Yeats’s War Poetry

Fran Brearton observed in The Great War in Irish Poetry, ‘Yeats is not considered a “war poet” . . . because the tendency has been, deceptively, to equate “war poet” with “anti-war poet,” and to judge Great War poetry according to the preoccupations of the famous . . . soldier poets.’ But Yeats wrote important Irish war poems without going into battle and, like D. H. Lawrence in Women in Love (1920), he emphasised the effect of war on civilian life and culture. He described the Easter Rising and the execution of Roger Casement (both took place in 1916 during World War I), the Irish Civil Wars of 1919-23 and the death of Major Robert Gregory in aerial combat, and wrote most of these poems between 1915 and 1923.

After a decade of intense political verse, Auden famously declared in ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939) that poetry has no practical effect and ‘makes nothing happen.’ But Yeats, who had written a provocative nationalistic drama Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) that called for political martyrdom, believed that literature could affect the course of history. In ‘The Man and the Echo’ (1939), he guiltily asked: ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’ Men did not rush out of the theatre and into the revolution, but his play contributed to the growing anger that incited the Easter Rising. Yeats, who admired Mussolini and flirted with fascism, was always excited by violence and there is plenty of it in his poems. His beloved Maud Gonne ‘Would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways’ (‘No Second Troy’); ‘Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out . . . / Until the town lie beaten flat’ (‘Lapis Lazuli’); ‘Even the wisest man grows tense / With some sort of violence’ (‘Under Ben Bulben’).

Though Yeats described violence in his own poems, he disliked the specific description of wounds and pain described by the World War I poets. Owen, Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg had revealed the brutal realities of war and opposed the propagandistic verse that justified the meaningless slaughter.

Yeats, in a notorious misjudgment, explained why he excluded their impressive war poems from his influential anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (1936):

I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all anthologies. . . . The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy – for all skill is joyful – but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that Arnold withdrew his “Empedocles on Etna” from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. . . . If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of a fever . . . or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease.

Yeats says these poems were famous ‘for a time,’ but would not endure because their grim subjects were not suitable for poetry.

Yeats’s essays and letters were even more critical of Owen, who famously wrote in the Preface to his Poems: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’ He declared that Owen was ‘too near [his] subject matter to do . . . work of permanent importance.’ He ‘is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar-stick . . . . There is every excuse for him, but none for those who like him. . . . I consider [him] unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper.’ Yeats praised the courage and compassion of these poets. (Owen and Sassoon won the Military Cross; Rosenberg was not an officer.) It was possible for the non-combatant Yeats (who was forty-nine years old in 1914) to forget all the suffering – which was not passive and not necessary – to compare it to a slight fever and remain oblivious to it. But the real question is not whether suffering is a proper theme for poetry, but how well the poets expressed that theme. The best war poets, who

suffered terribly, could never forget the war and their poems remained a tragic memorial.

Twenty years before his Introduction to the Oxford Book, Yeats had argued that poetry has necessary limitations. In his tendentious ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ (1915), he suggested that silence was better than meddling since poets could never persuade politicians to make wise decisions. Instead, poets should write of love or try to comfort old age:

I think it better that in times like these A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

The last line echoes Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Apologie for Poetrie’: ‘a tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner.’ Yeats sent the poem to Henry James (who became a British citizen during the war) saying that he wished to avoid the whole unpleasant business: ‘It is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem unfitting. I shall keep the neighbourhood of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, hoping to catch their comfortable snores till bloody frivolity is over.’

Yeats returned to this crucial theme in ‘Politics’ (January 1939), the month of his death. That year, when Italy was allied to the Nazis, the fascists won the Spanish Civil War and Germany and Russia, after signing a NonAggression Pact, invaded Poland from the west and east and started World War II. Undermining his own epigraph from the politically committed Thomas Mann, ‘ In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms,’ Yeats again argues that love distracts from and takes precedence over war:

How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?

He concludes, romantically and nostalgically, ‘But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms,’ which echoes the ballad ‘O Western Wind’: ‘that my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!’

Despite Yeats’s belief that poets should stay out of current politics, he could not help being caught up in the tragic events of the Easter Rising. Roy Foster provides the essential background for that rebellion, which took place on Easter Monday April 24, 1916. The postponement of Home Rule for the duration of the war seemed like a betrayal to the Irish, and the rebels seized the chance to strike at Britain when she was at war and most vulnerable. Yeats, in England at the time, relied on rumour and speculation. He worried about whether the Abbey Theatre had been damaged or burned down, and wrote: ‘I have been a good deal shaken by Dublin events – a world one has worked with or against for years suddenly overwhelmed.’ After the Rising was suppressed, the British government declared martial law and began to execute the fifteen leaders, but Yeats did not describe the hanging as Kipling did in ‘Danny Deever.’

