374
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plununet-measured face.
PARTISAN REVIEW
Pearse revered the name and legendary bearing of Cuchulain only less
devoutly than the more ascertainable memory of Columcille, one of the
three patron saints of Ireland. Sununoning is what Yeats is doing, too, in
this poem as in "Parnell's Funeral"; it is the most typical act of his later
poems. "Sect" is his word now for the earlier "race" as he bodies forth
Pearse as representative Irish figure and opposes him to the
fil
thy modern
tide of democracy, opposes Greek sculptural form-as in Phidias-to
Asiatic formlessness.
In
several of these later poems Yeats deduces a poli–
tics from an aesthetic, more particularly from the history of sculpture: the
Pythagorean theory of numbers is supposed to have made possible not only
Phidias but Michelangelo and a corresponding praxis of great men. Yeats's
pamphlet
On the Boiler
gives some theory in favor of the politics and is
chiefly to be read as indicating not what the poems mean but how close
Yeats was, in 1938, to the end of his tether. His talk of "rule of kindred"
is noxious.
In
the poems it hardly matters, because there it is merely part
of the elaborate mixture of allusions and invocations in each poem; it is to
be valued mainly for its enabling the poet to achieve his distinctive, des–
perately driven tone, his sense of the world rather than the world. I
construe the violence of the last poems as a sign of rage and desperation.
He hoped against hope that the Irish people would resist the claims of
democracy and climb to "our proper dark," the same darkness of subjec–
tivity and transformation in which we found Swift and Parnell.
Yeats knew that Ireland would have nothing to do with it, and would
not even choose to understand what he was saying. Modern Irish politics
is a politics of sameness, not a politics of difference. Many Irish people
have grown tired of being told that they are interesting beyond their num–
bers or that the trajectory from race through nation to state has made them
distinguished among their European associates. They want to be the same
as everyone else, the same as England to begin with and as the United
States later on.
It
is their right. But only wi th misgivings: there are other
values, which we advert to when we murmur name upon name-Davis,
Parnell, Yeats, Hyde, and their company-and when on this occasion we
come together to honor the name of Parnell.
