward some ideal or transcendent goal‖ (Allen 93) and crossing water

34 Goats were considered fairylike animals; an example in the folklore is the Irish fairy ―pooka‖, having it‘s origin in the gaelic poc for ―goat‖ (Monagham 218). The goat-creature in The Shadowy waters could have been a messenger from the Otherworld, sent to Forgael by the Everliving. 53 seems to symbolize overcoming the barrier which hinders the move to a next stage;35 whether for an individual, or for the whole nation and its consciousness.

3.1.2. Otherworld as a realm beyond senses

Often in Yeats‘s work, the Otherworld is seen as a parallel co-existing reality which ordinary mortals cannot perceive. There are, however, ―points of exchange between the two worlds‖ – whether geographical sites, such as fairy mounds, islands, bogs or lakes; or temporal instances of liminality, mostly twilight, dawn or certain days of the year (Monaghan 289). Not surprisingly, the motif of twilight is very frequent in

Yeats‘s poetry of the 19th century; knowing that twilight was often seen as a touch point between the two worlds, the motif gives his poetry an otherworldly hue in general:

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh heart again in the gray twilight,

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. (―Into the Twilight‖ 1-4)

The above quoted excerpt comes from the poem ―Into the Twilight‖, in which the poetic persona, being tired and ―out-worn‖ in time, seems to be seeking refuge in an otherworldly reality, although the Otherworld itself is not mentioned throughout the poem. He is talking about Ireland in general, but it is a mystical Ireland, governed by nature; it is a place where ―the mystical brotherhood / Of sun and moon and hollow and wood / And river and stream work out their will‖ (10-12). Therefore Yeats creates an illusion in his poems that there are two Irelands – the world of the mortals and the

―mystical brotherhood‖ behind it.

35 The motif of sailing across the water to achieve some ―transcendental goal‖ recurred in Yeats‘s poetry even much later in his life. Whereas young Yeats was crossing seas to reach the Otherworld in his poems, older Yeats was ―Sailing to Byzantium‖ [italics added] to get rid of the ―tatter in its mortal dress‖ and be gathered ―into the artifice of eternity.‖ 54

This mystical world can be entered through some of the aforementioned liminal places, in folklore mostly the fairy raths; or just simply through being granted insight

(MacCana 124). Usually one can enter only when they are chosen – ―specially selected human beings whose destiny is the Otherworld‖ (Bramsback 47). The notion of being chosen is a tricky one – even though the Otherworld is described as a world of bliss, to mortals it seems strange and unknown and they usually do not want to be chosen; it is the fairies and inhabitants of the Otherworld who do the choosing, often against the will of the mortals. Sometimes the person who is taken away to the Otherworld dies in the world of the mortals – in The Celtic Twilight, Yeats retells a story of a beautiful woman,

Mary Hynes, who ―died young because the gods loved her‖ (45); or they might turn crazy – they ―are at times ‗away,‘ as it is called, know all things, but are afraid to speak.‖ (―Notes‖ to The Wind Among the Reeds 67).

The theme of a conflict between the Otherworld and the world of mortals is dealt with in a play by Yeats, first staged in 1894, The Land of Heart’s Desire.36 It is a work based on one of the most common folklore themes, in which Yeats grasps the essence of Irish imagination (Bransback 46, 59). On May Eve,37 a day of supernatural powers in folk tradition, a fairy child tempts a newly wed bride, Mary, to renounce the mortal world where she will ―grow like the rest; / Bear children, cook, be mindful to the churn‖ (29) and go with her, instead, to the ―Land of Heart's Desire‖,

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,

But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.‖ (28)

36 The version mostly analysed in the present thesis is the 1905 published version of the play, for being the original one, pertaining to the era which is dealt with here. However, Yeats later revised the play and, occasionally, the revised version from 1912 is quoted. 37 Beltaine, held on the first day of May, is one of the greatest Celtic festivals, which, traditionally, marked the beginning of summer, and used to be connected to fertility festivities (Monaghan 40-42). However, Christianity attributed to Beltaine a somewhat sinister character among the country people, as can be seen from the words of Bridget Bruin, the mother of the family, talking to the priest: ―For there is not another night in the year / So wicked as to-night‖ (Land of Heart’s Desire 1912). The concerns of country people were based on superstitions that ―the veil between the realms of the living and the dead is thought to be at its thinnest‖ and it was actually possible to pass to the Otherworld (Matson, Roberts 9). 55

The Otherworld is described as blissfully as may be, with the always recurring motifs of beauty, joy, endlessness, dance, the ―merrier multitude‖ (28) of divine beings; which are all motifs used also in The Wanderings of Oisin to describe the Island of the Living. In opposition to this, Yeats sets a world ―of drudgery and misery‖ (Bramsbäck 69), which does not allow dreaming – for, in the words of the priest, ancient legends Mary likes to read are but ―foolish dreams‖ – with gloomy prospects of growing ―old and bitter of tongue‖ (29). Further, the latter world is expressed in words that evoke the ordinariness of the life Mary lives, such as ―butter‖, ―eggs‖, ―fowl‖, ―churn‖. If she does not leave for the ―Land of Heart‘s Desire,‖ she will ―grow like the rest‖ – emphasising the lack of possibilities in the mortal world to transcend one‘s own conditions; losing any kind of individuality and just melding with ―the rest.‖ However, no matter how beautiful the

Otherworld is, the fairy child who is offering its beauties to Mary is depicted, in opposition to the priest, as the antagonist of the play, who tricks her way into the favour of the family. Therefore, she is able to lay her charms on Mary, so that she wastes away, dying in the mortal world, only to be led away into the ―the woods and waters and pale lights‖ (30); the combination of these three motifs – paleness, trees and water – often constitute Yeats‘s vision of the Otherworld.

Mary herself ―dreads and longs for the Otherworld‖ (Bramsbäck 59); although from the very beginning of the play she desires to ―dance / Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood‖ (8), she still longs to stay with her husband, whom she loves greatly, and she still clings to ―mortal hope‖ (30). The Otherworld is in its essence absolutely non- human, and the ambivalent attitude of most of the humans towards it stems from not being able to understand it and to identify with its inhabitants; for example, the pastime in the Otherworld is described in ways which cannot be associated with anything human:

Yet I could make you ride upon the winds,

Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,

And dance upon the mountains like a flame. (26)

The ―winds‖, ―tide‖, ―mountains‖ and ―flame‖ represent all the elements; the natural setting and the dynamic verbs used, such as ―ride‖, ―run‖ and ―dance‖, create the notion that the inhabitants of the Otherworld not only belong to the natural world, but are personifications and manifestations of the elements themselves; or perhaps incarnations of boundless passions, which is somewhat at odds with the milder human ways of seeing life.38

The reader, or the audience, may feel ambivalent about the ending; and so does

Mary – there is an ―and yet‖ in her decision to leave into the fairy world:

―I always loved her world—and yet—and yet—‖ (31)

The non-articulated doubts expressed by the dying young woman carry their emotional impact and strength in not being specified. Mary dies without revealing what she actually wants, and the focus of the play stays with the family; the reader, or the audience, do not follow Mary‘s journey to the Otherworld. This way, the veil is not drawn, and the Otherworld remains mysterious. All the reader gets is the description made by the fairy child, and an insight provided through Mary‘s daydreaming. The blissful depiction of the Otherworld as a heavenly place of many delights is at odds with

Mary‘s unwillingness, or even fear, to obey the tempting powers of the Fairyland. Yet even more so, when the reader realizes that it is Mary herself who evoked these powers; not only is she ―courteous to them‖ (10) – spreading primroses, in front of the door, and

38 Seeing the inhabitants of the Otherworld as incarnations of boundless passions can be supported by Yeats‘s explanation of the fairies‘ immortality in his essay ―The Untiring Ones‖ from The Celtic Twilight where he draws the contrast between human and fairy emotions. He actually ascribed their immortality to the possibility of having boundless emotions: we, mortal people, ―cannot have any unmixed emotions‖ and ―it is this entanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them.‖ Their lives consist of ―untiring joys and sorrows‖ and ―love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet‖ (Celtic Twilight 130). 57 giving them milk and fire,39 but she invokes them directly, calling them, moreover, by the expression ―faeries‖:40 ―Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house! / Let me have all the freedom I have lost‖ (15). The Otherworld, depicted through descriptions of great beauty, is a stage to which one should aspire; and the fact that the Otherworld is deeply rooted in Mary‘s own self – the child lays her claims on Mary using the words: ―I keep you in the name of your own heart‖ – even emphasizes the idea that everyone has their own Otherworld to which they might aspire. Yet the play also depicts human fear of transcending their own possibilities and the conflict between desire and fear.

Whereas the Otherworld conceived as a physical place is usually described by the mortal visitors, such as Oisín, the Otherworld conceived as an alternative reality is depicted through the eyes of the inhabitants of the Otherworld – mostly fairies, especially in literature based on folk beliefs. It is so in The Land of Heart’s Desire, where the fairy child is tempting Mary and describing the bliss of the world with the greatest possible beauty, but also in one of Yeats‘s earliest poems, ―The Stolen Child‖, dating back to 1886. The addressee of the first three stanzas is a child, lured from the human world by fairies. They describe nature and their life, depicting, in beautiful images, what he would gain if he went with them ―to the waters and the wild‖ (10). The last stanza forms a contrast by showing what he lost, having gone off with them. Some of Yeats‘s early poetry was criticised as ―attempts to deny civilization and its

39 The primroses were supposed to bring good luck to the household, if a ―golden path‖ was made in front of the door (9). However, ―the wind cried and carried them away; / and a child came running in the wind and caught them in her hands and fondled them‖ (10). Later the faery child spreads primroses at Mary‘s feet when laying charms on her. Yeats probably ―picked up this idea when collecting folklore in the West of Ireland‖ (Bramsback 63), but later he discarded the primrose symbol, and exchanged it for the much more common ―quicken bough‖, a tree closely associated with fairy lore and the Otherworld – either used for detecting witches, or for making magic rods to cast spells with (Monaghan 400). 40 In Ireland, fairies were never called by their real name, as it was considered dangerous, and naming them brought ill luck; they were usually referred to as ―good people‖, but often rather not mentioned at all, as the country people believed that ―the fairies are very secretive and much resent being talked of‖ (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 4). In The Land of Heart’s Desire, Bridget Bruin blames Mary for not obeying the tradition: ―You know well / How calling the good people by that name / Or talking of them over much at all / May bring all kinds of evil on the house‖ (14). 58 discontents by escaping to the Happy Island of Oisín or Tír na nOg‖ (Kiberd 103), but in this poem, as in The Land of Heart’s Desire, the Otherworld is not presented as an ultimate solution which would be undoubtedly positive, because the reader can realize what the ―stolen child‖ and Mary have to renounce – the latter losing her mortal love and the possibility to ―watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire / And feel content and wisdom in your heart‖ (13); and the ―stolen child‖ missing forever the peaceful cosy atmosphere of a mortal home.

