Yeats as ‘Smiling Public Man’: the Nobel Poet and the new State

By Ed Mulhall

It was nearly 11 o’clock on the evening of 14 November 1923 when the future editor of the Irish Times telephoned the poet W.B. Yeats and told him he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. R.M. Smyllie was a reporter in the Newsroom that night when the news came over the Creed teleprinter and he immediately rang the poet’s house hoping to be the first to tell him. When Yeats answered, Smyllie by his own account was rather enthusiastic and gushing and slow to get to the point: ‘Mr. Yeats, I’ve got very good news for you, a very great honour has been conferred on you…this is a great honour for you and the country.’ Sensing the poet’s impatience, he broke the news: ‘You’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize, a very great honour to you and a very great honour to Ireland.’ Yeats’s response was direct: ‘How much, Smyllie, how much is it?’

Yeats had been alerted to the possibility of a win the previous week when a ‘rather drunk’ journalist had contacted him for comment on a Reuters report that he and Thomas Mann were in the running for the prize. At the time, he avoided comment but wrote to a friend that the prize money might help him pay his debts which were under stress due to the costs associated with his return to Merrion Square, the refurbishment of the Tower in Ballylee, Co. Galway; and his efforts to support his sisters’ Cuala Press which was in difficulty. (In fact Mann had not been nominated for the prize and it was Thomas Hardy that Yeats had beaten. Unknown to the poet this was the seventh time he had been nominated, the first in 1902 by William Lecky and 1921, 1922 and 1923, the last two nominations by the Nobel Committee.)

The confirmation of the award came in a telegram from the Swedish Ambassador in London shortly after Smyllie’s call and Yeats spent the remainder of the evening responding to other calls from the press. Yeats also sent a telegram to Lady Gregory with the news. When finished with the interviews around 1 o’clock, he and his wife George went in search of a bottle of wine to celebrate, but having found the cellar empty had fried sausages instead. The following day they bought a new carpet for the hall and stairs and went to the Shelbourne Hotel for a celebratory dinner with family and friends, including the poet, Thomas MacGreevy. According to his friend, and first official biographer, the publisher Joseph Maunsel Hone, it was at this dinner that Yeats received his ‘first’ telegram of congratulations. It was to Yeats’s ‘immense gratification’ from James Joyce in Paris. 

 

 

 

Report on the Senate’s vote of congratulations to one of its own on awarded the Nobel Prize (Image: The Irish Independent, 29 Nov 1923)

Smyllie didn’t use his ‘how much?’ quote in his lead article for the Irish Times, merely reporting that Yeats had said to his wife ‘if it is a small one, we will spend it and be rich, if it is a large one we will invest in and be substantial.’ Smyllie began his report though with the answer to Yeats’s question: the Nobel Prize for Literature (valued at £7,000).  The newspaper article gave a detailed account of Yeats’s immediate reflection on the award and how he believed the Nobel committee had chosen him principally for his work for Irish drama, which gave ‘Synge and Lady Gregory to the world and he felt the prize had been awarded rather to the Anglo-Irish literary movement rather than himself.’  He wrote that Yeats believed that the Irish literary movement was in transition, that the ‘romantic’ school’ (of which Yeats was ‘prophet and master’) was passing and a new ‘psychological’ one would replace it. This was exemplified by Lennox Robinson whose work showed ‘the invasion of psychology into romanticism and he believed political change would result in the eclipse of the dreamer and the emergence of a new school more or less on the model of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House’. Yeats added that ‘the difference between the old and the new is the difference between Dr. Douglas Hyde and Mr. Kevin O’Higgins. The making of a good citizen is the aim of today.’  He singled out James Joyce as a herald of this new school: ‘I am not a judge of the novel form but in Joyce’s work there is an intensity which is the essential of great art. Even in a bad writer or a bad painter one can always detect the signs of something new. Joyce is a very great writer, and something is there striving to be born.’  Yeats refused to believe that his poetry was responsible for his nomination but admitted it was his life’s work, ‘Irish folk is the only thing about which I shall ever care very deeply’, and Yeats went on to assert that everything he had written had as its inspiration the furtherance of the movement to which he had dedicated his life. Smyllie reported, ‘he thinks of the work as an artistic entity, which one suspects is not yet complete.’ Smylie concluded: ‘One could have spoken for hours with Mr. Yeats, but a poet who is at once a Nobel Prize winner and a Senator, albeit the most courteous and obliging of men has many claims upon his time, and besides, “last trams” have a cynical disregard for European fame.’

