Bob Geldof on WB Yeats: A Fanatic Heart

0:00:02 > 0:00:08This programme contains some strong language

0:00:10 > 0:00:12Out of Ireland have we come

0:00:15 > 0:00:17Great hatred, little room

0:00:17 > 0:00:19Maimed us at the start

0:00:21 > 0:00:24I carry from my mother's womb

0:00:24 > 0:00:25A fanatic heart.

0:00:33 > 0:00:37In 1966, I was 14

0:00:37 > 0:00:41and Ireland marked the 50th anniversary of its 1916 Rising.

0:00:47 > 0:00:48Across that Easter week,

0:00:48 > 0:00:53the one television station that most of the country could receive

0:00:53 > 0:00:57was filled with the most appalling,

0:00:57 > 0:01:01mawkish, emotional, nationalistic guff.

0:01:03 > 0:01:07I felt divorced from my own.

0:01:07 > 0:01:12I was engaged in the now and not what seemed to me the prehistoric.

0:01:13 > 0:01:18For others, it stirred the politics of hatred...

0:01:19 > 0:01:20..that found a response

0:01:20 > 0:01:25in the killings in the north of this island a mere two years later.

0:01:29 > 0:01:30In my classroom...

0:01:31 > 0:01:35..a priest began to read the poetry of WB Yeats.

0:01:35 > 0:01:41Now, here, I recognised immediately, was the country I belonged to.

0:01:41 > 0:01:44Here was Ireland articulated -

0:01:44 > 0:01:49a modern, plural, open, generous country.

0:01:51 > 0:01:52..Of dusty wind and after

0:01:52 > 0:01:54Thunder of feet, tumult of images

0:01:54 > 0:01:56Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind.

0:02:01 > 0:02:05I mean, you get so annoyed it's so good, you know?

0:02:06 > 0:02:09So who was he, this poet?

0:02:09 > 0:02:12He was the oddest,

0:02:12 > 0:02:14bravest,

0:02:14 > 0:02:18downright weirdest of revolutionaries.

0:02:19 > 0:02:21And he never killed a living soul.

0:02:22 > 0:02:26Yet it was his revolution that won in the end.

0:02:27 > 0:02:29The revolution of the Irish mind.

0:02:36 > 0:02:38But it was the uprising against the British,

0:02:38 > 0:02:40fought mostly in Dublin's General Post Office

0:02:40 > 0:02:42across Easter week a century ago,

0:02:42 > 0:02:44that continues to be the central point

0:02:44 > 0:02:47of both celebration and controversy.

0:02:47 > 0:02:49Over the course of a few days,

0:02:49 > 0:02:52hundreds died in a shambolic engagement.

0:02:52 > 0:02:53What happened next,

0:02:53 > 0:02:56when the British executed the rebellion's leaders,

0:02:56 > 0:02:59set the tone of Ireland's often tragic political situation

0:02:59 > 0:03:01for the next 100 years.

0:03:03 > 0:03:08I want to say that the poet WB Yeats

0:03:08 > 0:03:10not only deserves a place

0:03:10 > 0:03:13on the national pantheon of liberation

0:03:13 > 0:03:17occupied by the men and women who fought and died in this building,

0:03:17 > 0:03:20but actually in front of them.

0:03:20 > 0:03:23Yeats sang this country into being

0:03:23 > 0:03:30by imagining the creation myths so necessary, so required,

0:03:30 > 0:03:35for building the modern, pluralist,

0:03:35 > 0:03:38intellectual underpinnings and institutions

0:03:38 > 0:03:40necessary for the nation-state.

0:03:40 > 0:03:45As Gogarty said, there is no Free State without Yeats.

0:03:45 > 0:03:51And by that, he meant that Ireland doesn't exist without the poet.

0:04:01 > 0:04:04Modern Ireland was not born 100 years ago,

0:04:04 > 0:04:06but 70 years before that

0:04:06 > 0:04:09in the charnel house of the Irish famine.

0:04:09 > 0:04:13Inconceivable hundreds of thousands died of mass starvation,

0:04:13 > 0:04:16while millions of others escaping the horror

0:04:16 > 0:04:19slipped away on migrant ships bound for viability.

0:04:19 > 0:04:21The land lay empty.

0:04:21 > 0:04:23This was Ireland's year zero.

0:04:25 > 0:04:27Centuries of dispossession and defeat

0:04:27 > 0:04:30had dulled the brain to anything other than brute survival.

0:04:32 > 0:04:34Just over a decade later,

0:04:34 > 0:04:38Yeats is born into the Protestant landowning ruling caste.

0:04:38 > 0:04:39With devastation all around,

0:04:39 > 0:04:43the authority of that class, his class, was destroyed.

0:04:43 > 0:04:46Ireland itself and its language was in flux,

0:04:46 > 0:04:48desperate to be re-moulded into the new.

0:04:48 > 0:04:52We just needed someone to magic it into life.

0:04:55 > 0:04:58I had this thought a while ago

0:04:58 > 0:05:00My darling cannot understand

0:05:00 > 0:05:03What I have done or what would do

0:05:03 > 0:05:06In this blind, bitter land.

0:05:09 > 0:05:13Willie Yeats was born in interesting times and to an interesting family.

0:05:13 > 0:05:14His father, John Butler Yeats,

0:05:14 > 0:05:17was a South Dublin barrister with good prospects.

0:05:17 > 0:05:21Everything was perfectly Victorian and lovely and...proper.

0:05:23 > 0:05:29His dad then decided that this wasn't going to be for him.

0:05:29 > 0:05:31He suddenly drops his family, drops everything

0:05:31 > 0:05:34and heads off to London,

0:05:34 > 0:05:36where he enrols in the Slade School of Art.

0:05:36 > 0:05:38And from then on,

0:05:38 > 0:05:41they live a life of complete poverty.

0:05:41 > 0:05:46Now, I think this is an act of great bravery.

0:05:46 > 0:05:48His family thought it was an act of insanity.

0:05:48 > 0:05:50But in so much else at that time,

0:05:50 > 0:05:54I think his father was really feeling the moment.

0:05:54 > 0:05:57This was a point of soon-to-be cultural revolution

0:05:57 > 0:06:00as opposed to armed insurrection.

0:06:00 > 0:06:01There was a difference.

0:06:01 > 0:06:03And he was completely rejecting

0:06:03 > 0:06:06the background that he had inherited.

0:06:06 > 0:06:08He was the ultimate bohemian

0:06:08 > 0:06:11and he set out to live the ultimate bohemian's life.

0:06:11 > 0:06:14He was determined not to bring his children up

0:06:14 > 0:06:16as he had been brought up, with those expectations.

0:06:16 > 0:06:19He kept them away from school. Why?

0:06:19 > 0:06:21Because he said of Willie Yeats,

0:06:21 > 0:06:26"The boy must learn to believe in art and poetry

0:06:26 > 0:06:29"and the sovereignty of the intellect and the mind."

0:06:29 > 0:06:32To escape this bohemian penury,

0:06:32 > 0:06:35Willie Yeats's mother would regularly take her children

0:06:35 > 0:06:38to her family, the Pollexfens, a prosperous trading dynasty

0:06:38 > 0:06:42based in Sligo town in the north-west of Ireland.

0:06:42 > 0:06:45Susan Yeats bringing her brood to Sligo

0:06:45 > 0:06:50is the birthplace of WB's dream-like vision of Ireland.

0:06:50 > 0:06:53It's sort of sad that his mother is left out of the equation so much.

0:06:53 > 0:06:55Take me through the family.

0:06:55 > 0:06:57Yeats's mother's family

0:06:57 > 0:07:01is in some ways much more important in his background

0:07:01 > 0:07:02than his father's family.

0:07:02 > 0:07:04They provide the background

0:07:04 > 0:07:07that the kids go to in Sligo in the summers.

0:07:07 > 0:07:10They are in Merville, this nice big house

0:07:10 > 0:07:14with servants, with fires, with ample everything.

0:07:14 > 0:07:17Very much integrated into that world

0:07:17 > 0:07:23of the Protestant bourgeoisie of a prosperous Irish provincial town.

0:07:23 > 0:07:28But its hinterland is this magic landscape of lakes and mountains

0:07:28 > 0:07:29and myth and magic,

0:07:29 > 0:07:32which is conveyed to them by the servants,

0:07:32 > 0:07:35who tell them these stories,

0:07:35 > 0:07:38and the local children with whom they play.

0:07:39 > 0:07:41For Yeats and his sisters, Lily and Lolly,

0:07:41 > 0:07:43and his brother, Jack,

0:07:43 > 0:07:47that is their absolute formative experience.

0:07:49 > 0:07:52That hinterland revolved around Rosses Point,

0:07:52 > 0:07:55a few miles outside of Sligo town.

0:07:55 > 0:07:59What a playground for the shy, dreamy kid and his siblings.

0:08:02 > 0:08:09This is the place where this crazed, imaginative family took off.

0:08:09 > 0:08:11In fact, in the frontispiece of this book

0:08:11 > 0:08:14is a reproduction of Jack Yeats's Memory Harbour,

0:08:14 > 0:08:16which was Willie's favourite painting of his,

0:08:16 > 0:08:19and many people's favourite painting.

0:08:19 > 0:08:21It actually is a brilliant piece of work.

0:08:21 > 0:08:24And here's the little road here.

0:08:24 > 0:08:26At the time, there were beautiful cottages,

0:08:26 > 0:08:27unfortunately all gone,

0:08:27 > 0:08:30leading up to where we're standing now, Elsinore.

0:08:30 > 0:08:33This is the old pilot that used to take Willie and Jack fishing.

0:08:37 > 0:08:39They'd go out for a day's fishing

0:08:39 > 0:08:41and they'd come back and they'd sit around

0:08:41 > 0:08:44and the pilot would tell them stories

0:08:44 > 0:08:46and there would be other kids here.

0:08:46 > 0:08:49And it doesn't matter, you know, what age you are from.

0:08:49 > 0:08:53I mean, why would you just not remember that always forever

0:08:53 > 0:08:56as being a part of your life that was wonderful?

0:08:57 > 0:09:00With the wind, you know, crackling away outside,

0:09:00 > 0:09:03you can see the lads running home and, you know,

0:09:03 > 0:09:05full of stories and scared stiff

0:09:05 > 0:09:08that they were going to bump into a fairy wrath

0:09:08 > 0:09:10or hear the banshee wailing.

0:09:10 > 0:09:12Funny as that is as a kid,

0:09:12 > 0:09:14everyone was afraid of that stuff, you know?

