Sifting through the Yeatsian rubble
What the poet has to show us about the ruin of the day
One of the joys of reading Yeats, which only emerged to me after a chronological survey of his life’s writing, is seeing the worlds he builds with symbols. His late work is rife with the same allusions he drew on earlier, giving a kaleidoscopic effect. The reader is hit with the image and its echo from some earlier poem he might recall, and the image’s contextual connotations come with it. The common vocabulary among Yeats’s poems puts them into conversation with each other and allows the reader to travel from one period of Yeats’s writing to another with great ease. So we can take a question and sieve through his work in search of the answer.
The widening gyre
Yeats believed he was living in a world sliding rapidly toward ruin. Ruins were not difficult for the poet to imagine. He lived through World War I, which revealed how easy it was to kill on an industrial scale, how cities, platoons, a whole generation even, could be rapidly reduced to nothing with gas and shells, fired from miles away. The Troubles and the Irish War of Independence showed how fragile his country, or any country, was. It wasn’t just Ireland, but its social fabric that proved to be vulnerable, as country estates were burned—even Yeats’s own tower was looted. The marauders stole all the mirrors. Surely the gyre was widening.
And yet does any age feel different? We have missiles now. Five hundred years ago, men were pitched down from the stepped temples of Mexico. A thousand, the fields of Tours were lined with tents. How often has the slumbering beast lain tranquil?
Yeats at Ballylee
Immortalized in Yeats’s poem “To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee” (1921) is the formidable stone tower shown above. It was his home from 1918 to 1920, following his marriage and preceding his tenure as senator, purchased from Lady Gregory and partially renovated, not up to the full potential Yeats had had in mind. Though he lived there for only a few years, the tower has become symbolic of Yeats, a part of his legacy. This is partly owing to the tower’s prominent place in the poetry Yeats wrote there. The image of Thoor Ballylee and its medieval rooms figure heavily into The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), collections containing some of Yeats’s richest and most cherished poems. That Yeats intended the tower home to be “a setting for my old age, a place to influence lawless youth with its severity” (17)1 reveals the care with which he crafted his own legacy while living. The self-consciousness of the symbolic value of where he chooses to live is the same self-consciousness of his position as aging great poet evident in his late poems.
Thoor Ballylee fits Yeats’s mythos well. The castle is a Norman tower, built by conquerors of the Irish, located in rural Galway, prototypical wild West Ireland. In this sense the tower embodies the dichotomy Yeats struggles with in “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” (1919): the supportive Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the continental literary world versus the Irish revolutionaries and the insular heroes of Celtic lore. The line Yeats blurs in verse is sharper at Thoor Ballylee. Though Yeats gave it an Irish name, the tower is an invasive presence in the countryside, rising stark and geometric from an otherwise pastoral landscape. Hardly visible in the picture below is the cottage that was tacked on to the castle, which Yeats renovated and kept, mindful of maintaining “the contrast between the medieval castle and the peasant’s cottage” (14). Though conjoined in structure, the two architectures were treated as distinct from each other during the renovation, compartmentalized and done one at a time, the rustic cottage followed by the indulgent castle.
Yeats meant to rebuild Thoor Ballylee as his family home, a place to spend his twilight near a slumbering trout stream. The dream sounds like a holdover from his early years spent embroiled in Irish folk lore—it was then in fact that Yeats first visited and became enamored with Ballylee, while searching for the origin of the saying “there is a cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee” (13). Ultimately Yeats’s dream would go unfulfilled. Though the tower remains a symbol of the poet and his work, Yeats was prevented from ever moving into the tower permanently, first by the Irish War of Independence, and then by his duties in Dublin as senator. Politics seem to have gotten in the way of his pastoral aspirations. Thoor Ballylee is the real-life Innisfree, Yeats’s unattainable Irish dream.
The enduring stone and word
What is Yeats’s legacy? And how much of it has Yeats created on his own? Look how the tower, nearly a century later, has taken on the appearance of Moore’s interpretation. Like Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, see how the tower looks now the way Yeats set it down in memory. And what do we do with the stone reading “And may these characters remain when all is ruin once again,” that was engraved in 1948, after the poet’s death, the tower already slipping into disrepair? An earlier draft of To be carved on a stone at Thoor Ballylee went like this:
I, the poet, William Yeats, With common sedge and broken slates, And smithy work from the Gort forge, Restored this tower for my wife George; And on my heirs I lay a curse If they should alter for the worse, From fashion or an empty mind, What Raftery built and Scott designed.
This draft suggests a call on future generations to maintain his work. There is none of the resignation to inevitable ruin that we see in the final version of the poem. We, the readers, have continued the poet’s work and piled on to his legacy. Did an older Yeats decide that he didn’t want this, that we should leave it be? How would Yeats feel that historical societies are attempting now to rescue the tower and museumize it? In the face of a widening gyre it might be futile to guard this physical fortress; instead, in revision Yeats shifts the emphasis to preserving the written word.
Yeats wrote of Thoor Ballylee, “I like to think of that building as a permanent symbol of my work plainly visible to the passer-by. As you know, all my art theories depend on just this—the rooting of mythology in the earth” (26). Yeats understands that the value of the tower is its power as a symbol and its celebration of all things symbolic. The tower is a monument not to Yeats the man, but to his poetry, to his nebulous universe of thought and intertwining webs of motif. Yeats hopes, perhaps, that as long as it lasts, there will be someone passing by to read it. As his tombstone reads,
Cast a cold Eye On Life on Death Horseman pass by.
So we pass by
Christmas is around the corner, which means it’s almost time to reread James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” He wrote the story after living in Rome for a short time, where he felt the constant presence in the city of its own ruins. This was the same world that Yeats lived in, but where Joyce equated the ruins with a stagnation, Yeats saw fluidity. Yeats saw the sack of Troy unfold in one generation after another. He was a visionary who foresaw no rest in his future, no Innisfree. He was correct in a sense.
Where does Yeats leave us today? I don’t need to enumerate the uncertanties we face The world swirls with new highs in prosperity, the same old lows in poverty, new conflicts and old ones. Is the gyre widening? One thing we can hope to depend on is the constancy of poetry and beauty in all times. Let us follow the example set by William Butler Yeats. Let us always twist the turns of misfortune into something that unifies, that touches the soul, that resounds through the centuries. Let us take poetry and make it our rock.
Source: Thoor Ballylee—Home of William Butler Yeats edited by Liam Miller from a paper given by Mary Hanley to the Kiltartan Society in 1961.