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

Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule,

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

Yeats's vivid description of the murdered "mother" again smacks of nationalist historiography, of British confidence in its own evolutionary imperial project now exposed as simple tyranny, the wanton killing of an innocent woman. The mother referred to is Ellen Quinn (Cullingford, Yeats 106), a woman, as Lady Gregory's journals reveal, "shot dead with her child in her arms" in November 1920 (197). Gregory used this incident as the basis for her Nation article "Murder by the Throat" (1920), one of many nationalistic works decrying Black and Tan atrocities. Yeats too wrote an explicitly nationalistic poem on the subject. In "Reprisals" he imagines the deceased Robert Gregory looking upon the current state of Ireland and finding that "Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery / Are murdering [his] tenants there." The poem goes on to ask with bitterness:

Where may new-married women sit

And suckle children now? Armed men

May murder them in passing by

Nor law nor parliament take heed. (Variorum 791)

According to Jeffares, Yeats chose not to publish "Reprisals" for fear of upsetting Robert Gregory's pro-British widow (304). Yet the poem provides a useful context for Yeats's handling of the same incident in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." In the former, agency is quite clear, as these "armed men," the minions of a coldly detached British "parliament," move about the countryside--the traditional site, understandably enough, in nationalist historiography of evictions, burning of homes, and summary executions--"murdering" the Irish peasantry, Gregory's former "Kiltartan ... tenants." (18) In the latter, though Black and Tan "murder[s]" are certainly evoked, agency is somewhat clouded. The death of the mother is viewed as part of a more abstract whirlwind of chaos and violence, and the local Kiltartan time and setting is replaced by a broader vision of "days" that are now "dragon-ridden." [19] More important, the pronoun "we," so rarely used by Yeats, abounds in this section, suggesting no clear demarcation b etween Irish victim and British aggressor. The two, bound together in their desire to find stability in time and to discover in the past validation for deeds in the present, whether in service of an imperial or a national cause, have tragically failed to perceive the violent ends of such desires: "We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, / And planned to bring the world under a rule, / Who are but weasels fighting in a hole."

Sections two and three are less overtly concerned with specifically nationalist or imperialist narratives of time, but they too play upon historiographic desire. The poem's second section, beginning with "Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers," would seem to anticipate a high-modernist move--practiced by Pound and at times by Yeats--in which a Western present looks for a structuring aesthetic in an Eastern past. This expected focus, though, is displaced by a much broader vision of history: "So the Platonic Year / Whirls out new right and wrong, / Whirls in the old instead." The compulsion to find order in the past leads only to an awareness of time as profoundly uncontrollable, of a Platonic year of 25,000 years in which the planets return to their original positions, of change without change, of the whirling of Fuller's dancers replaced by the whirling of time itself in which "All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong." This move into a more abstract understanding of time is itse lf undercut, as Yeats plays ironically upon his own "platonic" sense of history. The "solitary soul" is compared to "a swan," recalling Yeats at a slightly earlier stage, the "moralist or mythological poet" who, in The Wild Swans at Coole, first wrote poems based on the visionary system he derived from automatic writing sessions with his wife. In the eponymous opening poem of that collection, swans "All suddenly mount / And scatter wheeling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings"--a figure for cyclical history, the wheeling of gyres whose true nature the poet in his tower, as Robartes sees in "The Phases of the Moon," "seeks in book or manuscript" but "shall never find."