0:09:14 > 0:09:18Out here, Willie was immersed in fairy folklore.

0:09:18 > 0:09:21But this wasn't Peter Pan and Tinkerbell stuff,

0:09:21 > 0:09:24this was dark, pagan, malevolent

0:09:24 > 0:09:28and utterly accepted, completely believed.

0:09:28 > 0:09:33There was another world as tangible and real and dangerous as this one.

0:09:33 > 0:09:36The night Willie's three-year-old brother died of croup,

0:09:36 > 0:09:38his mother said she heard the wailing

0:09:38 > 0:09:42of a witchlike harbinger of death the Irish call the banshee.

0:09:42 > 0:09:44Away with us he's going

0:09:44 > 0:09:45The solemn-eyed

0:09:45 > 0:09:51He'll hear no more the lowing of the calves on the warm hillside

0:09:51 > 0:09:53Or the kettle on the hob

0:09:53 > 0:09:57Sing peace into his breast

0:09:57 > 0:10:02Or see the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest

0:10:04 > 0:10:07For he comes, the human child

0:10:07 > 0:10:11To the waters and the wild

0:10:11 > 0:10:14With a faery, hand in hand

0:10:14 > 0:10:18From a world more full of weeping

0:10:18 > 0:10:19Than he can understand.

0:10:22 > 0:10:25He did say a wonderful thing.

0:10:25 > 0:10:31- He said the Sligo sea cliffs gave tongue to his poetry.- Mmm.

0:10:31 > 0:10:33That's no small sentence.

0:10:36 > 0:10:38The west of Ireland had endured

0:10:38 > 0:10:40the worst agonies of the great famine.

0:10:40 > 0:10:43That can't have gone unnoticed by the young Willie Yeats.

0:10:43 > 0:10:47Stories and songs of ghosts, spirits, shades, banshees,

0:10:47 > 0:10:51angry tales of loss, stolen lives and vanishing responsibilities.

0:10:54 > 0:10:57From 1801, Ireland has been part of Britain.

0:10:57 > 0:11:00But the famine comes along and it turns out

0:11:00 > 0:11:03that you're not really British if you live in Connemara

0:11:03 > 0:11:06in the same sense that you would be if you lived in Surrey,

0:11:06 > 0:11:09and that you are a surplus population

0:11:09 > 0:11:11and your children don't matter

0:11:11 > 0:11:13and, you know, this entire culture can disappear

0:11:13 > 0:11:15and no-one will care.

0:11:15 > 0:11:17And I think part of Yeats's brilliance

0:11:17 > 0:11:20is that he is one of the first people to see

0:11:20 > 0:11:22this will have to be rescued

0:11:22 > 0:11:24and myself and my friends are going to have to do it.

0:11:24 > 0:11:29And stage one in his evolution as a writer

0:11:29 > 0:11:33is to just try to put his arms around the wreckage

0:11:33 > 0:11:36and see, "Is there anything left there?"

0:11:37 > 0:11:40Yeats was caught in the half-light, a Celtic twilight,

0:11:40 > 0:11:43a moment where nobody knew who or what they were.

0:11:43 > 0:11:47Everything could be remade, rewritten.

0:11:47 > 0:11:50The ancient folktales and fairy stories that Willie heard here

0:11:50 > 0:11:54ignited a lifelong fascination with Irishness

0:11:54 > 0:11:56and with "the other".

0:11:56 > 0:11:58A kind of escape from reality

0:11:58 > 0:12:02where he could find imagery and metaphors for his writing.

0:12:02 > 0:12:05Yeats wrote, "The mystical world is at the centre

0:12:05 > 0:12:07"of all I do, think and write."

0:12:07 > 0:12:11All of that started here in that little pilot's cottage,

0:12:11 > 0:12:13listening to the stories.

0:12:14 > 0:12:15Though I am old with wandering

0:12:15 > 0:12:18Through hollow lands and hilly lands

0:12:18 > 0:12:20I will find out where she has gone

0:12:20 > 0:12:23And kiss her lips and take her hands

0:12:23 > 0:12:26And walk among long dappled grass

0:12:26 > 0:12:29And pluck till time and times are done

0:12:29 > 0:12:32The silver apples of the moon

0:12:32 > 0:12:34The golden apples of the sun.

0:12:43 > 0:12:47Whilst Sligo ignited his mystical, spiritual side,

0:12:47 > 0:12:50in London, with its vast, swirling stew,

0:12:50 > 0:12:54the centre of global, political, economic and cultural action,

0:12:54 > 0:12:57Yeats found himself thrillingly at the very heart

0:12:57 > 0:13:00of European revolutionary ideas.

0:13:00 > 0:13:02Depending on the state of the family finances,

0:13:02 > 0:13:05the Yeatses flitted between lodgings in Dublin and London.

0:13:05 > 0:13:08He was educated between the two cities,

0:13:08 > 0:13:11actually training to be an artist like his dad and brother.

0:13:11 > 0:13:13It was a time of new ideas -

0:13:13 > 0:13:18socialism, anarchism, Marxism, Darwinism, the death of God,

0:13:18 > 0:13:20the search for new answers

0:13:20 > 0:13:23opening different doors of perception.

0:13:23 > 0:13:27It was like the '60s, fuelled by hashish and mescaline.

0:13:27 > 0:13:29Willie became more obsessed with the numinous,

0:13:29 > 0:13:31the mystical and spiritual,

0:13:31 > 0:13:33mingling with theosophists,

0:13:33 > 0:13:37Rosicrucianists, Kabbalists, gurus, swamis,

0:13:37 > 0:13:39and the secretive, bizarre Order Of The Golden Dawn.

0:13:39 > 0:13:43You have to envy Willie and the wild London he arrived into.

0:13:45 > 0:13:48You can do Dublin in two days.

0:13:48 > 0:13:51You know, you can walk through it and find its things.

0:13:51 > 0:13:55You can't do London in a lifetime, I've found.

0:13:55 > 0:13:59Getting lost here is one of the best educations you could possibly have.

0:13:59 > 0:14:02But this was also the year of salon culture,

0:14:02 > 0:14:04decadence, symbolists, literary clubs

0:14:04 > 0:14:08and endless debate at places like the Cheshire Cheese.

0:14:08 > 0:14:11By the time 22-year-old WB arrived in 1887

0:14:11 > 0:14:14full of fairy tales and Celtic mysticism,

0:14:14 > 0:14:16London would have loved him.

0:14:16 > 0:14:20Even though he had barely published a handful of plays and prose,

0:14:20 > 0:14:21London and Europe were alive

0:14:21 > 0:14:24to what would eventually be called the Celtic Revival.

0:14:24 > 0:14:28Young Willie found himself in the right city at the right time

0:14:28 > 0:14:30and in the right house.

0:14:33 > 0:14:37He ended up here, in a sort of artists' colony

0:14:37 > 0:14:40specifically built for that purpose, called Bedford Park.

0:14:40 > 0:14:44And he found a very cheap house, as Willie called it,

0:14:44 > 0:14:45spelling it C-HEEP.

0:14:45 > 0:14:48He was a hopeless speller all his life.

0:14:48 > 0:14:51It cost 50 quid per annum,

0:14:51 > 0:14:54and that was largely because the drains were a bit dodgy.

0:14:54 > 0:14:57Now, it's pretty mega, really.

0:14:57 > 0:15:01I mean, you'd pay a lot of money for these places.

0:15:03 > 0:15:05It's beautiful, isn't it?

0:15:07 > 0:15:10It's hard to think about the...

0:15:10 > 0:15:14absolute poverty that this family lived in.

0:15:14 > 0:15:17There was often literally no food in the house.

0:15:17 > 0:15:20Clothes were never changed for anything new

0:15:20 > 0:15:25and even when it was down to the last, literally, the last penny,

0:15:25 > 0:15:28there was a vote in the family as to what to spend it on

0:15:28 > 0:15:31and the majority chose to spend that last penny

0:15:31 > 0:15:32on the Pall Mall Gazette,

0:15:32 > 0:15:36which Lily in her diary remarked, "Money well spent."

0:15:37 > 0:15:42Yeats was just another young Irish playwright and occasional poet.

0:15:42 > 0:15:44But at Christmas 1888,

0:15:44 > 0:15:47he was invited for lunch with the glamorous Wildes.

0:15:47 > 0:15:51That day, Oscar jealously recognising the young poet's genius,

0:15:51 > 0:15:55held forth on just how bad the Irish actually were at poetry.

0:15:55 > 0:15:57"Brilliant failures," he called them.

0:15:57 > 0:16:00But more crucially, the great star told WB

0:16:00 > 0:16:03it wasn't simply enough to be a poet,

0:16:03 > 0:16:05you had to look like a poet.

0:16:05 > 0:16:07You had to act like a poet.

0:16:08 > 0:16:10Willie rephrased it later,

0:16:10 > 0:16:12"Myself I must remake."

0:16:12 > 0:16:15The start of a lifelong fascination with image, masks,

0:16:15 > 0:16:18the constant reinvention of the artist.

0:16:21 > 0:16:23With myself I must remake,

0:16:23 > 0:16:30this Wildean and utterly modern concept was made concrete.

0:16:30 > 0:16:32I believe at that precise moment,

0:16:32 > 0:16:35and possibly the realisation that occurred in this room

0:16:35 > 0:16:36or in his bedroom upstairs,

0:16:36 > 0:16:40WB Yeats, the poet that we know, was born.

0:16:40 > 0:16:44Yeats the poet was coming into focus.

0:16:44 > 0:16:47He was creating the man and the myth.

0:16:47 > 0:16:49All he needed was the muse.

0:16:50 > 0:16:54Then, in January 1889, a beauty came to call.

0:16:54 > 0:16:58A notorious young English-born Irish nationalist, a feminist,

0:16:58 > 0:17:01activist, Ireland's Joan of Arc they would call her,

0:17:01 > 0:17:03and she was about to ignite

0:17:03 > 0:17:05Ireland's greatest unrequited love story.

0:17:05 > 0:17:09As Willie said, "The troubling of my life began."

0:17:11 > 0:17:15Maud Gonne pulled up outside that window

0:17:15 > 0:17:17in a hansom cab

0:17:17 > 0:17:19and she wandered into the room here

0:17:19 > 0:17:25and the family were stunned by this great star, this beauty.

0:17:25 > 0:17:27It just all coalesced.

0:17:27 > 0:17:30Here was the image of the Ireland he foresaw.

0:17:30 > 0:17:35She was pulling him in to that orbit that she inhabited

0:17:35 > 0:17:37of radical nationalism.