That James Joyce should be at the forefront of Yeats’s comments on the night he heard the news of his award may not seem surprising in retrospect but at the time it was indicative of his realization that Joyce was a major figure, particularly in the European/International context that the Nobel Prize represents. Joyce would never even be nominated for the prize. ‘No bell for Joyce’, he told Desmond Fitzgerald the Irish Minister who had suggested to Joyce in 1921 that the Irish government might nominate him (Joyce thought it unlikely and he was correct). It seems that Yeats and his wife George had met Joyce and Nora Barnacle and Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy at the time of the Irish Race Convention in Paris in 1922 just as Ulysses was about to be published. Yeats was there as a nominee of the Irish government as was his brother the painter Jack B. Yeats. Pound had written to Fitzgerald at the time: 'Don’t you think it an error to send nonentities like Lavery, and local celebrities (like the estimable Jack Yeats, Orpen etc.) and to omit a name far better known in Paris, namely our friend Mr Joyce, who has an European reputation, whose Ulysses is the event of the season, and whose works are translated, some of em at least into French, German, Italian, Sweedish and Spanish; and who is the one Irish candidate for the Nobel Prize that wd. have any chance of winning?' (sic) Yeats and his wife began to read Ulysses shortly after that visit, beginning in London and continuing in Ballylee with George Yeats writing to a friend that she found the book challenging, ‘Wily continues in admiration. I think a great deal is very fine but I want a large hot bath after each reading & that’s a bore.’ Yeats continued his positive discussion of Joyce with T. S. Elliot in London in December 1922 and continued to promote his work.

When settled in Merrion Square, Yeats wrote to Joyce to invite him to stay in his new house. There was a risk in the invitation. He admitted to Olivia Shakepear that he would have to disguise the fact that he had not finished the book (and indeed Yeats’s copy which is in the National Library of Ireland is only cut to part of the Cyclops episode). Yeats later invited Joyce to the Tailteann Games in 1924 (which he would politely decline) and offered Joyce membership of a proposed Irish Academy of Letters (both Joyce and Shaw refused). Just before the Nobel announcement Yeats had defended Joyce in a debate at Trinity College Dublin, saying that there was an intensity of the great writer in Joyce: ‘When James Joyce began to write in Ireland they had  not come to their recent peril – or the robbery and the murder and the things that came with it - but he thought the shadow of peril was over everyone when men are driven to intensity…He thought it was possible that Ireland had had that intensity out of which great literature might arise and it was possible James Joyce was merely the first drop of a shower.’

Amongst the congratulation messages for Yeats was one the President of Saorstát Éireann, the Irish Free State Government, W. T. Cosgrave, who wrote: ‘It is an honour which your services  to Irish literature have well merited and which will enhance the reputation of our country in the domain of the arts.’  There was also a formal motion of congratulations in the Senate on November 28th. The motion was proposed by Senator Oliver St. John Gogarty, who had recommended Yeats appointment to Arthur Griffith and Desmond Fitzgerald. ‘Our civilization will be assessed on the name of Senator Yeats. Coming at a time when there was a regular wave of destruction, hatred of beauty, a crushing out of perfection and blindness to the national ideal in this country, it was a very happy and welcome thing.’  This emphasis by Gogarty on the perils of recent times was a reflection of his own experience, and that of many of his colleagues in the Dáil and Senate, during the Civil War. He had performed the autopsy on the body of Michael Collins (and tended to Arthur Griffith in his final illness). Gogarty in November 1923 was still commuting to the Senate from London having moved there with his medical practice following a kidnap attempt by the IRA/Irregulars and the burning of his home in Renvyle, Co. Galway.  A few months previously, Cuala Press had published a small volume of his poetry with a preface by Yeats, whose title poem An Offering of Swans celebrated the gesture of thanks made by Gogarty to the River Liffey which facilitated his escape from his kidnappers. As a Senator, Yeats had been provided with an armed guard and his new home in Merrion Square had been shot at on at least one occasion when George and the children were present. Yeats saw his role not as one to make major speeches as might have been expected, but as a State-builder engaged in the minute tasks of developing new structures, laws and bureaucracy. As he explained to Olivia Shakespear: ‘Here one works at the slow exciting work of creating the institutions of a new nation - all coral insects but with some design in our heads of the ultimate island. Meanwhile the country is full of arms & explosives ready for any violent hand to use. Perhaps all our slow growing coral may be scattered but I think not - not unless Europe takes to war again, & starts new telepathic streams of violence and cruelty.’

