All language subtitles for BBC.Bob.Geldof.on.WB.Yeats.A.Fanatic.Heart.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org_Legendas01.ENG

This programme contains some strong
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Out of Ireland have we come

Great hatred, little room

Maimed us at the start

I carry from my mother's womb

A fanatic heart.

In 1966, I was 14

and Ireland marked the
50th anniversary of its 1916 Rising.

Across that Easter week,

the one television station that
most of the country could receive

was filled with the most appalling,

mawkish, emotional,
nationalistic guff.

I felt divorced from my own.

I was engaged in the now and not
what seemed to me the prehistoric.

For others,
it stirred the politics of hatred...

..that found a response

in the killings in the north of
this island a mere two years later.

In my classroom...

..a priest began to read
the poetry of WB Yeats.

Now, here, I recognised immediately,
was the country I belonged to.

Here was Ireland articulated -

a modern, plural, open,
generous country.

..Of dusty wind and after

Thunder of feet, tumult of images

Their purpose in
the labyrinth of the wind.

I mean, you get so annoyed
it's so good, you know?

So who was he, this poet?

He was the oddest,

bravest,

downright weirdest
of revolutionaries.

And he never killed a living soul.

Yet it was his revolution
that won in the end.

The revolution of the Irish mind.

But it was the uprising
against the British,

fought mostly in Dublin's
General Post Office

across Easter week a century ago,

that continues
to be the central point

of both celebration and controversy.

Over the course of a few days,

hundreds died in
a shambolic engagement.

What happened next,

when the British executed
the rebellion's leaders,

set the tone of Ireland's
often tragic political situation

for the next 100 years.

I want to say that the poet
WB Yeats

not only deserves a place

on the national pantheon
of liberation

occupied by the men and women who
fought and died in this building,

but actually in front of them.

Yeats sang this country into being

by imagining the creation myths
so necessary, so required,

for building the modern, pluralist,

intellectual underpinnings
and institutions

necessary for the nation-state.

As Gogarty said, there
is no Free State without Yeats.

And by that, he meant that Ireland
doesn't exist without the poet.

Modern Ireland was not born
100 years ago,

but 70 years before that

in the charnel house
of the Irish famine.

Inconceivable hundreds of thousands
died of mass starvation,

while millions of others
escaping the horror

slipped away on migrant ships
bound for viability.

The land lay empty.

This was Ireland's year zero.

Centuries of dispossession
and defeat

had dulled the brain to anything
other than brute survival.

Just over a decade later,

Yeats is born into the Protestant
landowning ruling caste.

With devastation all around,

the authority of that class,
his class, was destroyed.

Ireland itself
and its language was in flux,

desperate to be
re-moulded into the new.

We just needed someone
to magic it into life.

I had this thought a while ago

My darling cannot understand

What I have done or what would do

In this blind, bitter land.

Willie Yeats was born in interesting
times and to an interesting family.

His father, John Butler Yeats,

was a South Dublin barrister
with good prospects.

Everything was perfectly Victorian
and lovely and...proper.

His dad then decided that
this wasn't going to be for him.

He suddenly drops his family,
drops everything

and heads off to London,

where he enrols
in the Slade School of Art.

And from then on,

they live a life
of complete poverty.

Now, I think this
is an act of great bravery.

His family thought
it was an act of insanity.

But in so much else at that time,

I think his father
was really feeling the moment.

This was a point of soon-to-be
cultural revolution

as opposed
to armed insurrection.

There was a difference.

And he was completely rejecting

the background
that he had inherited.

He was the ultimate bohemian

and he set out to live
the ultimate bohemian's life.

He was determined not
to bring his children up

as he had been brought up,
with those expectations.

He kept them away from school. Why?

Because he said of Willie Yeats,

"The boy must learn to believe
in art and poetry

"and the sovereignty
of the intellect and the mind."

To escape this bohemian
penury,

Willie Yeats's mother would
regularly take her children

to her family, the Pollexfens,
a prosperous trading dynasty

based in Sligo town
in the north-west of Ireland.

Susan Yeats bringing
her brood to Sligo

is the birthplace of WB's
dream-like vision of Ireland.

It's sort of sad that his mother
is left out of the equation so much.

Take me through the family.

Yeats's mother's family

is in some ways much more
important in his background

than his father's family.

They provide the background

that the kids go to in Sligo
in the summers.

They are in Merville,
this nice big house

with servants, with fires,
with ample everything.

Very much integrated into
that world

of the Protestant bourgeoisie of
a prosperous Irish provincial town.

But its hinterland is this magic
landscape of lakes and mountains

and myth and magic,

which is conveyed to them
by the servants,

who tell them these stories,

and the local children
with whom they play.

For Yeats and his sisters,
Lily and Lolly,

and his brother, Jack,

that is their absolute
formative experience.

That hinterland
revolved around Rosses Point,

a few miles outside of Sligo town.

What a playground for the shy,
dreamy kid and his siblings.

This is the place where this crazed,
imaginative family took off.

In fact, in the frontispiece
of this book

is a reproduction of
Jack Yeats's Memory Harbour,

which was Willie's
favourite painting of his,

and many people's
favourite painting.

It actually is
a brilliant piece of work.

And here's the little road here.

At the time, there were
beautiful cottages,

unfortunately all gone,

leading up to where
we're standing now, Elsinore.

This is the old pilot that used to
take Willie and Jack fishing.

They'd go out for a day's fishing

and they'd come back
and they'd sit around

and the pilot
would tell them stories

and there would be other kids here.

And it doesn't matter,
you know, what age you are from.

I mean, why would you just not
remember that always forever

as being a part of your life
that was wonderful?

With the wind, you know,
crackling away outside,

you can see the lads running home
and, you know,

full of stories and scared stiff

that they were going to bump into
a fairy wrath

or hear the banshee wailing.

Funny as that is as a kid,

everyone was afraid of that stuff,
you know?

Out here, Willie was immersed
in fairy folklore.

But this wasn't Peter Pan
and Tinkerbell stuff,

this was dark, pagan, malevolent

and utterly accepted,
completely believed.

There was another world as tangible
and real and dangerous as this one.

The night Willie's three-year-old
brother died of croup,

his mother said she heard
the wailing

of a witchlike harbinger of death
the Irish call the banshee.

Away with us he's going

The solemn-eyed

He'll hear no more the lowing
of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast

Or see the brown mice bob round
and round the oatmeal chest

For he comes, the human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand

From a world more full of weeping

Than he can understand.

He did say a wonderful thing.

He said the Sligo sea cliffs
gave tongue to his poetry. Mmm.

That's no small sentence.

The west of Ireland had endured

the worst agonies
of the great famine.

That can't have gone unnoticed
by the young Willie Yeats.

Stories and songs of ghosts,
spirits, shades, banshees,

angry tales of loss, stolen lives
and vanishing responsibilities.

From 1801,
Ireland has been part of Britain.

But the famine comes along
and it turns out

that you're not really British
if you live in Connemara

in the same sense that
you would be if you lived in Surrey,

and that you are
a surplus population

and your children don't matter

and, you know,
this entire culture can disappear

and no-one will care.

And I think part
of Yeats's brilliance

is that he is one
of the first people to see

this will have to be rescued

and myself and my friends
are going to have to do it.

And stage one in
his evolution as a writer

is to just try to put his arms
around the wreckage

and see, "Is there anything
left there?"

Yeats was caught in the half-light,
a Celtic twilight,

a moment where nobody knew
who or what they were.

Everything could be remade,
rewritten.

The ancient folktales and
fairy stories that Willie heard here

ignited a lifelong fascination
with Irishness

and with "the other".

A kind of escape from reality

where he could find imagery
and metaphors for his writing.

Yeats wrote, "The mystical world
is at the centre

"of all I do, think and write."

All of that started here
in that little pilot's cottage,

listening to the stories.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands

I will find out where she has gone

And kiss her lips
and take her hands

And walk among long dappled grass

And pluck till time
and times are done

The silver apples of the moon

The golden apples of the sun.