0:17:37 > 0:17:39He was there willing and ready for it,

0:17:39 > 0:17:40particularly in London,

0:17:40 > 0:17:44as he dreamt of this idyllic other Ireland.

0:17:44 > 0:17:46He became as militantly nationalistic as she was,

0:17:46 > 0:17:50as patriotic as any of the great rebels.

0:17:50 > 0:17:55And he had found a way of expressing that,

0:17:55 > 0:17:57of focusing on it through her

0:17:57 > 0:18:00in a way that never killed anybody.

0:18:02 > 0:18:04Because of that great nobleness of hers

0:18:04 > 0:18:07The fires that stirs about her when she stirs

0:18:07 > 0:18:10Burns but more clearly

0:18:10 > 0:18:12O she had not these ways

0:18:12 > 0:18:15When all the wild summer was in her gaze

0:18:15 > 0:18:17O heart! O heart!

0:18:17 > 0:18:19If she'd but turn her head

0:18:19 > 0:18:22You'd know the folly of being comforted.

0:18:22 > 0:18:25She needs a country and a cause.

0:18:25 > 0:18:29And in Yeats, he found the troubling of his life

0:18:29 > 0:18:32and she found a poet for the cause. Isn't that really it?

0:18:32 > 0:18:35They're both in search of authenticity

0:18:35 > 0:18:37but it's a different kind of authenticity.

0:18:37 > 0:18:39Yeats is also looking for an Irish authenticity,

0:18:39 > 0:18:42cos he is this marginalised, odd,

0:18:42 > 0:18:45at an angle to the universe Protestant.

0:18:45 > 0:18:46She's looking for an authenticity

0:18:46 > 0:18:48because she is a ruthless peripatetic.

0:18:48 > 0:18:51Her beloved father dies, she doesn't have a mother.

0:18:51 > 0:18:54Neither of them, in a sense, has a mother. It's interesting.

0:18:54 > 0:18:57And I think they're looking for something to cling to.

0:18:57 > 0:19:01They were immensely close as friends,

0:19:01 > 0:19:05leaving aside the sexual aspects of his obsession with her.

0:19:06 > 0:19:08When you are old and grey

0:19:08 > 0:19:12And full of sleep and nodding by the fire

0:19:12 > 0:19:16Take down this book and slowly read

0:19:16 > 0:19:20And dream of the soft look your eyes had once

0:19:20 > 0:19:22And of their shadows deep.

0:19:22 > 0:19:26How many loved your moments of glad grace?

0:19:26 > 0:19:30And loved your beauty with love, false or true?

0:19:30 > 0:19:35But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

0:19:35 > 0:19:37And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

0:19:38 > 0:19:40He always classicises her,

0:19:40 > 0:19:44which in a sense lifts her out of the everyday.

0:19:44 > 0:19:47As he always said, she doesn't belong in this world.

0:19:47 > 0:19:49What's she doing here?

0:19:49 > 0:19:52I had a thought for no-one's but your ears

0:19:52 > 0:19:56That you were beautiful, and that I strove

0:19:56 > 0:19:59To love you in the old high way of love

0:19:59 > 0:20:02That it had all seemed happy

0:20:02 > 0:20:06And yet we'd grown as weary-hearted

0:20:07 > 0:20:09As that hollow moon.

0:20:12 > 0:20:16God, it just grips you, that last line, every time!

0:20:16 > 0:20:18I thought, "I won't tear up on that."

0:20:18 > 0:20:21But, fuck, it just does. Anyway...

0:20:23 > 0:20:26She gets this endless sort of stuff. Do...

0:20:26 > 0:20:28I mean, put yourself in her position.

0:20:28 > 0:20:32Does she go, "I just went to his house and I sat in a bloody chair,"

0:20:32 > 0:20:33you know? "Had a cup of tea."

0:20:33 > 0:20:36I mean, that would be it, wouldn't it?

0:20:36 > 0:20:39And he's going, "Oh, my love..."

0:20:39 > 0:20:41- Oh, come on. - I'm not going, "Oh, come on,"

0:20:41 > 0:20:43I'm saying, what would you do if you were her?

0:20:43 > 0:20:44Well, that's why I say come on.

0:20:44 > 0:20:49You know perfectly well that if somebody is completely mad about you

0:20:49 > 0:20:50and telling you,

0:20:50 > 0:20:53that's the least attractive thing possible that can be done.

0:20:53 > 0:20:56The way to have someone in love with you

0:20:56 > 0:21:00is clearly not to be in love with them.

0:21:00 > 0:21:06And when you get this kind of almost abasing stuff

0:21:06 > 0:21:10being sent to you, it's the biggest turnoff there is.

0:21:11 > 0:21:14Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths

0:21:14 > 0:21:18Enwrought with golden and silver light

0:21:18 > 0:21:20The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

0:21:20 > 0:21:23Of night and light and the half-light

0:21:23 > 0:21:25I would spread the cloths under your feet

0:21:25 > 0:21:30But I, being poor, have only my dreams

0:21:30 > 0:21:33I have spread my dreams under your feet

0:21:34 > 0:21:39Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

0:21:39 > 0:21:42If he came along to you and said, "Edna, when you are old and tired

0:21:42 > 0:21:44"and grey and full of sleep,

0:21:44 > 0:21:47"take down this book and read and dream of this..."

0:21:47 > 0:21:49I mean, would you swoon and just shag him?

0:21:51 > 0:21:52Probably, yeah.

0:21:52 > 0:21:54See, that's it.

0:21:59 > 0:22:03Maud was a radical, a hard and violent revolutionary.

0:22:03 > 0:22:05Willie?

0:22:05 > 0:22:06Willie was a lovestruck dreamer.

0:22:06 > 0:22:09No doubt she helped focus those dreams

0:22:09 > 0:22:10at a time when Charles Stewart Parnell

0:22:10 > 0:22:13was leading a democratic charge for Irish home rule,

0:22:13 > 0:22:15while the Irish Republican Brotherhood

0:22:15 > 0:22:18were stirring the boiling pot of revolt.

0:22:21 > 0:22:25But WB Yeats simply believed in Ireland -

0:22:25 > 0:22:29in its stories, its legends, its dream time and its people.

0:22:29 > 0:22:32He wanted to go back beyond oppression and rebellions,

0:22:32 > 0:22:35beyond famine, beyond Christianity,

0:22:35 > 0:22:39to an earlier time of Homeric warrior heroes.

0:22:39 > 0:22:42And he was doing it afresh in the English language,

0:22:42 > 0:22:46making it modern, relevant, full of magic and wonder.

0:22:46 > 0:22:49On a visit to Douglas Hyde in Roscommon,

0:22:49 > 0:22:51Yeats discovered Castle Island in Lough Key,

0:22:51 > 0:22:55where he and Maud imagined creating a new Irish faith,

0:22:55 > 0:22:57an order of Celtic mysteries,

0:22:57 > 0:23:00to awaken an Irish sense of identity.

0:23:00 > 0:23:03Not anti-English, just uniquely Irish.

0:23:03 > 0:23:07The perfect combination of her nationalism and his mysticism.

0:23:08 > 0:23:10Maud Gonne would have been mad for it.

0:23:10 > 0:23:13I mean, absolutely she would have loved this.

0:23:13 > 0:23:15And he sort of said,

0:23:15 > 0:23:19"Well, we can also make it into an island of heroes, Celtic heroes."

0:23:19 > 0:23:24He sort of was edging towards getting her on board

0:23:24 > 0:23:26so that he could be with her, so that, you know,

0:23:26 > 0:23:29the love affair could continue on several planes -

0:23:29 > 0:23:33mystic as well as carnal, and...

0:23:35 > 0:23:37..I'm sure in the back of his mind he thought,

0:23:37 > 0:23:40"Maud and I will end up here. This is perfect for us."

0:23:40 > 0:23:42It is terminally romantic.

0:23:44 > 0:23:46Unfortunately for Willie,

0:23:46 > 0:23:50Maud was more in love with revolution than romance.

0:23:53 > 0:23:56Like many a young Irishman before and since,

0:23:56 > 0:23:59WB Yeats in 1880s London is broke.

0:23:59 > 0:24:01He's in love with a girl who doesn't want him.

0:24:01 > 0:24:04He's waiting for his first book to come out

0:24:04 > 0:24:05and he's an unmade man,

0:24:05 > 0:24:07a sexually frustrated virgin.

0:24:07 > 0:24:10He's full of longing for success,

0:24:10 > 0:24:12for Maud, for home, for Ireland.

0:24:14 > 0:24:17But clearly he missed Sligo when he first came.

0:24:17 > 0:24:19You know, that longing for that which is familiar -

0:24:19 > 0:24:23those smells, those sights, those relationships.

0:24:34 > 0:24:37The kind of poetry WB Yeats was dreaming into life

0:24:37 > 0:24:40would need to be written with distance from afar,

0:24:40 > 0:24:42on literally the concrete empiricism

0:24:42 > 0:24:46of the grey pavements of the capital of the world.

0:24:46 > 0:24:49The literary revival he was at the centre of

0:24:49 > 0:24:52was fuelled by an unspecific yearning,

0:24:52 > 0:24:55inventing a new idealised version of the self, of the people,

0:24:55 > 0:24:57of Ireland.

0:24:57 > 0:24:58The Celtic Twilight,

0:24:58 > 0:25:03or Cultic Toilette, as James Joyce, the young punk would later call it,

0:25:03 > 0:25:05was triggered by a memory -

0:25:05 > 0:25:09a city street, a sign, a woman, a shop window.

0:25:12 > 0:25:15- Keep your eyes open for fairies, will you, Smithy?- I will, yeah.

0:25:18 > 0:25:21He adored this part of the world.

0:25:21 > 0:25:24Pined for this, pined for it.

0:25:24 > 0:25:28So I'm not surprised, given his financial circumstances,

0:25:28 > 0:25:31his romantic circumstances, his family circumstances,

0:25:31 > 0:25:36his panic over his first big book,

0:25:36 > 0:25:39that you want to get out.

0:25:39 > 0:25:43You know, you want to escape, you want to run away and you can't.

0:25:43 > 0:25:46And I suppose the word "free" pops into everyone's mind.