Unlike The Land of Heart’s Desire, where the tension is created by the fairies having an adversary, such as the priest or the Bruin family, in ―The Stolen Child‖, the conflict is wound around the depiction of two worlds, both of which are appealing in unique ways:

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rats; (lines 1-5)

He‘ll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal chest. (lines 44-49)

Here the two worlds are not set against each other as in The Land of Heart’s Desire, but they overlap and co-exist in symbiosis. Still, they create a tension, expressed by a set of

59 dichotomies.

The basic obvious dichotomy of human vs. fairy incorporates other dichotomies

– the most evident is woods vs. the house with all its human details as the ―kettle‖ or

―the oatmeal chest‖. For the fairies, nature is their home; they live ―where dips the rocky highland of Sleuthwood in the lake‖, on the ―leafy island‖, or in the ―hills above

Glen-car‖ (line 29). This dichotomy, setting the house and the woods in opposition, can be noticed in The Land of Heart’s Desire too, where the Bruins‘ house is seen as a safe place of simple peace, whereas the world behind the door poses a threat, and the woods are obviously the abode of the fairies.41 It is worth noticing that when describing the nature which encloses the Otherworld, Yeats uses names of concrete places in Ireland.

This has a few reasons: firstly, the Revivalists saw Western Ireland as the ―repository of

Gaelic values‖ (Allison 61); by using concrete places Yeats stresses the Gaelic otherworldliness, but makes it more accessible and imaginable for people; secondly, he sees these points as ―meeting places, locations of cultural unity and energy, regenerative sources for his imagination and for the nation at large (Allison 56); thirdly, these concrete places are meeting points of imagination and reality and by attributing otherworldly values to these real places, Yeats is implicitly shoving Ireland towards transcendence – individual as well as national – and towards the mentioned cultural unity, which was, at that stage, still the imagined ideal; and fourthly, some of these places carry otherworldly connotations by themselves – they are ancient mythological sites or places mysterious in folk imagination and merely mentioning is enough to create associations concerning fairies or ancient gods.42 Therefore the nature of the

41 In the 1912 version of The Land of Heart’s Desire, the initial stage directions for Mary read: ―MARY BRUIN stands by the door reading a book. If she looks up she can see through the door into the woods.‖ Her position by the open door foreshadows the plot – she is obviously depicted as on the periphery of the worlds; she, as the only one of the family, has a view on the mysterious woods, and therefore the only one who can perceive the Otherworld. 42 Rosses, mentioned in ―The Stolen Child‖, is ―a sandy plain, covered with short grass‖, being a 60

Otherworld is the real nature of Ireland itself.

The above mentioned contrast is also connected to the dichotomy of wildness vs. domestication: animals mentioned in the first part are ―herons‖, ―water-rats‖ and

―trout‖43 whereas in the last stanza it is ―calves‖, which are tamed animals, and ―mice‖, animals often living among people. The fairy world clearly favours freedom, symbolized, among other things, by the animals mentioned; in contrast to people who are constrained by the ―world full of troubles‖ (line 22).

Another interesting dichotomy is chill vs. warmth. The coldness of the fairy world44 comes from the strong presence of water in this world; dew, lakes, streams are everywhere: ―wandering water gushes‖ (28), ―ferns that drop their tears‖ (line 36). Even the ―dim grey sands‖ (line 14) in the moonlight seem moist and cold. Water is seen by

Yeats as something singularly Irish – in The Celtic Twilight he claims ―that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image‖ (135); the Irish, living in a moist and rainy climate, got formed by their environment and water is one of the constituents of their identity. Therefore, it is but natural that the Otherworld oozes with water, which makes the Irish people associate

―mournful, haunted place.‖ When a person fell asleep there, their soul would be carried away and they would wake up ―silly‖, according to the folk beliefs observed by Yeats (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares, Commentary 13). Another famous otherworldly site in Yeats‘s poetry was Knocknarea, the grave of Queen Meave of the Sidhe (Yeats, ―Notes‖ to The Wind Among the Reeds 69) where, according to his Autobiographies, strange lights were appearing – Yeats himself as a boy saw a ―small light‖ climbing up the hill, which ―in five minutes it reached the summit, and I [Yeats], who had often climbed the mountain, knew that no human footstep was so speedy‖ (Autobiographies 96) Places fabled with legends like this completed the picture of the Otherworld and made it more real. 43 Moreover, all three mentioned animals have symbolic meanings tying them to the Otherworld in some way: heron being a bird which exists in ―several elements‖, became the bird to symbolize the Otherworld (Monaghan 245); water-rat itself has no special symbolic meaning – but it is close to an otter, which was an animal to whom ―powers of the Otherworld‖ were ascribed, and who, like men, lived in their own kingdoms and were ―virtually invulnerable‖ (Monaghan 371); the trout had a special rank among the fish of Ireland – Yeats includes among his Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry Samuel Lover‘s story ―A White Trout; a Legend of Cong‖ (43-45), in which a caught trout changes into a beautiful lady; in his notes to the story he claims that ―these trout stories are common all over Ireland. Many holy wells are haunted by such blessed trout‖ (45). Moreover, this motif reappears in his own poetry in ―The Song of Wandering Aengus‖ – the Master of Love Angus ―caught a little silver trout‖, who consequently changed into ―a glimmering girl‖ and left him hopelessly enchanted. 44 Yeats in his Autobiographies comments on his conscious effort to acquire a ―cold‖ style: ―I deliberately reshaped my style, deliberately sought out an impression as of cold light and tumbling clouds‖ (91); this is, it might be argued, the style in which the fairy world is described. 61 themselves with it. The motif of dew is also often connected to the Otherworld – in The

Land of Heart’s Desire, Mary wishes to dance ―deep in the dewy shadow of a wood‖

(8) and this adds to the chilly impression.45 Contrasted to this, the fourth stanza depicts the warmth of the human world with the ―warm hillside‖ and the boiling water in the kettle. The chill in the wet wild nature also brings about a kind of unquietness vs. peacefulness of the child‘s house, where the kettle ―sings peace into his breast‖ (47).

The fairies dance all night, and seem always in motion; ―unquiet dreams‖ (34) are mentioned; the water is ―wandering‖ (28); and even moonlight, which is usually something constant, comes in ―waves‖ (14). Dance is an important motif connected to the Otherworld – fairies never get tired of dancing (The Celtic Twilight 130). Generally, this unquietness, which is disturbing for the mortals, may be caused by the impression of constant motion; which can be also noted in other poems, especially in ―The

Unappeasable Host‖.

Still, the fairies possess a wonderful mysterious beauty, as opposed to the meekness of the human life; establishing another dichotomy, aestheticism vs. ordinariness. The images and colours are more exotic (―reddest stolen cherries‖ [italics added] (8), pools ―that scarce could bathe a star‖ (31), ―ferns that drop their tears‖ (36)), in comparison with the ordinariness of the images in the last stanza (―brown mice‖

[italics added] (48), ―oatmeal chest‖ (49), ―kettle on the hob‖ (46)). There is a strong aesthetic aspect about the Otherworld, which can send chills down the spine: ―Where the wave of moonlight glosses / the dim grey sands with light‖ (lines 13-14).

The last, but not least, important dichotomy, portrayed in this poem is abstract vs. concrete. The first three stanzas are much more vague and dreamy, while the last one is filled with little concrete details. The fairies‘ ―mingling hands and mingling glances‖

45 Sometimes the mysterious chill of the Otherworld is connected to paleness as well as to water – in The Land of Heart’s Desire, the fairy child is described in a beautifully chilling simile: ―Her face was pale as water before dawn‖ (10). 62

(line 18) is not a still image and presents the reader with difficulty of imagining it; it is a motion and a vague fleeing moment. The fairy world might be beautiful, but it is essentially empty for mortals. The verses ―to and fro we leap / and chase the frothy bubbles‖ (lines 20-21) probably express best the vagueness and dreaminess of the fairy world. The motifs of ―froth‖ and ―bubbles‖ invoke the feeling of something being hollow and unreal, as if the fairies were chasing just after an illusion which is not real.

Also, the motif of rushes surrounding the pools where the fairies live (line 30) supports the theme of the fairy-realm‘s emptiness – rushes are hollow from within. The abstractness is stressed by the distance and inaccessibility of the Otherworld. It is ―far off, by furthest Rosses‖ [italics added] (15); the repetition of ―far‖ moves the realm beyond human reach and gives it a fairytale-like quality. The appeal of the refrain uses just the words ―come away‖ (line 9), leaving the ―away‖ dreamy, abstract, and unearthly, beyond the scope of human understanding. Abstraction is the main feature of the Otherworld – it creates the hazy impression, and, thus, stresses the transcendental value of a dream that is to be achieved. Moreover, Celticism saw abstraction as one of the stereotypical characteristics of the Celtic nations, and, therefore, depicting the

Otherworld behind this misty veil of abstraction yet even more stresses its Celtic singularity. One of the most famous Celticists, Ernest Renan, quoted by Yeats in his essay ―The Celtic Element in Literature‖ claims that the Celtic race ―has worn itself out on mistaking dreams for realities‖ (qtd. in Yeats 1903, 270)46 – a prose image which

46 Abstraction was a theme much discussed by Yeats in his poems as well as essays. At the time when the ―The Stolen Child‖ was written, Yeats still held a positive attitude towards abstraction; he was exalting the ―Celtic passion for ‗abstract right‘‖ and the capability of having ―abstract emotions‖, as linked to the concept of ―Irish virtue‖ (Dwan, ―Abstract Hatred‖ 24), which made the Irish special and distinguished them from the other ―more successful, and practical races‖ (Yeats qtd. in Dwan ―Abstract Hatred‖ 24). Later, however, Yeats became famous for his negative attitude towards abstraction in nationalism and the capability of Celtic nations of abstract hatred; by 1909 he claimed that ―Ireland‖ was ―ruined by abstraction‖ (qtd. Dawn ―Abstract Hatred‖ 19). In his essay on J.M. Synge, he writes that in Ireland ―abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature‖ until minds in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds ―cry down natural impulse with the 63 corresponds to the poetic image of ―chasing frothy bubbles‖ (21).

