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

... habits ... made old wrong

Melt down, at it were wax in the sun's rays;

Public opinion ripening for so long

We thought it would outlive all future days.

O what fine thought we had because we thought

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

"[H]abits"--established modes of reading the past--have served to limit historical perception and have led to a blind faith in the stability of "future days."

Elizabeth Cullingford reads this section as a bitter commentary on nineteenth-century values, faith in "Victorian stability, peace, and [a] belief in progress" (Yeats 118), and clearly the passage is designed to capture a mood of naive certainty. A trace of the Irish context, though, is recognizable in the drafts, as the lines concerning "public opinion" originally contained a more local reference: "A speedy remedy for obvious wrong; / No swaggering soldier on the public ways / Who weighed man's life lighter than a song" (Bradford 72). (15) Likely a direct allusion to the Black and Tans (Bradford 78), the British forces sent to occupy Ireland in 1920, these lines suggest a more pointed historical narrative that would align directly with nationalist historiography. The Victorian values espoused by British cultural imperialism--Britain as the paradigmatic modern, civilized nation fostering the evolutionary journey of the colony toward a similar state of civilization--were simply hollow rhetoric, a set of belief s no longer able to conceal during the Anglo-Irish War the true goals of imperialism: political subjugation, economic exploitation, and cultural domination. Yeats's use of the term "swaggering" would likely have had strong and direct connotations for an Irish audience all too familiar with R.I.C. and Black and Tan atrocities--the burning of Balbriggan, the sacking of Cork, and the Croke Park massacre--and with popular representations of these troops as proud, heartless, and, in the words of British Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, "drunken and insubordinate" (Lyons, "The War" 245). (16) Significantly, Yeats immediately does away with this image in the next draft, preferring the much more ambiguous "public opinion." In so doing, he moves from a clearly nationalistic history--one that would immediately sanctify 1919 and, by extension, the Anglo-Irish War as another chapter of heroic sacrifice--to a broader indictment of historical desire. Public opinion, be it British or Irish, has led to blind faith in histori cal progression, that which "made old wrong / Melt down," and the return of that faith leads to a state of profound violence in the present.

The two stanzas that follow look Janus-faced toward both sides of the Irish Sea. As several critics have noted, the phrase "Parliament and king" refers to the British Empire prior to the Great War, a world of imperial certainty soon to be undone, (17) while the stanza that follows, characterized by some of the most bitter language in The Tower, centers on Black and Tan attacks during the Anglo-Irish War:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare