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

Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,

Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide,

For the embrace of nothing.

According to Cullingford, this concluding section, which seems to move us beyond the local Irish context, is in fact a fitting commentary on the civil war: "What began as the struggle to avenge a genuine wrong, and to gain Ireland's independence from England, has degenerated into fratricidal strife" (765).

To this perceptive claim I would add that the stanza is not concerned merely with violence born from "revenge" but with the core ideological component driving the compulsion for revenge in civil war Ireland: nationalist historiographic constructions of martyrdom. According to Yeats's note, "A cry for vengeance because of the murder of the Grand Master of the Templars seems to me a fit symbol for those who labour from hatred, and so for sterility in various kinds" (Collected Poems 460-61).Vengeance for Molay is a "fit symbol," but it is so because Molay has himself been appropriated symbolically within Masonic historiography as an emblem of all who have given their lives to combat the influences of secular and religious tyranny, the foundational martyr whose death, so to speak, "pre-sanctions" subsequent extremism and unchecked violence. If, as I have suggested, "Meditations in Time of Civil War" functions to disrupt precisely those same types of constructions in Republican and Free State discourse, narratives spawned during a colonial period to counterbalance imperial versions of history and the tyranny they would legitimate, these "Monstrous familiar images [that] swim to the mind's eye" are more than fitting, more than "familiar." They provide a tale of chaotic violence and hatred that imprisons the present in the past, a tale by which a transitional Ireland ceaselessly replicates the initial wrongs of colonialism, a newly liberated Ireland struggling to become a truly postcolonial Ireland.

Rob Doggett has recently completed his dissertation, "Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William ButlerYeats," at the University of Maryland. He has published on the Irish playwright John Millington Synge in Colby Quarterly and ELH.

Notes

(1.) For a detailed account of The Tower's publication history and of the various orderings of the poems, see Finneran. All poetry quotations in this essay are taken from The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats edited by Finneran.

(2.) For an indictment of Yeats's fascist leanings, see O'Brien. For a detailed and persuasive response to O'Brien, see Cullingford. For an account of and partial response to those political attacks that center on Yeats as a modernist, see Bush. For a thorough overview of Yeats and politics, see Allison's "The Attack on Yeats" and his introduction to Yeat's Political Identities, which includes excerpts from these authors and others.

(3.) Jahan Ramazani's essay offers a thoughtful account of the problems associated with applying the postcolonial label to Yeats: his canonical status in the Eurocentric traditions of romanticism and high modernism, his conscious identification with the Protestant Ascendancy, his tendency to idealize peasant Ireland, and his attempts to assimilate the language and style of a literary tradition spawned during a period of British imperialism. Despite these qualifications, Ramazani does, in the end, find the postcolonial an accurate label and, when applied carefully, a productive lens through which to examine Yeats.