The Second Mister (2 page)

“ …
Na flatha fá raibh mo shean roimh éag do Chríost
” is the concluding line of Aodhagáin Ó’ Rathaille’s last great poem, said to have been written on his death bed. The poem shouts to the Universe Ó’Rathaille’s agonised admiration for the old gaelic aristocracy. The words quoted translate roughly as
“ My fathers served their fathers before Christ died.”
The line was greatly admired by William Butler Yeats.

You bet it was !

He admired it so much that he stole it and used it in his own play
The Countess Cathleen,
larceny being one of the cornerstones of literature.

The Countess Cathleen
is not often seen nowadays on Broadway or in the West End. Hollywood has shown no interest in it at all ! How can this be ? What can possibly explain such neglect of our National Poet and erstwhile
Nobel Laureate ?

Perhaps one can discern a hint of where the problem lies by looking at the play’s list of characters which includes inter alia:

“TWO DEMONS DISGUISED AS MERCHANTS,
PEASANTS, SERVANTS, ANGELICAL BEINGS, SPIRITS.”

The play opens with another character, Mary, asking the unforgettable question:

“ What can have made the grey hen flutter so ?”

Well it just goes downhill after that, in spite of mention being made of “
a man with ears spread out
” that “
moved up and down like a bat’s wing”.
Then we are entertained by an image of
“..a man who had no mouth, nor eyes nor ears; his face a wall of flesh ”
and of course this is followed by further references to the aforesaid hen.

The play was apparently written in 1892 when Yeats was 28 years old.

He had published
Crossways, his first collection of poems three years before. The book suffers from a kind of Pre-Raphaelite wishy- washiness but many of the poems hint of greatness to come, but not yet quite to hand.

He wrote many fine poems in the following years, but nonetheless managed to encumber the World with
The Man who dreamed of Faeryland
and the unspeakable tale of the doddery old priest
Peter Gilligan.

As late as 1903 in
Baile And Ailinn
he could still fall
prey to the well known, and usually fatal, poetic tendency to surrender all judgement, and abandon all taste, for the sake of a good noise.

Listen to this:

“ They know all wonders, for they pass
The towery gates of Gorias,
And Findrias and Falias,
And long-forgotten Murias
.”

I do not suppose that modern science has yet extended
the study of genetics to early twentieth century or medieval verse, but those lines of Yeats must have something in common with the following piece which has been battering the brain of man for half a millenium:

“ Aoibhinn bheith I mBinn Éadair,
Firbhinn bheith ós a bánmhuir,
Cnoc lánmhar, longmhar, líonmhar,
Beann fhíonmhar, fhonnmhar, ághmhar”.

These last two lines have always sounded to me like six fully armoured medieval knights falling off their horses in quick succession.

Then suddenly, around 1911, the poetry changes radically. It is said that the change occurred as a result of certain events in the poet’s love life, or the lack thereof. Gone are the hosts riding from Knocknarea, and Caoilte is no
longer tossing his burning hair. Now Yeats has a colder but even more intense engagement with reality.

The man who once had dreamed of faeries at the fair of Dromahair had come a long way when he wrote in
September 1913
:

“What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till,
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer until
You have dried the marrow from the bone.”

He never looked back after that and went on to pen some
of the most powerful and moving poetry ever written:
The Wild Swans at Coole, Colonos’ Praise, The Tower,
the two Byzantiums…the list goes on and on.

So, what is to be said of the occasional howler to be found in his earlier work? Very little, in fact. Every writer takes a tumble from time to time (even James Joyce, perhaps the most careful writer of all). I think it is very much to Yeats’ credit that he managed to cast off the baggage of Faeryland and angelical beings. His closeness to the reality of his historical situation enabled him to create phrases that so accurately reflected his times that they became clichés ( “…
the best lack all conviction
,” or
“…A terrible beauty is born
“).

I have been reading Yeats for over 50 years. Yes, he was one of the World’s greatest poets. Yes, his works are one of civilisation’s finest adornments.

I still have no idea as to what can have made that
wretched fowl flutter so.