The man who muttered - MADE MAGIC
The poetry of WB Yeats is a companion for life, writes Susan O’Keeffe
William Butler Yeats loved to mutter while he composed poetry; his brother and sisters used to banish him to another room to avoid listening to him. While a teenager, and living on Howth Head, he sometimes used to wander off by himself, occasionally sleeping in a cave overnight, always scribbling fragments of lines and verse. Writing poetry was an integral part of who he was; it was his way of reflecting his thoughts about life, death, the world and the afterlife.
Yeats never designed his poetry for the constraints of an exam syllabus. Instead, it was a life’s work, centred always on how to capture the intricacy of his thoughts entwined with the intricacies of life and rooted in what he defined as the ‘deep heart’s core’ a phrase from his best known poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. He read widely all his life, including Latin and Greek classics and Indian, Swedish, Japanese and Chinese writers. He was forever seeking new inspiration and concepts, and he retained a lifelong interest in spirituality, mysticism and the occult, all central to his thinking and his philosophy.
The poet’s deep understanding of spirituality never obscured his politics, which were rooted in giving Ireland back its voice, its identity and, ultimately, its independence from the British Empire. Yeats understood and believed that Ireland’s ancient mythology, folklore and traditional stories were the route to this independence and he, with others, worked to found the national theatre, the Abbey, creating a confidence and voice for the nation – a full ten years before the Easter Rising of 1916. Not surprising then that Yeats’ poem of that name has endured for a century.
Above all, the man with short sight, who liked to smoke a cigarette and kept a green parrot in his drawing room, loved Sligo, home of his mother, Susan Pollexfen. The Yeats children spent childhood holidays with their relations in Sligo, and WB loved the sea, took out a rowboat, rode horses, fished, wandered in the forests and climbed the mountains. To the young Yeats, this was a mystical land and he wrote that the ‘door to fairyland’ was in the limestone of the magical Ben Bulben mountain. What the image meant of course was the door to his inner soul, to his imagination. It was also for him, the symbol of the door to Ireland’s identity – to its beating heart of mysticism and love of the other world; its spirit. The Atlantic county of wild unspoilt beauty, of forest, wave, wind, mountain and lake stayed with him all his life, inspiring his work right to the days before he died, when he was still writing poems; a poet to the end.
The work of WB Yeats is a companion for life. From his lyrical, romantic creations, through his politics and his later, modernist spare poems, he contemplates beauty, women, friendship, love, power and death – and more. Its rewards are hidden in lines, in verses and in the unexpected lesser known works. Turn the pages of his work and you will be captivated by its beauty, its depth and its capacity to capture life in all its guises and across the ages.