Whilst Sligo ignited
his mystical, spiritual side,

in London,
with its vast, swirling stew,

the centre of global, political,
economic and cultural action,

Yeats found himself thrillingly
at the very heart

of European revolutionary ideas.

Depending on the state
of the family finances,

the Yeatses flitted between
lodgings in Dublin and London.

He was educated between
the two cities,

actually training to be an artist
like his dad and brother.

It was a time of new ideas -

socialism, anarchism, Marxism,
Darwinism, the death of God,

the search for new answers

opening different doors
of perception.

It was like the '60s,
fuelled by hashish and mescaline.

Willie became more obsessed
with the numinous,

the mystical and spiritual,

mingling with theosophists,

Rosicrucianists, Kabbalists,
gurus, swamis,

and the secretive, bizarre
Order Of The Golden Dawn.

You have to envy Willie and
the wild London he arrived into.

You can do Dublin in two days.

You know, you can walk through it
and find its things.

You can't do London
in a lifetime, I've found.

Getting lost here is one of the best
educations you could possibly have.

But this was also
the year of salon culture,

decadence, symbolists,
literary clubs

and endless debate at places
like the Cheshire Cheese.

By the time 22-year-old WB
arrived in 1887

full of fairy tales
and Celtic mysticism,

London would have loved him.

Even though he had barely published
a handful of plays and prose,

London and Europe were alive

to what would eventually be called
the Celtic Revival.

Young Willie found himself
in the right city at the right time

and in the right house.

He ended up here, in a sort
of artists' colony

specifically built for that purpose,
called Bedford Park.

And he found a very cheap house,
as Willie called it,

spelling it C-H-E-E-P.

He was a hopeless
speller all his life.

It cost 50 quid per annum,

and that was largely because
the drains were a bit dodgy.

Now, it's pretty mega, really.

I mean, you'd pay
a lot of money for these places.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

It's hard to think about the...

absolute poverty
that this family lived in.

There was often literally
no food in the house.

Clothes were never changed
for anything new

and even when it was down to
the last, literally, the last penny,

there was a vote in the family
as to what to spend it on

and the majority chose to spend
that last penny

on the Pall Mall Gazette,

which Lily in her diary remarked,
"Money well spent."

Yeats was just another young Irish
playwright and occasional poet.

But at Christmas 1888,

he was invited for lunch
with the glamorous Wildes.

That day, Oscar jealously
recognising the young poet's genius,

held forth on just how bad
the Irish actually were at poetry.

"Brilliant failures,"
he called them.

But more crucially, the great star
told WB

it wasn't simply enough
to be a poet,

you had to look like a poet.

You had to act like a poet.

Willie rephrased it later,

"Myself I must remake."

The start of a lifelong
fascination with image, masks,

the constant
reinvention of the artist.

With myself I must remake,

this Wildean and utterly modern
concept was made concrete.

I believe at that precise moment,

and possibly the realisation
that occurred in this room

or in his bedroom upstairs,

WB Yeats,
the poet that we know, was born.

Yeats the poet was coming
into focus.

He was creating the man
and the myth.

All he needed was the muse.

Then, in January 1889,
a beauty came to call.

A notorious young English-born
Irish nationalist, a feminist,

activist, Ireland's Joan of Arc
they would call her,

and she was about to ignite

Ireland's greatest
unrequited love story.

As Willie said,
"The troubling of my life began."

Maud Gonne pulled up outside
that window

in a hansom cab

and she wandered into the room here

and the family were stunned
by this great star, this beauty.

It just all coalesced.

Here was the image
of the Ireland he foresaw.

She was pulling him in
to that orbit that she inhabited

of radical nationalism.

He was there willing
and ready for it,

particularly in London,

as he dreamt of this
idyllic other Ireland.

He became as militantly
nationalistic as she was,

as patriotic as any
of the great rebels.

And he had found a way of
expressing that,

of focusing on it through her

in a way that never killed anybody.

Because of that great
nobleness of hers

The fires that stirs about her
when she stirs

Burns but more clearly

O she had not these ways

When all the wild summer
was in her gaze

O heart! O heart!

If she'd but turn her head

You'd know the folly
of being comforted.

She needs a country and a cause.

And in Yeats,
he found the troubling of his life

and she found a poet for the cause.
Isn't that really it?

They're both in search
of authenticity

but it's a different
kind of authenticity.

Yeats is also looking
for an Irish authenticity,

cos he is this
marginalised, odd,

at an angle to the universe
Protestant.

She's looking for an authenticity

because she is a ruthless
peripatetic.

Her beloved father dies,
she doesn't have a mother.

Neither of them, in a sense,
has a mother. It's interesting.

And I think they're looking
for something to cling to.

They were immensely close
as friends,

leaving aside the sexual aspects
of his obsession with her.

When you are old and grey

And full of sleep
and nodding by the fire

Take down this book and slowly read

And dream of the soft look
your eyes had once

And of their shadows deep.

How many loved your moments
of glad grace?

And loved your beauty with love,
false or true?

But one man loved
the pilgrim soul in you

And loved the sorrows
of your changing face.

He always classicises her,

which in a sense lifts her
out of the everyday.

As he always said,
she doesn't belong in this world.

What's she doing here?

I had a thought
for no-one's but your ears

That you were beautiful,
and that I strove

To love you in
the old high way of love

That it had all seemed happy

And yet we'd grown as
weary-hearted

As that hollow moon.

God, it just grips you,
that last line, every time!

I thought,
"I won't tear up on that."

But, fuck, it just does. Anyway...

She gets this endless sort of stuff.
Do...

I mean, put yourself
in her position.

Does she go, "I just went to his
house and I sat in a bloody chair,"

you know? "Had a cup of tea."

I mean, that would be it,
wouldn't it?

And he's going, "Oh, my love..."

Oh, come on.
I'm not going, "Oh, come on,"

I'm saying, what would you do
if you were her?

Well, that's why I say come on.

You know perfectly well that if
somebody is completely mad about you

and telling you,

that's the least attractive thing
possible that can be done.

The way to have someone
in love with you

is clearly not to be
in love with them.

And when you get this kind of
almost abasing stuff

being sent to you,
it's the biggest turnoff there is.

Had I the heavens'
embroidered cloths

Enwrought with golden
and silver light

The blue and the dim
and the dark cloths

Of night and light
and the half-light

I would spread
the cloths under your feet

But I, being poor,
have only my dreams

I have spread my dreams
under your feet

Tread softly
because you tread on my dreams.

If he came along to you and said,
"Edna, when you are old and tired

"and grey and full of sleep,

"take down this book
and read and dream of this..."

I mean, would you swoon
and just shag him?

Probably, yeah.

See, that's it.

Maud was a radical,
a hard and violent revolutionary.

Willie?

Willie was a lovestruck dreamer.

No doubt she helped focus
those dreams

at a time when
Charles Stewart Parnell

was leading a democratic charge
for Irish home rule,

while the Irish Republican
Brotherhood

were stirring the boiling pot
of revolt.

But WB Yeats simply
believed in Ireland -

in its stories, its legends,
its dream time and its people.

He wanted to go back
beyond oppression and rebellions,

beyond famine, beyond Christianity,

to an earlier time
of Homeric warrior heroes.

And he was doing it afresh
in the English language,

making it modern, relevant,
full of magic and wonder.

On a visit to Douglas Hyde
in Roscommon,

Yeats discovered
Castle Island in Lough Key,

where he and Maud imagined
creating a new Irish faith,

an order of Celtic mysteries,

to awaken an Irish sense
of identity.

Not anti-English,
just uniquely Irish.

The perfect combination of
her nationalism and his mysticism.

Maud Gonne would have
been mad for it.

I mean, absolutely she would have
loved this.

And he sort of said,

"Well, we can also make it into an
island of heroes, Celtic heroes."

He sort of was edging
towards getting her on board

so that he could be with her,
so that, you know,

the love affair
could continue on several planes -

mystic as well as carnal, and...

..I'm sure in the back of his mind
he thought,

"Maud and I will end up here.
This is perfect for us."

It is terminally romantic.

Unfortunately for Willie,

Maud was more in love
with revolution than romance.

Like many a young Irishman
before and since,

WB Yeats in 1880s London is broke.