Yeats’s contributions to the Senate throughout 1923 were primarily short and succinct comments, primarily on procedural matters, such as the motion on joining the League of Nations or commemorative, as with the death of Arthur Griffith. There were, however, two substantive contributions: a motion on the Hugh Lane pictures which he and Lady Gregory had been campaigning on for many years and a proposal for the introduction of a support structure for the  scholarship in,  and preservation of, Irish Manuscripts (Yeats chaired the parliamentary committee making the proposal). And in a contribution to a motion on the Censorship of Films Bill he argued against the proposition that censorship protected the vulnerable from harm: “We see only the evil effect, greatly exaggerated in the papers, of these rather inferior forms of art which we are now discussing, but we have no means of reducing to statistics their other effects. I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the general conscience of mankind.”

Yeats would later describe himself in these years, following a visit to a school in County Waterford, as a ‘smiling public man’.  But as an establishment figure, seen as a supporter of the Free State government, and with government ministers regularly visiting his home (Desmond Fitzgerald and Kevin O’ Higgins in particular),Yeats was  drawn into public controversies, often through demands for him to make a statement of protest or support.  His actions, or more regularly his failure to act, left him at odds with close friends and relatives, many of whom, like his brother Jack B. Yeats, did not support the Treaty. Thus he and Maud Gonne had a major rift over Yeats’s failure to protest during the hunger strike of Mary MacSwiney. George Yeats had urged him to make representations on behalf of Erskine Childers prior to his execution. And Lady Gregory, who was staying in Yeats’s home, offered to leave when they clashed over the treatment of Republican prisoners on hunger strike by the government after the ending of the Civil War - Gregory had written a letter of protest with Lennox Robinson and James Stephens which Yeats refused to sign.  (Yeats did however join with George Russell [AE], Stephens and Gogarty in signing the letter of support for James Weldon, the father of author and Abbey playwright, Brinsley MacNamara [John Weldon],who was in the courts seeking compensation following the boycott of his school  in Devlin by locals protesting at the depiction of the town in his son’s novel The Valley of the Squinting Windows.)

There was no rift with Lady Gregory despite these differences. They were working closer together then they ever had during this period, continually on the Lane pictures and particularly on trying to get a sustainable future for the Abbey Theatre, dealing with the many challenges of running the theatre and supporting its new productions. Yeats had been in Ballylee and Coole during some of the most intense periods of the Civil War, when houses were being burnt and atrocities reported on both sides. He had begun his epic sequence Meditations in Time of Civil War during this time, with Lady Gregory first to see an early draft. It included his horror at the casual acceptance of the violent acts in the lands surrounding Coole and his tower at Ballylee and his fearful vision of the consequences:

Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,
Nothing but the grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out
the moon.

