Contact and like us on Facebook

Follow my personal account on Twitter

W. B. Yeats was born in Dublin and he inherited what Stephen Gwynne was to describe as the condition of being ‘spiritually hyphenated without knowing it’. (Stan Smith). The ‘spiritual hyphenation’ was a dilemma of the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority, to which Yeats belonged. They were the descendants of English, Scots, or even Huguenot, that settled in the country after Elizabeth I and Cromwell’s reconquests of Ireland in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

The Anglo-Irish Protestant had lost most of their land to the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, which was known as the Ascendancy. The Ascendancy took its livelihood from rents from its estates and was based in great country houses. The Ascendancy found their careers in the military, colonial and civil services. Yeats’ patron and friend, Lady Augusta Gregory, (whose ‘Coole Park’ is evoked in some of his poems), was the widow of the Governor of Ceylon, and her son, Robert, died as a major in the British Air Force. At this time, in particular in the north of Ireland, a class of small landowning Protestant farmers was prospering well. Both these classes were sustained by the trading and professional strata from which Yeats’ family derived.

It was important to Yeats to carry on the Protestant strand in Irish nationalism, which was already established by others. His great-grandfather, Reverend John Yeats, was imprisoned briefly because they suspected him of supporting a rebellion against the British rule. But the Protestant tradition during the 18th Century did provide Yeats with some heroes: political theorist Edmund Burke; satirist Jonathan Swift; poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith; and philosopher Bishop Berkeley. (All these are celebrated in Yeats’ poems).

Yeats was regarded as a dreamer and a waster, and never went to university. In what could be described as a revolt against the materialistic, he was drawn to the various mysticisms and mystical societies that were around near the end of the last century. His mother’s family, the Pollexfens, were highly interested in astrology and magic. Yeats’ father disbelieved and questioned the Christian belief, which lead Yeats to explore and investigate informal and exotic ones.

In his early play, The Shadowy Waters, (started in the 1880s, but finished in 1907 after several revisions), Yeats makes use of symbolism. Although at this point in his life Yeats didn’t know that much about Japanese theatre, the play does resemble the style of a ritualised movement in Noh. (For example, where Dectora cuts the rope that binds the two ships together). When I read the play for the first time, it reminded me very much of a dream, combining music, stage lighting and speech to create a very supernatural piece of theatre. The Shadowy Waters feels as though it’s on the border of an old style of theatre and a new style.

In his book, Essays and Introductions, Yeats explains that he had many ideas from the style of Japanese plays:

"With the help of Japanese plays . . . I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and, symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its way – an aristocratic form."

Yeats liked to listen to stories and teachings that spoke of supersensual experiences, or those that gave him the background for the visions that would come to him ‘from beyond the mind’. He discovered magic and rituals, astral projection, seances and occult ceremonies, which attracted his ‘anti-scientific’ side. He states in Essays and Introductions, that ‘our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal.’
Yeats was a founder of the Dublin Hermetic Society, (a secret order devoted to studying oriental religions and writings by the ancient Graeco-Egyption sage, Hermes Trismegistus). When his family went to London, he joined the London Lodge of the Theosophists. (They were a sect of spiritualists, based on the revelations of the charismatic charlatan, Madame Blavatsky).

His inspiration for Cathleen ni Houlihan came to Yeats in a dream. Although the play is simple, it does require sophisticated acting because the stage realism is intersected by a different, symbolic mode. After completing the piece, he insisted that the actresses who played Cathleen to keep their ‘young faces’, therefore destroying the myth that the old women magically turns herself into a beautiful young maiden that makes the soldier have courage to give himself to her. He also thought that the symbolism in the play should not be forced upon the audience, but should steadily spread out, through their imaginations.

Yeats is described as being a visionary, and he surrounded himself with images. The magic and its imaginative life appealed to him and he was attracted by astrology and astronomy. He studied many visonary traditions, such as the Platonic, the Neoplatonic, the Swedenborgian, the alchemical, the Tibetan Mysteries, Buddhism, (and many other beliefs). Yeats was later expelled from the Dublin Hermetic Society, for favouring an approach to supernatural phenomena. He experimented with telepathy and clairvoyance with his uncle, George Pollexfen, and later in 1890, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (They incorporated traditional European Cabalistic Magic and astrology, and was dedicated to exploring the mystical doctrines of the Kabbala – the Jewish tradition of arcane wisdom and magic).

"The secret books of the Kabbala contained much that that had spilled over from the Neo-Platonic thought, particulary in the idea that the universe is made up of a series of overflows from a pure primal source, the spiritual becoming coarser and coarser in each stage of the descent until it becomes matter, the crudest embodiment of spirit. This metaphor lies beyond much of Yeats’ thought." (Stan Smith)

The Golden Dawn allowed him to explore experimentation and expression. He learnt about magical and esoteric symbols, creating interrelationships between the seasons, various parts of the body, the five elements, numbers, and so on. He put this knowledge with his own experiences and poetry, creating his own system of symbols. Yeats was then able to express what he was envisioning in his writing. (For example, The Shadowy Waters). He looks at themes, such as the questions of life and death, eternity, immortality, change and the changelessness of things and the entire world.