He's in love with a girl
who doesn't want him.

He's waiting for his first book
to come out

and he's an unmade man,

a sexually frustrated virgin.

He's full of longing for success,

for Maud, for home, for Ireland.

But clearly he missed Sligo
when he first came.

You know, that longing
for that which is familiar -

those smells, those sights,
those relationships.

The kind of poetry WB Yeats
was dreaming into life

would need to be written
with distance from afar,

on literally the concrete empiricism

of the grey pavements
of the capital of the world.

The literary revival
he was at the centre of

was fuelled by
an unspecific yearning,

inventing a new idealised version
of the self, of the people,

of Ireland.

The Celtic Twilight,

or Cultic Toilette, as James Joyce,
the young punk would later call it,

was triggered by a memory -

a city street, a sign, a woman,
a shop window.

Keep your eyes open for fairies,
will you, Smithy? I will, yeah.

He adored this part of the world.

Pined for this, pined for it.

So I'm not surprised,
given his financial circumstances,

his romantic circumstances,
his family circumstances,

his panic over his first big book,

that you want to get out.

You know, you want to escape,
you want to run away and you can't.

And I suppose the word "free"
pops into everyone's mind.

I will arise and go now

And go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there

Of clay and wattles made

Nine bean-rows will I have there

A hive for the honey-bee

And live alone
in the bee-loud glade

And I shall have some peace there

For peace comes dropping slow

Dropping from
the veils of the morning

To where the cricket sings

There midnight's all a glimmer

And noon a purple glow

And evening full of
the linnet's wings

I will rise and go now

For always night and day

I hear lake water lapping
with low sounds by the shore...

Oh, it is lapping. Listen.

"I hear lake water lapping
with low sounds by the shore."

While I stand on roadway

Or on the pavements grey

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The choice of words is...

is masterly.

You know, nine bean-rows,
a hive for the honey-bee,

the bee-loud glade.

You don't ever have to come here,
you know, he's just done it for you.

Dublin in the 1880s was
the second city of the Empire

and just as much a hotbed

of political thought and debate
as London.

Yeats was beginning to believe
not just in a romantic Ireland

but one that could stand culturally
and politically on its own two feet.

He would be a fervent
nationalist all his life

and he put that down to meeting
just one man in 1885,

the old Irish revolutionary
called John O'Leary.

Willie's father, JB,
brings him along one day

to meet fellow intellectuals
in the Contemporary Club.

And Yeats meets this sort of
patriarchal figure

who is a revolutionary.

O'Leary had said, "We need a poet."

Of course he would say that,
he was one of the Young Irelanders.

That's how you got ideas across.

And he was waiting, waiting,

and this beautiful boy
walks into the room

and he is the son of his friend
and he reads his, sort of,

you know, his early stuff,
which is still amazing,

and he goes, "He's the fella."

And he brings him along.

He instructs him,
he takes him under his wing.

O'Leary had been tried for treason
in the year WB was born

and he helped found
the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

a secret organisation

whose sole aim was an independent,
democratic Irish Republic,

and whose oath swore
absolute allegiance to that aim.

Bizarrely, an oath
O'Leary himself refused to take.

Ultimately, the IRB would be
the cabal

at the heart of the 1916
Easter Rising.

It's almost certain that
Yeats took the oath,

the revolutionary oath.

And he may very well have done that
because he believed it,

or to be in with the lads,
or to further his career,

or to, you know, tip the wing
to Maud that,

"I am a fellow traveller here,
you can count on me.

"I'm with you all the way, Maud,
now can we shag?"

By the 1890s,
WB's words were growing in stature.

But his political, spiritual
and emotional life

revolved around his Helen of Troy,

his beloved Maud.

To Willie, she was Ireland,

but she had never been
fully honest with him.

The year she met him,

she'd had a son with a right wing
French radical

called Lucien Millevoye.

When that son died of meningitis,

Maud Gonne could not
hide her grief

but told Willie the child
wasn't hers, that it was adopted.

To try to help in any way,

WB brought Maud to see his friend

and mystic writer and artist
AE George Russell

in this room on Ely Place,

home of the Dublin
Theosophical Society.

The plan was to hold a seance

to discover if Maud's dead child
could be reincarnated.

They sit down and the seance occurs

and whatever signals AE is
getting from the other side,

he turns around and,
to Maud's great comfort,

he says, "Yes, it is possible.

"It's possible to reincarnate
your child

"and it's possible to reincarnate
you child within your family."

Maud goes tearing back to Paris,
to Millevoye,

who she's long given up,

and she takes him
about 60 miles out of Paris

to the tomb of her now long-dead,
buried son

and the two of them have sex
in the vault

of the tomb of their child

in order to reincarnate him
and bring him back to the family.

It's so weird and odd

and pitiful and sad.

They were so out there,
excitingly out there,

so open to any mad ideas.

But a child resulted from
that experiment, a beautiful child,

Iseult Gonne, who, of course,
22 years later,

Yeats would ask to marry.

I think it's apt that
in this room of all,

we do The Pity Of Love.

A pity beyond all telling

Is hid in the heart of love

The folk who are buying and selling

The clouds on their journey above

The cold, wet winds ever blowing

And the shadowy hazel grove

Where mouse-grey waters are flowing

Threaten the head that I love.

Throughout his life, Willie seemed
attracted to dark, tragic,

often violent women.

But despite the sexual temptations
which London offered

and the unrequited obsessive
desire for Maud Gonne,

he was to reach 31
before he lost his virginity.

And when he finally did so,

it was most likely in his tiny flat
near Euston Station in London,

and it was to an older, gentler,

more experienced married woman,
Olivia Shakespear.

It was an absolute disaster.

Olivia took him shopping for the bed
in which he would be deflowered.

I don't know which was worse
for Willie,

the shopping or the sex.

He was dismayed
by the business of shopping.

Olivia came in,
she started bouncing up on the beds.

He was in a fever of embarrassment
and fear of the coming act,

that at 31 he was finally
going to do it.

So this was the big moment.

Understandably enough, poor Willie
failed miserably to perform.

He later said, "She was too
wholesome to my inmost being."

He craved a violent eroticism,
in his mind personified by Maud.

That same year, another woman was
about to enter Willie Yeats's life.

She and her home were probably
more important to Yeats's work

than even Maud.

The woman's name was
Augusta Gregory, Lady Gregory,

one of the local bigwigs.

She took him away
to this place, here.

This is Coole, Coole Park,
and Coole House.

And this is all that remains,
unfortunately, of it.

This is the area of it.

This plinth I'm standing on

is the foundation platform
for the whole house.

He would run here,
he would retreat here.

This was a second home.

Yeats's job was to be a poet

in the same way that someone is
a bus driver or an accountant.

You get up in the morning
to write poems.

He laboured and worked
and worked

to reduce, to reduce,

to get to the very essence of
what it was that he wanted to say.

Days, weeks, sometimes months
on some poems.

This is what he got here.

This is what he was able to do,

withdraw from the freneticism of
his committees,

his desperate need
to be in these esoteric societies.

And he could take the experiences
of the last few months,

come to Coole, let it
drain down into some essence.

And that's what he's
explaining in this unbeliev...

This is one of... I keep saying
this is one of the greats, you know.

He was explaining the craft
of this thing

but he was able to hone
and direct that craft

particularly here at Coole.

I hope I look languid and romantic
enough to read this poem.

I chose this tree
and this pose specifically,

so, you know, I hope it's working.

Adam's Curse.

We sat together at one summer's end

That beautiful mild woman,
your close friend

And you and I, and talked of poetry

I said,
a line will take us hours maybe

Yet if it does not seem
a moment's thought

Our stitching and unstitching
has been naught

Better go down upon
your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement

Or break stones like an old pauper,
in all kinds of weather

For to articulate
sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these

And yet be thought an idler
by the noisy set

Of bankers,
schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

One early summer, he was ill
and very depressed

and Lady Gregory, he says,

"Brought me from cottage to cottage
while she began to collect stories.

"As that ancient system of belief
unfolded before us

"with unforeseen probabilities
and plausibilities,

"it was though we had begun
to live in a dream."