During May 1923, Lady Gregory had stayed with George Bernard Shaw at his home in the English village of Ayot St. Lawrence where he had read her the drafts of his new play on Joan of Arc as he was writing it (he also gave her the manuscript of T.E .Lawrence’s war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom which had been sent to him by Lawrence). Lady Gregory recognised Saint Joan as a major work and it would lead to Shaw getting his own nomination for the Nobel Prize for 1925, which he would receive in 1926. On her return home Lady Gregory discovered a lump on her breast which necessitated an operation to remove it. Yeats insisted that she stay with him and George in Merrion Square for her convalescence and perhaps the surgery underlined her frailty to him. By the time of their clash over the hunger strikes letter in November she was back to full health and had just completed a new passion play The Story Brought by Brigit, which Yeats much admired. She had been pleased by remarks Yeats made about her work in a talk to Trinity College Dublin’s Philosophical Society and had just returned to Coole when she got the telegram from Yeats saying he had won the Nobel Prize. She wrote in her diary: ‘I am proud and glad of this triumph for I believed in him always and was glad he “never made a poorer song that he might have a heavier purse.” In these twenty six years our friendship has never been broken.’

The importance of the award for writing and cultural life was emphasised by George Russell (AE) in the newly launched Irish Statesman journal. Unique in its combination of political commentary and analysis with new works in prose and poetry, the journal had been founded by Horace Plunkett to support the development of the new State (replacing the Irish Homestead which Russell had also edited). In its cultural content the Irish Statesman was beginning to fulfil the need for an outlet for new writing that had been missing since the demise of the Irish Review and the constraints of wartime censorship that had prevented new ventures. Launched in September 1923, the Irish Statesman, together with a poetry journal, The Dublin Magazine, was to publish some of the important work by new and established writers. Modelled on the New Statesman, the Irish Statesman contained political and economic commentary that was broadly in support of the institutions of the new State, though not uncritically, as well as a lively and at times contentious review section. Russell with assistant editors Susan Mitchell and James Good, gave the journal a supply of quality writing themselves as well as being able to attract and find some excellent contributors, some finding their first outing in its pages, just as James Joyce had with Russell in the Irish Homestead. The first edition in September had included a piece of political commentary by George Bernard Shaw which was critical of the stance taken by Irish Republicanism and it had, in a gesture which linked back to the Irish Review, started the serialisation of a new work by James Stephens, TÍr na nÓg. While this may have been an establishment choice the review was soon publishing new writing by established poets like Gogarty and Padraic Colum but also by new writers such as Austin Clarke, F. R. Higgins, Seán O’Casey, Mícheál Mac Liammóir, Francis Stuart and Liam O’Flaherty. The latter was a significant addition as he was one of the participants on the Republican side in the siege of the Four Courts (he was also a veteran of the First World War) and his short stories of life on the Aran Islands were soon to be published in London. In subsequent years Frank O’Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin would feature, as well as Patrick Kavanagh.

 

 

The Irish Statesman, which made its appearance in September 1923 and included a piece of political commentary from George Bernard Shaw (Image: Wikimedia) 

Russell had been privately critical of Yeats’s public role, believing it was hampering his artistic output. (though as his biographer Roy Foster noted it was the completion of his ‘philosophic work’ A Vision that was the distraction from poetry in this period) and ironically his one great poem of 1923 which was informed by this work was rejected by Russell when it was summitted to the Irish Stateman in early 1924. The poem ‘Leda and the Swan’ was thought to be too disturbing for the audience and a similar case of self-censorship occurred in the Dublin Magazine where a review of Ulysses by Con Leventhal was rejected. Both the review and Yeats’s poem were published subsequently in two new radical (and short lived) periodicals but their rejections were indicative of a growing climate of censorship in the new State which culminated in the Censorship of Publications Act of 1928, which Yeats opposed.

Despite his often tense relationship with Yeats, Russell in his editorial on the Nobel Prize was unequivocal: ‘No poet of his generation, writing in English, has set before himself higher ideals of perfection in his art and we cannot remember a single poem where the artist seems to have grown weary in his search for perfection. In that passionate conscientiousness of his which laboured to make all things beautiful there was restored to Ireland a spirit which has not existed since the Book of Kells…Nothing is more important to a nation than the images which haunt the mind of its people, for it is by these they are led to act. If they are images of violence, they will inevitably be led to act with violence. If they are images of beauty they will create beauty. It is according to the measure in which the best in literature is made available to our people that in the next generation we shall find them empty headed, as in this, or creating the arts, the sciences, the culture and the social order which make a civilisation. If we create so high a thing in the coming time nobody will have contributed more to the beauty of the building than William Butler Yeats.’ In true Irish Statesman style this editorial is followed by one, called ‘The Machinery of Government’ on the Ministries and Secretaries Bill, which ‘President Cosgrave correctly describes as second in importance only to the Constitution.’