The poem is told from the perspective of the fairies, so the Otherworld is presented initially as the ideal solution to escape troubles. The reader, however, has got a human perspective and reading the poem written in the first person from the point of view of fairies creates tension in them; and the reader moves on the brink of the real and supernatural. The poem itself, therefore, is a point of liminality; works like this were supposed to be the doors to the realm beyond earthly senses, carrying the reader off to the Otherworld.

3.1.3. General motifs in the poetry on the Otherworld

Having described the Otherworld in Yeats‘s work, next it would be suitable to point out a few recurring motifs which constitute Yeats‘s depiction of the Otherworld generally, whether it is seen as a physical place or a realm beyond senses.

The presence of peculiar light in combination with various colours is perhaps one of the most powerful tools for Yeats to create an unearthly impression. Yeats distinguished between the ―red flare of dreams‖ and the ―common light of common hours‖ (The Land of Heart’s Desire 9). This peculiar light can be created through the aforementioned twilight, or by using verbs and adjectives which imply any sort of shimmering and glossing – ―wave of moonlight glosses‖ (―Stolen Child‖ 13),

―glimmering waves‖ (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 314), ―midnights glimmer‖ (―The

Lake Isle of Inishfree‖ 7), ―gleaming bodies‖ (The Wanderings of Oisin III, 28 )‖,

―golden or silver skies‖ (―The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland‖ 21), ―softness came from the starlight‖ (The Wanderings of Oisin III, 72). Images filled with this otherworldly light evoke the impression of perfect beauty and the reader may thus feel the power of

morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea‖ and the defence of ―that what is so unreal‖ is making the patriots ―bitter and restless― (The Cutting of an Agate 150). 64 the Otherworld. Forest Reid argues – though originally the comment was meant to describe Yeats‘s prose, it may be well applied to some of his poems too – that through the dark atmosphere ―flame wild unearthly lights that lure the soul to its destruction‖

(Reid 132). He uses uncommon descriptions, similes and metaphors to carry the reader off to the Otherworld, as their unusualness strikes the reader‘s senses; such as ―drops of frozen rainbow light‖ (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 184) or ―the pale blossom of the moon‖ (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 288). In the former the combination of the motifs of drops, cold, colours, and light implied in the simile creates a mysterious beauty; whereas in the latter the word ―blossom‖ bestows the moonlight with a sense of flourishing, fragrance, and unearthly glamour.47

Another motif closely associated with the Otherworld is the sound of dripping, or drops in general. When Oisín and Niamh arrive to the Island of Forgetfulness, they hear ―dropping, murmurous dropping; silence and that one sound‖ (III, 18). The monotony of the dripping may be soothing to the soul – ―peace comes dropping slow‖

[italics added] (Innisfree, line 5). Hearing water dripping from the depths of the forest might create a mysterious atmosphere, and seem magical, especially when it is combined with a personification like the following: ―Leaning softly out / from ferns that drop their tears / over the young streams‖ (35-7). Perhaps the sound of dripping is also used because of the Irish rainy weather – yet another way how to distinguish the

Otherworld as particularly Irish; and at the same time, by drawing corresponding links between Ireland and the happy Otherworld, Yeats is embellishing the vision of Ireland and making it ―beautiful in the memory‖ (Yeats Autobiographies 126).

Related to the drops, dew is perhaps the most common motif in early Yeats‘s

47 Moreover, comparing the moon to a flower enables Yeats to introduce his favourite symbol of the ―Rose‖; which might give the moonlight a more mystical hue, taking into consideration the connotations Yeats‘s ―Rose‖ carries (even though the Rose did not become ―an increasingly complex symbol‖ sooner than in 1891 (Jeffares Commentary 22), two years after publishing of The Wanderings of Oisin), the reader might ascribe this mystical meaning to the ―blossoming moon‖, though originally unintentional. 65 poetry as such, especially in The Wind Among the Reeds. In his descriptions of the

Otherworld, this motif appears over and over, completing the image of wet cold shimmering beauty; on the Island of the Living, Oisín and Niamh walk through

―shadowy ways / Where drops of dew in myriads fall‖ (221-22); and in The Land of

Heart’s Desire the Fairyland is told to be ―deep in the dewy shadow of a wood‖ (8).

There is something magical about dew; it is water that appears every morning on the leaves and grass without any obvious reason such as rain – this might have been seen as somewhat supernatural in the past. Moreover, occult practices consider dew an important element – in alchemy it is a component related to the ―subtle form of the fire of nature‖ (Greer 132); all these connotations were probably known to Yeats and were made use of to create the Otherworldly character of his poems.48 He often combined the motif of dew, and all its magical connotations, with the other transcendental motifs, in order to strengthen the mysticism of his images: with the liminal twilight, to stress the vagueness between the two worlds, as in ―dew ever shining and twilight grey‖; and to reach beyond the earthiness, he uses expressions as ―dew-drowned stars‖ – by creating a link between dew and something as unreachable as stars, Yeats draws the unattainable far away stars closer to our world, and, at the same time, it gives a yet even more transcendental value to dew.

The last of the frequent motifs linked to the Otherworld in Yeats‘s work which will be given attention to, is that of birds. In his work around 1900 a wide variety of birds can be found, to which he attributes different symbolism (Bramsbäck 85). Birds had an important place in Irish mythology and folklore – they were often companions of goddesses, either as sinister, death foreboding images, or as messengers of joy

(Monaghan 46); the famous love god Aengus was closely associated closely with

48 Interestingly, in a passage in The Wanderings of Oisín, the love god Aengus compares in his song men‘s hearts to fiery dew, which stresses the transcendental value of dew, as something coming directly form gods: ―Men‘s hearts of old were drops of flame / that from the saffron morning came‖ (Book I, 276-7). 66 birds.49 In folklore a motif of a transformation of a soul into a white bird at the moment of death was common (Bramsbäck 86); this idea was used in The Land of Heart’s

Desire, where Mary‘s soul transforms into a bird as she dies. The Faery Child luring her, she is repeatedly referring to Mary as: ―White bird, white bird, come with me, little bird‖ (31).50 Yeats was aware of the cultural meanings attributed to birds, finding evidence in the oral lore of country people or in older Gaelic literature (Bramsbäck 85).

The connection to the Otherworld is obvious – either through the association with gods, or through the transcendental motif of the transformation of a soul into a bird. In The

Shadowy Waters, ―grey birds‖, which are men who died, serve as ―good pilots‖, calling

―from wind to wind‖ (21), showing him the way to the Otherworld. Birds are also the first creatures which Oisín and Niamh behold as they approach the Otherworld – ―round every branch the song birds flew‖ (180). The motif of birds seems to complete the vision of the Otherworld not only because of their mythological and folkloric meaning, but also through other themes they may represent. Birds are generally seen as unfretted and free; the Otherworld, too, is seen as a place where there ―is nor law, nor rule‖ (I,

282). The theme of freedom was, moreover, rather topical at the turn of the 20th century, when Ireland was aspiring to become a nation. Birds with their wings and flying towards the sky can also become a symbol of aspirations – trying to achieve something beyond one‘s current reach, transcending one‘s possibilities; and on a larger scale, the aspirations of Ireland as an independent nation.

49 The phrase ―birds of Aengus‖ appears in many Yeats‘s poems and works – among other, in The Shadowy Waters (41), or in the epic poem ―Baile and Aillinn‖, where they can be seen as patrons of love. According to the mythology, the birds ―that used to be with Angus were four of his kisses that turned into birds and that used to be coming about young men of Ireland, and crying after them (Lady Gregory 66). 50 The motif of a soul‘s transformation into a white bird is also used in a poem written to Maud Gonne, ―White Birds‖ – a love poem, in which he wishes to change into a bird together with his beloved, in order to escape the ―weariness‖ (5) and the ―fret of the flames‖ (11) of this world: ―For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!‖ (8). 67

3.2. Otherworldly beings

Having described the Otherworld and analysed its depiction in Yeats‘s poetry, now its inhabitants should be looked upon in more detail. Often it is them who are the cause of the mortal‘s entering the Otherworld, whether voluntarily, or against their will.

They act as mediators between the worlds and as psychopomps51 – leaders of mortal souls, helping them to reach out beyond the borders of their constrained lives.

3.2.1. Classification and description of the otherworldly beings

The expressions Tuatha Dé Danann, Sidhe and fairies all refer to the inhabitants

51 The word ―psychopomp‖ is not used in its narrow sense, understood from Greek mythology, as guides of souls into the Underworld after death, but also on a more general level – as guides to the Otherworld, or just to some other level of being, perhaps seeing it in a slightly Jungian way, who used the term to describe something within the self of a person – like an anima pointing ―the way to the highest meaning‖ (Jung 29), or the archetype of and old man, who is ―the enlightener, the master and teacher, a psychopomp whose personification…‖ (Jung 37).

68 of the Otherworld; but they have quite different connotations, even though their meanings overlap to an extent. As mentioned before, the Tuatha Dé Danann, ―The

People of the Goddess Danu‖, came to Ireland as the fifth invaders, which is described in Lebor Gabála Érenn, “The Book of Invasions.” They were a ―magical race‖

(Monaghan 457) who ―became skilled in the arts of druidry and magic‖ when living in the ―northern islands of the world‖ (MacCana 58). Having defeated the previous inhabitants of Ireland, Fir Bolgs, and the demon-like Fomorians, they ruled the island for nearly 3000 years, only to be subdued by the last invasion of the Milesians, or

Goidelic Celts, in the end. However, wielding many supernatural powers, they made the

Milesians agree to split Ireland – the Sons of Mil took the surface of the land, while the

Tuatha Dé Danann retreated to misty islands, bottoms of lakes, or fairy mounds

(Monaghan 457); or, according to Lady Gregory‘s Mythology, they ―chose out the most beautiful of the hills and valleys of Ireland for them to settle in; and […] put hidden walls about them, that no man could see through, but they themselves could see through them and pass through them‖ (Lady Gregory 61). Seen either way, this world of theirs became later known as the Otherworld, and the Tuatha Dé Danann, who created it, became known as the Ever-Living. In folklore though, the inhabitants of the Otherworld are rarely referred to as Tuatha Dé Danann – it is rather a scholarly term, found in

Gaelic texts and not commonly accessible in the 19th century. It was Lady Gregory‘s mythology Gods and Fighting Men which was probably the most influential book treating the Tuatha Dé Danann written in her times. Yeats himself, however, did not mention the gods often. The only one from the Dananns to get credit in Yeats‘s poetry is

Angus Óg, the aforementioned god of beauty and poetry (Monaghan 21), sometimes seen as the god of love (Matson, Roberts 3), who plays a role in many of Yeats‘s poems and dramatic pieces, being the patron of lovers and poetry.

