Happy Birthday to Ireland’s Finest
Forgive me my self indulgence here, but I was an English major and continue to be a poetry lover. So I couldn’t let this day pass without remembering my favorite poet in English—who is Irish—born June 13, 1865 on the outskirts of Dublin. No surprise that it should be William Butler Yeats, widely considered to be the greatest poet writing in the 20th century, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924.
Though not Catholic, Yeats was an Irish patriot and served as Senator in the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. More importantly, he was a central force—both as producer and promoter—of what is called the “Irish Renaissance,” with its remarkable florescence of plays and poetry.
Yeats was prolific and wrote on a broad number of subjects—Irish folklore, politics, nature, art, daily life in Ireland—but he is perhaps best remembered for his verse on aging and his own mortality. Here I reproduce the last half of “A Dialogue Between Self and Soul,” in which his Soul gives his Self the bad news of the nearing end; his rebellious Self wants none of it and demands to live on no matter what price he pays. Sometimes called the poet of “tragic joy,” Yeats makes his case for life here in his incomparable way.
A DIALOGUE OF SELF AND SOUL
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect its wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery—
Heart's purple—and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies?—
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.