Free Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd

history of their land, to Protestant artists that history could only be, as Lady Gregory insisted, a painful accusation against their own people; and so they turned to geography in the attempt at patriotization. At the Godolphin School in London, patriotic English boys in Yeats's class read of Cressy, Agincourt and Union Jacks, while he, "without those memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish Catholic, thought of mountain and lake, of my grandfather and of ships". 16
    In emphasizing locality, Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory were deliberately aligning themselves with the Gaelic bardic tradition of dinn-sheanchas (knowledge of the lore of places). Yet there was undeniably something strained about their manoeuvre, as Synge conceded in describing himself as a mere "interloper" among the islanders of Aran. Unlike most of his Irish contemporaries, Yeats spent a good part of his boyhood in England, a fact which may have allowed him, even while rather young, to reinvent his Irish childhood in a more pleasing pattern. Cynical commentators have often marvelled at just how many years Ireland's national poet managed to spend outside his native land, in keeping with the theory which has it that those Irish who live outside the island are a lot more starry-eyed about the place than those still living within it. (Frank O'Connor remarked during an American exile that he returned at least once a year to remind himself what a terrible place it was.) So, Yeats, too, is inventing Ireland, as he employs his autobiographer's art to remake his life. He wrote in the Preface:
    I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge; for I am writing after many

years and have consulted neither friend, not letter, nor old newspaper, and describe what comes oftenest into my memory. 17
    Yet, no matter how much insurance he takes out against the law court, this most forgetful of autobiographers knows that the past is irrecoverable, that paradise is always by very definition lost. If each of the main characters in Yeats's book has been "reborn as an idea", then so too has the image of childhood as a sign of cultural despair.
    There is so little reference to childhood in the poems themselves that a reader might be forgiven for wondering whether the poet had a youth at all. Childhood is invoked fleetingly in some lyrics, but only as a measure of the adult man's desperation."Among School Children" is about the suffering of being a woman, the costs of art, the sources of aesthetic and organic beauty – everything, that is, except schoolchildren, who stare in momentary wonder before disappearing out of the poem. And "momentary wonder" is all that the poet feels at the sight of them. Since communication with the children seems out of the question, the kind old nun does all the replying. The infant Yeats puts in a brief appearance in stanza five, solely as a "shape" upon his mother's lap. Similarly, in "To a Child Dancing Upon the Wind", Yeats evokes the symbol in the tide and first line, only to veer away in the second to the adult cares, of which the child is so irritatingly innocent:
    Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or ocean's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet.
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind? 18
    A more orthodox romantic poet might have marvelled at the adult's culpable ignorance of childish ways, but not this one. Yeats resists the temptation to attempt an exploration of the inner world of the child; and this may be to his credit, since many who expend great intensity on children do so because they feel themselves subtly unfitted for the

demands of adult life. Yeats was usually shrewd enough to play within his limits, recalling that he wrote