When the Tuatha Dé Danann retreated into the Otherworld, they became known as the Sidhe (sídh, ―fairy‖ in Gaelic). Originally, sídh meant ―hill‖ or a mound that served as a passage to the Otherworld52 (Monaghan 419); and the people hiding in these mounds were referred to as Aes Sidhe, ―The People of the Fairy Mounds‖ (Monaghan

169). Eventually, the aes was dropped, and name of their dwelling became to denote the fairies themselves (Bramsbäck 49). Although sídh means fairy in Irish, the connotations of the word are more mystical than those of the word ―fairy‖, perhaps because there is a noble air about them – they are unearthly, beautiful and shadowy. Sometimes they are called ―the host of air‖,53 as ―they journey with the wind‖ (Yeats, ―Notes‖ to The Wind

Among the Reeds 65); the manner in which Yeats describes them in one of his prose stories implies a sense of mysticism and airiness:

And before them and beyond them, but at a distance as if in reverence,

there were other shapes, sinking and rising and coming and going, and

Hanrahan knew them by their whirling flight to be the Sidhe, the ancient

defeated gods. (Stories of Red Hanrahan 58-59)

The same ambivalence which enfolds the Otherworld can be also noticed when speaking, or writing, about the Sidhe. Sometimes they are depicted as a ―gay, exalting and gentle race‖ (―The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland‖ 20) with brows as ―white as fragrant milk‖ (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 204), emphasising their beauty and nobility; sometimes they are portrayed with neither positive nor negative connotations, yet in words which evoke a mystical sensation in the reader – showing them as essentially

52 Here is a nice example of the overlapping of history and mythology. These mounds were usually ancient man-made cairns, or passage tombs, from the pre-Celtic era (Matson, Roberts 102); it makes sense that the Tuatha Dé Danann, in mythology a pre-Celtic (pre-Milesian) people, would find their home in the burial tombs built by the pre-Celtic men in history. 53 Yeats asserts that he believes ―the host of air‖ and ―the host of the Sidhe‖ to be the same, but ―some writers distinguish between the Sluagh Gaoith, the host of the air, and Sluagh Sidhe, the host of the Sidhe, and describe the host of the air as of a peculiar malignancy (―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 78). 70 non-human, and beyond the mortals‘ comprehension because of their feelings connected to unearthly passion, which is outside of the human concepts of right and wrong – ―the wayward twilight companies / who sigh with mingled sorrow and content / because their blossoming dreams have never bent / under the fruit of evil and of good‖ (―To

Some I Have Talked by Fire‖ 6-9); and sometimes their portrayal is clearly dark, shadowy and sinister, stressing the connection of the Sidhe to death,54 or to baleful powers of nature, such as ―desolate winds‖ (―Unappeasable Host‖); one of the most tenebrous descriptions of them is expressed in the following simile, which presents their tendency to sometimes take over a mortal‘s soul: ―the dark folk who live in souls / of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees‖ (―To Some I Have Talked by Fire‖ 4-5).

They are not particularly interested in the world of people and rarely intervene into the world of the mortals (MacCana 65); usually they live their own lives, do not care for much attention, even ―resent being talked of‖ (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 4).

Moreover, ―if any one becomes too much interested in them, and sees them over much, he loses all interest in ordinary things‖ (Yeats, ―Notes‖ to Wind Among the Reeds 66) – sometimes just glancing upon their unearthly beauty is enough to become glamoured and drop the ―mortal dream‖ (―Hosting of the Sidhe‖ 5), renouncing hopes of happiness in the ordinary world; and being endowed with the dreams and desires of the immortal beauty of the world of the Sidhe:

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand,

We come between him and the hope of his heart. (―Hosting of the

Sidhe‖ l0-12)

Sídh is sometimes used synonymously to fairy, but the term ―fairy‖ encompasses

54 A ―battle among the Sidhe at a man's death‖ is said to be fought and that ―is the battle of life and death‖ (Yeats, ―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 101). 71 less mysticism, and is more general – it may refer to ―different beings of the

Otherworld‖ – the Tuatha Dé Danann (or sometimes referred to as ―Dannan children‖ in Yeats‘s work), elves (in the English diminutive conception of little pixies55), or even ghosts (Monaghan 167). Fairies in Yeats‘s work are ―more complicated and less human‖

– ―pretty and kind‖, yet ―lawless angels‖ who ―live in the elements of ―air, water, and fire‖ (Parkinson 26); very different from ―trumpety little English fairies‖ (MacNeice qtd. in Parkinson 25). Yeats tried to create a systematic classification of Irish fairies, which analysed types of fairies ―imaginatively rather than scientifically‖ (Bramsbäck

28).56 Yeats distinguishes between two types of fairies – the sociable fairies and solitary fairies (Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales 402). The most common of the sociable fairies are called also trooping fairies, or sheehogues; these are the typical Irish ―Good People‖ or ―Wee

Folk‖ (Yeats, Irish Tales 402; Monaghan 168), who live in fairy raths, steal children and sometimes act mischievously, but are otherwise ―on the whole good‖ (Irish Fairy Tales

403). The solitary fairies are, on the other hand, ―nearly all gloomy and terrible in some way‖ (Irish Fairy Tales 403) – perhaps the most famous is the Leprechaun and other similar spiteful creatures; the Pooka, described as a ―wild staring phantom‖, which takes forms of various animals and is ―only half in the world of form‖ (Yeats, Fairy and Folk

100); various water spirits, which are a kind of will‘o‘the‘wisps, and house spirits

(Yeats, Writings on Folklore 23); the Banshee, whose wailing is an omen of death

(Yeats, Fairy and Folk 113); and, finally, the Leanhaun Sidhe, one of the most important fairy figures in Yeats‘s work, who is the fairy mistress and muse of poets who become her slaves (Irish Fairy Tales 402-3).

55 Size of Irish fairies disputable – they are sometimes little, but often they are thought to be of human size, this feature being one of the main difference from the English fairies (Bramsbäck 28); Yeats explains this discrepancy about the fairies‘ size by the fact that ―everything is capricious about them, even their size‖ (Fairy and Folk Tales 12) and they often seem little ―when first seen, though seeming of common human height when you are once glamoured‖ (Writings on Folklore 20-21). 56 This classification was first published in 1889 in an article of his, ―Irish Fairies, Ghosts and Witches‖; later it constituted an appendix to his compilation Irish Fairy Tales from 1892. 72

The Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, also explain the origin of the fairies

– from the outlook of Christian peasants that they are ―fallen angels‖, not good, nor bad enough to be either redeemed or damned; from the more pagan view that they are ―gods of the earth‖, or, they are placed on one level with the Sidhe and the Tuatha Dé Danann, they are ―the gods of pagan Ireland‖, who, with the arrival of Christianity, ―when no longer worshiped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination and now are only a few spans high‖ (11).

In Yeats‘s times, the faith in fairies or the Sidhe was still widely spread among the peasantry of western Ireland. In his introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish

Peasantry, he actually stresses the fact that people believed in fairies in Ireland, whereas in England this faith has been long dead (3); thus using fairy lore as one of the self- fashioning tools, seeing it as purely Irish, un-English, and, therefore, as a distinctive feature of the Irish nation. However, Yeats was blamed that he was ―merely trying to bring back a little of the old dead beautiful world of Romance into this century of great engines and spinning jennies‖, when he claimed that the Irish peasant still believes in fairies (Yeats, Writings on Folklore 77). Yeats gathered his information from country people; he ―wandered about raths and faery hills and questioned old women and old men‖ when he ―was tired out or unhappy‖ (Autobiographies 96). Among these people, he mentions, in his writings, most often Paddy Flynn and Biddy Hart, who became to be viewed symbols of the peasant wisdom. He claims that in Ireland, ―no matter what one doubts, one never doubts the fairies‖ (The Celtic Twilight 8) – even when all other faith has failed, people still have the fairies to stick to. As for Yeats himself, in his Reveries of

Childhood and Youth, he explains how his emotional intuition reflected in his own faith in fairies: ―I did not believe with my intellect that you could be carried away body and soul, but I believed with my emotions and the belief of the country people made that

73 easy‖ (Autobiographies 96).

3.2.2. Themes of freedom, desire and uneasiness

When speaking about themes connected to the inhabitants of the Otherworld, and the motifs they are expressed through, it is impossible to draw generalizations – the motifs are sometimes very complex and express more than just one theme. Therefore, first the themes which are most closely connected to the Sidhe57 will be analysed; then the most recurring motifs in Yeats‘s work concerning the Sidhe will be dealt with on their own in a separate subchapter. Generally in folklore, as well as in Yeats‘s poetry, three themes are strongly connected to the inhabitants of the Otherworld – desire, freedom, and uneasiness. All of these themes were extremely topical in the late 19th century Ireland, which found itself in an age of transition, changes, and uncertainty about picking the right way take in order to achieve the desired outcome.