Him and Gregory would walk through
the woods at Coole

looking for impressions made in
the ground by fairy troops

or wraths or fairy forts
that they had left behind.

They'd see bits of wood
lined at an angle

and they were absolutely convinced
they were in...

they were living in this dream.

He was at this stuff
from the very beginning.

He was at this stuff
over in the pilot's cottage

over at Rosses Point.

What got me into him really and
his importance beyond being a poet,

his importance just in Ireland,

is the fact that
that guy took down these things,

made them into our literature.

But I equated it with a musical
history I'm more familiar with,

which is the history of America.

There was a man called Alan Lomax

who went around
the Appalachian Mountains

and the southern states of America.

So he started recording
and transcribing all the stories

and all the songs

and giving them all
to the Library Of Congress.

And this was the background of
America, this was America's story.

Now, Yeats did that.
There's just no question of it.

He gave the Irish, in a moment
of great confusion and loss,

he told them who they were.

He said, "It's not all dispossession
and defeat,

"go back long before the endless
fighting and invasions.

"Have you heard of
Fionn mac Cumhaill?

"Have you heard of Cuchulainn?"

They had but not in the sense
of this glorious, elegant,

dignified ancestry.

Halfway between Dublin
and Belfast stands an ancient stone.

Cuchulainn, Ireland's great
warrior hero,

mortally wounded in battle,

is said to have strapped himself
to this rock

so he might die standing.

As I learned in Africa,

you can't create a nation
by simply drawing lines on a map.

Every people needs a creation myth,

its own Cuchulainn's stone,
its own stories.

As Yeats said, there is no fine
nationality without literature

and no fine literature
without nationality.

And along with the other scholars

who were digging up the stories
and translating them from the Irish,

he elevated these heroes -

Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oisin,
Cuchulainn -

into a pantheon of heroes
that we should aspire to,

that can be emulated in
the creation myth of a new country.

A nation is the political
expression of a people.

If there isn't a people,
you can't build the state.

And the only way
you can build a state

is by building the institutions,

the scaffolding upon which
a constitution can hang.

Yeats was the great mover
behind a modern art gallery,

a ballet academy
and the National Academy of Letters.

But the greatest institution Yeats
created with Augusta Gregory

and their protege, a young
playwright called John Synge,

was the Abbey Theatre,
today our National Theatre.

They became the triumvirate at
the heart of what Yeats aspired to,

a national literature
in English for the Irish -

not anti-English but pro-Irish,

about what we are,
not what we are against.

It was revolutionary
with pens instead of guns.

No surprise its emblem
is the mythical Queen Maeve.

And the first character to
speak on stage on its opening night

was Cuchulainn.

He writes somewhere that he realises
that the Irish don't read, that

that whole part of our culture,
you know, is not a big thing,

but that they might go to shows.

It's just fantastic to see this
stern, austere figure of Yeats

with a light bulb moment going,

"Maybe if we opened a theatre
they might come along!"

And it just goes to
the whole punk aspect of it.

You know, the punk thing
was a reaction

against the professionalism,
the 72-track studios of the...

the sort of prog rock musicality
of the bands.

No, strip that out,
go back to attitude,

go back to the roots of the music
and "anyone can do it."

Can't play guitar? Doesn't matter,
pick it up and make a noise.

Yeats and Gregory and Synge
were going to make a noise.

Even if you were an amateur
two years ago, like Synge,

you were going to make a noise.

Even if you were an amateur
like Gregory,

you were going to make a noise.

It was this central, core group
of revolutionaries

who were provoking,
who were disturbing,

who needed the debate to happen.

It could not just be owned
by the advanced nationalists,

ie those who were quite prepared
to pick up the gun and go.

The war drums were beating louder.

WB and Maud had chaired
a committee

to celebrate the centenary
of the failed 1798 rebellion.

There had been violent protests
at Queen Victoria's Jubilee,

and later at her visit to Dublin.

Yeats himself publicly
supported the Boers

in their fight against
British colonialism.

In this boiling pot,

he was challenged by more hardline
Republicans

to write a Nationalist play.

It's not his finest hour.

Co-written with Augusta Gregory
as a star vehicle for Maud Gonne,

essentially playing Ireland,

the play is not important
because of its genius, far from it,

but its impact.

And it happened in this very room,

where they are now,
to Willie's dismay I'd imagine,

building a nail bar
and tanning salon.

God, it's small.

And this is where...

..the appalling Kathleen ni Houlihan
was first staged.

So the old woman,
who represents Ireland, says,

"Sometimes my feet are tired
and my hands are quiet,

"but there's no quiet in my heart.

"When the people see me quiet,
they think old age has come in me

"and that all the stir
has gone out of me.

"But when the trouble is on me,
I must be talking to my friends."

Bridget - "What was it
put the trouble on you?"

Old woman -
"My land that was taken from me!"

Peter - "Was it much land
that they took from you?"

"My four beautiful green fields!"

Which is the pose you see

the photographs
of Maud Gonne striking,

precisely this.

Fuck off!

But it was that stuff that sent
a very astute critic,

Stephen Gwynn, reeling.

And he wrote in his diary...

"The effect of
Kathleen ni Houlihan on me

"was that I went home asking myself

"if such plays should be produced

"unless one was prepared for people
to go out to shoot and be shot."

After the Rising, Yeats,
in his later poems,

as an older man,
much after the Rising,

questions himself and says,

"Did certain of my plays send out
some men to be shot?"

And the answer is maybe not,

but the atmosphere
which he created,

and we're talking about a monstrous
box office hit for those days -

it was played again and again -

certainly contributed
to the overall war drums

being beaten ever more feverishly.

All that I have said and done

Now that I am old and ill

Turns into a question

Till I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right

Did that play of mine

Send out certain men
the English shot?

Did words of mine put
too great strain

On that woman's reeling brain?

Yeats's nationalism

and his belief in
an independent Ireland

was never in doubt.

But his old mentor John O'Leary
had said,

"There are some things a man
must not do to save a nation."

Whatever way the road forked,
WB's path was cultural revolution,

the pen not the sword.

What ultimately distanced WB Yeats
from the revolutionary cause

was a broken heart.

Maud Gonne, in the cauldron
of nationalist fervour,

married John MacBride,

a Republican hero who had fought
with the Boers against the Empire.

But he was also a drinker

and this perfect rebel marriage
was doomed.

The MacBride marriage
is essentially a publicity...

not a publicity stunt,
but it's...

It had big propaganda value.

Two icons of Republican resistance
marry each other

and are sworn to bring down
the British Empire

and are photographed in publicity
shots for a French magazine

with their new baby,

with lots of guns
on the table in front of them,

and the caption is "Three
Irish revolutionaries in Paris."

You know, it's a very,
very public and very publicised...

The Bonnie and Clyde
of Republicanism? In a way.

The squalid and long drawn out
and publicised separation case,

they don't get a divorce -
they're Catholics after all -

but there is a legal separation,

drags in all sorts of allegations
of his drunken behaviour

and his alleged molestation
of young women,

including Iseult, allegedly.

This shocks Yeats, who believes
all this implicitly,

very much indeed.

But what he's even more...

well, as shocked by
is that traditional IRB people,

nationalist men close
ranks around MacBride

and in many ways exorcise Maud Gonne

and have her hissed at in public
and so forth.

And the Neanderthal and
patriarchalist attitudes

of the old IRB guard
around MacBride,

who include, by the way,
John O'Leary,

is a deep disillusionment to him.

Why should I blame her

That she filled my days with misery

Or that she would of late
have taught to ignorant men

Most violent ways

Or hurled the little streets
upon the great

Had they but courage
equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful

With a mind that nobleness
made simple as a fire

With beauty like a tightened bow

A kind that is not natural
in an age like this

Being high and solitary
and most stern?

Why, what could she have done,
being what she is?

Was there another Troy
for her to burn?

On the eve of World War I,
Yeats was approaching 50,

with no Maud
and no marriage in sight.

"I have no child," he wrote
dismissively about his life,

"I have nothing but a book."

He was turning bitter,
sharper, angrier.