0:25:48 > 0:25:51I will arise and go now

0:25:51 > 0:25:53And go to Innisfree

0:25:53 > 0:25:55And a small cabin build there

0:25:55 > 0:25:58Of clay and wattles made

0:25:58 > 0:26:01Nine bean-rows will I have there

0:26:01 > 0:26:04A hive for the honey-bee

0:26:04 > 0:26:07And live alone in the bee-loud glade

0:26:08 > 0:26:11And I shall have some peace there

0:26:11 > 0:26:13For peace comes dropping slow

0:26:14 > 0:26:17Dropping from the veils of the morning

0:26:17 > 0:26:18To where the cricket sings

0:26:18 > 0:26:22There midnight's all a glimmer

0:26:22 > 0:26:25And noon a purple glow

0:26:25 > 0:26:28And evening full of the linnet's wings

0:26:31 > 0:26:34I will rise and go now

0:26:34 > 0:26:36For always night and day

0:26:36 > 0:26:42I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore...

0:26:44 > 0:26:46Oh, it is lapping. Listen.

0:26:50 > 0:26:55"I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."

0:26:55 > 0:26:57While I stand on roadway

0:26:57 > 0:27:00Or on the pavements grey

0:27:00 > 0:27:05I hear it in the deep heart's core.

0:27:07 > 0:27:09The choice of words is...

0:27:09 > 0:27:11is masterly.

0:27:11 > 0:27:15You know, nine bean-rows, a hive for the honey-bee,

0:27:15 > 0:27:17the bee-loud glade.

0:27:17 > 0:27:21You don't ever have to come here, you know, he's just done it for you.

0:27:23 > 0:27:26Dublin in the 1880s was the second city of the Empire

0:27:26 > 0:27:28and just as much a hotbed

0:27:28 > 0:27:30of political thought and debate as London.

0:27:30 > 0:27:34Yeats was beginning to believe not just in a romantic Ireland

0:27:34 > 0:27:38but one that could stand culturally and politically on its own two feet.

0:27:39 > 0:27:42He would be a fervent nationalist all his life

0:27:42 > 0:27:46and he put that down to meeting just one man in 1885,

0:27:46 > 0:27:50the old Irish revolutionary called John O'Leary.

0:27:50 > 0:27:54Willie's father, JB, brings him along one day

0:27:54 > 0:27:58to meet fellow intellectuals in the Contemporary Club.

0:27:58 > 0:28:04And Yeats meets this sort of patriarchal figure

0:28:04 > 0:28:06who is a revolutionary.

0:28:06 > 0:28:09O'Leary had said, "We need a poet."

0:28:09 > 0:28:12Of course he would say that, he was one of the Young Irelanders.

0:28:12 > 0:28:14That's how you got ideas across.

0:28:14 > 0:28:16And he was waiting, waiting,

0:28:16 > 0:28:19and this beautiful boy walks into the room

0:28:19 > 0:28:24and he is the son of his friend and he reads his, sort of,

0:28:24 > 0:28:29you know, his early stuff, which is still amazing,

0:28:29 > 0:28:32and he goes, "He's the fella."

0:28:32 > 0:28:34And he brings him along.

0:28:34 > 0:28:37He instructs him, he takes him under his wing.

0:28:39 > 0:28:43O'Leary had been tried for treason in the year WB was born

0:28:43 > 0:28:46and he helped found the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

0:28:46 > 0:28:47a secret organisation

0:28:47 > 0:28:51whose sole aim was an independent, democratic Irish Republic,

0:28:51 > 0:28:55and whose oath swore absolute allegiance to that aim.

0:28:56 > 0:29:00Bizarrely, an oath O'Leary himself refused to take.

0:29:00 > 0:29:03Ultimately, the IRB would be the cabal

0:29:03 > 0:29:06at the heart of the 1916 Easter Rising.

0:29:06 > 0:29:10It's almost certain that Yeats took the oath,

0:29:10 > 0:29:11the revolutionary oath.

0:29:11 > 0:29:15And he may very well have done that because he believed it,

0:29:15 > 0:29:17or to be in with the lads, or to further his career,

0:29:17 > 0:29:21or to, you know, tip the wing to Maud that,

0:29:21 > 0:29:23"I am a fellow traveller here, you can count on me.

0:29:23 > 0:29:26"I'm with you all the way, Maud, now can we shag?"

0:29:28 > 0:29:32By the 1890s, WB's words were growing in stature.

0:29:32 > 0:29:35But his political, spiritual and emotional life

0:29:35 > 0:29:37revolved around his Helen of Troy,

0:29:37 > 0:29:39his beloved Maud.

0:29:39 > 0:29:41To Willie, she was Ireland,

0:29:41 > 0:29:44but she had never been fully honest with him.

0:29:44 > 0:29:46The year she met him,

0:29:46 > 0:29:48she'd had a son with a right wing French radical

0:29:48 > 0:29:50called Lucien Millevoye.

0:29:50 > 0:29:52When that son died of meningitis,

0:29:52 > 0:29:54Maud Gonne could not hide her grief

0:29:54 > 0:29:57but told Willie the child wasn't hers, that it was adopted.

0:29:58 > 0:30:01To try to help in any way,

0:30:01 > 0:30:03WB brought Maud to see his friend

0:30:03 > 0:30:07and mystic writer and artist AE George Russell

0:30:07 > 0:30:09in this room on Ely Place,

0:30:09 > 0:30:12home of the Dublin Theosophical Society.

0:30:15 > 0:30:18The plan was to hold a seance

0:30:18 > 0:30:22to discover if Maud's dead child could be reincarnated.

0:30:28 > 0:30:32They sit down and the seance occurs

0:30:32 > 0:30:36and whatever signals AE is getting from the other side,

0:30:36 > 0:30:40he turns around and, to Maud's great comfort,

0:30:40 > 0:30:41he says, "Yes, it is possible.

0:30:41 > 0:30:44"It's possible to reincarnate your child

0:30:44 > 0:30:48"and it's possible to reincarnate you child within your family."

0:30:48 > 0:30:52Maud goes tearing back to Paris, to Millevoye,

0:30:52 > 0:30:54who she's long given up,

0:30:54 > 0:30:57and she takes him about 60 miles out of Paris

0:30:57 > 0:31:03to the tomb of her now long-dead, buried son

0:31:03 > 0:31:08and the two of them have sex in the vault

0:31:08 > 0:31:10of the tomb of their child

0:31:10 > 0:31:15in order to reincarnate him and bring him back to the family.

0:31:15 > 0:31:19It's so weird and odd

0:31:19 > 0:31:22and pitiful and sad.

0:31:22 > 0:31:25They were so out there, excitingly out there,

0:31:25 > 0:31:28so open to any mad ideas.

0:31:31 > 0:31:35But a child resulted from that experiment, a beautiful child,

0:31:35 > 0:31:39Iseult Gonne, who, of course, 22 years later,

0:31:39 > 0:31:41Yeats would ask to marry.

0:31:44 > 0:31:47I think it's apt that in this room of all,

0:31:47 > 0:31:48we do The Pity Of Love.

0:31:48 > 0:31:51A pity beyond all telling

0:31:51 > 0:31:53Is hid in the heart of love

0:31:53 > 0:31:55The folk who are buying and selling

0:31:55 > 0:31:57The clouds on their journey above

0:31:57 > 0:32:00The cold, wet winds ever blowing

0:32:00 > 0:32:01And the shadowy hazel grove

0:32:01 > 0:32:04Where mouse-grey waters are flowing

0:32:04 > 0:32:06Threaten the head that I love.

0:32:06 > 0:32:10Throughout his life, Willie seemed attracted to dark, tragic,

0:32:10 > 0:32:12often violent women.

0:32:12 > 0:32:15But despite the sexual temptations which London offered

0:32:15 > 0:32:19and the unrequited obsessive desire for Maud Gonne,

0:32:19 > 0:32:22he was to reach 31 before he lost his virginity.

0:32:22 > 0:32:24And when he finally did so,

0:32:24 > 0:32:27it was most likely in his tiny flat near Euston Station in London,

0:32:27 > 0:32:29and it was to an older, gentler,

0:32:29 > 0:32:33more experienced married woman, Olivia Shakespear.

0:32:33 > 0:32:35It was an absolute disaster.

0:32:35 > 0:32:39Olivia took him shopping for the bed in which he would be deflowered.

0:32:39 > 0:32:41I don't know which was worse for Willie,

0:32:41 > 0:32:44the shopping or the sex.

0:32:44 > 0:32:47He was dismayed by the business of shopping.

0:32:47 > 0:32:50Olivia came in, she started bouncing up on the beds.

0:32:50 > 0:32:57He was in a fever of embarrassment and fear of the coming act,

0:32:57 > 0:33:01that at 31 he was finally going to do it.

0:33:01 > 0:33:04So this was the big moment.

0:33:04 > 0:33:08Understandably enough, poor Willie failed miserably to perform.

0:33:08 > 0:33:13He later said, "She was too wholesome to my inmost being."

0:33:13 > 0:33:18He craved a violent eroticism, in his mind personified by Maud.

0:33:18 > 0:33:23That same year, another woman was about to enter Willie Yeats's life.

0:33:23 > 0:33:27She and her home were probably more important to Yeats's work

0:33:27 > 0:33:28than even Maud.

0:33:29 > 0:33:32The woman's name was Augusta Gregory, Lady Gregory,

0:33:32 > 0:33:34one of the local bigwigs.

0:33:34 > 0:33:37She took him away to this place, here.

0:33:37 > 0:33:41This is Coole, Coole Park, and Coole House.

0:33:41 > 0:33:43And this is all that remains, unfortunately, of it.

0:33:43 > 0:33:45This is the area of it.

0:33:45 > 0:33:47This plinth I'm standing on

0:33:47 > 0:33:50is the foundation platform for the whole house.

0:33:51 > 0:33:54He would run here, he would retreat here.

0:33:54 > 0:33:55This was a second home.

0:33:58 > 0:34:00Yeats's job was to be a poet

0:34:00 > 0:34:04in the same way that someone is a bus driver or an accountant.

0:34:04 > 0:34:07You get up in the morning to write poems.

0:34:07 > 0:34:09He laboured and worked and worked

0:34:09 > 0:34:11to reduce, to reduce,

0:34:11 > 0:34:16to get to the very essence of what it was that he wanted to say.

0:34:16 > 0:34:19Days, weeks, sometimes months on some poems.

0:34:21 > 0:34:22This is what he got here.

0:34:22 > 0:34:24This is what he was able to do,

0:34:24 > 0:34:27withdraw from the freneticism of his committees,

0:34:27 > 0:34:31his desperate need to be in these esoteric societies.

0:34:31 > 0:34:33And he could take the experiences of the last few months,

0:34:33 > 0:34:38come to Coole, let it drain down into some essence.

0:34:38 > 0:34:41And that's what he's explaining in this unbeliev...

0:34:41 > 0:34:44This is one of... I keep saying this is one of the greats, you know.