When describing the Sidhe, Dananns and fairies, their freedom and unfettered character is always stressed:

But we in a lonely land abide,

Unchainable as the dim tide,

With hearts that know nor law, nor rule,

And hands that hold no wearisome tool (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 337-

340)

The mention of the ―wearisome tool‖ clearly shows that the freedom of the Sidhe was also seen as liberation from the daily drudgery of the Irish people, for whom the vision of the Otherworld was an escapist fantasy from their ordinary lives; its inhabitants were happy because their hands were free of ―wearisome tools‖. In the above quoted excerpt,

57 Where the term Sidhe is used in the thesis, it is usually meant to denote the inhabitants of the Otherworld in general; it implies the Tuatha Dé Danann as well as the fairies. 74 boundless sea is used as the motif which expresses the theme of freedom – ―unchainable as the dim tide‖; but other accurate motifs, such as wind and dance recur in Yeats‘s poems. Generally, movement is important to express freedom – when speaking about the Sidhe, dynamic verbs are often used, and the poems seem to be, at all times, in restless fluttering motion. A good demonstration of this can be found in the poem ―The

Unappeasable Host‖, which is written in first person from the perspective of a mortal woman, while a host of the Sidhe is passing by. The whole poem is in motion; nothing is still, apart from the mortal woman, who is the speaker, and her child – therefore everything supernatural is on the move. If the reader makes a list of the verbs used in the poem, almost all of them express a somewhat violent circulation – ―ride‖, ―flies‖,

―calling‖, ―cry‖, ―hover‖, and ―beat‖, ―blow ‖,― shake‖; the Sidhe move freely at their will, and there is nothing to tie them up. Even their appearance shows them as unrestrained and free:

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart. (―The Hosting of the Sidhe‖ 7-9)

These three verses not only show the unfettered character of the Sidhe, through motifs of their unbound hair, heaving breasts, waving arms; but also a kind of ecstasy rooted in their freedom – the ―eyes agleam‖ and ―lips apart‖ indicate that the Sidhe indulge in their freedom to the point of rapture. Dishevelled hair is also a motif connected to fairies and the Sidhe which would express a degree of freedom; in the Land of Hearts Desire, the fairy child is described to have ―wild hair the winds have tumbled‖ (1912). In his notes to the first edition of The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats says about them that ―they are almost always said to wear no covering upon their heads, and to let their hair stream out‖ (―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 66), an image which emphasises the theme of

75 freedom in Yeats‘s work.

The other important theme connected to the Sidhe is that of desire. Yeats‘s early work is full of motifs which express desire – either spiritual (the desire of mortals for the immortal world, or for a kind of spiritual epiphany); or romantic – longing for immortal love. These are usually intermingled indiscernibly, and achieving one often entails achieving the other as well – this is the case of Forgael, who inseparably links love and the Otherworld; or the case of the fisherman in the poem ―The Man who

Dreamt of Faeryland‖; or Oisín and Niamh, Cúchulainn and Fand, and other such mythological couples. The Sidhe seem to be connected to ―vague desires and hopes‖

(Yeats, ―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 86) and their desire does not dwindle; it is

―the immortal desire of immortals‖ (―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 93). In The

Wanderings of Oisín, Yeats employs an interesting motif, which expresses an unfulfilled everlasting longing – Oisín and Niamh, while crossing the sea to the Otherworld, encounter two phantoms:

We galloped; now a hornless deer

Passed us by, chased by a phantom hound

All pearly white, save one red ear;

And now a lady rode like the wind

With an apple of gold in her tossing hand;

And a beautiful young man followed behind

With quenchless gaze and fluttering hair. (I, 139-45)

Yeats borrowed the motifs of the hornless deer and red-eared hound, who change into the lady and the young man, from the Gaelic poem by Michael Comyn (Alspach 852-

53). He adopted this shape-shifting motif to such an extent, that he used it later in another poem of his own ―Mongan Laments the Change that has Come upon Him and

His Beloved‖ – ―Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns! / I have been changed to a hound with one red ear‖ (1-2). The very motif of a hunt is a symbol of desire; and in his notes to the Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats claims that ―this hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man ‗which is for the woman,‘ and ‗the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,‘ and of all desires that are as these‖ (92-3). The image describes eternal unfulfilled desire; for anytime Oisín and

Niamh pass the sea, these two phantoms are chasing each other, never to achieve their goal. They are obviously otherworldly beings – white animals with red ears come from the Otherworld, according to Celtic folklore (Hemming 71); and they, apart from romantic desire, express the ―Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen.‖58 It reached beyond this world, and those who got overcome by this kind of desire, ―found no comfort in the grave‖ (―The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland 48). By giving such a great importance to the theme of desire in his early poetry, Yeats is definitely voicing his own romantic frustrations; yet he also makes it clear that this longing is not just his own, but it is a ―Celtic longing‖ – a general feeling of a nation, long deprived of welfare, which is striving to achieve liberty and peace. The Irish desire, whether it belonged to the mortal, or immortal world, helped the Irish to identify themselves with the Sidhe – a ―chosen race‖, who rejoice in spite of ―whatever ravelled waters rise and fall‖ (30-1); something denied to the Irish for centuries, being the subdued race, tossed and turned by the ―ravelled waters.‖

However, as already mentioned, the Revival was not homogenous – there was no agreed way to fashion the Irish identity (OCH 319), making the last two decades of the 19th century a turbulent period full of hopes and desires to achieve national and personal freedom; but leaving the nation quite uncertain about how they were to be

58 The desire connected to the Sidhe seems to be similar to that which Yeats described as characteristic of Rossetti‘s paintings, where ―the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire become wisdom without ceasing to be desire‖ (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 70). 77 achieved, and which is the right path to take. The fairies were to lead the way; however, in popular depiction, as well as in poetry, the fairies were shrouded in ambivalence. The uncertainty of the era may be reflected in the uncertainty and uneasiness about those who were to symbolise the transition into the new age. People feared and awed the

Sidhe, who were a mysterious race from beyond the realms of the mortal world; moreover, the Sidhe were capable of evoking in mortals contradictory feelings at the same time:

He heard while he sang and dreamed

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay. (―Host of Air‖ 9-12)

The fairy piper from the ―host of air‖ creates a feeling of ambivalence in the mortal listeners; in the same way nothing was black and white in the reality, and the contradictory feelings about many national matters were at place, as can be seen from

Yeats‘s bitter description of the era given in his Ireland after Parnell.

3.2.3. Motifs connected the Sidhe

To create the above described image of the Sidhe, and to express the aforementioned themes connected to them in tradition, Yeats used certain motifs more than others. Of these the perhaps most remarkable is the motif of the wind, which is connected to Ireland in general;59 the strong association of this motif and the Sidhe in

59 Moreover, wind is an extremely powerful natural force – associating it with Ireland gave the nation a sense of power. In ―The Unappeasable Host‖, wind is the chief symbol, not only representing the Sidhe, but also demonstrating the power of the mystical world: Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West; Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven and beat The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost. (7-10) The triple anaphora shows that wind is everywhere, being unbound and mighty. By not ending verse 9 with the object (―doors of Heaven‖), but with the predicate of ―desolate winds‖ (―beat‖), the enjambment 78

Yeats‘s work has its roots in folklore, according to which the Sidhe certainly have

―much to do with the wind.60 They journey in whirling winds‖ and ―when the country people see the leaves whirling on the road they bless themselves, because they believe the Sidhe to be passing by‖ (―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 65-6). The belief that

―The Sidhe are in the wind‖ can be noted in The Land of Heart’s Desire, when the wind carries away the primroses which were to protect the family, and the Bruins believe that it is the fairies who have taken them, and the child who ―came running in the wind‖(10).

Yeats uses the wind to symbolize desire, as he claims: ―wind and spirit and vague desire have been associated everywhere‖ (―Notes‖ to Wind among the Reeds 86). This ―vague desire‖ is something which is characteristic of Yeats‘s early poetry and is strongly linked to the Irish mind and spirit, as was pointed out before. An interesting combination of motifs is that of ―wind‖ and ―reeds‖ – both very typical of the Irish environment and scenery. The motif of ―the wind among the reeds‖ can evoke different feelings in the reader – it can conjure an image of a nation thrown about by circumstances, at the mercy of something powerful and unconcerned, but still able to withstand it, as the reeds withstand the gusts of wind; or, on the other hand, it might be taken into consideration that it is the wind that makes the reeds speak, thus, giving a voice to an otherwise dumb plant – it speaks out for a voiceless people, perhaps through the power of the Sidhe: ―The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits [. . .] lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds‖ (The Celtic Twilight

174). In The Land of Heart’s Desire the final fairy song ends by repeating what they

makes the Heaven and Hell seem relatively unimportant in comparison to the almighty strength of the wind. The wind even brings ―many a whimpering ghost‖ to the doors of Heaven and Hell, which makes it a kind of psychopomp. 60According to Yeats‘s notes, ―Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind‖ (65), but this is not verified otherwise.

―heard a reed of Coolaney say‖, when swayed by the wind.61 The very title of his most aesthetic collection (Jeffares, Man and Poet 106) is The Wind Among the Reeds, a term which Yeats associates with the poetry of Ireland. In the Celtic Twilight, he said about poems of an Irish peasant, that ―they, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds, seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen‖ (16). This longing is what enables the Sidhe in the wind to act as psychopomps on various levels – they are guides who lead the mortals to the ―land of heart‘s desire‖; whether that may be the Otherworld, or Ireland itself.

Another important recurring motif is that of a ―host‖. The Sidhe were often depicted as passing in groups, forming a host – ―the merrier multitude‖ or ―the Western host‖, being the expressions the fairy child uses in The Land of Heart’s Desire (28). The word ―host‖ carries a multitude of meanings, all of them applied in the poems and helpful to constitute the picture of the Sidhe: it can mean an ―army‖, originating in Latin hostis, ―enemy‖; or a ―host‖ can be someone who receives or entertains guests, from

Latin hospit, ―guest‖. This near-opposite double meaning expresses the ambivalence towards the Sidhe and fairies – looking upon them with slight mistrust, but accepting them as an inevitable part of the Irish tradition and of being Irish. For example, the title of a poem ―The Hosting of the Sidhe‖ offers a sinister image of an airy host passing by, but also implies that the Sidhe are inviting the mortals to join them. The word has yet another meaning: Eucharist bread, from Latin hostia – ―sacrifice‖. The ―host of the

Sidhe‖ are the gods of old, and the meaning of ―Eucharist‖ implied in the word ―host‖,

61 Giving an important voice to the nature of Ireland meant actually giving power to Ireland itself; as the Irish were considered to be closely connected to nature, as was said in the previous chapters. This connection is stressed in the juxtaposition of the ―reeds‖ and ―man‖ in the following verses: The wind is blowing on the waving reeds The wind is blowing on the heart of man. (The Land of Heart’s Desire 24) Both ―the waving reeds‖ and ―the heart of man‖, being objects of the sentence with the same construction, give the reader not only an impression of connection, but a vague sense of identification of the hearts of men and swaying reeds. 80 brings the old religion to the level of Christianity; for the Sidhe still have a refined place in the religious and metaphysical lives of the Irish – ―the unappeasable host / Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary‘s feet‖ (―The Unappeasable Host‖ 11-12).