For some, he's the poet,
already a national treasure,

for others, he is a pompous
Anglo-Irish Protestant

taking a civil list pension
from the King.

He feels Ireland is growing
away from him,

it's not the romantic Ireland
he's tried to sing into life.

He rails against Dublin's new
bourgeois Catholic conservatism,

against a grubby materialism
and against militant nationalism.

What need you, being come to sense

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer

Until you have dried
the marrow from the bone

For men were born to pray and save

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone

It's with O'Leary in the grave.

WB Yeats puts his voice
and his support behind John Redmond,

his Irish Parliamentary Party
and democratic freedom.

In 1914,
the Home Rule Bill is passed.

Ireland has finally and peacefully
secured its independence.

But it's deferred
because of the Great War

and implacable Unionist opposition.

Things fall apart

The centre cannot hold...

But I am old and you are young...

I carry from my mother's womb
a fanatic heart...

That is no country for old men

The young in one another's arms...

Changed utterly

A terrible beauty is born.

Oh, that's great.

It's a beautiful drawing,
I've never seen it even reproduced.

But what's really
interesting about this,

where this sort of touches history,

is that this is exactly Yeats,

exactly Yeats
at the moment that the guns

were firing in O'Connell Street
on Easter Monday in 1916.

This is what he was doing,

he was being sketched by his friend,
the artist William Rothenstein,

in his house in Gloucestershire
where he was staying.

Of course, this was before he knows

that at this moment
that this is being drawn

that people are being killed
and being shot

and being fired at.

But the shock of Easter week
has a profound effect on him

and, of course, on the country -

but more specifically his art.

Hurrah for revolution
and more cannon-shot!

A beggar upon horseback
lashes a bigger on foot

Hurrah for revolution
and cannon come again!

The beggars have changed places,
but the lash goes on.

# When Irish eyes are smiling

# Sure is like a morn in spring... #

The Easter Rising lasted six days
and left nearly 500 dead.

When the leaders were captured
and executed by the British,

the ensuing outrage led to more
carnage and death

and ultimately, many think,
to Irish independence.

But I believe the glorification
of what happened in the GPO

stained my country's history
in blood for decades.

There are no creation myths here.

It's just a post office.

This isn't the foundation stone
of anything.

This isn't the crucible
of revolution.

No, that's over in
the execution yards of Kilmainham.

This isn't...the cradle
of our national Bethlehem.

This is the original
sin of a mismanaged, misgoverned,

often abusive and corrupt state.

This is the foul rag and bone shop
of the national heart,

which, as Yeats so brilliantly
reminds us,

is where all the ladders start.

I find myself very conflicted

by the idea of the blood sacrifice
in heroism.

The delirium of death.

Dying is...very easy.

I've been around it a lot.

It isn't radical to die,
it's inevitable.

Staying alive is hard.

Life is hard.

Staying alive to change
and implement change

must be what it's about.

Dying?

For a cause?

Whose cause?

The individual's?

Hoping that something
will come out of it.

This ludicrous notion of death
or glory...

or death and glory escapes me.

WB Yeats didn't die for Ireland.

He stayed alive to fight
for Ireland -

a better, inclusive,
progressive version of Ireland -

and to fight against the version
I eventually fled -

petty, censorious,
Catholic narrow-mindedness

fixated with
the false glory of martyrdom.

Had they converted into
a project of self-sacrifice?

Well, there I think we come back

to the Catholicisation
of the thing,

in retrospect,
and to Pearse's writings,

very cleverly aimed at exactly
this interpretation of it,

which were released...written
just before the Rising

and released just after it,

where the whole thing
is written into,

inscribed into the traditional
of Catholic sacrifice

and of mysticism

and of the way of the cross and of
Calvary and all the rest of it.

The other thing is
that the calculation is,

and this does seem to be the case,
this isn't retrospective,

that they knew
they would be executed

and that this would bring about
a response

in public opinion in Ireland.

And there they were
absolutely right. Fine.

Meanwhile at the end of all this
you get 500 people dead.

I mean, how dare they?

You may say "How dare they?"

but for them, the 500 people dead
were worth the reward,

which was a revived,
radical Republican...

And Stalin would have
exactly the same point.

Perhaps.

So the people of 1916 are an elite,

a revolutionary elite
blinded by, you know,

blood-dimmed revolutionary lust?

You say that. I didn't say it.
I am saying that.

They're certainly
a revolutionary elite.

And they're certainly bent on...
So he would have approved of that?

They're bent on the vertigo
of self-sacrifice.

And that's how Yeats
will both commemorate them

and remember them.

O but we talked at large
before the sixteen men were shot

But who can talk of give and take

What should be and what not

While those dead men are loitering
there to stir the boiling pot?

You say that we should still
the land till Germany's overcome

But who is there to argue that
now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

And is there a logic to outweigh
MacDonagh's bony thumb?

How could you dream they'd listen

That have an ear alone

For those new comrades
they have found

Lord Edward and Wolf Tone

Or meddle with our give and take

That converse bone to bone?

Hero Tales
And Legends Of The Serbians.

This is Yeats' library, that his
wife gave to the National Library.

These are the books, this is what
surrounded him all his life.

Oh, here we go, George Moore.
Oh, Shelley and Blake.

Yeah, they're his two touchstones,
aren't they?

Look at this,
Folklore In The Old Testament.

The Waste Land.

"For William Butler Yeats Esquire

"in admiration of his work,
TS Eliot."

These are his own editions
of his own works.

So I have to wear the gloves
made famous

on endless history programmes

and these are,
from Ireland's point of view,

you know, almost sacred texts.

And why not?

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey
eighteenth-century houses

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words

Or have lingered awhile and said
polite meaningless words

And thought before I had done
of a mocking tail or a gibe

To please a companion
around the fire at the club

Being certain that they and I
but lived where motley is worn

All changed

Changed utterly

A terrible beauty is born.

The events of 1916 took him aback,

and he didn't quite know
how to respond to it.

Then, of course,
like everybody else,

he recoiled at what the authorities
did to the leaders,

which was a serious political
mistake, of course,

and just went with the
cack-handedness and misgovernment

of what was coming from London.

He sat down and put his own doubt

and shock and questioning

into one of the most powerful poems
of the century, in any language.

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said

We know their dream

Enough to know
they dreamed and are dead.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse -

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be

Wherever green is worn

Are changed, changed utterly

A terrible beauty is born.

TEARFULLY: Brilliant.

One person wasn't so sure
that Yeats got it right -

his inspirational muse and
great love of his life Maud Gonne.

And now, because of the Rising,

this fanatic Republican icon
was a widow.

Maud is outraged
by this 'Easter, 1916.'

She thinks he's betrayed
the actual Rising itself.

"No, Willie, I do not
like your poem,"

begins this terrific,
terrific letter.

I think it's one of
the great political poems

because of its ambivalence.

But it does reflect the upheavals
of his own life during that summer,

with Maud, with her daughter Iseult.

And I think the stanza about
the stone of fanaticism

in the stream of life
is very much about...

This obsession with one idea
that blocks any other. Yeah.

Maud is the unspoken presence
in that poem.

It's probably his last great
love poem to her.

But I think the main thing is
the man is in the throes

of what can only be called
a nervous breakdown.

He is at the absolute edge
of self control.

It's the fallout of 1916 to 1917,

his horoscopes have told him

all sorts of world-shattering
things are happening.

He's looking for certainty
everywhere,

as he has done in the strangest
places over the last few years.

The 18 months after the Rising

saw WB descend into spirals
of confusion and depression

about politics but also
about his own personal life.

He's a 52-year-old bachelor

and, as many horoscopes, seances
and visits to mediums insist,

he must be married
by the end of the year.

In this state of panic,

Willie heads to Normandy
to visit Maud

and her travelling menagerie
of parrots, monkeys, dogs and cats.

He proposes one last time

and she turns him down again.

Then, literally, he turns
and walks along the beach

to her 22-year-old daughter Iseult

and proposes to her.

After all, she'd flirtingly
proposed to him

just two years earlier.

O you will take
whatever's offered

And dream that
all the world's a friend

Suffer as your mother suffered

Be as broken in the end

But I am old and you are young

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

Iseult says no.

