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

Sections two and three are less overtly concerned with specifically nationalist or imperialist narratives of time, but they too play upon historiographic desire. The poem's second section, beginning with "Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers," would seem to anticipate a high-modernist move--practiced by Pound and at times by Yeats--in which a Western present looks for a structuring aesthetic in an Eastern past. This expected focus, though, is displaced by a much broader vision of history: "So the Platonic Year / Whirls out new right and wrong, / Whirls in the old instead." The compulsion to find order in the past leads only to an awareness of time as profoundly uncontrollable, of a Platonic year of 25,000 years in which the planets return to their original positions, of change without change, of the whirling of Fuller's dancers replaced by the whirling of time itself in which "All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong." This move into a more abstract understanding of time is itse lf undercut, as Yeats plays ironically upon his own "platonic" sense of history. The "solitary soul" is compared to "a swan," recalling Yeats at a slightly earlier stage, the "moralist or mythological poet" who, in The Wild Swans at Coole, first wrote poems based on the visionary system he derived from automatic writing sessions with his wife. In the eponymous opening poem of that collection, swans "All suddenly mount / And scatter wheeling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings"--a figure for cyclical history, the wheeling of gyres whose true nature the poet in his tower, as Robartes sees in "The Phases of the Moon," "seeks in book or manuscript" but "shall never find."

In "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," in time of war, such attempts to garner a broader comprehension of history have taken on an added sense of urgency. Yet here again the fulfillment of historiographic desire never occurs: time viewed politically, artistically, or, in this case, philosophically remains profoundly uncontrollable. History whirls onward, "A man" remains "lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / in art or politics," while the dreams of those, including the poet, who sought "to mend / Whatever mischief seemed / To afflict mankind" have gone unfulfilled:

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:

That image can bring wildness, bring a rage

To end all things, to end

What my laborious life imagined, even

The half-imagined, the half-written page:

O but we dreamed to mend

Whatever mischief seemed

To afflict mankind, but now

That winds of winter blow

Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

The swan has departed, fading, as with all things in this poem, into a whirlwind of dust and chaos, a "desolate heaven." Such knowledge tempts the poet to despair, "to end / What my laborious life imagined," yet that individual sense of bitterness is again linked with a broader "we," a people on both sides of the Irish Sea whose faith in history as evolutionary is now revealed as "crack-pated."