When You Are Old Read Online
When You Are Old
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CLASSICS
WHEN YOU ARE OLD
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, the son of a barrister turned painter, John Butler Yeats. Yeats attended school in London and in Dublin, but spent his summers in Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where he imbibed the scenery, folklore, and supernatural legends that would later color his work and form the setting of many of his poems. In 1883, he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, and although he quickly abandoned painting to pursue a life in writing, he was deeply influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite artists and by the works of the Arts and Crafts movement. He joined the Theosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him for its embrace of an imaginative life far removed from the mundanities of working life and which led him to a devoted study of the prophetic books of William Blake. Yeats became a prominent figure within the Celtic Revival (often called the Celtic Twilight after Yeats’s collection of Irish folktales), which rejected the cultural influence of English rule in Ireland in favor of Ireland’s traditional culture. His first major verse collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, was published in 1889. That year marked the beginning of his relationship with Maud Gonne, the beautiful yet elusive Irish revolutionary activist who became his muse and, despite spurning his affection, would figure in his writing for the rest of his career. In 1897, with Lady Gregory, Yeats founded the Irish Literary Theatre and served as its chief playwright. After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art drastically shifted toward a more esoteric and experimental style, heavily influenced by the Japanese Noh plays, which he came to through Ezra Pound, a major influence on Yeats’s modernism in his own right. On the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, Yeats accepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate and in 1923 he became the first Irishman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yeats’s poetry volumes, in particular The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Plays and Poems (1940), distinguished him as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Yeats died on January 28, 1939, in Roquebrune, France, and by his request, his remains were later moved to the burial place of his ancestors in County Sligo, Ireland.
ROB DOGGETT is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He has published widely on Yeats and is the author of Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler Yeats.
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This edition published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015
Introduction and selection copyright © 2015 by Robert Doggett
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ISBN 978-0-698-19437-3
Cover art: Drawing based on block-printed fabric Tulip and Willow originally designed by William Morris, 1873.
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Contents
Suggestions for Further Reading
WHEN YOU ARE OLD
Introduction: An Irish Story-teller
Classification of Irish Fairies
To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire
To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland
The Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists
The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
To Ireland in the Coming Times
The Song of the Happy Shepherd
The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes
The Meditation of the Old Fisherman
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
Aedh Tells of the Rose in His Heart
Mongan Laments the Change That Has Come upon Him and His Beloved
Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace
Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty
Aedh Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes
To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear
Michael Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods
Aedh Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers
Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty
Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge
Aedh Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved
Hanrahan Laments Because of His Wanderings
The Poet Pleads with His Friend for Old Friends
Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of His Songs in Coming Days
Aedh Pleads with the Elemental Powers
Aedh Wishes His Beloved Were Dead
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Mongan Thinks of His Past Greatness
‘Dust hath closed Helen’s eye’
Regina, Regina Pigmeorum, Veni
The Three O’Byrnes and the Evil Faeries
The Thick Skull of the Fortunate
Concerning the Nearness Together of Heaven, Earth, and Purgatory
A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for Having Soured the Disposition of Their Ghosts and Faeries
The Friends of the People of Faery
Introduction
READING THE EARLY YEATS: THEN AND NOW
The first time that W. B. Yeats read his verse on the radio as part of “An Irish Programme” for the BBC that aired at 9:10 p.m. on September 8, 1931, Ireland’s Nobel Prize–winning poet and, at the age of sixty-six, its most recognizable literary figure announced to his audience, “I am going to begin with a poem of mine called ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ because, if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it. It is the only poem of mine which is widely known.”1 He may have sounded a little petulant, but he wasn’t wrong. Although The Tower (1928), now regarded as among the defining poetry volumes of the twentieth century, was released just three years earlier and to considerable critical acclaim, Yeats’s popular reputation up until his death in 1939 rested mainly on the poetry and drama he wrote in the late nineteenth century. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which he composed in 1888 at the age of twenty-three, was his signature piece, and his early collection Poems (1895), revised and reprinted fourteen times during his life, was his best-known and best-selling book. All of which was a source of considerable annoyance to the elder Yeats who, as his patron Lady Gregory once remarked, would always pull a face “when you find the play or poem some charming lady is gushing about is either Land of Heart’s Desire or Innisfree.”2 Nevertheless, Yeats begins his radio program with selections from the early verse not because of any real need to satisfy popular taste—which he was never shy about defying—but because these poems, as his fans knew then and as we know today, are astonishingly good. Eighty years after that first radio broadcast, at a time when Yeats’s late poems are studied in high school English classes and when his apocalyptic “The Second Coming” has surpassed “Innisfree” as his most frequently quoted work, a depressing indication indeed of our own state of affairs, we still return to these beautiful and moving early poems—“Down by the Salley Gardens,” “The Stolen Child,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Fiddler of Dooney,” “When You Are Old,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” and so many others.
The fact that we cherish the same poems as his first readers does not, however, mean that we read them in the same exact way. A poetic fantasy from the nineteenth century about living in a cabin on a remote island in western Ireland resonates differently in a world of mobile phones, Internet connectivity, and rapid global transit. This is true, of course, for all literary productions, but the issue is more complicated with Yeats. For one, the poems we read now are in some cases literally different because he consistently revised his published works, including many of his earliest poems, which he believed were written in a “style” that, in retrospect, “seemed too elaborate, too ornamental.”3 For another, we usually encounter his verse in complete editions of the poetry that were assembled after Yeats’s death, and these chronologically arranged books, by their very nature, encourage us to see the early poems as a kind of necessary scaffolding that enabled his later poetic achievements. Most important, though, we live in the shadow of Yeats the literary critic, who, in his Autobiographies (1916–1935) and extensive critical writings, did more than perhaps any other modern author to define how future readers should approach his works. The youthful poems and plays, at their worst, suffered from what he called “an exaggeration of sentiment and sentimental beauty.”4 His full commitment to the theater in the early 1900s introduced a bolder, “less dream-burdened will into [his] verses,”5 and, in the end, his entire career could best be understood as an ongoing process of self-refashioning that culminated in a final, totalizing aesthetic vision. As Yeats wrote in a late essay that was meant to introduce his complete works, the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.”6 What we gain from this perspective is the certainty of progression and the assurance of an overarching design.
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