Free Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd Page B

whose recollection of oral narratives was flawless. John Butler Yeats had indeed praised his wife as one who pretended to nothing that she did not feel: and in this he saw her as utterly unlike the average modern reader, who derived second-hand

opinions from books. "Neither Christ nor Buddha wrote a book", wrote their (somewhat hypocritical) son, "for to do that is to exchange life for a logical process". 24 Yet we must assume this statement to be sincere. From the Pollexfens, Yeats seems to have gathered the notion that books can erode the integrity of self: art, like sex, may be the activity of an aching, unfulfilled heart:
    Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of. 25
    The man who saw himself faced with the rather puritan choice between a perfect life and a perfect work often wondered whether he should have thrown poor words away and been content to live. Nearing his fiftieth year, he closed the first volume of his autobiography with a repudiation of "all the books I have read", which were now dismissed as "a preparation for something that never happens". 26 That something may well have been a child, to judge by the introductory poem of the collection called Responsibilities, where the lyrical process of a book is deemed a poor compensation for the lack of better offspring:
    Pardon, that for a barren passion's sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine,
I have no child; I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine. 27
    The book is seen as the rival and enemy of the child. No great wonder that John Butler Yeats exclaimed, on reading the son's autobiography: "Don't ever throw a book at your child. He might write his mem-ours". 28
    The book had been thrown out of momentary frustration at the son's slow progress at learning to read. Even at the age of seven, he had yet to master the alphabet: and throughout his adult life he remained a poor speller, blighting his chances of the Chair of English at Trinity College, Dublin by mis-spelling the word "Professorship" in his letter of application. That reluctance to enter the world of book-learning might be construed as a kind of repudiation of the colonizing code. To the end, Yeats believed passionately in education, which valued a child for its intrinsic sake, and he despised mere schooling, which concerned itself more with producing the kind of adult the child must eventually become. In his estimate, a true culture consisted not in acquiring opinions but in getting rid of them. Life was a learning of how to

shed "civilized" illusions and a coming to terms with the desolation of reality. Many of his most remarkable poems –"A Coat","Easter 1916","Meru","The Circus Animals' Desertion" – document that process, but there is a sense in which each, especially "Easter 1916", is a rewritten version of his earliest lyric of fairyland and childhood,"The Stolen Child". It is there that he expresses most chillingly his reservations about the alleged happiness of childhood.
    The notion that "innocence" is something lost in a careless half-hour of late adolescence is risible. People either are or are not innocent to begin with, and those natural tendencies are reinforced with the passing years. Innocence is not inexperience, but its opposite. This realization led Yeats to discount much of his early work as the cry of the heart against necessity. "It is not" he wrote, "the poetry of insight and knowledge, but of longing and complaint... I hope some day to alter that and write the poetry of insight and knowledge". 29 Critics, taking him at his word, tend to describe "reality" for Yeats as a delayed but invigorating discovery, as if the mature poet caught the last bus back from Tír na nÓg just in the nick of time. Yet the critique of his own longing and complaint was actually written with exemplary self-awareness by a poet still in his early twenties: and those same reservations were built into the best early