0:34:44 > 0:34:47He was explaining the craft of this thing

0:34:47 > 0:34:50but he was able to hone and direct that craft

0:34:50 > 0:34:52particularly here at Coole.

0:34:54 > 0:34:59I hope I look languid and romantic enough to read this poem.

0:34:59 > 0:35:01I chose this tree and this pose specifically,

0:35:01 > 0:35:04so, you know, I hope it's working.

0:35:06 > 0:35:08Adam's Curse.

0:35:08 > 0:35:10We sat together at one summer's end

0:35:10 > 0:35:13That beautiful mild woman, your close friend

0:35:13 > 0:35:16And you and I, and talked of poetry

0:35:16 > 0:35:19I said, a line will take us hours maybe

0:35:19 > 0:35:22Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought

0:35:22 > 0:35:24Our stitching and unstitching has been naught

0:35:24 > 0:35:26Better go down upon your marrow-bones

0:35:26 > 0:35:28And scrub a kitchen pavement

0:35:28 > 0:35:31Or break stones like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather

0:35:31 > 0:35:36For to articulate sweet sounds together

0:35:36 > 0:35:39Is to work harder than all these

0:35:39 > 0:35:42And yet be thought an idler by the noisy set

0:35:42 > 0:35:45Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

0:35:45 > 0:35:47The martyrs call the world.

0:35:51 > 0:35:55One early summer, he was ill and very depressed

0:35:55 > 0:35:59and Lady Gregory, he says,

0:35:59 > 0:36:03"Brought me from cottage to cottage while she began to collect stories.

0:36:03 > 0:36:07"As that ancient system of belief unfolded before us

0:36:07 > 0:36:11"with unforeseen probabilities and plausibilities,

0:36:11 > 0:36:14"it was though we had begun to live in a dream."

0:36:16 > 0:36:19Him and Gregory would walk through the woods at Coole

0:36:19 > 0:36:24looking for impressions made in the ground by fairy troops

0:36:24 > 0:36:28or wraths or fairy forts that they had left behind.

0:36:28 > 0:36:31They'd see bits of wood lined at an angle

0:36:31 > 0:36:34and they were absolutely convinced they were in...

0:36:34 > 0:36:35they were living in this dream.

0:36:38 > 0:36:42He was at this stuff from the very beginning.

0:36:42 > 0:36:44He was at this stuff over in the pilot's cottage

0:36:44 > 0:36:46over at Rosses Point.

0:36:51 > 0:36:54What got me into him really and his importance beyond being a poet,

0:36:54 > 0:36:57his importance just in Ireland,

0:36:57 > 0:37:02is the fact that that guy took down these things,

0:37:02 > 0:37:04made them into our literature.

0:37:04 > 0:37:09But I equated it with a musical history I'm more familiar with,

0:37:09 > 0:37:11which is the history of America.

0:37:11 > 0:37:13There was a man called Alan Lomax

0:37:13 > 0:37:16who went around the Appalachian Mountains

0:37:16 > 0:37:18and the southern states of America.

0:37:18 > 0:37:22So he started recording and transcribing all the stories

0:37:22 > 0:37:24and all the songs

0:37:24 > 0:37:26and giving them all to the Library Of Congress.

0:37:26 > 0:37:31And this was the background of America, this was America's story.

0:37:31 > 0:37:36Now, Yeats did that. There's just no question of it.

0:37:36 > 0:37:40He gave the Irish, in a moment of great confusion and loss,

0:37:40 > 0:37:42he told them who they were.

0:37:42 > 0:37:47He said, "It's not all dispossession and defeat,

0:37:47 > 0:37:51"go back long before the endless fighting and invasions.

0:37:51 > 0:37:53"Have you heard of Fionn mac Cumhaill?

0:37:53 > 0:37:54"Have you heard of Cuchulainn?"

0:37:54 > 0:38:00They had but not in the sense of this glorious, elegant,

0:38:00 > 0:38:02dignified ancestry.

0:38:04 > 0:38:09Halfway between Dublin and Belfast stands an ancient stone.

0:38:09 > 0:38:11Cuchulainn, Ireland's great warrior hero,

0:38:11 > 0:38:13mortally wounded in battle,

0:38:13 > 0:38:15is said to have strapped himself to this rock

0:38:15 > 0:38:17so he might die standing.

0:38:18 > 0:38:20As I learned in Africa,

0:38:20 > 0:38:24you can't create a nation by simply drawing lines on a map.

0:38:24 > 0:38:26Every people needs a creation myth,

0:38:26 > 0:38:28its own Cuchulainn's stone, its own stories.

0:38:28 > 0:38:32As Yeats said, there is no fine nationality without literature

0:38:32 > 0:38:35and no fine literature without nationality.

0:38:37 > 0:38:39And along with the other scholars

0:38:39 > 0:38:42who were digging up the stories and translating them from the Irish,

0:38:42 > 0:38:45he elevated these heroes -

0:38:45 > 0:38:48Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oisin, Cuchulainn -

0:38:48 > 0:38:52into a pantheon of heroes that we should aspire to,

0:38:52 > 0:38:57that can be emulated in the creation myth of a new country.

0:38:58 > 0:39:02A nation is the political expression of a people.

0:39:02 > 0:39:05If there isn't a people, you can't build the state.

0:39:05 > 0:39:08And the only way you can build a state

0:39:08 > 0:39:10is by building the institutions,

0:39:10 > 0:39:14the scaffolding upon which a constitution can hang.

0:39:16 > 0:39:20Yeats was the great mover behind a modern art gallery,

0:39:20 > 0:39:23a ballet academy and the National Academy of Letters.

0:39:23 > 0:39:27But the greatest institution Yeats created with Augusta Gregory

0:39:27 > 0:39:30and their protege, a young playwright called John Synge,

0:39:30 > 0:39:34was the Abbey Theatre, today our National Theatre.

0:39:34 > 0:39:38They became the triumvirate at the heart of what Yeats aspired to,

0:39:38 > 0:39:41a national literature in English for the Irish -

0:39:41 > 0:39:44not anti-English but pro-Irish,

0:39:44 > 0:39:46about what we are, not what we are against.

0:39:46 > 0:39:50It was revolutionary with pens instead of guns.

0:39:50 > 0:39:53No surprise its emblem is the mythical Queen Maeve.

0:39:53 > 0:39:57And the first character to speak on stage on its opening night

0:39:57 > 0:39:59was Cuchulainn.

0:40:00 > 0:40:04He writes somewhere that he realises that the Irish don't read, that

0:40:04 > 0:40:07that whole part of our culture, you know, is not a big thing,

0:40:07 > 0:40:09but that they might go to shows.

0:40:09 > 0:40:13It's just fantastic to see this stern, austere figure of Yeats

0:40:13 > 0:40:15with a light bulb moment going,

0:40:15 > 0:40:18"Maybe if we opened a theatre they might come along!"

0:40:18 > 0:40:23And it just goes to the whole punk aspect of it.

0:40:23 > 0:40:25You know, the punk thing was a reaction

0:40:25 > 0:40:30against the professionalism, the 72-track studios of the...

0:40:30 > 0:40:32the sort of prog rock musicality of the bands.

0:40:32 > 0:40:35No, strip that out, go back to attitude,

0:40:35 > 0:40:38go back to the roots of the music and "anyone can do it."

0:40:38 > 0:40:42Can't play guitar? Doesn't matter, pick it up and make a noise.

0:40:42 > 0:40:46Yeats and Gregory and Synge were going to make a noise.

0:40:46 > 0:40:50Even if you were an amateur two years ago, like Synge,

0:40:50 > 0:40:51you were going to make a noise.

0:40:51 > 0:40:53Even if you were an amateur like Gregory,

0:40:53 > 0:40:55you were going to make a noise.

0:40:55 > 0:40:59It was this central, core group of revolutionaries

0:40:59 > 0:41:01who were provoking, who were disturbing,

0:41:01 > 0:41:04who needed the debate to happen.

0:41:04 > 0:41:07It could not just be owned by the advanced nationalists,

0:41:07 > 0:41:11ie those who were quite prepared to pick up the gun and go.

0:41:13 > 0:41:16The war drums were beating louder.

0:41:16 > 0:41:18WB and Maud had chaired a committee

0:41:18 > 0:41:22to celebrate the centenary of the failed 1798 rebellion.

0:41:22 > 0:41:26There had been violent protests at Queen Victoria's Jubilee,

0:41:26 > 0:41:27and later at her visit to Dublin.

0:41:29 > 0:41:31Yeats himself publicly supported the Boers

0:41:31 > 0:41:34in their fight against British colonialism.

0:41:34 > 0:41:35In this boiling pot,

0:41:35 > 0:41:37he was challenged by more hardline Republicans

0:41:37 > 0:41:39to write a Nationalist play.

0:41:39 > 0:41:42It's not his finest hour.

0:41:42 > 0:41:45Co-written with Augusta Gregory as a star vehicle for Maud Gonne,

0:41:45 > 0:41:47essentially playing Ireland,

0:41:47 > 0:41:50the play is not important because of its genius, far from it,

0:41:50 > 0:41:51but its impact.

0:41:51 > 0:41:53And it happened in this very room,

0:41:53 > 0:41:56where they are now, to Willie's dismay I'd imagine,

0:41:56 > 0:41:59building a nail bar and tanning salon.

0:42:03 > 0:42:05God, it's small.

0:42:06 > 0:42:08And this is where...

0:42:09 > 0:42:15..the appalling Kathleen ni Houlihan was first staged.

0:42:17 > 0:42:23So the old woman, who represents Ireland, says,

0:42:23 > 0:42:27"Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet,

0:42:27 > 0:42:30"but there's no quiet in my heart.

0:42:30 > 0:42:35"When the people see me quiet, they think old age has come in me

0:42:35 > 0:42:38"and that all the stir has gone out of me.

0:42:38 > 0:42:42"But when the trouble is on me, I must be talking to my friends."

0:42:42 > 0:42:46Bridget - "What was it put the trouble on you?"

0:42:46 > 0:42:49Old woman - "My land that was taken from me!"

0:42:49 > 0:42:53Peter - "Was it much land that they took from you?"

0:42:53 > 0:42:57"My four beautiful green fields!"

0:43:00 > 0:43:02Which is the pose you see

0:43:02 > 0:43:05the photographs of Maud Gonne striking,

0:43:05 > 0:43:07precisely this.

0:43:07 > 0:43:08Fuck off!

0:43:10 > 0:43:16But it was that stuff that sent a very astute critic,

0:43:16 > 0:43:19Stephen Gwynn, reeling.

0:43:19 > 0:43:22And he wrote in his diary...