Moreover, the etymology of the last meaning of the word, ―sacrifice‖, indicates that getting to know the Sidhe, and the acceptance of their world, requires a sacrifice of the joys of the human world. This can be seen in many poems, mainly in ―The Stolen

Child‖, ―Hosting of the Sidhe‖, or the in play The Land of Heart’s Desire.

To describe the past time of the Sidhe and to stress their unbound and free character, Yeats often uses the motif of dance. When Oisín and Niamh came to the

Island of the Living, they danced with the immortals, who ―danced like shadows on the mountains‖ (I, 388); Mary longs for a ―dance deep in the dewy shadow of the wood‖

(The Land of Heart’s Desire 8), in ―The host of Air‖, O‘Driscoll and his bride Bridget joined the ―faery‖ people for a dance before these carried Bridget away. This motif became increasingly important in Yeats‘s later poetry, expressing, according to Allison

Bate, something in Yeats, which is forcing him ―to attempt a creation of an art separate from everything heterogeneous and casual, from all character and circumstance‖ (Yeats qtd. in Bate 1217), connecting dance and eternity (Bate 1218);62 but already in his early poems it was connected to immortality and those who danced the ―wild and sudden dance‖ of the immortals, ―mocked at Time and Fate and Chance‖ (Wanderins of Oisin I,

291). Dance in folklore is depicted as being the favourite past time of fairies, who

―danced on and on, and days and days went by, and all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet never tired.‖ (The Celtic Twilight 131). Their dancing is described in a rather mystical and unearthly way:

We foot it all the night,

62 In Bate‘s essay, the expression ―association between dance and eternity‖ was used to describe a poem by Arthur Symons, but it might as well describe Yeats‘s conception of the dance metaphor. 81

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances (―The Stolen Child‖ 16-18)

In The Land of Heart‘s Desire, dance is used as a form of sorcery, when the fairy child

―dances, swaying about like the reeds‖ (24) and thus charms Mary – perhaps carrying out a kind of initiation rite of Mary to the Otherworld. Dance also symbolises passion; not in the restricted romantic sense of the word, but in much broader terms – it can evoke the feeling of a vague unearthly passion. In Rosa Alchemica, Yeats describes a mystical dance which was an initiation rite into a magical order: ―and every moment the dance was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened under our feet‖ (―Rosa Alchemica‖ in Stories of Red Hanrahan 222). This kind of passion also runs through the feet of the dancing Sidhe in Yeats‘s depiction of the otherworldly beings.

Another motif also connected to the unrestrained passion and sorcery of the

Sidhe, though not as dominant as that of ―dance‖, is the motif of ―fire.‖ In the

Otherworld, love is seen as an ―imperishable fire‖ (The Shadowy Waters 49), which emphasises the theme of eternal passion of its inhabitants. In the early version of The

Land of Heart’s Desire, the fairy child, after dancing and forming around Mary a barrier of primroses, kisses the flowers and makes them to turn into ―little twisted flames‖ (35).

The Sidhe are sometimes depicted in a fiery way – as a part of the ―embattled flaming multitude‖ (―To Some I have Talked by Fire‖ 10), which represents the transcendental unearthly powers in Ireland. In the ―Hosting of the Sidhe‖, Caoilte (who was originally a mortal hero, but probably achieved immortality by joining the Sidhe63) is ―tossing his

63 The character of Caoilte is somewhat problematic in mythology: according to some sources, he and Oisín were the only members of the Fianna to survive into the days of Christianity and talked to St. Patrick (MacCana 106) (this is told in the 12th century story Colloquy of Old Men; however, in Yeats‘s account of this story, the dialogue occurs only between Patrick and Oisín); the Celtic Encyclopaedia even hints that the two Fenian heroes got later merged into one, as Caoilte was displaced by Oisín in most of the later ballads (MacKillop); this, however, is at odds with Lady Gregory‘s Mythology, which was one of 82 burning hair‖ – Yeats explains this image in the notes to The Wind Among the Reeds, by retelling a legend of Caoilte‘s appearance to a king of Ireland years after his alleged death, while being ―a flaming man, that he might lead him in the darkness‖ (69)64. The motif of fire was important also because of the relation to the character of Irish people as it was seen back in the 19th century – ―as the most inflammable people on God‘s earth‖ (Taylor qtd. in Yeats, Autobiographies 283). Depicting the Irish as fiery and inflammable, while attributing these very qualities to the Sidhe, might have worked as a means of self-fashioning; Yeats was creating national identity by remaking Irish people into ―mystic Celts‖ (Cairns, Richards 67).

The last motif related to the Sidhe, particularly important for Yeats as an artist, is that of a ―voice.‖ The voices of the Sidhe are the inspiration for the artist; the

―everlasting voices‖, who talk to the mortals ―in birds, in wind on the hill, / in shaken boughs, in tide on the shore‖65 (―Everlasting Voices‖ 6-7). In The Land of Heart’s

Desire, the voices of unseen beings speak the last words in the play, and continuously repeat what can be seen as Mary‘s verdict, ―the lonely of heart is withered away‖ (17,

33). But The Land of Heart’s Desire is not the only work in which Yeats stresses the importance of voices at the moment of someone‘s death; in the short story ―The Death of Red Hanrahan‖, the poet Hanrahan is embraced by a woman of the Sidhe, who claims to be one of the ―one of the lasting people, of the lasting unwearied Voices‖

Yeats‘s most likely sources – for Caoilte is introduced as a unique member of the Fianna and his adventures are described at length, side by side with the adventures of Oisín. When he was old ―he went into a hill of the Sidhe to be healed of his old wounds. And whether he came back from there or not is not known; and there are some who say he used to be talking with Patrick of the Bells the same time Oisín was with him. But that is not likely, or Oisín would not have made complaints about his loneliness the way he did‖ (Lady Gregory Gods and Fighting Men 291). 64 The image of ―Caoilte tossing his burning hair‖ also comes from Lady Gregory, as in her book, the mentioned account of Caoilte‘s appearance to the king is present and he is described as the ―very tall man, that was shining like a burning flame‖ (291). 65 In an essay ―The Golden Age‖ in The Celtic Twilight there is a prose passage which corresponds to these verses: ―The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle‖ (174). 83

(Stories of Red Hanrahan 76). The significance of the motif of a voice is brought about by the fact that the poet, inspired by the voices of the Sidhe, is a voice himself, inspiring the nation.

3.3. Transcendence

The two previous chapters have dealt with the Otherworld and its inhabitants, who act as psychopomps, leading the mortals towards transcendence; here, the act of transcendence itself, aided by the otherworldly beings, will be looked upon. In Yeats‘s writings there are various instances in which the fairies, or the Sidhe, act as psychopomps to human souls and accompany them to a next stage of their being. There are various types of psychopomps and transcendence to be noticed in folklore, as well as in Yeats‘s work, and a few categories can be drawn; yet it is impossible to clearly

84 discern between them, as they often overlap.66

3.3.1. Death

As already mentioned, the Sidhe were often connected to death. In Yeats‘s time a legend existed in Western Ireland, that ―a battle over the dying‖ was fought ―between the friends and enemies of the dying‖ among the Sidhe (―Notes‖ to Wind Among the

Reeds 100).67 The fairy most closely linked to death in Irish folklore is probably the banshee (bean sidhe – Gaelic for ―woman fairy‖). Banshees are categorised as solitary fairies; though Yeats claims that, perhaps, a banshee is ―a sociable fairy grown solitary through much sorrow‖ (Irish Fairy Tales 405). Appearing sometimes as hags and sometimes as beautiful women (Monaghan 34), they often foretell a person‘s death by wailing in grief or clapping their hands (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 113). The more respectable and brave the dying person was, the more keening voices of banshees‘ lamented over him; therefore, the cry of a banshee often stressed the factor of dead person‘s greatness in praise poetry, as can be seen from the poem by Clarence Mangan, published in Yeats‘s compilation of Irish fairy tales:

There was lifted up one voice of woe,

One lament of more than mortal grief,

Through the wide South, to and fro,

For a fallen Chief. (―A Lamentation‖ ll. 1-4, in Fairy and Folk Tales 117)

66 Overlapping and inconsistency is a typical phenomena in Celtic mythology – the Celts had no ―clear differentiation of divine functions‖ (MacCana 23) and their deities roles overlapped. 67 He also provides the reader with an examples from living folklore: ―I have heard of the battle over the dying both in County Galway and in the Isles of Arann, an old Arann fisherman having told me that it was fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he had for keeping fish, when it was over.‖ 85

However, the banshee is ―a folkloric rather than literary character‖ and did not occur in

Irish literature before the 17th century (Monaghan 34). In Yeats‘s work she appears in different forms – as various fairies who bear certain characteristics of a banshee.

In The Land of Heart’s Desire, the fairies singing outdoors bear certain accepts of a banshee, as their song about how ―the lonely of heart is withered away‖ foreshadows Mary‘s death. After she dies, the song of the fairies ―is taken up by many voices, who sing loudly, as if in triumph‖ (33). The fairies‘ singing accompanies her through her death and presumably leads her to the Otherworld. Such a companion in death is also the character Winny Byrne from the short story ―The Death of Hanrahan‖

(The Stories of Red Hanrahan). Winny is an old beggar, whose wits were stolen by ―the

Others, the great Sidhe‖ (67-8), and she tends the poet Owen Red Hanrahan during his last illness in her hut. In the moment of his death she embraces him:

And then there came out of the mud-stiffened rags arms as white and as

shadowy as the foam on a river, and they were put about his body. (75)

As he is dying, he marries one of the lasting people, who dwells in Winny‘s body, and he can see lights which sometimes seem like a ―wisp lighted for a marriage, and sometimes like a tall white candle for the dead‖ (76). The image of the flames, which are lighted at a marriage as well as at a funeral, strengthens the connection between the end of life in the mortal world and the new beginning in the Otherworld, where Owen

Hanrahan‘s soul has probably departed, after having joined Winny.