In this emotional meltdown, Willie
thinks, 'Well, who else do I know?'

So the now hysterical Yeats
heads straight back to England

and proposes to Georgie Hyde Lees,
the daughter of a friend,

who says, "OK."

Within days, under pressure
of the horoscope deadline,

the happy couple arrive
at a London register office.

But Lily, Willie's sister,
took to her immediately.

"She is not good-looking
but is comely.

"Her nose is too big for good looks,
her colour ruddy

"and her hair reddish brown.

"Her eyes are very good
in a fine blue

"with very dark,
strongly marked eyebrows.

"She is quiet but not slow.

"Her brain I would judge
quick and trained and sensitive."

In fact, everyone remarked
on the intelligence of the woman.

Yeats, although now married
and on his honeymoon,

was still in a complete
state of panic.

Had he let down Maud or Iseult?

Was he betraying his new wife by
not being fully committed to her?

That's when Georgie displayed
her true talents.

So he'd met his deadline,

he had got married by that
astrological deadline.

Hurrah, he'd found somebody
less than half his age

who was willing to marry him.
That's a great success.

That's not a failure,
that's a success. Yeah.

So they get married,
they go on honeymoon,

they go down to this little hotel
just south of London.

And - first night,
nothing happens sexually.

Second night,
nothing happens sexually.

Third night, it's really
disconcerting for her.

It's really stressful.

And they, between them, decide to
start doing some automatic writing.

And she starts doing
this automatic writing....

Wasn't that bonkers, actually?
No, it wasn't that bonkers.

Well, you would say that, cos...
I would, wouldn't I?!

..you're selling bonkers books
in this book shop, you know,

with this hippie sofa
and stuff, you know.

She comes from
an occultist background.

He comes from
an occultist background.

It's a thing that she knows about.
It's a thing that he knows about.

It's a thing that
he's very keen that she does.

And she sits down to do it

and she starts

and they get some results.

He loves it. He absolutely loves it.

It transpires Georgie
had the ability

to connect the pen in her hand

to the great wisdom of
some unknown spiritual instructors.

Willie would ask a question

and Georgie's pen would
automatically write out an answer.

For Willie, this was the pinnacle
of a lifetime of spiritual quest.

New ideas, new metaphors
for his poetry.

Roy Foster called it a factory
for mysterious images.

And Willie didn't it want to stop.

But isn't that always
what all of this was about,

from the fairy legends
to the folk legends

to the Rosicrucianism,
to the theosophy?

Just this constant search
for stimulation of new imagery?

You know this yourself,

that's what creative writers,

that's what poets,
that's what songwriters do.

They're ruthless
in the search of a theme.

Ruthless.

And they will rummage
through anything

and extract anything

and steal anything

in order to get
an inspirational image

out of which will come a poem
or a song

or a piece of creative writing.

What they undertook to do
they brought to pass

All things hang like a drop of dew
upon a blade of grass.

So simple.

Yeats' new domestic stability
sat uneasily

with the end of the Great War
and the rise of Bolshevism.

At home, England's hesitation

in implementing
hard fought for home rule

provoked the
Irish War of Independence.

It was only 1919, but, with that
remarkable prescience of his,

he could sense impending doom.

And with his store of magical
metaphors and imagery,

a new, sharper
and darker genius began to emerge.

Turning and turning
in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Things fall apart,
the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world

The blood dimmed tide is loosed

And everywhere the ceremony
of innocence is drowned

The best lack all conviction

While the worst
are full of passionate intensity

Surely some revelation is at hand

Surely the Second Coming is at hand

The Second Coming?

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight

Somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body
and the head of a man

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

Is moving its slow thighs

While all about it reel shadows
of the indignant desert birds

The darkness drops again

But now I know that twenty centuries
of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare
by a rocking cradle

And what rough beast

Its hour come round at last

Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?

Creatively and emotionally,
WB Yeats had found a new maturity.

He gave up his old
London bachelor pad

and tried to create a family home

in his mythical dream time,
the West of Ireland.

It's pretty ludicrous that
we are sort of scurrying along

past this place, cos of course
it isn't normally like this.

This is a road
and the river is down there

and we are now crossing over
normally a bridge.

But the countryside is in flood.

But the problem with the tower
was that it was regularly in flood.

Pound said this is Willie's
phallic symbol in the country,

"Ballyphallus
or whatever it is he calls it

"with the river flowing through
the first floor."

And there it is.

And it was with some dismay
that he brought Georgie back here,

his wife, and raised his kids
a lot of the time.

It was freezing,

and...no electricity or anything.
But he loved it.

And you can see why.

It's got that austere beauty
that's so prevalent in the poetry.

What a place to live in.

Although I can see him still

The freckled man who goes
to a grey place on a hill

In grey Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies

It's long since I began
to call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man

All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped 'twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality.

Ireland was now in the middle

of a vicious and cruel war
of independence

and Yeats was rightly outraged
by the atrocities

committed around Coole and Ballylee
by the warring parties.

He finally publishes
his Easter Rebellion poetry

and nails his nationalism
to the mast.

In 1921, in a speech
to the Oxford Union,

he launched a blazing attack
on the English in Ireland.

"I am a Victorian," he said,

"They knew the meaning of the terms
truth, honour and justice, but you?

"You do not know
the meaning of them."

WB Yeats is no longer ambivalent.

Once again, he wants to stand up
and be counted.

He was a one-man
anti-emigration scheme.

He didn't want to leave,

like Joyce and Beckett
and Wilde and Shaw.

He didn't want to go.

He wanted to stay and change.

And it's kind of the boring point
I've been making

about this whole film.

You can die for a cause,
but you can live for a reason.

It's only being alive
that change happens,

and that was the route he took.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty
brought about a compromise

which Yeats supported -

the Irish Free State.

He accepted a role as senator
in this new government.

This was no token position,
Ireland was now in a civil war.

Senators were being attacked,
houses were being burned.

His own new home
on Merrion Square in Dublin

was shot at and had armed guards.

He was going into the Senate

to ensure that the revolution
that he had helped to engender

and the unique literary revolution

that he hoped would become
the soul of the country,

which in fact it did,

should endure,
and should be ensured.

The new conservative
Catholic free state,

despite their declarations,
did nothing for the rights of women

and sidelined important and vocal
Protestants into the Senate.

The plurality which
the rebellion had promised

had been replaced with what,
in effect,

was a Catholic clerical coup d'etat.

Unbelievably, a later government

even sent a telegram to the Pope

desiring to "repose
at the feet of your Holiness

"and our devotion to
your August Person."

But nobody would muzzle WB Yeats.

He stood up against legislation
that he saw not only as unjust

but that might alienate Protestants

and rule out any chance
of a united Ireland.

He wrote, "We must become a modern,
tolerant, liberal nation."

He argued unsuccessfully

against the compulsory use of
Irish language, against censorship

and the Catholic fear of
"evil literature"

like James Joyce's Ulysses.

Some people see him still, though,
as the Englishman, don't they?

I mean,
they're sort of dismissive of him.

Well, yeah, I think
he's seen as somebody

who's speaking for values

that are alien to what

the increasingly
pietistic Catholic -

you know,
pledging allegiance to the Pope -

Free State governments want.

He believes that
the artistic imagination

is part of the way a country
empowers and liberates itself.

And that is what he's preaching
in the Senate as well.

He talks on issues of art, on issues
of education, on issues of culture.

That's what he thinks an upper house
in a modern government should be

and that's what he thinks
is being denigrated

by the new highly Catholic,
very bourgeois,

very conservative polity
that the Free States become.

Famously, Yeats spoke out in vain

against the new state's plan
to prohibit divorce.

He felt that it was grossly
oppressive

to the Protestant minority
and he said,

"I am proud to consider myself
a typical man of that minority.

"We, against whom you have done
this thing, are no petty people."

And he rightly claimed that when the
iceberg of Catholic control melted,

Ireland would become
an increasingly tolerant country.

