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Authors: Declan Kiberd
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childhood in The Land of Heart's Desire, but the writer who turns on Christmas Day 1914 from a war-torn world to "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth" finds in the past only suffering of a kind that led him in the first place to evoke it. This may sharpen the focus on an apparent contradiction in the autobiography between his nostalgia for Sinbad's yellow shore and the following thoughts from the opening chapter "Indeed, I remember little of childhood but its pain, I have grown happier with every year of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself, for certainly my miseries were not made by others but were a part of my own mind". 10 The poet may have been too forgiving in this instance, for some of his troubles were caused by the puritanical gloom and inconsiderate handling which he experienced among thePollexfens, his mothers people in Sligo. Permanently afraid of both uncle and aunt, the young boy
confused grandfather William Pollexfen with God, praying that he might punish him for his sins.
Pollexfen himself was something of an eccentric, who could not bear to hear the tapping sound made by the children with spoons as they removed the top from an egg. He chastened them with an alternative, and of course superior, method:
His way was to hold the egg-cup firmly on its plate with his left hand, then with a sharp knife in his right hand to behead the egg with one blow. Where the top of the egg went to was not his business. It might hit a grandchild or the ceiling. He never looked ... 11
The Pollexfens passed on their propensity for gloomy introspection to Willie, who was sometimes so filled with "hobgoblin fancies" that his aunts wondered whether the boy was in possession of all his faculties. This judgement would be echoed years later by London neighbours who wondered why the nice young Yeats girls used to walk down Blenheim Road "with the mentally afflicted young gentleman".
Small wonder that the poet in middle age could write of:
. . . that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man . . . 12
or that the old man could write (in an imitation from the Japanese):
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy. . . 13
For one of his earliest recollections had been of his grateful surprise when great-uncleWilliam Middleton had said: "We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble, and they can never see any end". 14 As a boy, Yeats made a mental note never to talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood. This returns us to the question already asked in another way: how can these childhood ignominies be reconciled with nostalgia for the Sligo of Yeats's youth?
The simple answer is that Yeats's longings were for locations, whereas his pains were caused by people. It may well be that beautiful landscapes, which assuaged boyhood pain, were sanctified in the memory of later years by their association with intense early epiphanies. In his
autobiographical writings, George Bernard Shaw registered a similar discrepancy between his "devil of a childhood, rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities" and the serene settings in which some of his days were passed. He did, however, recall one moment of ecstatic happiness when his mother confided that they were to live in Dalkey. "Under its canopied skies", he recalled at the age of eighty, he learned "to love Nature and Ireland when 1 was a half-grown nobody". 15 The plaque which now stands on Shaw's cottage in Dalkey may well in its inscription speak also for Yeats: "The men of Ireland are mortal and temporal, but her hills are eternal". Behind such an aphorism lies a familiar strategy of the Irish Protestant imagination, estranged from the community, yet anxious toidentify itself with the new national sentiment. While Roman Catholic writers of the revival period seemed obsessed with the
confused grandfather William Pollexfen with God, praying that he might punish him for his sins.
Pollexfen himself was something of an eccentric, who could not bear to hear the tapping sound made by the children with spoons as they removed the top from an egg. He chastened them with an alternative, and of course superior, method:
His way was to hold the egg-cup firmly on its plate with his left hand, then with a sharp knife in his right hand to behead the egg with one blow. Where the top of the egg went to was not his business. It might hit a grandchild or the ceiling. He never looked ... 11
The Pollexfens passed on their propensity for gloomy introspection to Willie, who was sometimes so filled with "hobgoblin fancies" that his aunts wondered whether the boy was in possession of all his faculties. This judgement would be echoed years later by London neighbours who wondered why the nice young Yeats girls used to walk down Blenheim Road "with the mentally afflicted young gentleman".
Small wonder that the poet in middle age could write of:
. . . that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man . . . 12
or that the old man could write (in an imitation from the Japanese):
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy. . . 13
For one of his earliest recollections had been of his grateful surprise when great-uncleWilliam Middleton had said: "We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble, and they can never see any end". 14 As a boy, Yeats made a mental note never to talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood. This returns us to the question already asked in another way: how can these childhood ignominies be reconciled with nostalgia for the Sligo of Yeats's youth?
The simple answer is that Yeats's longings were for locations, whereas his pains were caused by people. It may well be that beautiful landscapes, which assuaged boyhood pain, were sanctified in the memory of later years by their association with intense early epiphanies. In his
autobiographical writings, George Bernard Shaw registered a similar discrepancy between his "devil of a childhood, rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities" and the serene settings in which some of his days were passed. He did, however, recall one moment of ecstatic happiness when his mother confided that they were to live in Dalkey. "Under its canopied skies", he recalled at the age of eighty, he learned "to love Nature and Ireland when 1 was a half-grown nobody". 15 The plaque which now stands on Shaw's cottage in Dalkey may well in its inscription speak also for Yeats: "The men of Ireland are mortal and temporal, but her hills are eternal". Behind such an aphorism lies a familiar strategy of the Irish Protestant imagination, estranged from the community, yet anxious toidentify itself with the new national sentiment. While Roman Catholic writers of the revival period seemed obsessed with the
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