Finding Yeats continued

In his poem, A Prayer for my Daughter, written in 1919, Yeats writes about the conditions he wants for his daughter as she grows and the kind of woman he hopes she will become. He wants her to have a solid foundation so she might cultivate qualities of mind he approves: kindness, courtesy, merriment, innocence and beauty. These are to be cultivated in contrast to women of opinionated mind who risk everything for an old bellows full of angry wind.

Oh dear, these are not the sentiments likely to appeal to modern women who value their 'opinions' and do not appreciate being put down for holding them. Yeats is yearning for establishment values based on long-term land ownership from which custom and ceremony cultivate fine sensibilities. But how many people have such a solid base and what happens when the base is rocky? Are we all bound to fall into barbarism?

These sorts of questions led me into a search to find out more about Yeats and where he was coming from. First, though, I read a short novel by the Irish-born novelist Elizabeth Bown whose books I once looked into and enjoyed many years ago. In The Last September (published in 1929) Elizabeth Bowen describes life in an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy mansion of the type Yeats seems to have yearned for and which was indeed part of Bowen's legacy at Bown Court, her family's country estate. The story is set in 1920 when Ireland was rocked by the 'Troubles' between the British army and the IRA. This was part of the context in which Yeats sought the stability of old places and old ideas. In Bowen's novel the movement is forward with the young woman of the place set to move on into a wider world.

R.F. Foster's wonderful biography of Yeats considers the context of A Prayer for my Daughter in fascinating detail. Yeats appears to be reacting against his own 'troubles' with Maud Gonne and contrasting her radicalism with what he perceived as the kindness and courtesy of his young wife, George, who had given birth to the 'daughter', Anne, who is the child of the poem. The poem is also influenced by Yeats's acquisition of a 'castle' (his famous Tower), and his immersion in spiritualism at the time. All this plus 'his apprehension at a world descending into formless anarchy' as he expressed over and over again in his poems, as in The Second Coming which he composed around the same time as the Prayer:
Things fall apart; the centre can not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Being introduced to Yeats's poem through my poetry group led my to think a lot about the foundations (or not), of place, of belonging, of reactions when stability is threatened. It led me to Elizabeth Bowen and into a reading of Yeats's life and his poetry. The journey through words is a rich and rewarding one.

Text details for this post:
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. Vintage paperback novel (1998) with an introduction by Victoria Glendinning. pp. 206. Available Book Camel $8 plus postage and packaging.

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life 11: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Pulished by Oxford University Press, 2003. Copy borrowed from City Library, Melbourne.

W. B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, in W. B. Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan paperback. First published 1962.

Finding Yeats

I sometimes meet with a group of people who like to write poetry. The theme of place (special places, belonging to a place) was suggested for our most recent meeting. Someone had come up with the phrase dear perpetual place when the theme was being discussed. Later I discovered that the phrase was from a poem by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. I found the poem and also set out on a journey learning about Yeats. I'll start by typing out the long poem then share my reflections and some of the things I've been learning. This poem was written in 1919.

A Prayer for my Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack - and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatreds driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Reference: from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) in W B Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan, 1965