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

On Yeats's table rests one such emblem, "Sato's gift, a changeless sword?' At once an art object and an instrument of war, the sword represents an Eastern past like the previously envisioned Anglo-Irish past in which greatness is born from violence and bitterness, "a changeless work of art" produced by "an aching heart." The sword, one of many "marvellous accomplishment[s]" passed "From father unto son," sparks a renewed desire for historical continuity, but such hopes are quickly dashed: "it seemed / Juno's peacock screamed." In the 1925 version of A Vision, the scream of Juno's peacock is linked with the full expansion of the primary gyre and the inevitable slide of civilization as a whole, signaled by the abandonment of individual thought, toward mob rule: "The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation, the scream of Juno's peacock" (qtd. in Unterecker 179). Though Yeats's esoteric claims are, in A Vi sion, applicable not simply to the history of Ireland but to history in general, the stanza that follows in "Meditations" immediately shifts the focus to a more local Irish context:

Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,

Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,

But the torn petals strew the garden plot;

And there's but common greenness after that.

We are again in the garden of the Big House, a garden littered with "torn petals," confirmation that the rose of Ireland has indeed been broken. The closing image comments ironically on "Easter, 1916," where the heroes of revolution, "Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly." Though by no means devoid of irony itself, "Easter, 1916" presents violent historical change as a "terrible beauty," the flowering of independence from the graves of martyrs. Here we have violence without growth, a landscape scene in which an image of temporal progression, dawn, gives way to "common greenness." (26)

In "The Road at My Door," Yeats, for the first time in the poem, meditates directly on the civil war itself:

An affable Irregular,

A heavily-built Falstaffian man,

Comes cracking jokes of civil war

As though to die by gunshot were

The finest play under the sun.

Here Yeats ironically evokes a British theatrical tradition in order to indict a Republican ideological project, a project built upon nationalist dramatic representations of the noble, self-sacrificing Irish soldier. The reference to Falstaff evokes the braggart soldier, yet it falls somewhat short of outright condemnation, expressing rather a curious mixture of tragedy and farce. In a letter from December 1922, Yeats adopts the same tone to describe the burning of a friend's home:

I have just heard that when Mrs. Campbell's house was burnt ... she appealed to the irregulars not to turn her children out in the night. The irregulars cried but said they could not help themselves, the new orders. Presently one of them went up stairs with Mrs. Campbell to fetch down--the house was I think already burning--the children's Xmas toys. (Letters 695)