Yeats readily accepted the invitation by the Swedish Academy to receive the Prize in person in Stockholm and to give a Nobel lecture while there. In discussing the topic of the lecture Yeats said that he would come with two options in readiness: ‘I shall certainly give the Lecture you speak of with pleasure ­ I could either lecture to you upon the Irish Dramatic Movement or upon my own Poetry. When I lecture upon my own Poetry, as I do occasionally here, I read 7 or 8 Poems, tell how I came to write them, explain them etc. Possibly a Swedish audience would prefer that I should speak upon the `Irish Theatre' as the Scandinavian countries have produced so much dramatic Literature. I can take either subject and feel that you will be able to choose the appropriate more readily than I. I shall come prepared to speak upon either theme.’  While the formal citation for the award emphasised his achievements in poetry, ‘for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’, Yeats chose to concentrate on his contribution to drama for his Nobel lecture which he titled The Irish Dramatic Movement. This was partly a practical solution: Yeats would speak from notes and had delivered this talk a number of times during the year, including to Trinity College’s Elizabethan Society in the Ritz Café on Grafton Street just three weeks previously. However, this emphasis was also tactical as Yeats and Lady Gregory were in delicate consultation with Irish government figures about a possible State subvention for the Abbey Theatre and the prospect of it becoming the National Theatre.

The events in Stockholm in December 1923 included a state banquet and special performances of Yeats’ play Cathleen Ní Houlihan and Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Yeats recounted his impression to his sister Lily on the way back through London: ‘He said it was like the Prisoner of Zenda, a fine spectacle. There was the giving of prizes. He had to walk backwards up five steps coming from the King. There was a banquet. He sat by a Princess, George by a Prince, who talked with her in French the whole time and told W. B. that she spoke without accent. The royal family are very cultivated people and have people of intellect about them… Sweden does not ennoble any one, but bestows orders on literature, art and science.’  Yeats had a less endearing encounter with the poet Robert McAlmon, associate of Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach who had assisted Joyce in the typing of Ulysses. As a friend of Pound, Yeats had met him in his hotel room. McAlmon wrote later that it didn’t go well: ‘He mentioned truth and beauty and art, and I gathered he was going to elaborate upon the point that “beauty or art is the eternal search”- you finish. It was some comment on Joyce or Pound or other poet which had started Yeats on this theme.” The eternal search for”- I pleaded another engagement and bolted. ... If he had been nearer my own age I would have stopped his sermon on beauty. As it was I knew it was hopeless.’ This generational frustration with the Yeats ‘aesthetic’ would recur in later years, most notably with the Irish poet Monk Gibbon’s experience of  the Yeats Monday gatherings, a notable event where writers, by invitation, met for discussion and debate at the poet’s home in Merrion Square.

 

 

 

A perspective on Stockholm, Sweden in the early 20th century. It was to this city that Yeats travelled in December 1923 to receive his Nobel Prize and deliver his Nobel lecture. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540)

The play Cathleen ní Houlihan was singled out from Yeats’s work by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee in his presentation speech: “Here more powerfully than anywhere else he touches the patriotic string. The subject is Ireland’s struggle for liberty throughout the ages, and the chief personage is Ireland herself, impersonated by a wandering beggar woman. But we hear no simple tone of hatred, and the profound pathos of the piece is more restrained than in any other comparable poem. We hear only the purest and highest part of the nation’s feeling; the words are few and the action the simplest possible. The whole thing is greatness without a touch of affectation.”