Two years after Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed, On Baile’s Strand had its first staging at the end December, 1904. The audiences and reviews said that there was ‘less of the mystical and more of the human element in the composition’, (Cited from Seleted Plays) and that the characters were ‘virile and actual’. Malice, evil, scheming and an indifference to human suffering are invested into the Blind Man and the Fool. The Blind Man knows the secret of Connla’s parentage and has a sadistic pleasure in revealing the revelation to augment the misery of Cuchulain. It is despair at the knowledge and not the magic that drives Cuchulain to a vengeful madness. And the Fool’s ‘innocence’ can only see the physical manifestation of the madness, which doesn’t show the spiritual and emotional breakdown of Cuchulain.

In At The Hawk’s Well, Yeats makes good use of dance-drama, songs, masks, rituals and a clever use of stylisations with the design and staging. He takes the audience on an imaginative discovery to where the processes are made that make choices in our very own self, that determine our individuality. It isn’t easy to show this journey, yet Yeats manages to explore our very selves with At The Hawk’s Well. The play also makes good use of Noh drama. Yeats uses the devices of Noh drama to create an emotional and intellectual intensity that enables total concentration on the stage and on the content of the play.

It is hard to decide where the idea for the play came from. There are stories of wells with magical life-enhancing properties within the Irish lore. There are several romantic narratives by William Morris that Yeats admired, that use the words ‘well’ and ‘tree’, as a symbol of energy and fertility. There was also a Noh play, Yoro, or The Sustenance of Age, (by Zeami), that tells a story of a waterfall inhabited by a god of peace and bounty, who endowed the waters with invigoration powers. However, the play does not directly draw a parallel to At the Hawk’s Well.

Yeats’ play, The Words upon the Window-Pane, which was put in the memory of Lady Gregory, (who died on 22nd May, 1930), deals with a spiritualist séance, with which Yeats shows with a dispassion. Good and ‘hostile’ spirits are discussed and because of the satire the characters show, it’s difficult to tell whether Yeats wants you to take the play seriously or not. However, Dr Trench shows authority and discusses the idea that the afterlife has ghosts that ‘dream back’ or can relive ‘some passionate or tragic moment of life’, which Yeats had incorporated from Noh drama into The Dreaming of the Bones and Calvary.

Mrs Henderson, (the medium), is possessed by a ‘passionate’ ghost and her body and voice changes into that of the ghost’s. Mrs Henderson is then possessed by other ghosts. Anger and bitterness are felt on the stage and it relies on either a good performance by the actress playing Mrs Henderson, or a lot of imagination from the audience. But the role is well created by Yeats. It demands that they project very distinct voices – a high voice for the child Lulu and a low, harsher one for Swift, while Mrs Henderson is in the spirit world. The role also demands two styles of movement – one where Mrs Henderson is herself and one where she is possessed, in particular to when Swift goes through the several stages of his fraught life in his middle and old age).

When I first read The Words upon the Window-Pane, I didn’t enjoy it that much. I thought it was funny in places and I couldn’t take it seriously. But the second time I read it I began to understand more about the ideas of the good and hostile spirits. Yeats had attended several séances in his life and the play reflects a similar setting to one. To me, The Words upon the Window-Pane offers a clear and simple warning to those who perform séances and use Ouija boards – do not delve into things that you cannot understand or control.

Yeats clearly points out in Essays and Introductions, that:

"We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought . . . our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal."

Yeats’ visions weren’t limited to the plays he wrote. He wrote many poems that allowed him express and explore his ideas. There are two types of vision he had – one were he called upon the vision using his own will:

‘And I call up McGregor from the grave,
For in my firs hard springtime we were friends.’ The Tower

The other kind of vision was when he is called into it without his will:

‘I saw a virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side,
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;’ Two Songs from a Play

Yeats had a lot of visions connected with the idea of ‘gyres’ – cones that spiral together and symbolise objectivity and subjectivity of the word. They represent a cycle that lasts 2000 years, and our cycle ends at the start of January, 2000.

‘The gyres! the Gyres! Old Rocky Face look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.’ The Gyres

Although Yeats looked at many other beliefs and myths in his plays, he did write about Jesus Christ. (Calvary and The Resurrection, for example). He also predicts in his writings, the coming of Christ and the birth of the Anti-Christ, at the start of the Millenium:

‘The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ The Second Coming

Yeats also touches upon the ideas of life, death and the reincarnation of souls. (In The Words upon the Window-Pane, he talks about good and hostile spirits, and how ‘passionate’ ghosts can ‘dream back’). He also talks about what happens after death, describing the process of return of the soul to the ‘cosmic trance’.

‘O sages standing in God’s holy fire . . .
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.’ Sailing to Byzantium

He didn’t just limit the idea of reincarnation of a soul to human beings. His ideas refer to the world and the universe – that the universe is connected by a system of energies, which are always changing and never disappearing. Although everything is effected by this change, Yeats sought something that wouldn’t be affected – something immortal and eternal. And this is the world where the imagination comes from. Yeats also talks about the Great Memory, (or Great Mind), from which every image and truth springs from. In one of his essays, he wrote that he was surprised that whenever he found an image that came ‘out of beyond [his] mind’, it was already described by some previous poet or writer. He said, that ‘therefore a poet and his imagination is a medium of the truth coming from the place of wisdom in the world. For him every true poet was also a prophet.’

His desire for knowledge and truth lasted all his life. Although he believed that a man could never reach the final truth while he lived on this planet, he believed they would find what they’re looking for once they had died. Yeats wanted to find and know his true self, and not only his ‘mask’. Even though Yeats suffered with several diseases in his old age, he was still able to look at the world with some joy. Before he died in France, he managed to keep his energy flowing and believed that he finally found what he was looking for:

Next Page  >>