Peter CostelloThis year the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats is being celebrated with a wide range of events and media occasions.
Yeats is one of those poets that school anthologies have made familiar, and yet remain strangely powerful in their resonances. Here are some thoughts on a man who is arguably Ireland’s greatest poet, a somewhat meaningless title by the way, as if literature were some sort of race, winner take all.
Back in the 1920s when the Central Catholic Library was struggling into existence, Yeats, who was a friend of the library’s Jesuit founder Fr Stephen Brown, gave a presentation at a fundraising event held in the Sacred Heart Convent in Leeson Street. Appropriately enough Senator Yeats, who had survived an attempt on his life by a Republican sniper in his Merrion Square home, spoke about “The Poetry of Patriotism” and read his own and others poems.
The notion of Yeats generously supporting the creation of a Catholic library appalled the editors of the Catholic Bulletin (a partisan journal of political rather than religious import). Yet it was part and parcel of the man and the poet, much of whose life had been devoted to a spiritual quest. This search had taken him into strange places and strange company; but was also the source of the powerful later poetry that still surprises and moves us today.
Example
An episode nearly a decade earlier provides an example of his search. In May 1914 Yeats descended upon Mirebeau-en-Poitou, a little village in la France profonde, along with Maud Gonne MacBride, his old friend, and Hon. Everard Feilding, a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Maud Gonne and Feilding were active and pious Catholics.
In the village the object of their interest was an oleograph of the Sacred Heart (pictured) which in 1911 had inexplicably begun to bleed, an event which had caused a sensation in both Catholic and psychical research circles. This was the property of the parish priest, the Abbé Vachère. According to Yeats, Feilding was authorised by the Vatican to investigate the affair. Feilding was sceptical; Maud Gonne fell at once upon her knees.
The image was certainly exuding what seemed to be blood. But such bleeding images are not rare. The famous encarmined statue in Templemore in 1920 attracted worldwide attention and many others have been documented before and since. Rarely do they receive the approbation of the Church, whose caution with regard to the miraculous is well known.
Later the blood from Mirebeau was analysed for Feilding and found not to be human. The phenomenon in these days is thought to be a natural rather than a supernatural one. But not in 1914.
The year before Abbé Vachère had been ordered by the local bishop to cease his promotional activities which were becoming, he claimed, “a nuisance”. The Abbé Vachère died in 1921, the matter still unresolved.
Yeats wrote a report on the expedition, but never published it. Mirebeau may have failed him, but his search continued.
A Dublin journalist, covering a 1913 lecture in London by Yeats on his mystical experiences, reported that the poet had remarked that people were born either believers or unbelievers. “He (Mr Yeats) was born a believer, and he never seriously doubted the existence of the soul or of God.”
When his remains returned to Ireland in 1948 his family felt able to give the poet a Church of Ireland funeral, attended with all the dignities of a state ceremony, led by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sean MacBride, the surviving son of Maud Gonne.
Yeats’ imagination took him, as I say, into strange places; but no stranger perhaps than those places that other kinds of mystics have found themselves in.
Faced with the obscure mysteries of life and the spirit, the poet Yeats might have echoed the remark in 384AD of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a senator who retained a pious regard for old Roman traditions, that “… uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum” (… by one pathway it is not possible to arrive at so great a mystery).