For his lecture, Yeats spoke from notes without a full text. He began with the rationale for his choice of subject: “Perhaps the English committees would never have sent you my name if I had written no plays, no dramatic criticism, if my lyric poetry had not a quality of speech practised upon the stage, perhaps even – though this could be no portion of their deliberate thought – if it were not in some degree the symbol of a movement. I wish to tell the Royal Academy of Sweden of the labours, triumphs, and troubles of my fellow workers.” His story of the dramatic movement begins with the fall of Parnell and the disillusionment of the Irish people with parliamentary politics. He presents himself and Douglas Hyde on two parallel paths - Hyde with the Gaelic League focussing on the Irish language while Yeats worked in English and as the “great mass of our people, accustomed to interminable political speeches, read little, and so from the very start we felt that we must have a theatre of our own.”
There follows the story of the dramatic movement from Yeats first meeting with Lady Gregory in 1896, through their collaboration and writing of plays to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre and the discovery of new playwriters, in particular John M. Synge, to the present day and the end of war and conflict. And it is this trinity that he sees as the heart of the movement as he concluded:

“It is too soon yet to say what will come to us from the melodrama and tragedy of the last four years, but if we can pay our players and keep our theatre open, something will come. We are burdened with debt, for we have come through war and civil war and audiences grow thin when there is firing in the streets. We have, however, survived so much that I believe in our luck, and think that I have a right to say I end my lecture in the middle or even perhaps at the beginning of the story. But certainly I have said enough to make you understand why, when I received from the hands of your King the great honour your Academy has conferred upon me, I felt that a young man’s ghost should have stood upon one side of me and at the other a living woman in her vigorous old age. I have seen little in this last week that would not have been memorable and exciting to Synge and to Lady Gregory, for Sweden has achieved more than we have hoped for our own country. I think most of all perhaps of that splendid spectacle of your court, a family beloved and able that has gathered about it not the rank only but the intellect of its country. No like spectacle will in Ireland show its work of discipline and of taste, though it might satisfy a need of the race no institution created by English or American democracy can satisfy.”

The text of the lecture which endures is that prepared by Yeats from his notes and published in 1925, most notably in the autobiographical account of the event prepared for Cuala Press. Lady Gregory took exception to the original description of her as ‘an old woman sinking into the infirmities of age’. As she wrote in her diary: ‘not even fighting against them! However, L.R. (Lennox Robinson agreed with me that this description would send down my market value, and be considered to mean that I had gone silly, so  he has consented to take it out.’ He did not change the final sentence, which Roy Foster notes shows a tendency toward elitism that presages some of Yeats political follies later in the 1920s. The Bounty of Sweden’s autobiographical content was described by Susan Mitchell in her Irish Statesman review as ‘distinguished gossip’ and showed Yeats fascination with the Royal court together with tales of his encounters with locals on his travels. For the Cuala Press edition he added a number of footnotes. In a note written on 15 June 1925 he describes the realistic drama shown by the Abbey production of Juno and the Paycock.  ‘In this play, which draws its characters and scenes from the Dublin slums, a mind not unlike that of Dostoevsky looks upon the violence and tragedy of civil war. There is assassination, sudden poverty, and the humour of drunkards and the philosophy of wastrels, and there is little but the out-worn theme of seduction, and perhaps a phrase or two of mechanical humour, to show that the author is not finished his artistic education. He knows thoroughly the life which he describes.’ The play had given them, he said, ‘the greatest success we have had in years.’ (In his draft Yeats had originally inserted the O’Casey comment in the text of the lecture but decided to keep the integrity of the original talk and presented it as footnote instead.)

The Bounty of Sweden was published in the summer of 1925, when Yeats made his most controversial Senate speech on divorce and Seán O’Casey submitted his next major work, The Plough and the Stars, to the Abbey. This play, whose first night was attended by government ministers Kevin O’Higgins and Ernest Blythe, led to the protests which would see Yeats on the Abbey stage defend the work against its critics from the revolutionary generation, amongst them Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, Mary MacSwiney, Dorothy Macardle and writers, F.R. Higgins and Liam O’Flaherty.  The essence of the protest was expressed by Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, who targeted Yeats and the theatre as responsible: ‘In no country save in Ireland could a State-subsidised theatre presume on popular patience to the extent of making a mockery and a byword of a revolutionary movement on which the present structure claims to stand.’ In riposte to these views, Yeats said that this sensitivity to criticism was a natural part of the growing pains of an immature state: ‘The moment a nation reached intellectual maturity, it became increasingly proud and ceased to be vain and when it became exceedingly proud it did not disguise its faults, because it was satisfied to know what were its qualities and powers….With success came pride, and with pride came indifference as to whether people were shown in a good or bad light on stage.’