‘Easter 1916’ reveals Yeats’s fascinating change of mind from a negative to a positive to an ambivalent portrayal of the Rising. At first, like his sister Lily, he thought it was all ‘a catalogue of folly and blunder’; that Ireland, obsessed by one idea, was ‘like a man diseased who can only think of his disease.’ This pathological comparison foreshadowed his advice to poets to forget the war as if it were a painful disease. Then, under the fanatical influence of Maud Gonne, he came to believe, by the time he wrote ‘Easter 1916’ five months later in September, that a ‘tragic dignity had returned to Ireland.’ As he contrasted ‘the barbarities of the [pro-British] military and chivalric conduct of the insurrectionists,’ the late rebels became ‘the ablest and most fine natured of our young men.’ In ‘September 1913’ Yeats had regretfully written, ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave’. But Foster observes that in 1916 ‘the ‘romantic Ireland’ of O’Leary’s sacrificial nationalism had returned from the grave. People Yeats

had ‘regarded with contempt, had joined, at a stroke, the mythic company of Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone’ – the Irish revolutionary martyrs during Britain’s war against Napoleon in 1798 and 1803.

In ‘Easter 1916’ Yeats attempts to transform a disastrous failure into a heroic ideal. Maud Gonne’s ‘violent ways’ in ‘No Second Troy’ have now become an utterly changed and paradoxical ‘terrible beauty.’ Yeats pardons his old political adversary Patrick Pearse, who’d attacked the Abbey Theatre and was ‘a man made dangerous by the Vertigo of Self-Sacrifice.’ And he both condemns and forgives his personal enemy John MacBride, the husband of Maud Gonne and putative father of her daughter, ‘A drunken, vainglorious lout. / He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near to my heart.’ But doubt that all was utterly changed seeps into the ambivalent poem. Sacrifice could turn the heart to stone and Maud’s beauty was indeed terrible. In the end, Yeats even concedes that the Easter deaths might have been useless, ‘For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said’. Alluding to the hanged rebels in ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ (1920), he advises moderation and suggests ‘that we should still the land / Till Germany’s overcome’. The most extraordinary change was personal and emotional. Yeats seized the opportunity, when MacBride was dead and Maud Gonne was emotionally vulnerable, to once again propose marriage to her. When Maud refused, he impulsively proposed to her beautiful young daughter Iseult, who also rejected him.

Fifteen rebels were hanged after the Easter Rising and Yeats adds Roger Casement as the sixteenth. An Irish-born Protestant, British consular official and humanitarian, Casement was knighted for exposing the atrocities committed on the enslaved rubber workers in the Congo and the remote Putumayo region of the Peruvian Amazon. In 1914, after joining Sinn Fein, he tried to get German arms for the Easter Rising and to recruit Irish prisoners-of-war to fight against Britain. In April 1916 he landed in Ireland in a German submarine, was immediately arrested and convicted of high treason. Along with Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton and John Galsworthy, Yeats vainly appealed for clemency. But all sympathy for Casement vanished when his crude and explicit

homosexual Black Diaries were publicly released, and he was hanged that year.

In February 1936, twenty years after Casement’s execution, Dr. William Maloney, a New York physician, published The Forged Casement Diaries with the Talbot Press in Dublin. Though Maloney did not actually examine the Diaries, he argued, based on apparent inconsistencies, that they had been forged to incriminate Casement. (In 2012 handwriting experts proved that the Diaries were, in fact, authentic.) In a letter about Casement, Yeats referred to his capture, but not his influential exposure of atrocities, and focused on his noble character: ‘Casement was not a very able man but he was gallant and unselfish, and had surely his right to leave what he would have considered an unsullied name.’ The traitor, however, had no right to anything. Gullibly following Maloney’s conclusions, which he wanted to believe, and claiming that Casement had to become involved in revolutionary activities, Yeats wrote of this ‘most gallant gentleman / That is in quicklime laid’:

I say that Roger Casement Did what he had to do. He died upon the gallows, But that is nothing new.

Afraid they might be beaten Before the bench of Time, They turned a trick by forgery And blackened his good name.

In another patriotic ballad, ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’ (1936), Yeats repeats the refrain, ‘ The ghost of Roger Casement / Is beating on the door’, to suggest that Casement’s ghost will continue to haunt the British until justice is done and his name is cleared.

‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (1921) marked for Yeats the start of the Irish Civil War. The Nationalists supported the Irish Free State that was

created in 1922 and remained within the British Empire. The Republicans saw the Free State as a betrayal of the independent Irish Republic that had been declared during the Easter Rising. Yeats’s poem was partly inspired by atrocities committed by the pro-Nationalist Black and Tan soldiers who fought against the Republicans. Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats’s closest friend and patron, told him that in Galway in November 1920 the soldiers, randomly ‘shooting from a truck as they drove past, killed a woman [Eileen Quinn] holding a baby in her arms.’ Yeats dramatises this incident in his poem:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.

He compares this brutality to savage ‘weasels fighting in a hole’ and mourns the war’s destruction of fragile beauty and high culture. The benign alternatives to the intensification of evil, ‘Violence, upon the roads: violence of horses,’ are Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers, who soon whirl out of sight, and the comfort of love. But that joy is also illusory and ephemeral: ‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes.’ The poem weakly concludes with an arcane reference to ‘That insolent fiend Robert Artisson,’ a fourteenth-century evil spirit and incubus of the ‘love-lorn Lady Kyteler’. Yeats searches for a historical figure to symbolise the violent aggression he describes, but the spooky Artisson is too remote and insignificant to bear this weight.

