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

Section four seems to address the confident mindset of the British (and perhaps the Anglo-Irish) prior to the Great War:

We, who seven years ago

Talked of honour and truth,

Shriek with pleasure if we show

The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

"[S]even years ago," though certainly evocative of prewar Britain, speaks equally to Ireland's recent past. The years 1912-1914, alluded to in "Easter, 1916" ("For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said"), marked a period of debate concerning the final prerevolution Home Rule Bill introduced to the British Parliament in April 1912. (20) That bill, designed to grant Ireland a separate parliament with jurisdiction over internal affairs, was, after two years of heated Parliamentary argument, (21) placed on the statute books in 1914 but not enacted because of the outbreak of war. The subsequent Easter Rising, the British government's hardline response and its later attempts to conscript Irish forces, all led to a climate in which support for constitutional home rule in Ireland gave place to more extreme demands for complete autonomy.

In this context, the section tantalizingly evokes a pointedly nationalist reading of history: imperial commitments, talk of "honour and truth," have given way to the reassertion of imperial might. Yet the pronoun "we" is again of central importance. Like most nationalists (Lyons, "The Developing" 144), Yeats supported the 1912 bill, and it is particularly telling that he referred to the weight of history when expressing that support to a group of southern Protestants: "The clear verdict of the history of civilised nations in modern times is that the responsibilities of self- government and the growth of political freedom are the most powerful solvents for sectarian animosities" (qtd. in Cullingford, Yeats 86). Adopting a key trope of imperialist historiography--"the history of civilised nations" as the field from which "clear" historical truths may be harvested-Yeats recasts the evolutionary certainties of the modern imperial nation in Irish terms, establishing those certainties as the basis of his faith in m oderate constitutional nationalism. In "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" such faith is dismissed as another component of the labyrinth, a historical myopia pervading both sides of the colonial binary; however, rather than replicate that binary by simply attacking imperialism's rhetoric of "honour and truth" and by positioning himself as an Irish nationalist who perceives clearly the betrayal that imperial discourse would belie, Yeats indicts all who have participated in the construction of sanctioning historical narratives. What remains is not the aloof comfort of gazing upon a historical narrative proved false but the bitter "shriek" of "pleasure" that comes with perceiving the hollow core of historiographic desire.

In the poem's concluding section Yeats moves quickly from a chaotic present in which there are no heroes (the "few ... handsome riders ... break and vanish"), no clear villains, only "Violence upon the roads," to a vision of the distant past, a final ironic play on historiographic desire: