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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
John Unterecker suggests that Yeats is referring here to a soldier who "had actually been dragged ... down a nearby road, his body so battered that his mother could recover only his torn disembodied head" (180). Yeats does mention such an incident, complete with the gruesome detail of the head, in an October 1922 letter to J. C. Grierson, (27) but there Yeats is describing previous Black and Tan violence. A more plausible reference is the death of a "National soldier," described in a letter to T. Sturge Moore written while Yeats was working on the "series of poems about this Tower and on the civil war," which would become "Meditations": "A motor has just passed with a National soldier and a coffin up on end and what I suppose were the relatives of the dead man" (W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore 46). In either case, what is important is the absence of agency in the poem itself, the refusal to identify the soldier's affiliation and thus the affiliation of his killers. For Yeats, tempting as it may be, this momen t must not be made into another tale of heroic martyrdom readily inscribed into a Republican narrative designed to further revolutionary bloodshed, or a Free State narrative designed to justify reprisal violence. Rather, this is meaningless violence served to a people who, including the poet, "had fed the heart on fantasies." To represent this death as part of a broader fantasy of heroic sacrifice would be to contribute further to a current state in which "The heart's grown brutal from the fare; / More substance in our enmities / Than in our love...."
"Meditations in Time of Civil War" concludes with images of chaos and violence that abruptly shift the setting from civil war Ireland to eighteenth-century France, as cries now resound calling "For vengeance on the murders of Jacques Molay." Generally regarded as an emblem of the coming apocalypse that Yeats dramatized in "The Second Coming," outlined in A Vision, and saw proof of in world events such as the Bolshevik revolution, few critics, with the notable exception of Elizabeth Cullingford, (28) have analyzed this section at any length in light of the local Irish context. A Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay was executed, with the tacit approval of Pope Clement V, by Philip the Fair of France in 1314. During the eighteenth century, French Free Masons, a society at odds with both the Catholic Church and the French monarchy, symbolically linked their ancestral founder, Hiram Abif, executed for refusing to divulge the society's secrets, with Molay. From the perspective of anti-Masonic Fren ch historians, the desire of Masons to avenge the death of Molay helped to fuel the antimonarchy and anti-French church sentiments of the French revolutionaries, the "class-hatred" Yeats cryptically refers to in his note on Molay in "Meditations" (Cullingford, "How Jacques" 763-64). But the poem itself sees vengeance as anything but clear:
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,
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