Yeats explains in a note the background of ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1923): ‘These poems were written at Thoor Ballylee in 1922, during the civil war. Before they were finished the Republicans blew up our “ancient bridge” one midnight. They forbade us to leave the house, but were otherwise polite, even saying at last “Good-night, thank you,” as though we had given them the bridge’. The poem considers the relation of grandeur and violence and asks, can we ‘take our greatness with our violence . . . In this tumultuous spot, / Where long wars and sudden night alarms’ destroy

the fragile peace. Sato’s sword, a Japanese work of art and gift to Yeats, and the heart aching for love, are analogous to Loie Fuller’s artistic dance and the unrequited love in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.’ Another violent incident matches the murder in the earlier poem. In ‘Meditations’ a soldier in the Irish Republican Army, which refused to sign a peace treaty and started the Civil War, suddenly appears at Yeats’s door:

An affable Irregular, A heavily-built Falstaffian man, Comes cracking jokes of civil war As though to die by gunshot were The finest play under the sun.

Though affable, he’s blown up Yeats’s ancient bridge. In the last section Yeats drags in Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templars in Jerusalem. He was unjustly burned at the stake in 1314 by King Philip IV of France, who was deeply indebted to the Order and wanted to seize its wealth. Yeats claims that Molay is ‘a fit symbol for those who labour from hatred’. But like the medieval Robert Artisson, he is hopelessly obscure and poetically ineffective, and the far-fetched comparison adds nothing to the meaning of the poem.

Though Yeats told Henry James that he would write no more poems about the Great War, the death of Augusta Gregory’s son Robert drew him back into the conflict. He winds slowly into his elegiac tribute to the aristocrat of the air, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ (1918). Augusta asked for a poem to commemorate Robert, whom Yeats called a ‘strange pure genius’ but didn’t particularly like. Educated at Harrow School, New College, Oxford, and the Slade School of Fine Art, Gregory was an excellent boxer, cricketer and horseman. He exhibited his landscape paintings in London in 1914, and the following year joined the Irish Connaught Rangers. In 1917 he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a fighter pilot, shot down nineteen German planes and won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry.

The poem begins by focusing on Yeats himself rather than on the ostensible subject. The setting is the poet’s new house Thoor Ballylee, with its ancient tower and winding stair, where Gregory’s death stirs up memories of Yeats’s lost friends: ‘all that come into my mind are dead.’ The poet then provides the social context for Gregory’s civilian life and character with recollections of three old companions. He suggests that Gregory, joining that elite company and combining the best qualities of all three friends, had Lionel Johnson’s courtesy, John Synge’s artistry and George Pollexfen’s skill as a rider. Yeats’s modern hero, ‘Our Sidney and our perfect man,’ also had the artistic talent, love of action and early death of the noble English Renaissance poet and warrior.

Gregory was familiar with the tower and water-hens of Thoor Ballylee, which was built on his mother’s land. Riding recklessly with the foxhounds, he outraced everyone, jumped over perilously high fences and even rode horses without using a bit. His wild action inspired his lofty ideas and foreshadowed his airborne flights. Crediting Gregory for work he had not yet done, Yeats praises him as a great painter, inspired by vision, emotion and action. With another allusion to Sir Philip Sidney, he thrice calls him ‘Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, / As ’twere all life’s epitome.’ He repeats ‘all’ six times to show the breadth of Gregory’s talent as connoisseur of art and architecture, as artist in metal and wood, and as another Renaissance man: ‘all he did done perfectly.’

The dashing pilot was not destined to fulfil his promise and survive to a quiet old age. Yeats declares that he’s still unable to accept the thought of Gregory’s recent death, which ‘took all my heart for speech’. The poet does not describe his actual death, which would have ruined the idea of a heroic sacrifice. He died tragically enough on the Austrian front in January 1918, aged thirty-six, when an allied Italian pilot mistakenly shot down his fragile biplane, and was buried in Padua. Gregory, more idealised than real, never quite comes alive in this elegant poem, with seems more traditional than sincere.

While Yeats’s first poem on Gregory is leisurely and expansive, his

second is compressed and intense, more dynamic, vivid and convincing than the formal elegy. In ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1918), Gregory prophesies his demise in his own anti-heroic voice. He knows he is going to die in aerial combat, though he doesn’t hate the enemy or, as an Irishman, love his English comrades. Neither his death nor the outcome of the war will profoundly affect his rural countrymen. He had no obligation to enlist. Indeed, many patriotic Irishmen, especially after the executions that followed the Easter Rising, supported the German enemy of Britain. He was not propelled by rabid enthusiasm for war but by a desire for action: ‘A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds’. Yeats imagines Gregory reflecting on the possibilities of his past and future, balancing his life with death, seeking glory and submitting to his predestined fate. He uses the elegiac form to make sense of the untimely death of the classic hero who sacrificed his life for the sake of the living. Unlike the World War I poets who emphasise the suffering of their men, Yeats idealises the heroic Gregory. High above the gas and mud of the trenches, he dies a gallant (if accidental) death.