I walk through the long schoolroom
questioning

A kind old nun
in a white hood replies

The children learn to cypher
and to sing

To study reading books
and histories

To cut and sew,
be neat in everything

In the best modern way

The children's eyes
in momentary wonder

Stare upon a sixty-year-old
smiling public man.

This film could actually
be called

How The Prods Invented
Catholic Ireland.

You know, so many of the great
heroes of this story,

going way back,
the great revolutionaries -

Emmett, Wolfe Tone -

never mind the literary figures -
Douglas Hyde -

so critical to the realisation
of national self,

coming to sort of an apotheosis
in Yeats' genius,

were of course Protestants.

And Yeats wasn't going to
let that pass.

He was deeply proud
of his caste and his background

and his people

and their rallying call
of Nationalism.

At every turn, Yeats constantly
had to fight against

the narrow-minded worldview
of this new young Ireland.

He chaired the Coinage Committee

but was attacked for choosing pagan
designs by an English Protestant.

Maud Gonne in particular hated them.

Less successfully, perhaps,

he also advised on the design

for the new robes
for the Irish judiciary.

Unfortunately, this is what
he thought Irish judges should wear

sitting in front of, sort of,
gougers and yahoos and corner boys,

you know, drug dealing

and, like, beating up people
when the pubs came out.

They would stand in the dock
in front of people dressed as this.

Are you serious?

"Jeez, what do you got on there,
your honour?!" You know?

And of course,
every lawyer who saw this

thinking they were
going to be judges

in the new independent country
were looking at it,

"You can fuck off if you think
I'm ever going to wear that."

What...?

Regardless of what some in Ireland
thought of WB Yeats' Irishness,

in 1923, Europe and the world

were about to recognise
the greatness of his poetry.

The Nobel Prize then,
as now, is huge.

For the country, it's such an honour

and it's taken as not just
an imprimatur of genius

but that Ireland has been
fully accepted now

into the great states of the world.

The winning of the Nobel Prize

showed that there was
a world recognition of this...

of this poet and of the literature
that he championed.

So, you know, we didn't have to
feel ashamed of it

or feel in any way that it was
second rate or whatever.

This had been recognised
internationally

and we could embrace it
without any feeling at all

that we were embracing
the colonialists' language.

He was a more important ambassador
for our state

then any statesman who was
Taoiseach,

or, as it would have been called,

President of the Executive Council
at the time. So,

did the new state fail him?

Yes. It was...

It was petty and he wasn't. Ever.

Witheringly, and insultingly,

the Catholic press branded Willie
and his like "new ascendancy."

They dismissed him as a neopagan
agnostic Freemason pensioner.

They couldn't handle his utter
belief in the integrity of art

and the artistic,
independent revolutionary voice.

The Catholic Church, of course,

could never reconcile
themselves to it.

They were spiteful,
they were full of hatred

because he represented
everything that they were not -

openness, pluralism, modernity,
the individual, the thoughtful,

the less than infantile Irish
that they insisted we were.

The patrimony of
the Catholic Church.

"Father. Oh, father."

Father?
You're not my fucking father.

You know? So he resisted all that.

Yeats' Abbey Theatre

had first outraged the narrow-minded
patrons in 1907,

shocked at Synge's new realism
and his depiction of the language,

earthiness and sexual frankness
of the Irish

in Playboy Of The Western World.

In 1926, he was at it again

with Sean O'Casey's
The Plough And The Stars,

a less than reverent take
on the holy rising

of just ten years earlier,

written by a man who, as a committed
socialist and revolutionary,

had every right to his opinion.

The Plough And The Stars
is important

because it totally fitted in
to where Yeats was at that time.

He was the public man
who'd stepped up to the plate.

He'd been going on and on and on
and on and on.

Really, now, people were fed up
of this guy going on

about the Ireland that should be.

O'Casey's play dared question
the Rising and its leaders

and Yeats would defend to the death

any artist's right
to do precisely that.

This is viewed as
a national disgrace.

Already these men have been
set in stone on plinths.

Already, the GPO, 1916
are shibboleths.

You cannot say
anything against them.

They are utterly totemic and vital
to the national sense of self.

O'Casey is very hardcore about it.

He's saying, "What was all that for?

"That didn't really work.

"Who are we?
What is it we wanted to be?"

All hell breaks loose again.

And they couldn't handle that.

In the same way that Playboy
had held up the mirror,

this newer Ireland had
a mirror held up to itself

and they couldn't stand it.

But this time,
he ain't going to debate anything.

This time, there is a real rage

cos he genuinely,
like Synge, thinks,

"Here's the new one,
here's the new genius."

So he walks out on the stage,

and the cartoons would show you
that stance here,

right here at this point,
staring at them.

He shouts at them,

"You've disgraced yourselves again.

"You've disgraced yourselves again!"

It's not a headmaster
chastising the class, it's...

..it's the disappointed leader.

I'm not sure Willie
had it in him any more.

He was getting old and jaded.

Perhaps the grubby and pious Ireland
he had found himself in

was not the romantic island
he'd dreamed of.

He retired from his role as senator
in 1928, his health failing.

He said he wished to live
his remaining years as a bee

rather than a wasp.

Willie's version
of Ireland was being smothered.

But one of his greatest
weapons was outrage.

New stark, sexual poems,

sometimes written
in a woman's voice, Crazy Jane,

always speaking the unspeakable.

A sudden blow.

The great wings beating still
above the staggering girl

Her thighs caressed
by the dark webs

Her nape caught in his bill

He holds her helpless breast
upon his breast

How can those terrified vague
fingers push

The feathered glory
from her loosening thighs?

What lively lad most pleasured me

Of all that with me lay?

I answer that I gave my soul

And loved in misery

But had great pleasure with a lad

That I loved bodily.

No ups and downs, my pretty

A mermaid, not a punk

A drunkard is a dead man

And all dead men are drunk.

THEY LAUGH

It's great, isn't it?

It's like one of yours!

He started to reminisce
about his class, his caste,

where he came from.

He had an affinity not just
for the West of Ireland

but for the Protestant ascendancy,
the big house.

He wasn't a natural democrat

and harboured a lifelong
suspicion of the mob.

He believed in that ancient
Homeric view of the aristocracy

to lead a country, corresponding
to his interest in Nietzsche

and the hierarchy of class.

He felt great families
were wiser than governments.

He was a bit of a snob.

He wanted to be here
and he got here

and he got here because
he became the famous writer.

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till time catch

Should the conflagration climb

Run till all the sages know

We the great gazebo built

They convicted us of guilt

Bid me strike a match and blow.

Part of his insistence that
we the great gazebo built,

the great gazebo of Ireland,
it is...

It's your thing, it is our thing,
we cannot be dismissed.

We are no petty people.

Of course he was right.

He predicted an unspecific
and terrifying dark era in Europe.

And his fear of communism led him
to a misguided dabble in fascism.

He wrote silly marching songs
for Ireland's Blue Shirts,

a right wing movement
of the early 1930s,

until he realised they were
nothing more than a cabal

of the conservative Catholics
he despised.

He felt impotent
about how the world was going,

about where Ireland was going,

about where old age was taking him.

I ranted to the knave and fool

But outgrew that school

Would transform the part

Fit audience found, but cannot rule

My fanatic heart.

I sought my betters

Though in each

Fine manners, liberal speech

Turn hatred into sport

Nothing said
or done can reach

My fanatic heart

Out of Ireland have we come

Great hatred, little room

Maimed us at the start

I carry from my mother's womb

A fanatic heart.

That's another great line -

we turn hatred into sport. I know.

You think it horrible
that lust and rage

Should dance attendance
upon my old age?

They were not such a plague
when I was young

What else have I
to spur me into song?

Yeats had a family,

a patient and loving wife,

but also a permanent gaggle
of rackety female admirers.

Sex, like all acts of creativity,
happens first and most in the mind.

And sexual frisson had always been
the source of his writing energies,

yet his impotence
left him creatively barren.

But then, in London, he heard
about an unlikely medical procedure.

What is a Steinach operation?

Oh, well, there are a whole lot
of things going on at this time,

early 20th-century,

now that they have discovered
the idea of glands and hormones.

And the idea of sexual glands
and hormones

to, you know, restore
people's sexual potency.