0:43:24 > 0:43:29"The effect of Kathleen ni Houlihan on me

0:43:29 > 0:43:31"was that I went home asking myself

0:43:31 > 0:43:34"if such plays should be produced

0:43:34 > 0:43:39"unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot."

0:43:40 > 0:43:45After the Rising, Yeats, in his later poems,

0:43:45 > 0:43:48as an older man, much after the Rising,

0:43:48 > 0:43:50questions himself and says,

0:43:50 > 0:43:53"Did certain of my plays send out some men to be shot?"

0:43:53 > 0:43:56And the answer is maybe not,

0:43:56 > 0:43:58but the atmosphere which he created,

0:43:58 > 0:44:02and we're talking about a monstrous box office hit for those days -

0:44:02 > 0:44:04it was played again and again -

0:44:04 > 0:44:07certainly contributed to the overall war drums

0:44:07 > 0:44:10being beaten ever more feverishly.

0:44:13 > 0:44:15All that I have said and done

0:44:15 > 0:44:17Now that I am old and ill

0:44:17 > 0:44:19Turns into a question

0:44:19 > 0:44:23Till I lie awake night after night

0:44:23 > 0:44:25And never get the answers right

0:44:27 > 0:44:29Did that play of mine

0:44:29 > 0:44:33Send out certain men the English shot?

0:44:33 > 0:44:36Did words of mine put too great strain

0:44:36 > 0:44:39On that woman's reeling brain?

0:44:39 > 0:44:40Yeats's nationalism

0:44:40 > 0:44:43and his belief in an independent Ireland

0:44:43 > 0:44:44was never in doubt.

0:44:44 > 0:44:47But his old mentor John O'Leary had said,

0:44:47 > 0:44:51"There are some things a man must not do to save a nation."

0:44:51 > 0:44:56Whatever way the road forked, WB's path was cultural revolution,

0:44:56 > 0:44:59the pen not the sword.

0:44:59 > 0:45:03What ultimately distanced WB Yeats from the revolutionary cause

0:45:03 > 0:45:05was a broken heart.

0:45:05 > 0:45:07Maud Gonne, in the cauldron of nationalist fervour,

0:45:07 > 0:45:09married John MacBride,

0:45:09 > 0:45:12a Republican hero who had fought with the Boers against the Empire.

0:45:12 > 0:45:14But he was also a drinker

0:45:14 > 0:45:17and this perfect rebel marriage was doomed.

0:45:19 > 0:45:22The MacBride marriage is essentially a publicity...

0:45:22 > 0:45:24not a publicity stunt, but it's...

0:45:24 > 0:45:27It had big propaganda value.

0:45:27 > 0:45:30Two icons of Republican resistance marry each other

0:45:30 > 0:45:34and are sworn to bring down the British Empire

0:45:34 > 0:45:38and are photographed in publicity shots for a French magazine

0:45:38 > 0:45:39with their new baby,

0:45:39 > 0:45:41with lots of guns on the table in front of them,

0:45:41 > 0:45:44and the caption is "Three Irish revolutionaries in Paris."

0:45:44 > 0:45:48You know, it's a very, very public and very publicised...

0:45:48 > 0:45:51- The Bonnie and Clyde of Republicanism?- In a way.

0:45:51 > 0:45:56The squalid and long drawn out and publicised separation case,

0:45:56 > 0:45:59they don't get a divorce - they're Catholics after all -

0:45:59 > 0:46:01but there is a legal separation,

0:46:01 > 0:46:04drags in all sorts of allegations of his drunken behaviour

0:46:04 > 0:46:07and his alleged molestation of young women,

0:46:07 > 0:46:09including Iseult, allegedly.

0:46:09 > 0:46:12This shocks Yeats, who believes all this implicitly,

0:46:12 > 0:46:13very much indeed.

0:46:13 > 0:46:15But what he's even more...

0:46:15 > 0:46:19well, as shocked by is that traditional IRB people,

0:46:19 > 0:46:23nationalist men close ranks around MacBride

0:46:23 > 0:46:26and in many ways exorcise Maud Gonne

0:46:26 > 0:46:29and have her hissed at in public and so forth.

0:46:29 > 0:46:34And the Neanderthal and patriarchalist attitudes

0:46:34 > 0:46:37of the old IRB guard around MacBride,

0:46:37 > 0:46:40who include, by the way, John O'Leary,

0:46:40 > 0:46:43is a deep disillusionment to him.

0:46:43 > 0:46:45Why should I blame her

0:46:45 > 0:46:49That she filled my days with misery

0:46:49 > 0:46:52Or that she would of late have taught to ignorant men

0:46:52 > 0:46:55Most violent ways

0:46:55 > 0:46:58Or hurled the little streets upon the great

0:46:58 > 0:47:00Had they but courage equal to desire?

0:47:02 > 0:47:04What could have made her peaceful

0:47:04 > 0:47:09With a mind that nobleness made simple as a fire

0:47:09 > 0:47:12With beauty like a tightened bow

0:47:12 > 0:47:15A kind that is not natural in an age like this

0:47:15 > 0:47:19Being high and solitary and most stern?

0:47:19 > 0:47:23Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

0:47:23 > 0:47:26Was there another Troy for her to burn?

0:47:26 > 0:47:31On the eve of World War I, Yeats was approaching 50,

0:47:31 > 0:47:34with no Maud and no marriage in sight.

0:47:34 > 0:47:37"I have no child," he wrote dismissively about his life,

0:47:37 > 0:47:40"I have nothing but a book."

0:47:40 > 0:47:44He was turning bitter, sharper, angrier.

0:47:45 > 0:47:48For some, he's the poet, already a national treasure,

0:47:48 > 0:47:51for others, he is a pompous Anglo-Irish Protestant

0:47:51 > 0:47:54taking a civil list pension from the King.

0:47:55 > 0:47:58He feels Ireland is growing away from him,

0:47:58 > 0:48:01it's not the romantic Ireland he's tried to sing into life.

0:48:01 > 0:48:06He rails against Dublin's new bourgeois Catholic conservatism,

0:48:06 > 0:48:09against a grubby materialism and against militant nationalism.

0:48:11 > 0:48:15What need you, being come to sense

0:48:15 > 0:48:17But fumble in a greasy till

0:48:17 > 0:48:20And add the halfpence to the pence

0:48:20 > 0:48:22And prayer to shivering prayer

0:48:22 > 0:48:25Until you have dried the marrow from the bone

0:48:25 > 0:48:29For men were born to pray and save

0:48:29 > 0:48:31Romantic Ireland's dead and gone

0:48:31 > 0:48:33It's with O'Leary in the grave.

0:48:33 > 0:48:38WB Yeats puts his voice and his support behind John Redmond,

0:48:38 > 0:48:42his Irish Parliamentary Party and democratic freedom.

0:48:43 > 0:48:47In 1914, the Home Rule Bill is passed.

0:48:47 > 0:48:52Ireland has finally and peacefully secured its independence.

0:48:53 > 0:48:56But it's deferred because of the Great War

0:48:56 > 0:48:59and implacable Unionist opposition.

0:49:01 > 0:49:02Things fall apart

0:49:02 > 0:49:05The centre cannot hold...

0:49:05 > 0:49:08But I am old and you are young...

0:49:08 > 0:49:11I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart...

0:49:11 > 0:49:13That is no country for old men

0:49:13 > 0:49:16The young in one another's arms...

0:49:16 > 0:49:17Changed utterly

0:49:18 > 0:49:20A terrible beauty is born.

0:49:36 > 0:49:37Oh, that's great.

0:49:38 > 0:49:41It's a beautiful drawing, I've never seen it even reproduced.

0:49:41 > 0:49:44But what's really interesting about this,

0:49:44 > 0:49:47where this sort of touches history,

0:49:47 > 0:49:50is that this is exactly Yeats,

0:49:50 > 0:49:54exactly Yeats at the moment that the guns

0:49:54 > 0:49:59were firing in O'Connell Street on Easter Monday in 1916.

0:49:59 > 0:50:01This is what he was doing,

0:50:01 > 0:50:06he was being sketched by his friend, the artist William Rothenstein,

0:50:06 > 0:50:10in his house in Gloucestershire where he was staying.

0:50:10 > 0:50:12Of course, this was before he knows

0:50:12 > 0:50:15that at this moment that this is being drawn

0:50:15 > 0:50:18that people are being killed and being shot

0:50:18 > 0:50:20and being fired at.

0:50:20 > 0:50:27But the shock of Easter week has a profound effect on him

0:50:27 > 0:50:29and, of course, on the country -

0:50:29 > 0:50:33but more specifically his art.

0:50:33 > 0:50:36Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!

0:50:36 > 0:50:40A beggar upon horseback lashes a bigger on foot

0:50:40 > 0:50:44Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!

0:50:44 > 0:50:48The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

0:50:52 > 0:50:56# When Irish eyes are smiling

0:50:56 > 0:50:59# Sure is like a morn in spring... #

0:50:59 > 0:51:05The Easter Rising lasted six days and left nearly 500 dead.

0:51:05 > 0:51:08When the leaders were captured and executed by the British,

0:51:08 > 0:51:11the ensuing outrage led to more carnage and death

0:51:11 > 0:51:13and ultimately, many think, to Irish independence.

0:51:13 > 0:51:17But I believe the glorification of what happened in the GPO

0:51:17 > 0:51:20stained my country's history in blood for decades.

0:51:23 > 0:51:25There are no creation myths here.

0:51:25 > 0:51:27It's just a post office.

0:51:27 > 0:51:30This isn't the foundation stone of anything.

0:51:30 > 0:51:32This isn't the crucible of revolution.

0:51:32 > 0:51:36No, that's over in the execution yards of Kilmainham.

0:51:36 > 0:51:40This isn't...the cradle of our national Bethlehem.

0:51:40 > 0:51:47This is the original sin of a mismanaged, misgoverned,

0:51:47 > 0:51:51often abusive and corrupt state.

0:51:51 > 0:51:56This is the foul rag and bone shop of the national heart,

0:51:56 > 0:51:59which, as Yeats so brilliantly reminds us,

0:51:59 > 0:52:02is where all the ladders start.

0:52:03 > 0:52:06I find myself very conflicted

0:52:06 > 0:52:11by the idea of the blood sacrifice in heroism.

0:52:11 > 0:52:15The delirium of death.

0:52:15 > 0:52:18Dying is...very easy.

0:52:18 > 0:52:19I've been around it a lot.

0:52:22 > 0:52:25It isn't radical to die, it's inevitable.

0:52:25 > 0:52:28Staying alive is hard.

0:52:28 > 0:52:30Life is hard.

0:52:30 > 0:52:34Staying alive to change and implement change

0:52:34 > 0:52:38must be what it's about.

0:52:38 > 0:52:40Dying?

0:52:40 > 0:52:43For a cause?

0:52:43 > 0:52:44Whose cause?

0:52:44 > 0:52:45The individual's?

0:52:45 > 0:52:48Hoping that something will come out of it.

0:52:48 > 0:52:51This ludicrous notion of death or glory...

0:52:51 > 0:52:55- or death- and- glory escapes me.

0:52:59 > 0:53:02WB Yeats didn't die for Ireland.

0:53:02 > 0:53:04He stayed alive to fight for Ireland -

0:53:04 > 0:53:07a better, inclusive, progressive version of Ireland -

0:53:07 > 0:53:10and to fight against the version I eventually fled -

0:53:10 > 0:53:13petty, censorious, Catholic narrow-mindedness

0:53:13 > 0:53:16fixated with the false glory of martyrdom.

0:53:19 > 0:53:23Had they converted into a project of self-sacrifice?

0:53:23 > 0:53:24Well, there I think we come back

0:53:24 > 0:53:26to the Catholicisation of the thing,

0:53:26 > 0:53:30in retrospect, and to Pearse's writings,

0:53:30 > 0:53:34very cleverly aimed at exactly this interpretation of it,

0:53:34 > 0:53:37which were released...written just before the Rising

0:53:37 > 0:53:38and released just after it,

0:53:38 > 0:53:42where the whole thing is written into,

0:53:42 > 0:53:45inscribed into the traditional of Catholic sacrifice

0:53:45 > 0:53:46and of mysticism

0:53:46 > 0:53:50and of the way of the cross and of Calvary and all the rest of it.

0:53:50 > 0:53:52The other thing is that the calculation is,

0:53:52 > 0:53:55and this does seem to be the case, this isn't retrospective,

0:53:55 > 0:53:57that they knew they would be executed

0:53:57 > 0:53:59and that this would bring about a response

0:53:59 > 0:54:01in public opinion in Ireland.

0:54:01 > 0:54:03- And there they were absolutely right.- Fine.

0:54:03 > 0:54:06Meanwhile at the end of all this you get 500 people dead.

0:54:06 > 0:54:08I mean, how dare they?

0:54:08 > 0:54:09You may say "How dare they?"

0:54:09 > 0:54:14but for them, the 500 people dead were worth the reward,

0:54:14 > 0:54:18which was a revived, radical Republican...

0:54:18 > 0:54:20And Stalin would have exactly the same point.

0:54:20 > 0:54:22Perhaps.

0:54:22 > 0:54:26So the people of 1916 are an elite,

0:54:26 > 0:54:31a revolutionary elite blinded by, you know,

0:54:31 > 0:54:34blood-dimmed revolutionary lust?

0:54:34 > 0:54:37- You say that. I didn't say it. - I- am- saying that.

0:54:37 > 0:54:39They're certainly a revolutionary elite.

0:54:39 > 0:54:42- And they're certainly bent on... - So he would have approved of that?

0:54:42 > 0:54:45They're bent on the vertigo of self-sacrifice.

0:54:45 > 0:54:51And that's how Yeats will both commemorate them

0:54:51 > 0:54:54and remember them.

0:54:58 > 0:55:02O but we talked at large before the sixteen men were shot

0:55:02 > 0:55:05But who can talk of give and take

0:55:05 > 0:55:07What should be and what not

0:55:07 > 0:55:12While those dead men are loitering there to stir the boiling pot?

0:55:12 > 0:55:17You say that we should still the land till Germany's overcome

0:55:17 > 0:55:21But who is there to argue that now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

0:55:21 > 0:55:26And is there a logic to outweigh MacDonagh's bony thumb?

0:55:26 > 0:55:28How could you dream they'd listen

0:55:28 > 0:55:30That have an ear alone

0:55:30 > 0:55:32For those new comrades they have found

0:55:32 > 0:55:35Lord Edward and Wolf Tone

0:55:35 > 0:55:37Or meddle with our give and take

0:55:37 > 0:55:40That converse bone to bone?

0:55:41 > 0:55:44Hero Tales And Legends Of The Serbians.

0:55:46 > 0:55:50This is Yeats' library, that his wife gave to the National Library.

0:55:50 > 0:55:55These are the books, this is what surrounded him all his life.

0:55:55 > 0:56:00Oh, here we go, George Moore. Oh, Shelley and Blake.

0:56:00 > 0:56:02Yeah, they're his two touchstones, aren't they?

0:56:02 > 0:56:05Look at this, Folklore In The Old Testament.

0:56:08 > 0:56:09The Waste Land.

0:56:09 > 0:56:13"For William Butler Yeats Esquire

0:56:13 > 0:56:16"in admiration of his work, TS Eliot."

0:56:18 > 0:56:21These are his own editions of his own works.

0:56:21 > 0:56:25So I have to wear the gloves made famous

0:56:25 > 0:56:28on endless history programmes

0:56:28 > 0:56:31and these are, from Ireland's point of view,

0:56:31 > 0:56:35you know, almost sacred texts.

0:56:35 > 0:56:36And why not?

0:56:38 > 0:56:41I have met them at close of day

0:56:41 > 0:56:43Coming with vivid faces

0:56:43 > 0:56:48From counter or desk among grey eighteenth-century houses

0:56:49 > 0:56:51I have passed with a nod of the head

0:56:51 > 0:56:54Or polite meaningless words

0:56:54 > 0:56:59Or have lingered awhile and said polite meaningless words

0:56:59 > 0:57:03And thought before I had done of a mocking tail or a gibe

0:57:03 > 0:57:07To please a companion around the fire at the club

0:57:07 > 0:57:12Being certain that they and I but lived where motley is worn

0:57:14 > 0:57:15All changed

0:57:15 > 0:57:17Changed utterly

0:57:18 > 0:57:20A terrible beauty is born.

0:57:22 > 0:57:26The events of 1916 took him aback,

0:57:26 > 0:57:29and he didn't quite know how to respond to it.

0:57:29 > 0:57:31Then, of course, like everybody else,

0:57:31 > 0:57:38he recoiled at what the authorities did to the leaders,

0:57:38 > 0:57:43which was a serious political mistake, of course,

0:57:43 > 0:57:46and just went with the cack-handedness and misgovernment

0:57:46 > 0:57:48of what was coming from London.

0:57:49 > 0:57:53He sat down and put his own doubt

0:57:53 > 0:57:58and shock and questioning

0:57:58 > 0:58:04into one of the most powerful poems of the century, in any language.

0:58:04 > 0:58:07Was it needless death after all?

0:58:08 > 0:58:10For England may keep faith

0:58:10 > 0:58:12For all that is done and said

0:58:14 > 0:58:16We know their dream

0:58:17 > 0:58:21Enough to know they dreamed and are dead.

0:58:21 > 0:58:23And what if excess of love

0:58:23 > 0:58:25Bewildered them till they died?

0:58:27 > 0:58:29I write it out in a verse -

0:58:29 > 0:58:32MacDonagh and MacBride

0:58:32 > 0:58:34And Connolly and Pearse

0:58:34 > 0:58:37Now and in time to be

0:58:37 > 0:58:38Wherever green is worn

0:58:38 > 0:58:41Are changed, changed utterly

0:58:42 > 0:58:43A terrible beauty is born.

0:58:52 > 0:58:54TEARFULLY: Brilliant.

0:58:59 > 0:59:02One person wasn't so sure that Yeats got it right -

0:59:02 > 0:59:06his inspirational muse and great love of his life Maud Gonne.

0:59:06 > 0:59:08And now, because of the Rising,

0:59:08 > 0:59:11this fanatic Republican icon was a widow.

0:59:12 > 0:59:17Maud is outraged by this 'Easter, 1916.'

0:59:17 > 0:59:21She thinks he's betrayed the actual Rising itself.

0:59:21 > 0:59:23"No, Willie, I do not like your poem,"

0:59:23 > 0:59:26begins this terrific, terrific letter.

0:59:26 > 0:59:28I think it's one of the great political poems

0:59:28 > 0:59:30because of its ambivalence.

0:59:30 > 0:59:34But it does reflect the upheavals of his own life during that summer,

0:59:34 > 0:59:36with Maud, with her daughter Iseult.

0:59:36 > 0:59:40And I think the stanza about the stone of fanaticism

0:59:40 > 0:59:43in the stream of life is very much about...

0:59:43 > 0:59:46- This obsession with one idea that blocks any other.- Yeah.

0:59:46 > 0:59:50Maud is the unspoken presence in that poem.

0:59:50 > 0:59:52It's probably his last great love poem to her.

0:59:54 > 0:59:57But I think the main thing is the man is in the throes

0:59:57 > 0:59:59of what can only be called a nervous breakdown.

0:59:59 > 1:00:04He is at the absolute edge of self control.

1:00:04 > 1:00:07It's the fallout of 1916 to 1917,

1:00:07 > 1:00:09his horoscopes have told him

1:00:09 > 1:00:13all sorts of world-shattering things are happening.

1:00:13 > 1:00:15He's looking for certainty everywhere,

1:00:15 > 1:00:19as he has done in the strangest places over the last few years.

1:00:19 > 1:00:22The 18 months after the Rising

1:00:22 > 1:00:26saw WB descend into spirals of confusion and depression

1:00:26 > 1:00:29about politics but also about his own personal life.

1:00:29 > 1:00:31He's a 52-year-old bachelor

1:00:31 > 1:00:35and, as many horoscopes, seances and visits to mediums insist,

1:00:35 > 1:00:38he must be married by the end of the year.

1:00:40 > 1:00:41In this state of panic,

1:00:41 > 1:00:44Willie heads to Normandy to visit Maud

1:00:44 > 1:00:48and her travelling menagerie of parrots, monkeys, dogs and cats.

1:00:48 > 1:00:50He proposes one last time

1:00:50 > 1:00:52and she turns him down again.

1:00:54 > 1:00:57Then, literally, he turns and walks along the beach

1:00:57 > 1:00:59to her 22-year-old daughter Iseult

1:00:59 > 1:01:01- and proposes to- her.

1:01:01 > 1:01:04After all, she'd flirtingly proposed to him

1:01:04 > 1:01:05just two years earlier.

1:01:06 > 1:01:09O you will take whatever's offered

1:01:09 > 1:01:11And dream that all the world's a friend

1:01:11 > 1:01:13Suffer as your mother suffered

1:01:13 > 1:01:16Be as broken in the end

1:01:16 > 1:01:20But I am old and you are young

1:01:20 > 1:01:23And I speak a barbarous tongue.

