More on "Meditations"
Written in the summer/autumn of 1922 while Yeats was staying at his Tower in Co. Galway during the Irish Civil War. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had recently been signed... cue bloody civil war... The outcome of the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty split the Irish into Free State and Republican parties.
Yeats was a private supporter of the Free State party, which saw the outcome of the Treaty as a means for establishing the Ireland that the revolutionaries dreamed of... The Republicans saw the Treaty as a betrayal of the fundamental basis for the revolution. While neither party was unjustified, the bloodshed that resulted was seen by Yeats as senseless violence, as he outlines in "Meditations".
But, it wasn't published until 1928.
C&P'd: "Meditations" is a series of poems dedicated to the consideration of the violence Yeats observed in Ireland as a whole. In the first poem "Ancestral Houses", Yeats describes the difference between the Ireland of the past and his contemporary Ireland. While the past had greatness that stemmed from the violence of rebellion, that greatness had a purpose. Later Irish violence, the violence of the Civil War, had no greatness; rather, it was full of "slippered Contemplation" which no longer had a cause to motivate its violence, but simply a "servile shape, at others' beck and call."
The idea of violence for the sake of violence - vilified by Yeats in "I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness." Templar knight Jacques Molay used as a metaphor for the situation in Ireland - the vengeance sought by those who saw Molay as a martyr was more devastating than simple revenge. Martyrdom created a compulsion for revenge that would be taken out on anyone seen as an "other" figure. Such was the case, as Yeats saw it, in Ireland. The martyrs of 1916 created something that even they would not have been able to control. Fundamentalism of this nature is so volatile that Irishmen were fighting Irishmen, and civil war would only devastate the original cause.
Yeats was a private supporter of the Free State party, which saw the outcome of the Treaty as a means for establishing the Ireland that the revolutionaries dreamed of... The Republicans saw the Treaty as a betrayal of the fundamental basis for the revolution. While neither party was unjustified, the bloodshed that resulted was seen by Yeats as senseless violence, as he outlines in "Meditations".
But, it wasn't published until 1928.
C&P'd: "Meditations" is a series of poems dedicated to the consideration of the violence Yeats observed in Ireland as a whole. In the first poem "Ancestral Houses", Yeats describes the difference between the Ireland of the past and his contemporary Ireland. While the past had greatness that stemmed from the violence of rebellion, that greatness had a purpose. Later Irish violence, the violence of the Civil War, had no greatness; rather, it was full of "slippered Contemplation" which no longer had a cause to motivate its violence, but simply a "servile shape, at others' beck and call."
The idea of violence for the sake of violence - vilified by Yeats in "I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness." Templar knight Jacques Molay used as a metaphor for the situation in Ireland - the vengeance sought by those who saw Molay as a martyr was more devastating than simple revenge. Martyrdom created a compulsion for revenge that would be taken out on anyone seen as an "other" figure. Such was the case, as Yeats saw it, in Ireland. The martyrs of 1916 created something that even they would not have been able to control. Fundamentalism of this nature is so volatile that Irishmen were fighting Irishmen, and civil war would only devastate the original cause.
posted by David | 6:16 PM
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