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Yeats's Country Of The Young
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Among the manuscripts and typescripts left by W. B. Yeats in the possession of his wife are two unpublished plays, one an unfinished manuscript consisting of two dialogues written in Yeats's inimitable, nearly undecipherable handwriting and the other a rough typescript inaccurately punctuated and proofread. The first was written in 1918 during the period of Yeats's interest in the Noh drama and has to do with a young girl, who lives as a goatherd in an old tower on a hill, and her lover, whose mother wants to block their marriage. This play is mentioned by Birgit Bjersby (though she makes an inaccurate quotation from the MS.) in her study of the Cuchulain legend in Yeats's works. The second play has been mentioned, as far as I know, only by Allen Wade. It is of interest chiefly for three reasons. First, it forms a dramatic milieu for “The Happy Townland,” a poem which Yeats liked well enough to preserve in his Collected Poems. Second, it throws some light upon Yeatsian symbology. And third, it is an example of a collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory. Allen Wade mentions this play only to assert that it evidently no longer exists. But four years ago a typescript of the play was shown to me by Mrs. Yeats. I found it to be a variation upon Lady Gregory's play, The Travelling Man.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957
References
Note 1 in page 510 Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B. Yeats (Uppsala, 1950), p. 35 n. She reads “ghosts” for “goats.”
Note 2 in page 510 Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats (London, 1951), p. 65 n. Wade also asserts that “The Happy Townland,” which Yeats told him was from the lost play, was printed in In the Seven Woods (1903) under the title, “The Rider from the North.” Wade asserts that he asked Yeats why he published the poem first as “The Happy Townland” (in the Weekly Critical Rev., Paris, 4 June 1903), changed the title to “The Rider from the North” for In the Seven Woods, and then subsequently changed the name back for later collections of his poems. Yeats replied that he could not remember doing so. There is probably a simple reason for the change. The poem as it appears in the play is sung by a “rider” of horses. By the time that Yeats had published the poem in the Weekly Critical Rev. he had put the play away and undoubtedly wanted the poem to stand alone with a more suitable title. That the poem appears in a book one month later suggests either that the MS. for the printer was put in shape before Yeats made the change of title or that Yeats inadvertently gave to the printer a copy of the poem with the old title on it.
Note 3 in page 510 See The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (New York, 1954), p. 390.
Note 4 in page 510 New York and London, 1913, p. 105.
Note 5 in page 511 Quoted ibid., pp. 80-81.
Note 6 in page 511 Gogarty makes this statement in It Isn't This Time of Year at All (Garden City, 1954), p. 246.
Note 7 in page 511 Our Irish Theatre, p. 105.
Note 8 in page 512 Seven Short Plays (Dublin, 1911), pp. 207–208.
Note 9 in page 512 The text is available in Seven Short Plays, pp. 165–179.
Note 10 in page 514 I wish to thank Mrs. W. B. Yeats for her permission to make quotations from the MS. in her possession.
Note 11 in page 516 Our Irish Theatre, p. 105.
Note 12 in page 516 Ideas of Good and Evil (London and Stratford, 1914), p. 191.
Note 13 in page 517 Ibid., pp. 233–234.
Note 14 in page 518 There are other similarities to Blake in, of course, the treatment of innocence and experience. In treating the states of the human soul Yeats was strongly influenced by Blake, whom he studied meticulously, and by his father, who held neo-Blakean views of art and morality.
Note 15 in page 519 “Coole and Ballylee,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1954), p. 240.