Writing out chaos: Constructions of history in Yeats's "nineteen hundred and nineteen" and "meditations in time of civil war" - of

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2001 by Rob Doggett

As with "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," a sequence of poems Yeats composed while residing in his tower during the summer and autumn of 1922, may be productively studied in light of nationalist discourse, particularly in light of Republican and Free State appeals to Ireland's noble past during the Anglo-Irish Treaty debates and ensuing civil war. (22) Not surprisingly, both groups adopted the rhetoric of preindependence nationalism, though with different ends in mind. While Free State supporters tended to promote the treaty as the climactic moment in a centuries-old struggle, an ultimate validation of the heroic actions undertaken by previous generations, Republicans characterized the treaty as a fundamental betrayal, "a surrender" according to Republican leader Eamon De Valera, "of the ideals for which the sacrifices of the past few years were deliberately made and the sufferings of these years consciously endured" (qtd. in Cronin 154). Following the Republican seizure of the Four Courts, the act that precipitated the civil war, De Valera issued an "Easter Proclamation," a revolutionary declaration designed to construct a clear historical trajectory extending from 1916, through the current "uprising," and toward the imagined future republic, "the destiny God has in mind for Ireland the fair, the peerless one" (qtd. in Coogan 314). The Free State responded in kind:

Under [the] Treaty the government and control of your own country and its resources have been surrendered back to you after centuries of usurpation. You are asked to reject this surrender and engage in a hopeless and unnecessary war with Great Britain. The people in the Four Courts say they are fighting for a Republic. In reality they are fighting to bring the British back.

(qtd. in Cronin 153)

Here the weight of history is brought to the fore, though the emphasis is on a highly specific historical narrative. The agreed return to Ireland of limited political and economic control is characterized as a British "surrender," a term designed expressly to position this "victory" within a nationalist tradition of armed resistance, heroic sacrifice, and martyrdom, as opposed to a more moderate tradition of constitutional nationalism. Accused by Republicans of securing merely a "political" triumph akin to the supposed triumph of the 1914 Government of Ireland Act, this Free State pronouncement places the treaty within history as the end for which previous generations had given their lives. To reject the treaty would amount to an invalidation of those sacrifices and a return to a "hopeless" war against the British, a curious twist of logic given that the British had apparently "surrendered."

Written in the whirlpool of violence that followed the treaty split, "Meditations in Time of Civil War" engages these competing narratives of an Irish present and past. Again, though, it is important to recognize the fundamental instability of these ideologically driven narratives. As both Fanon and Bhabha emphasize, the articulation of a new national history along a progressive linear axis necessarily remains an ongoing and essentially temporal process. Throughout that process fissures are constantly erupting as the national "intellectual" is called to graft the amorphous, uncertain, and chaotic present of which he or she is a participant onto nationalism's more stable master narratives. This, explains Bhabha, is the central difficulty facing those who would write the history of a people: