Week 4: Week 4: “All changed, changed utterly”:

Poetry of Revolution and Resolution

Writing IrelandWriting Ireland

The War of Independence/The Anglo-Irish War 21st January 1919–11th July 1921

The Irish Civil War (1922-3)

‘The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 11th July 1921 precipitated civil war between the Free Staters under Collins and Griffith who accepted the Treaty, and the Republicans under de Valera who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown and refused to concede the six counties of Ulster.’ (Elmer Andrews, p.103)

The IRA‘Men joined the Volunteers/IRA for recreational and social reasons as well as political ones. It provided a colourful alternative to the monotony of small-town life: many veterans were to look back on these years as the happiest of their lives.’

Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Dublin, 2002), p.106.

Relevance to Irish Writing

• ‘In such circumstances, autobiography, or the writing of a memoir […] is always going to reproduce, in some variation, those ultimately disturbing queries about the issue of identity, national or personal.’Seamus Deane et al. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, (Derry, 1991), p.380.

• ‘The elision of the personal and the national, the way history becomes a kind of scaled up biography, and biography a microcosmic history, is a particularly Irish phenomenon.’R. F. Foster, The Irish Story : Telling Tales and Making It up in Ireland, (London, 2002), p.xi.

O’Connor: Nation and Self

‘It was a period of political unrest, and, in a way, this was a relief, because it acted as a safety valve for my own angry emotions. Indeed, it would be truer to say that the Irish nation and myself were both engaged in an elaborate process of improvisation. I was improvising an education I could not afford, and the country was improvising a revolution it could not afford.’ (O’Connor, p.184)

O’Faolain: Reality of War

‘In my six years as a rank-and-filer of the IRA I shot nobody and was briefly under fire once. I have no war memories to record except ‘Were those the Troubles? And if so was it a revolution?’(O’Faolain, p.137)

O’Faolain: Reality of War“There was only one thing each of us knew he could do well, and must do well if called upon to do it, the least active rank-and-filer, the humblest citizen. If arrested and condemned for any or no reason, each man knew that he could die – “For Ireland!” This is not romanticism; the time for being romantic about those years has long since gone; and any young man of those years, and they were enough, who died facing a firing squad may well have been white and terrified at the end. But it must surely have helped him to know that he was dying for something as fervently as we believed in Ireland then. I wish to God I could believe in anything as fervently now” (O’Faolain, 138).

“Nobody wanted to contemplate being stripped, having his testicles rhythmically beaten with a swinging revolver butt, his eyeballs persistently rapped with the ends of fountain pens, bayonets stuck in him, his feet stamped to a pulp, his toenails pulled out, and more; all the things that English gentlemen just do not do, nor French, nor Jews, nor Irish, nor Americans, nor anybody, but are done by them all, are being done, one need have no least doubt, somewhere at this moment, and will always go on being done in time of war” (O’Faolain, 138).

‘Life through a veil of literature’

‘Nowadays I merely wonder at my own behaviour and remember with revulsion that I once wore a dead boy’s blood-stained cap. It was not merely that I couldn’t afford to lose a cap. I fancy the truth is that nothing of it was real to me, and it never once occurred to me that the boy whose cap I was wearing had that day been as living as myself, and perhaps loved his mother as much as I did mine. It was all as if I had read about it in War and Peace.’ (O’Connor, pp.223-4)

‘Impaled on one green corner of the universe’

‘By the end of the Civil War life had presented itself to me, forever, under the form of a number of ineluctable challenges, or experiences, densely compressed into the one world, Ireland.’ (O’Faolain, p.174)

The ‘Spirits’ of the ‘Ages’‘From the 1950s, such bread and butter issues as wages, standards of living, and social reform began to outflank the ‘national question’ and the old civil war divide as electoral priorities, while some older assumptions about authentic Irish identity and Ireland’s place in the world underwent far-reaching revision.’Senia Paseta, Modern Ireland : A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford, 2003), p.128.

‘The passage of time in between also shapes the telling of a story, and the vantage point from which it is told may determine whether it is opening up, or in fact sealing off, a troubled past […] the cultural spaces from which they are retrieved have as much to do with now as then.’Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, (Cork, 1996), p.96.

Lasting Impact

‘So traumatic was the rearrangement of relations with Great Britain, and so powerful the emotions and beliefs needed to negotiate those changes, that the revolutionary period maintained a hold on the Irish imagination long after 1922. […] Who am I in relation to the groups and the beliefs and the political affiliations I perceive around me? Who am I in relation to the past from which I believe myself to have emerged and the future towards which I believe myself to be moving?’ Gerry Smyth, The Novel & the Nation, (London, 1997), pp.3-4.

. .

W.B.YeatsW.B.Yeats

The

Lak

e Is

le o

f In

n isf

ree

The

Lak

e Is

le o

f In

n isf

ree

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 : The Lake Isle of Innisfree [from The Poems (1997) , Scribner : The Rose 1893 ]

1 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 2 And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: 3 Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, 4 And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

5 And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 6 Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; 7 There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 8 And evening full of the linnet's wings.

9 I will arise and go now, for always night and day 10 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 11 While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, 12 I hear it in the deep heart's core.

To

I re

lan

d in

the

Com

ing

Tim

esT

o I r

ela

nd

in th

e C

omin

g T

imes

1 Know, that I would accounted be 2 True brother of a company 3 That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong, 4 Ballad and story, rann and song; 5 Nor be I any less of them, 6 Because the red-rose-bordered hem 7 Of her, whose history began 8 Before God made the angelic clan, 9 Trails all about the written page. 10 When Time began to rant and rage 11 The measure of her flying feet 12 Made Ireland's heart begin to beat; 13 And Time bade all his candles flare 14 To light a measure here and there; 15 And may the thoughts of Ireland brood 16 Upon a measured quietude.

17 Nor may I less be counted one 18 With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, 19 Because, to him who ponders well, 20 My rhymes more than their rhyming tell 21 Of things discovered in the deep, 22 Where only body's laid asleep. 23 For the elemental creatures go 24 About my table to and fro, 25 That hurry from unmeasured mind 26 To rant and rage in flood and wind; 27 Yet he who treads in measured ways 28 May surely barter gaze for gaze. 29 Man ever journeys on with them

30 After the red-rose-bordered hem. 31 Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, 32 A Druid land, a Druid tune!

33 While still I may, I write for you 34 The love I lived, the dream I knew. 35 From our birthday, until we die, 36 Is but the winking of an eye; 37 And we, our singing and our love, 38 What measurer Time has lit above, 39 And all benighted things that go 40 About my table to and fro, 41 Are passing on to where may be, 42 In truth's consuming ecstasy, 43 No place for love and dream at all; 44 For God goes by with white footfall. 45 I cast my heart into my rhymes, 46 That you, in the dim coming times, 47 May know how my heart went with them 48 After the red-rose-bordered hem.

No

Sec

ond

Tro

yN

o S

econ

d T

roy

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 : No Second Troy [from The Poems (1997) , Scribner : The Green Helmet and Other Poems 1910 ]

1 Why should I blame her that she filled my days 2 With misery, or that she would of late 3 Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, 4 Or hurled the little streets upon the great, 5 Had they but courage equal to desire? 6 What could have made her peaceful with a mind 7 That nobleness made simple as a fire, 8 With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind 9 That is not natural in an age like this, 10 Being high and solitary and most stern? 11 Why, what could she have done, being what she is? 12 Was there another Troy for her to burn?

Ea s

ter

1 916

Ea s

ter

1 916

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 : Easter, 1916 [from The Poems (1997) , Scribner : Michael Robartes and the Dancer 1921 ]

1 I have met them at close of day 2 Coming with vivid faces 3 From counter or desk among grey 4 Eighteenth-century houses. 5 I have passed with a nod of the head 6 Or polite meaningless words, 7 Or have lingered awhile and said 8 Polite meaningless words, 9 And thought before I had done 10 Of a mocking tale or a gibe 11 To please a companion 12 Around the fire at the club, 13 Being certain that they and I 14 But lived where motley is worn: 15 All changed, changed utterly: 16 A terrible beauty is born.

[…]

Med

itat io

ns in

Tim

e of

Civ

il W

ar

Med

itat io

ns in

Tim

e of

Civ

il W

ar

Chapman, Wayne K. “Joyce and Yeats: Easter 1916 and the Great War” New Hibernia Review, Volume 10, Number 4, Geimhreadh/Winter 2006, pp. 137-

151

Chapman, Wayne K. “Joyce and Yeats: Easter 1916 and the Great War” New Hibernia Review, Volume 10, Number 4, Geimhreadh/Winter 2006, pp. 137-

151

Next WeekNext WeekWeek 6: “No

Surrender”?: Conflicts within

and Beyond

MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal (London: Cape, 1983)

Peter Mahon, “Blood, Shit, and Tears The Textual Reinscription of Sacrifice, Ritual, and Victimhood in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal” ELH, Volume 77, Number 1, Spring 2010

Week 6: “No Surrender”?:

Conflicts within and Beyond

MacLaverty, Bernard. Cal (London: Cape, 1983)

Peter Mahon, “Blood, Shit, and Tears The Textual Reinscription of Sacrifice, Ritual, and Victimhood in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal” ELH, Volume 77, Number 1, Spring 2010