This short story is probably the best prose account of the gradual transmission into the Otherworld through death which can be found in Yeats‘s work. At first, it seemed to Red Hanrahan that he ―was beginning to belong to some world out of sight and misty‖ (65); he moved on the edge of the worlds, somewhere between dream and reality because ―sometimes he would hear coming and going in the wood music that

86 when it stopped went from his memory like a dream‖ (65). Then ―once in the stillness of midday he heard a sound like the clashing of many swords‖ (65), which is the above mentioned battle between the friends and enemies of a man who ―is near his death‖

(70). At night he heard ―the faint sound of keening‖ (65), which would be the banshee, and the sound of ―frightened laughter broken by the wind‖ (65-6); and to show, that it is the Sidhe who lead the way and act as psychopomps, Hanrahan saw ―many pale beckoning hands‖ (66). Later, in Winny‘s house, he heard ―voices, very faint and joyful‖

(72-3) and he knew that the room was filled by ―some [beings] greater than himself‖

(72) who had ―all power in their hands‖ (72). The short story follows, step by step, a death of a person, looked upon from a folkloric and at the same time mystical point of view.

In Yeats‘s poetry, ―The Unappeasable Host‖ is definitely noteworthy, as for dealing with the theme of transcendence through death. In this vague poem, the fairy and the human worlds overlap in the approach of death, while a host of the Sidhe passes by. Being written from the subjective perspective of a woman narrator, the reader does not learn whether all this is really happening or whether it is just a vision and some kind of a mystical experience of the dying woman:

The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,

And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,

For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,

With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:

I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,

And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me. (1-6)

The theme of death is present through various motifs such as the ―narrow graves‖,

―heart fallen cold‖; and, in connection to the Sidhe, the motif of clapping hands is

87 important – as already mentioned, according to Yeats‘s explanatory chapters in The

Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, banshees clap their hands to foretell a person‘s death. The whole poem is written in a mystic tone, belonging to the supernatural world.

Only the verse ―I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast‖ (5) seems to be rooted in the real world; everything else is somewhat veiled and vague. The poem is also based on iteration of contrasting concepts, which creates certain bipolarity. The double vision of the world as the human and the supernatural is expressed by pairs of contrasting words and images, which represent also the contrast between life and death: such as

―laugh – wail‖, ―cradles – narrow graves‖, ―clap their hands together – press my child to my breast‖68. The contrast is also reinforced by the repetition of the word ―child‖ in the expressions ―my wailing child‖ and the ―Danaan children‖ – the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Therefore the same word ―child‖ refers to the vulnerable wailing being, and to the

Sidhe, who, perhaps, have the life of the ―wailing child‖ in their hands. The host of the

Sidhe, in this poem, with all their beauty and charm, are the guides of souls; and in the moment of death, Christian belief is displaced by old Celtic myth, because ―The unappeasable host / is comelier than candles at Mother Mary‘s feet‖ (11-12).

3.3.2. Kidnappers

Another type of psychopomps among the fairies, or the Sidhe, are the kidnappers. They usually carry away a child, or a newly-wed bride, whom they fancy – in Yeats‘s poetry and drama, the subject is dealt with in ―The Stolen Child‖, ―The Host of Air‖ and the Land of Hearst‘s Desire. In an essay ―Kidnappers‖, published in Celtic

Twilight, Yeats displays folk stories he gathered, which talk about people who were carried away. The poem ―The Host of Air‖ is based on one of these stories – a young

68 The last pair of images is not exactly contrasting, but the first image expresses joy, while the second evokes the feeling of anxiety; therefore arousing contrasting feelings. 88 man, O‘Driscoll, joins a merry company among whom is his bride, ―with a sad and a gay face‖. While he is engaged in playing cards with them, the company is suddenly

―gone like a drifting smoke‖ and carrying off his bride. In the story published in Celtic

Twilight, the young man rushes home, only to find his bride dead; and in original version of the poem, the last stanza was more explicit:

He knew now the folk of the air,

And his heart was blackened by dread,

And he ran to the door of his house;

Old women were keening the dead. (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares, Commentary)

It may be just the soul which is stolen, after death – ―when it has left the body, it is drawn away, sometimes, by the fairies‖ and ―such souls are considered lost‖ (Yeats,

Fairy and Folk Tales 131). Or sometimes, when the fairies carry off a mortal, they leave

―some sickly fairy child‖ instead, or ―a log of wood, so bewitched that it looks like a mortal pining away, and dying, and being buried‖ (Fairy and Folk Tales 55). They take away the body and soul and ―the dead body was but an appearance made by the enchantment of ‗the others‘, according to country faith‖ (Yeats, ―Broken Gates of

Death‖ in Folk Writings 176). This ―country faith‖ is demonstrated in The Land of

Heart’s Desire, where Bridget warns Mary‘s husband to keep away from her body, because the fairy child has not only taken Mary‘s soul, but her body as well, leaving

―nothing, but a dead image behind‖ (Bramsbäck 89):

Come from that image: body and soul are gone.

You have thrown your arms about a drift of leaves

Or bole of an ash-tree changed into her image. (32)

But the kidnappers need not be connected with death – they can steal a child or a new-wedded bride and keep these mortals to live among them in the ―bloodless land of

Faery‖ where, according to folk beliefs, mortals are ―happy enough, but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour‖ (The Celtic Twilight 118). Or, perhaps, the soul can be carried off, leaving the body untouched, yet without wits – there are places where one should not sleep, for there is a possibility that if they do, they ―may wake silly‖; such as the aforementioned Rosses point (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares 1968, 13), or fairy raths. In the ―Death of Red Hanrahan‖, the Sidhe stole Winny Byrne‘s wits ―one

Samhain night many years ago, when she had fallen asleep on the edge of a rath‖ (The

Stories of Red Hanrahan 68); and one of the Ever-living found dwelling in her body.

Perhaps the contact with the Sidhe, and the transcendental value of their madness, is what gave ―the fools of the Celtic stories‖ wisdom ―that was above all the wisdom of the wise‖ (―Notes‖ to Wind Among the Reeds).

The most famous kidnappers in Yeats poetry are the fairies in ―The Stolen

Child‖. Their voice resonates throughout the poem, but it is most distinctly heard in the refrain:

Come away, O human child,

To the waters and the wild,

With a faery hand in hand

For the world‘s more full of weeping than you can understand. (9-12)

The verses sound rather theatrical and convey a really strong appeal. One wonders, whether the child even has a chance to say ―No‖. A very strong contrast between the human child and the fairies is present. The rhyme ―child-wild‖ is somewhat expected,69which makes the refrain easy to remember; and, together with the regular rhythm, it sounds almost like an incantation. However, the tone changes in the fourth stanza and the last refrain. It is still spoken by the fairy, but the addressee shifted from

69 As one of Yeats‘s favourite rhymes, it connects the child to its natural surroundings (Kiberd 102). 90 the child to someone third – there is no more the necessity to lure him, since the fairies have triumphed and are leading him away: ―Away with us he‘s going, / the solemn eyed‖ (lines 42-3). Also, the minor chances in the last refrain make a great difference, as for the effect it has:

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

From a world more full of weeping than he can understand. (lines 50-53)

The final refrain is less dramatic and theatrical. It is no longer an appeal and there is no argumentation, which is expressed by the change of ―for the world‘s more full of weeping‖ to ―from a world more full of weeping than he can understand.‖ The child is stolen, nothing can be done about it, and the world will stay the same as it was, for those who remain – still ―full of weeping.‖ Moreover, the very last verse seems to imply that also the child‘s departure will cause the weeping mentioned in the poem, but he will be no longer touched by it; for he has gone beyond the scope of the human world.

3.3.3. Art and love

Another important instant of fairies or Sidhe acting as psychopomps in mythology, particularly important for Yeats, are the stories of people who achieve transcendence through art or love. It can be transcendence to a physical Otherworld, such as that of Oisín, but it can be just an insight to the world of art, or being changed through love. Depicting psychopomps like this means seeing them more on the metaphorical level – many a time they lead the souls to a different stage of knowledge and being. Art and love are connected in the figure of the Leanhaun Sidhe (Gaelic for

―fairy mistress‖) – a fairy who seeks love of men and becomes their muse, giving

91 inspiration to the poets who, however, pine away under her influence. According to

Yeats, ―most of the Gaelic poets, down to quite recent times, have had a Leanhaun

Shee‖; they die young and are carried to the Otherworld, ―for death does not destroy her power‖70 (Fairy tales 404-5). The theme of a poet under the power of a Leanhaun Shee is treated by Yeats in many of his narrative works; his poet-heroes, for example,

Michael Hearne from the Speckled Bird, but most notably, Owen Red Hanrahan, must experience some kind of epiphany or transcendence to become real poets. A Yeatsian poet-hero is described as ―solitary, contemplative, an outcast in search of ineffable experience, a doomed wanderer and exile in search of eternal beauty‖ (Hirsch 59) and this eternal beauty comes to him as a fairy mistress, who is for Yeats ―both the muse of the Gaelic poet and an emblem of the deep cost to the romantic artist‖ (Hirsch 61).

However, the Leanhaun Shee ―is simultaneously life-giving […] and life-denying‖

(Hirsch 61), and she leads them to their moment of epiphany and transcendence at the cost of renouncing the human world.

In the poem ―The Hosting of the Sidhe‖, a whole host of unearthly beautiful beings are the inspiration of the poet and therefore act as psychopomps, guiding his soul into and through the world of poetry. However, they have a similar effect as the

Leanhaun Shee has on those who ―gaze on‖ their ―rushing band‖ (10) – they come between ―him and the deed of his hand‖ and ―him and the hope of his heart‖; thus bereaving him of the mortal hopes of happiness in this world, but replacing them with a sense of beauty:

―The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,

And where is there hope or deed as fair?‖ (13-14)

70 This can be compared to the desire of ―The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland‖, who also wanted to find love and beauty in the Otherworld – and he never escaped the desire; ―he found no comfort on the grave‖ (48). 92

In this evaluative conclusion carried out by the speaker of the poem, he seems to imply that they are so beautiful, that it might be worth sacrificing human happiness

(satisfaction with the human life and world) for the ideal of beauty towards which they could lead his soul. The host of the Sidhe has given the speaker his poetic abilities, but there is a price to be paid: the Sidhe interfere with his human life, and ―to attain this immortal beauty in a single timeless moment the Yeatsian hero must leave the time- bound human world for the supernatural otherworld‖ (Hirsch 62).

