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

This contrast between a past in which violence leads to greatness and a present in which violence yields only further violence, is evident in the opening stanza. The spirit of Ascendancy Ireland is characterized as a jet of water that "rains down life," choosing "whatever shape it wills / And never stoop[ing] to a mechanical / Or servile shape, at others' beck and call." In an Ireland gripped by civil war, those who embrace violence and bitterness, certainly do so in a "mechanical" manner, obeying the "beck and call" of their Republican leaders with the blind zeal of martyrs. But this awareness of the gap between past and present offers little comfort, only the knowledge, as the poem's closing lines suggest, that Anglo-Ireland's noble past cannot be recreated in the present: "What if those things the greatest of mankind / Consider most to magnify, or to bless, / But take our greatness with our bitterness?"

Marjorie Howes, discussing the previous stanza, suggests that the verb "take" in the phrase "But take our greatness with our violence?" holds two possible connotations: "take away" and "take on" (124). The same holds true for the closing stanza, though here the focus is very much historiographic desire. Those who would "magnify" or "bless" the outward trappings of Ascendancy Ireland and would retreat from the everencroaching chaos of the present into "great chambers and long galleries, lined / With famous portraits of our ancestors," "take away" greatness with bitterness. "[P]acing to and fro on polished floors," they remain caught in comfortable, impotent nostalgia, failing, like the leaders of contemporary Ireland, to take decisive action in the present--while those who perceive the necessary link between violence and greatness and who comprehend fully the root of Anglo-Irish greatness are faced with an awareness that the past contained the seeds of its own demise. A world built from bitterness and violence has regressed into violence, the past has again yielded its ironic harvest, and the speaker is left to confront a present in which the choice to "take on" further violence will merely perpetuate the cycle.

In the second poem, "My House," Yeats turns to the tower itself, a hybrid image--derived in typical Yeats fashion from British literary culture ("Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on / In some like chamber") and Irish local culture (24)--that might serve as a physical reminder of some preexisting unity, a period in Yeats's own past when a strategic blending of imperial and colonial traditions provided the basis for a vibrant cultural nationalism. Struggling against the ever-impinging real, Yeats opens each of the first two stanzas by detailing the physical characteristics of the tower, "A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone, / A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth," as it to rebuild the tower in art, to create a monument linking past and present. But the "wall is loosening." The tower is crumbling, the civil war is at hand, and, as Yeats writes in a letter from 1922,