Finding Yeats continued

In his poem, A Prayer for my Daughter, written in 1919, Yeats writes about the conditions he wants for his daughter as she grows and the kind of woman he hopes she will become. He wants her to have a solid foundation so she might cultivate qualities of mind he approves: kindness, courtesy, merriment, innocence and beauty. These are to be cultivated in contrast to women of opinionated mind who risk everything for an old bellows full of angry wind.

Oh dear, these are not the sentiments likely to appeal to modern women who value their 'opinions' and do not appreciate being put down for holding them. Yeats is yearning for establishment values based on long-term land ownership from which custom and ceremony cultivate fine sensibilities. But how many people have such a solid base and what happens when the base is rocky? Are we all bound to fall into barbarism?

These sorts of questions led me into a search to find out more about Yeats and where he was coming from. First, though, I read a short novel by the Irish-born novelist Elizabeth Bown whose books I once looked into and enjoyed many years ago. In The Last September (published in 1929) Elizabeth Bowen describes life in an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy mansion of the type Yeats seems to have yearned for and which was indeed part of Bowen's legacy at Bown Court, her family's country estate. The story is set in 1920 when Ireland was rocked by the 'Troubles' between the British army and the IRA. This was part of the context in which Yeats sought the stability of old places and old ideas. In Bowen's novel the movement is forward with the young woman of the place set to move on into a wider world.

R.F. Foster's wonderful biography of Yeats considers the context of A Prayer for my Daughter in fascinating detail. Yeats appears to be reacting against his own 'troubles' with Maud Gonne and contrasting her radicalism with what he perceived as the kindness and courtesy of his young wife, George, who had given birth to the 'daughter', Anne, who is the child of the poem. The poem is also influenced by Yeats's acquisition of a 'castle' (his famous Tower), and his immersion in spiritualism at the time. All this plus 'his apprehension at a world descending into formless anarchy' as he expressed over and over again in his poems, as in The Second Coming which he composed around the same time as the Prayer:
Things fall apart; the centre can not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Being introduced to Yeats's poem through my poetry group led my to think a lot about the foundations (or not), of place, of belonging, of reactions when stability is threatened. It led me to Elizabeth Bowen and into a reading of Yeats's life and his poetry. The journey through words is a rich and rewarding one.

Text details for this post:
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. Vintage paperback novel (1998) with an introduction by Victoria Glendinning. pp. 206. Available Book Camel $8 plus postage and packaging.

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life 11: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Pulished by Oxford University Press, 2003. Copy borrowed from City Library, Melbourne.

W. B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter, in W. B. Yeats Selected Poetry, Macmillan paperback. First published 1962.