Leonard Cohen will be in the company of some great literary and political ghosts when he takes to the stage at Lissadell this weekend...
WHEN LEONARD Cohen performs this weekend he will be surrounded not just by thousands of adoring fans but also by many of the iconic landmarks that feature so prominently in the poetry of WB Yeats. Lissadell House itself is commemorated in the elegy,
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz,
Ben Bulben gives its name to one of Yeats’s last poems (
Under Ben Bulben
), and in Drumcliffe churchyard the famous epitaph, “Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by!”, marks his final resting place.
In late November 1894 Yeats made the first of a number of memorable visits to Lissadell House, ancestral home of the Gore-Booth family. For someone of his modest Anglo-Irish background, the invitation to stay in one of Ireland’s most impressive neo-classical Ascendancy houses marked his arrival as a poet of distinction on the national scene.
At this time Yeats's reputation rested primarily on his long narrative poem, The Wanderings of Oisin, championing the virtues of the heroic Celtic spirit over the austere demands of Christianity.
Significantly, his early poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, had also struck a chord in its stirring reversal of the trajectory of Irish emigration. In this famous lyric Yeats declared his intention to leave London and return to Sligo, making it a centre of creative possibility. In so doing, he provided an imaginative blueprint for the Irish Revival movement, which would develop along the lines of the modest self-help project proposed in that poem.
Yeats's ambition to make an impact on Irish affairs was also becoming apparent in poems such as To Ireland in the Coming Times, in which he shamelessly promoted himself as the most important poetic figure of the emerging generation. At this time he was also showing an eagerness to get involved in debates on matters of literary taste and was gaining valuable experience in setting up societies and clubs. His main aspiration, however, was to become Ireland's national poet – a title he hoped to seize from Thomas Moore, still hugely popular almost 40 years after his death. Yeats despised Moore's maudlin Melodiesand was intent on replacing them with a more vigorous poetry which would speak to the deeper emotions of the Irish rather than to the whims of English taste.
Making an entrance at Lissadell for the first time Yeats must have experienced a feeling of quiet satisfaction that he had crossed the threshold from the lower reaches of Anglo-Irish privilege into the upper echelons of Ascendancy life. The big house itself was, in time, to become a potent symbol of Anglo-Irish cultivation for Yeats, and there is no doubt that the time he spent at Lissadell made a huge impact on him. He was enchanted by the hospitality, intellectual curiosity and unconventional manners of the Gore-Booths and revelled in his newfound role as “artist in residence”.
During various sojourns Yeats spent a lot of time in the company of two extraordinary women, Eva and Constance Gore-Booth, the latter of whom was later to become Countess Markiewicz. He got to know them at a pivotal moment in Irish affairs when the deadlocked politics of the post-Parnell era were giving way to the revolutionary energies of an emerging generation. Like Yeats, Eva and Constance were mavericks in their own class and believed that a vigorous national literature was vital to Ireland’s regeneration. By the time the Irish State was founded in 1922, however, events had propelled them along quite distinct trajectories.
Both Eva and Constance were political radicals who were prepared to give up their privileged world in Lissadell for revolutionary action. From their perspective, life in the big house was stiflingly oppressive of female possibility and complicit in the subjugation of the Irish nation.
While the Gore-Booth sisters left Lissadell to become suffragettes and socialists, Yeats increasingly felt compelled to praise and celebrate the civilities and certainties of the Anglo-Irish big house at a time of revolutionary upheaval in Ireland and across Europe.
In time, Constance was to become a central figure in Ireland’s fight for independence as well as a leading campaigner for women’s rights. She commanded a battalion of troops in St Stephen’s Green during the 1916 Rising, became the first female MP to be elected to the House of Commons and the first Irish woman to hold a ministerial post. Eva moved to Manchester and became active in politics on feminist and socialist issues.
Yeats wrote In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewiczin 1927 after the death of Constance; Eva pre-deceased her in 1926. In the poem he combines elegy with harsh critique as his heartfelt affection for the two sisters is undercut by an undisguised scorn for their political ideals and actions. The "Two girls in silk kimonos" that he remembered fondly from his early visits to Lissadell ended their days removed from the splendour of their former home and contributed in no small way to the undermining of their own class. In Yeats's eyes, however, their "conspiring among the ignorant" served only to undercut "the great gazebo" of Anglo-Irish achievement.
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer’s wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague Utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
W B Yeats - October 1927
P J Mathews lectures in Anglo-Irish literature and drama at UCD and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to JM Synge