In another note in The Bounty of Sweden, Yeats included the opening verse of the key section of Meditations in Time of Civil War (perhaps reflecting the discussion of some of his poetry during the events in Stockholm) with this context: ‘One felt an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature. A stare (our West of Ireland name for a starling) had built in a hole beside my window and I made these verses out of the feeling of the moment:

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house is burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

That is only the beginning but it runs on in the same mood. Presently a strange thing happened; I began to smell honey in places where honey could not be, at the end of a stone passage or at some windy turn of the road and it came always with certain thoughts. When I got back to Dublin, I was with angry people, who argued over everything or were eager to know the exact facts. They were in the mood that makes realistic drama.’  This note is added to the official record of Yeats Nobel Speech in the Academy archives.

In his own Nobel Prize winning speech, seventy years after the publication of The Bounty of Sweden, Seamus Heaney returned to this Yeats poem, Meditations in Time of Civil War, and quoted in full The Stare’s Nest By My Window section, thus completing Yeats’s Nobel extract from the poem :

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Heaney continued:

“I have heard this poem repeated often, in whole and in part, by people in Ireland over the past twenty-five years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded towards life itself as St. Kevin was and as tough-minded about what happens in and to life as Homer. It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust.”

The title of Heaney’s lecture was Crediting Poetry and it to poetry that Yeats turned to express his frustration as his grew increasing bleak about the values of the State he was helping create.  As he wrote in the title poem of his next collection, The Tower:

It is time I wrote my will,
I choose upstanding men,
That climb the streams until
The fountains leap and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of a people that were
Bound neither to cause nor to State,

Yeats did not seek a second term to the Senate. He retired in 1928 on health grounds so that he could spend the winters in the warmth of Rapallo in Northern Italy, where Ezra Pound lived. The poetry in The Tower and that from his final decade are considered amongst his greatest work.

 

FURTHER READING:
W. B. Yeats, The Bounty of Sweden ( Cuala Press Dublin, 1925)
W. B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae (London, 1936)
Roy Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life, Volume 2, The Arch Poet (Oxford,2003)
John S. Kelly, A W.B. Yeats Chronology (New York, 2003)
Richard Ellmann, Yeats, the Man and the Masks (New York, 1987)
The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Electronic Edition (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 2002)
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (London, 1954)
W.R. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits (London, 1972)
The Gonne-Yeats Letters, edited by Anna McBride and A Norman Jeffares (London, 1992)
The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Alt and Russell K. Alspach (NewYork, 1966)
W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928), Manuscripts Materials (The Cornell Yeats) edited by Richard J. Finneran, Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer (New York, 2007) 
Margaret Kelleher, Ireland's Interpreter" and "Europe's Welcome": W.B. Yeats and the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923, Joseph Hassett Lecture 2023, National Library of Ireland. Video accessible online at: https://www.nli.ie/stories/recording-annual-hassett-yeats-lecture-2023.
Bridgit Bramsback, Yeats and The Bounty of Sweden, in Yeats The European, edited by Norman J. Jeffares (Gerrards Cross, 1989)
Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George, the Life of Mrs W.B.Yeats (Oxford, 2002)
The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, edited by Donald R. Pearce (London 2001; Indiana,1960)
Lady Gregory’s Journals, Volume One, edited by Daniel J. Murphy (Gerrards Cross, 1978)
Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats (Harmondsworth, 1962)
Frank Shovlin, The Irish Literary Periodical 1923-1958 (Oxford, 2004)
Nicholas Allen, George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905-30 (Dublin 2007)
Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, edited by Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’ Neill (London, 1967)
Brenda Maddox, George’s Ghosts (London, 1999)
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