The Leanhuan Shee is often connected to death, as Winny Byrne is, in the last story from the Stories of Red Hanrahan – as the poet is dying, she enters into a kind of mystical marriage with him, and, being one of the ―lasting unwearied Voices‖ (76), she is also his muse, who was with him throughout his life, but whom he was still seeking; when she reveals herself, she whispers to him: ―You will go looking for me no more upon the breasts of women‖ (75). In this case, the poet hero ―must die a physical death in order to attain the irreducible and indefinable mystified essence‖ (Hirsch 63).

However, this need not be always the case; the transcendence through art and love may be only metaphorical, as mentioned before. It is concerned mainly by the ―hero's spiritual growth and development‖ and ―his developing faith in a higher, invisible level of being‖ (Hirsch 52).71

Yeats‘s concern with the theme of transcendence though art and love, enabled through a relationship with a fairy muse, definitely has much to do with his own romantic obsession with Maud Gonne. In his eyes, she was the incarnation of the

71 In the poem ―Fergus and the Druid‖, the Ulster king Fergus pursues this ―higher, invisible level of being‖. He gives up his crown , seeks wisdom and experiences his own personal transcendence by unloosing ―the cord‖, opening a ―little bag of dreams‖ which ―wrap‖ him ―round‖ and give him insight he did not have before. 93 immortal beauty of the Sidhe;72 he stressed her godlike character in his autobiographical writings as well as in his poetry:

With a beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern? (―No Second Troy‖ 8-10)

He gives her attributes which could easily be used to describe one of the Tuatha Dé

Danann. She, by ―being what she is‖ (No Second Troy 11), became his psychopomp, carrying his soul helplessly away, and becoming an inspiration of much of his poetry; in

The Wind Among the Reeds she is the most frequent object and addressee of his love poems, which are full of unyielding devotion. This, together with the Celtic imagery and choice of the motifs, creates a transcendental impression:

And therefore my heart will bow, when dew

Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,

Before the unlabouring stars and you. (―He Tells of the Perfect Beauty‖

6-8)

Maud was well aware of being Yeats‘s muse. In her autobiography, she recorded a dialogue with Yeats, where she says: ―The world should thank me for not marrying you‖ … ―because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness‖

(Jeffares, Man and Poet 113). Just as the Gaelic muse Leanhaun Shee, Maud ―is an emblem of the poet's necessary fatal attraction to the predatory muse‖ (Hirsch 61), who enables him, through love, to move to a different, and higher, stage of being.

3.3.4. Metaphor of transcendence of the nation

72 Yeats‘s description of Maud manifests his view of her as the very ideal of the Otherworldly beauty: ―I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the bloom of apples … and stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were works of grace … she seems like a goddess.‖ (Yeats Reader)

All these mentioned forms of transcendence symbolize the transfiguration of an individual and their reaching out for new possibilities. But Yeats is also concerned about transcendence on a broader level in his world – ―the quotidian social world‖ changing

―into a higher invisible or supernatural realm‖ (Hirsch 56), which symbolizes the transcendence of the whole nation.73 At the end of the 19th century, Ireland, tackling with a political crisis, badly needed a guide who would lead it towards independence or

Home Rule. Literature was to become the mediator between the reality and the desired outcome. This idea was already discussed in the chapter on the role of art in Ireland – art itself has an otherworldly character, as it transcends time and links the past, presence and future. Therefore, not only the Sidhe, depicted in literature and mythology were psychopomps, who symbolically lead Ireland to transcendence and national consciousness, but Yeast‘s poems as such could be considered the guides of souls, leading the readers to a kind of, whether individual or national, transcendence.

However, Yeats, being a mystic, went even further and practised a kind of sorcery through his poems. The poem ―The Secret Rose‖ is an invocation of something great which is to come. He ends the poem with words:

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose? (31-2)

One must keep in mind that the Rose, among other things, symbolises also Ireland.

Here, it is some great revelation, either for the world, for Ireland, or for Yeats himself.

What is interesting, is what led to these final culminating words – the greater part of the poem, Yeats is remembering episodes from Irish mythic past, which are enfolded in the

73 This is not just the transformation of the mundane world into the Otherworld in literature – in one poem, Yeats describes an apocalyptic vision of a world where ―the day sinks, drowned in dew / Being weary of the world‘s empires, bow down to you, / Master of still stars and of the flaming door‖ (―The Valley of the Black Pig‖ 5-8). Yeats comments on the poem, asserting that Irish peasants, those ―who still labour by the cromlech on the shore‖ (4), ―have for generations comforted themselves, in their misfortunes, with visions of a great battle, to be fought in a mysterious valley called ‗The Valley of the Black Pig,‘ and to break the last power of their enemies. (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares Commentary 69). This, too, is a transformation of the whole society into something grander, even if mysterious and sinister. 95

―great leaves‖ of the Memory of the World. Therefore, on a level of mysticism and sorcery, the combination of mythology and poetry can bring some great revelation – it is though the ancient stories mentioned in the poem, that Yeats invokes the ―Secret Rose‖.

He himself is the psychopomp, the leader of souls, the magician who though his art encourages the rose to bloom once again:

Come near; I would, before my time to go,

Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:

Red Rose, prod Rose, sad Rose of all my days. (―To Rose upon the Rood

of Time‖ 22-4)

4. Conclusion

The main purpose of the thesis was to demonstrate how national identity can be constructed through literature, and, particularly, how the use of certain motifs and themes in Yeats‘s poetry supports the process of Irish self-fashioning. As the Irish identity, to a large extent, depended on the people‘s adherence to their racial Celtic substrate, and on differentiating themselves from the English, the Revival literature, which strove to support the self-fashioning process, turned to ancient myths and Celtic elements. Further, the thesis argued that the theme of transcendence in poetry symbolized the metaphorical transcendence of the Irish, who were reaching towards liberation.

The motifs Yeats chose to employ in the analysed works were closely connected to the Irish folk imagination of the 19th century; apart from the theme of mystic transcendence, the choice of the motifs points to themes topical in Yeats‘s times and related to the strives of the 19th century Ireland: desire, freedom, aspirations, insecurity, and vision of happiness.

The motif of the Otherworld conveyed solace for the country people, who saw in it the vision of happiness. Moreover, the personal journey of a hero who reaches the

Island of the Blest can bear parallels to the journey of the Revivalists to reach the

―imaginary Ireland‖ (P&T), which would be independent. This symbolic value of the

Otherworld is supported by the use of images which are typically Irish – apart from the fact, that as a physical place it is usually an island, the use of mist, weater, dew, drops, birds is extensive, all of these being motifs connected to Ireland. The implicit identification of the Otherworld and Ireland is yet strengthened by the fact that the

Otherworld actually is in Ireland; it is the ―other‖, unseen, mystical part of the country,

97 which gives Ireland as such a whim of glamour and nobleness.

The other dominant motif in Yeats‘s Celtic poetry is represented by the Sidhe.

They are the inhabitants of the Otherworld, and, being able to pass in and out of their invisible realm, they have also become the mediators between the two worlds.

Therefore, it is they who enable the aforementioned transcendence. As is the case with the Otherworld, the Sidhe, too, are connected to sub-motifs such as wind, dance, and fire, which express themes of desire and freedom. Their very appearance, with their loose hair, unearthly beauty, unfettered character and unpredictable behaviour, reflects the very themes important in the revivalist literature.

The Sidhe act as psychopomps, leading the mortals into the Otherworld; whether through death, kidnapping, love, or art. The figure of a psychopomp became increasingly important in the late 19th century, because, as mentioned, the transcendence to the Otherworld could be seen as a metaphor: in the real world it corresponded to the transcendence of a subdued nation into the Irish nation; a process in which art, in this case particularly poetry, played the role of the psychopomp. Or, perhaps, poems could be seen as the aforementioned liminal places – the ―points of exchange‖ (Monaghan

289) between the two worlds and the gateways into the Otherworld. Then it would be the poet himself, who would be the psychopomp, guiding his readers‘ souls towards finding their own national identity; which certainly was one of Yeats‘s ambitions.

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Résumé

The thesis offers an insight into the early poetry, drama and prose of William

Butler Yeats, focusing on the Celtic elements. These, in the late 19th century, were meant to aid the process of so-called self-fashioning – in Ireland, as in this present thesis, the term is used to denote the formation a national identity, or sense of the national self. The work is divided into two major parts: the theoretical, where the historical and cultural background is briefly outlined; and the analytical, which deals with certain motifs in Yeats‘s work.

The first, theoretical part, deals first with the historical development of the era and the events that lead to the formation of the Irish Literary Revival. Then the work moves on to the exploration of the process of self-fashioning. Mythology and folklore have proved to be an essential base for this process and the Irish Literary Revival leaned on myths exceedingly. The second part analyses Yeats‘s poems and searches in them for

Celtic elements. The theme which is analysed in greatest detail is the theme of transcendence in mythology, and therefore, the motifs like the Otherworld and the Sidhe

(fairies) are paid most attention to in the thesis. Some poems, or parts of poems, are subdued to close-reading, which has shown how tightly the theme of transcendence is tied to the strivings of the Irish for personal, as well as national freedom.

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Resumé

Práce je zaměřena na ranou poezii, dramata a prózu Williama Butlera Yeatse obsahující Keltské prvky. Ty v 19. století napomáhaly snahám o takzvané sebeurčení. V

Irsku, jak v mé práci stojí, se tento termín používá k označení vznikání národní identity nebo pocitu sounáležitosti národa. Práce je rozdělena na dvě části: teoretickou část, kde je krátce načrtnuta historie a kulturní pozadí tématu, a analytickou část, jež se zabývá určitými motivy v Yeatsových dílech.

První (teoretická) část pojednává o historickém vývoji oné éry a o událostech, jež vedly ke vzniku Irského literárního obrození. Dále v práci zkoumám proces sebeurčení. Folklór a zejména mytologie se prokázaly být základními kameny Irského literárního obrození, které na nich stavělo. V druhé části rozebírám Yeatsovy básně a hledám v nich Keltské prvky. Nejvíce rozebírám tématiku transcendence v mytologii, a tím pádem se zde nejvíce soustřeďuji na Onen svět a takzvané Sidhe (bytosti z Onoho světa). Podrobnou analýzou některých básní nebo jejich částí se ukázalo, jak úzce spolu motiv transcendence a boj Irů za osobní i národní svobodu souvisí.

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