Free Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd Page A

The Land of Heart's Desire "in some discomfort when the child was theme, for I knew nothing of children". 19
    With other people's children the poet was painfully inept. On one notorious occasion, he frightened Oscar Wilde's children out of the room with a ghost story, which got only as far as "once upon a time there was a ghost". In later years, when he had children of his own, he often gave his infant son a baffled look, as if to ask how he had got there: a curious reversal of the difficulty which some children have in believing that their parents actually went to bed and conceived them. In terms of Christian theology, Yeats's exploration of the symbolic meaning of childhood was utterly heretical. WhereasChristianity sees the child as the living embodiment of a love which unites the parents, Yeats saw the child as the necessary physical evidence of the fact that a man and woman had momentarily tried, and failed, to be one:
    And when at last that murders over
Maybe the bride bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there. 20
    That same imperfection was found by Yeats in the experience of the Christian God, whose unsatisfactory and inconclusive love-affair with the world gave rise to the need for the incarnation of Jesus in the womb of Mary, a mystery summed up in the peasant adage: "God possesses the heavens, but he covets the earth". So the infant Jesus, like the child of even the truest lovers, is born out of love's despairing search for a moment of ecstasy: and this may be one of the implications behind the strange phrase "beauty born out of its own despair" in "Among School Children".
    Through every phase of the poetry, one finds Yeats's lines freighted with these darker intimations from an adult world. "A Prayer for My Daughter" is less about the child in the cradle than about the kind of grown-up she might become. In "Among School Children" Yeats wonders whether the pain of his mother in childbirth is justified by the scarecrow he now feels himself to be. In a late poem"What Then?" the self-questioning of the time-bound man is even more radical:
    His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
"What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?" 21
    In such a painful world, only a few like Helen of Troy retain the self-delight of the child into their adult years:
    That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She minks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
    Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence. 22
    The chorus makes it quite clear that the experience of being three-parts a child is unshareable, unknowable.
    All of which illustrates the tragedy which Synge found in the literary vocation: youth knows how to feel but not how toexpress, and by the time it has learned to express itself, it has all too often forgotten how to feel. No writer likes to admit that the unexpressed part of the life is the happy part, for to an artist expression is the ultimate fulfilment: but if expression is frustrated, that adds yet another dimension to the pain of the unrecorded life. This may explain whyYeats balanced the pain of childhood against the assertion that he grew happier with every passing year. The later life is the life expressed.
    The poet who had little good to say of his own childhood had much to remark about the prevailing systems ofeducation. Perhaps the pain of the one was but a further proof of the need for reform of the other. Throughout the autobiography, he is at pains to stress the comparative unimportance to the literary artist of reading and of books. "I have remembered nothing that I read", he writes, somewhat paradoxically, "but only those things that I heard or saw". 23 His envy is of those, like his mother, who read no texts but