And the Steinach operation was
one of the less out there things,

because it didn't actually involve
transplanting monkey glands.

It was actually
a one-sided vasectomy.

And the idea was that by cutting
off the seminal cells

and causing them to atrophy,

the other cells in the testes
would proliferate

and recirculate in the bloodstream

and restore youth and vitality
to the man who had it done.

And this wasn't
just about sexual potency,

it was also about productivity,

ability to, you know, in
the case of Yeats, to write poetry.

But, you know, in all sorts
of other ways to restore men

to full, you know, productive
and creative vigour. Did it work?

No... Well,

it was said to work

but I think the placebo effect
is a very strong thing.

How can I, that girl standing there

My attention fix on Roman or
on Russian or on Spanish politics

Yet here's a travelled man
that knows what he talks about

And there's a politician

That has both read and thought

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.

Part of the keynote of Yeats' last
decade, the 1930s, is frustration.

Frustration on all sorts of levels.

There is, in a celebrated way,
his sexual frustration,

his declining potency,

which he attempts to reverse
with this operation.

His obsessive pursuit of
usually pretty willing women

to reignite some sort of sexual
excitement in his life.

with Edith Heald, with Ethel Mannin,

even with Dorothy Wellesley,
though she was a lesbian,

with Margot Ruddock.

And all this, I think, links
very much to a sense of mortality.

He has been seriously ill
in the late '20s,

nearly died in the late '20s.

The wonderful Byzantium poems
come out of his recovery

from a near death experience.

And I think when you read them
in that light,

they make a special sense.

That is no country for old men

The young in one another's arms,
birds in the trees

Those dying generations
at their song

The salmon-falls,
the mackerel-crowded seas

Fish, flesh, or fowl,
commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten,
born, and dies

Caught in that sensual music

All neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

As Yeats' age increased

and all the vicissitudes that
attend old age dropped down on him,

he was very aware that life
was becoming limiting.

And he wrote to his great friend
Olivia Shakespear, he said,

"My age increases my change.
My need for freedom grows."

And for Yeats in the later years,

freedom for him was represented
by the Mediterranean.

"The encouraging presence
of palm trees," he called it.

An aged man is but a paltry thing

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing,
and louder sing

For every tatter
in its mortal dress.

He needed to come to
the south of France to winter here.

He'd spend summers in England
with his various lady friends,

but also back at home
in Rathfarnham in Dublin

with his wife and the kids,

though that was increasingly
becoming a sort of...

..nurse and patient relationship.

Again, the more you read,

the more your admiration
for his wife increases

and the more he becomes a sort of...

a contrary oul' fella, really.

A Drinking Song.

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye

That's all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die

I lift the glass to my mouth

I look at you, and I sigh.

That's it? That's it.

OK. Not bad.

I like those short ones!

I think he was...

..wilful, self-important,

self obsessed
and involved to the nth -

and maybe, when you read
about other great geniuses,

maybe that's what is required.

But sadly, with his children,

with his wife, with his many,
many muses...

..was he capable of love?

And that's the great irony.

The man who wrote
some of the greatest love poems

ever imagined in
the English language

possibly actually
never understood what it was.

A most astonishing thing

Seventy years have I lived

Hurrah for the flowers of Spring

For Spring is here again

Seventy years have I lived

No ragged beggar man

Seventy years have I lived

Seventy years man and boy

And never have I danced for joy.

Yeah.

Poor fucker. Mmm.

Willie's father had
once brilliantly said

that their family tended
to die slowly, like great empires.

WB Yeats died peacefully
on 28th January 1939,

surrounded by his wife
and his female friends.

He understood he was going.

Almost the very, very last act

was to change
one of the great final poems

constructed in the last
couple of weeks

from the title His Convictions

to Under Ben Bulben.

Knowing what he was doing at
the last moment - Under Ben Bulben,

he is writing himself into, finally,

the pantheon of great Irish heroes,

beyond the literary genius,
the word genius.

No, under the pantheon
of great Irish heroes.

Before he died, he instructed George

to bury him for a year
here in Roquebrune

until the fuss died down
back in Ireland

and then take him home to Sligo.

They took a plot of land up here
for a brief period of time.

But war broke out,

so they couldn't bring him back
to Sligo after a year.

Instead, they dug up bones

when the lease had run out
on the ground

and put them down
in that building there,

where the terracotta tiles are.

After the war,

Ireland wanted
their great national poet home.

So the French returned some bones
that some people say aren't Yeats,

they're another fellow
called Alfred Hollis

who had been buried beside him,
or some other geezer.

I mean, I love the joke.

I love the absurdity,
as the Irish do.

But it is utterly meaningless.

The pilgrimages to Drumcliff,

that small little graveyard
under Benbulben,

continue from all over the world.
Why?

Not because of what bones are there

but because of this great genius.

Cast your mind on other days

That we in coming days may be

Still the indomitable Irishry

Under bare Ben Bulben's head

In Drumcliff churchyard

Yeats is laid

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago,
a church stands near

By the road an ancient Cross

No marble, no conventional phrase

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death

Horseman, pass by!

In the end, Roy,
how important is Yeats to Ireland?

I think Yeats is
of central importance

to the Irish sense of identity.

Partly because he so...

brilliantly and aggressively
flouted it in his own lifetime.

And you get the sense there that
Yeats to the very end was,

as I think Stephen Gwynn said,

tearing down idols
in the marketplace.

And I think that's
a great thing to do.

There's been far too many idols
in the Irish marketplace.

Yeats devoted his life
to tearing them down

or to questioning them.

And I think one of the very
interesting things

is how he is impossible
to get away from.

No matter where you look
at Irish identity

and Irish cultural history from,

he keeps coming up.

As George Moore said,

everything begins in Yeats
and everything ends in Yeats.

Ireland, like everywhere,
acknowledges its heroes -

often the wrong ones -

its loudmouths
and its literary geniuses.

But WB, he's at the top
of the heap.

He's in our DNA.

His childhood playground in Sligo
is now officially Yeats Country

for thousands of tourists
every year.

Under Benbulben,
I even found an illustrator

who created an entire book
just about his appalling love life.

This is a fantastic piece.

That was one of the first ones
I did.

"Yeats proposes to Maud
the first time."

You can see all womanhood behind
the window jeering!

I know, it's all terribly symbolic.

"Maud Gonne has said yes!"

HE LAUGHS

But you know what, it's true,
he wouldn't have written a note.

WH Auden said of Yeats,
"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."

But he was our mad old eejit -

a permanent adolescent
and, above all,

an obsessive about love,
life, about Ireland.

Auden also said he was silly,
like us.

But Yeats wasn't silly when he said,
"My weapon is my verse

"and it takes 50 years for a poet's
weapons to influence the issue."

50 years after WB died,

we elected a woman as president,
a human rights lawyer.

The power and fear of
the Catholic Church collapsed.

We finally started to see an
Ireland based on peace, pluralism

and respect.

Now that's Yeats country.

He is a great historical figure,
he is a great radical,

he's a great revolutionary,
he's a great nationalist,

he's a great patriot.

Did he succeed?

From that objective here in Sligo,
as a kid,

did he win in the end
what he set out to do?

Absolutely.
Did he transform the country?

Absolutely.
Did he transform literature?

Absolutely.

And at the end of his life,
he sort of said,

"What's it all about?"

And he looked back and in another...

..literally deathless poem,
he asked the question 'What Then?'

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?"

Everything he wrote was read

After certain years he won
sufficient money for his need

Friends that have been
friends indeed

"What then?" sang Plato's ghost

"What then?"

All his happier dreams came true

A small old house, wife,
daughter, son

Grounds where plum and cabbage grew

Poets and wits about him drew

"What then?" sang Plato's ghost

"What then?"

The work is done,
grown old he thought

According to my boyish plan

Let the fools rage

I swerved in naught

Something to perfection brought

But louder sang that ghost

"What then?"

Well, the answer is Ireland.

# I walk beside you

# Through the world today

# While dreams and songs

# And lovers bless your way

# I look into your eyes

# And hold your hand

# I'll walk beside you

# Through the golden land. #