1:01:24 > 1:01:25Iseult says no.

1:01:25 > 1:01:30In this emotional meltdown, Willie thinks, 'Well, who else do I know?'

1:01:30 > 1:01:33So the now hysterical Yeats heads straight back to England

1:01:33 > 1:01:36and proposes to Georgie Hyde Lees, the daughter of a friend,

1:01:36 > 1:01:39who says, "OK."

1:01:40 > 1:01:43Within days, under pressure of the horoscope deadline,

1:01:43 > 1:01:47the happy couple arrive at a London register office.

1:01:49 > 1:01:53But Lily, Willie's sister, took to her immediately.

1:01:53 > 1:01:55"She is not good-looking but is comely.

1:01:55 > 1:01:58"Her nose is too big for good looks, her colour ruddy

1:01:58 > 1:02:00"and her hair reddish brown.

1:02:00 > 1:02:03"Her eyes are very good in a fine blue

1:02:03 > 1:02:05"with very dark, strongly marked eyebrows.

1:02:05 > 1:02:07"She is quiet but not slow.

1:02:07 > 1:02:11"Her brain I would judge quick and trained and sensitive."

1:02:11 > 1:02:14In fact, everyone remarked on the intelligence of the woman.

1:02:16 > 1:02:19Yeats, although now married and on his honeymoon,

1:02:19 > 1:02:22was still in a complete state of panic.

1:02:22 > 1:02:24Had he let down Maud or Iseult?

1:02:24 > 1:02:28Was he betraying his new wife by not being fully committed to her?

1:02:28 > 1:02:31That's when Georgie displayed her true talents.

1:02:33 > 1:02:35So he'd met his deadline,

1:02:35 > 1:02:38he had got married by that astrological deadline.

1:02:38 > 1:02:40Hurrah, he'd found somebody less than half his age

1:02:40 > 1:02:42who was willing to marry him. That's a great success.

1:02:42 > 1:02:44- That's not a failure, that's a success.- Yeah.

1:02:44 > 1:02:47So they get married, they go on honeymoon,

1:02:47 > 1:02:49they go down to this little hotel just south of London.

1:02:49 > 1:02:52And - first night, nothing happens sexually.

1:02:52 > 1:02:54Second night, nothing happens sexually.

1:02:54 > 1:02:56Third night, it's really disconcerting for her.

1:02:56 > 1:02:58It's really stressful.

1:02:58 > 1:03:02And they, between them, decide to start doing some automatic writing.

1:03:02 > 1:03:05And she starts doing this automatic writing....

1:03:05 > 1:03:08- Wasn't that bonkers, actually? - No, it wasn't that bonkers.

1:03:08 > 1:03:11- Well, you would say that, cos... - I would, wouldn't I?!

1:03:11 > 1:03:14..you're selling bonkers books in this book shop, you know,

1:03:14 > 1:03:16with this hippie sofa and stuff, you know.

1:03:16 > 1:03:18She comes from an occultist background.

1:03:18 > 1:03:19He comes from an occultist background.

1:03:19 > 1:03:22It's a thing that she knows about. It's a thing that he knows about.

1:03:22 > 1:03:25It's a thing that he's very keen that she does.

1:03:25 > 1:03:28And she sits down to do it

1:03:28 > 1:03:30and she starts

1:03:30 > 1:03:31and they get some results.

1:03:31 > 1:03:34He loves it. He absolutely loves it.

1:03:35 > 1:03:38It transpires Georgie had the ability

1:03:38 > 1:03:39to connect the pen in her hand

1:03:39 > 1:03:44to the great wisdom of some unknown spiritual instructors.

1:03:44 > 1:03:46Willie would ask a question

1:03:46 > 1:03:49and Georgie's pen would automatically write out an answer.

1:03:49 > 1:03:53For Willie, this was the pinnacle of a lifetime of spiritual quest.

1:03:53 > 1:03:56New ideas, new metaphors for his poetry.

1:03:56 > 1:04:00Roy Foster called it a factory for mysterious images.

1:04:00 > 1:04:02And Willie didn't it want to stop.

1:04:02 > 1:04:06But isn't that always what all of this was about,

1:04:06 > 1:04:10from the fairy legends to the folk legends

1:04:10 > 1:04:13to the Rosicrucianism, to the theosophy?

1:04:13 > 1:04:17Just this constant search for stimulation of new imagery?

1:04:17 > 1:04:18You know this yourself,

1:04:18 > 1:04:20that's what creative writers,

1:04:20 > 1:04:23that's what poets, that's what songwriters do.

1:04:23 > 1:04:26They're ruthless in the search of a theme.

1:04:26 > 1:04:28Ruthless.

1:04:28 > 1:04:31And they will rummage through anything

1:04:31 > 1:04:33and extract anything

1:04:33 > 1:04:35and steal anything

1:04:35 > 1:04:38in order to get an inspirational image

1:04:38 > 1:04:41out of which will come a poem or a song

1:04:41 > 1:04:43or a piece of creative writing.

1:04:45 > 1:04:49What they undertook to do they brought to pass

1:04:49 > 1:04:54All things hang like a drop of dew upon a blade of grass.

1:04:56 > 1:04:57So simple.

1:04:58 > 1:05:02Yeats' new domestic stability sat uneasily

1:05:02 > 1:05:05with the end of the Great War and the rise of Bolshevism.

1:05:05 > 1:05:07At home, England's hesitation

1:05:07 > 1:05:09in implementing hard fought for home rule

1:05:09 > 1:05:12provoked the Irish War of Independence.

1:05:12 > 1:05:17It was only 1919, but, with that remarkable prescience of his,

1:05:17 > 1:05:19he could sense impending doom.

1:05:19 > 1:05:22And with his store of magical metaphors and imagery,

1:05:22 > 1:05:26a new, sharper and darker genius began to emerge.

1:05:28 > 1:05:32Turning and turning in the widening gyre

1:05:32 > 1:05:34The falcon cannot hear the falconer

1:05:34 > 1:05:39Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

1:05:39 > 1:05:42Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

1:05:42 > 1:05:45The blood dimmed tide is loosed

1:05:45 > 1:05:49And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned

1:05:49 > 1:05:52The best lack all conviction

1:05:52 > 1:05:55While the worst are full of passionate intensity

1:05:55 > 1:05:59Surely some revelation is at hand

1:05:59 > 1:06:03Surely the Second Coming is at hand

1:06:03 > 1:06:04The Second Coming?

1:06:05 > 1:06:07Hardly are those words out

1:06:07 > 1:06:11When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight

1:06:11 > 1:06:15Somewhere in sands of the desert

1:06:15 > 1:06:18A shape with lion body and the head of a man

1:06:18 > 1:06:21A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

1:06:21 > 1:06:24Is moving its slow thighs

1:06:24 > 1:06:29While all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds

1:06:30 > 1:06:33The darkness drops again

1:06:33 > 1:06:37But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep

1:06:37 > 1:06:41Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

1:06:41 > 1:06:43And what rough beast

1:06:43 > 1:06:46Its hour come round at last

1:06:46 > 1:06:50Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

1:07:07 > 1:07:12Creatively and emotionally, WB Yeats had found a new maturity.

1:07:12 > 1:07:14He gave up his old London bachelor pad

1:07:14 > 1:07:16and tried to create a family home

1:07:16 > 1:07:20in his mythical dream time, the West of Ireland.

1:07:23 > 1:07:26It's pretty ludicrous that we are sort of scurrying along

1:07:26 > 1:07:30past this place, cos of course it isn't normally like this.

1:07:30 > 1:07:34This is a road and the river is down there

1:07:34 > 1:07:37and we are now crossing over normally a bridge.

1:07:37 > 1:07:40But the countryside is in flood.

1:07:40 > 1:07:43But the problem with the tower was that it was regularly in flood.

1:07:43 > 1:07:47Pound said this is Willie's phallic symbol in the country,

1:07:47 > 1:07:49"Ballyphallus or whatever it is he calls it

1:07:49 > 1:07:51"with the river flowing through the first floor."

1:07:51 > 1:07:53And there it is.

1:07:53 > 1:07:56And it was with some dismay that he brought Georgie back here,

1:07:56 > 1:07:58his wife, and raised his kids a lot of the time.

1:07:58 > 1:08:00It was freezing,

1:08:00 > 1:08:04and...no electricity or anything. But he loved it.

1:08:04 > 1:08:05And you can see why.

1:08:05 > 1:08:08It's got that austere beauty that's so prevalent in the poetry.

1:08:10 > 1:08:12What a place to live in.

1:08:16 > 1:08:19Although I can see him still

1:08:19 > 1:08:22The freckled man who goes to a grey place on a hill

1:08:22 > 1:08:24In grey Connemara clothes

1:08:24 > 1:08:26At dawn to cast his flies

1:08:26 > 1:08:28It's long since I began to call up to the eyes

1:08:28 > 1:08:30This wise and simple man

1:08:31 > 1:08:33All day I'd looked in the face

1:08:33 > 1:08:34What I had hoped 'twould be

1:08:34 > 1:08:36To write for my own race

1:08:36 > 1:08:37And the reality.

1:08:39 > 1:08:40Ireland was now in the middle

1:08:40 > 1:08:43of a vicious and cruel war of independence

1:08:43 > 1:08:46and Yeats was rightly outraged by the atrocities

1:08:46 > 1:08:49committed around Coole and Ballylee by the warring parties.

1:08:51 > 1:08:53He finally publishes his Easter Rebellion poetry

1:08:53 > 1:08:56and nails his nationalism to the mast.

1:08:56 > 1:08:59In 1921, in a speech to the Oxford Union,

1:08:59 > 1:09:02he launched a blazing attack on the English in Ireland.

1:09:02 > 1:09:04"I am a Victorian," he said,

1:09:04 > 1:09:10"They knew the meaning of the terms truth, honour and justice, but you?

1:09:10 > 1:09:12"You do not know the meaning of them."

1:09:12 > 1:09:16WB Yeats is no longer ambivalent.

1:09:16 > 1:09:20Once again, he wants to stand up and be counted.

1:09:22 > 1:09:24He was a one-man anti-emigration scheme.

1:09:24 > 1:09:26He didn't want to leave,

1:09:26 > 1:09:29like Joyce and Beckett and Wilde and Shaw.

1:09:29 > 1:09:31He didn't want to go.

1:09:31 > 1:09:33He wanted to stay and change.

1:09:33 > 1:09:35And it's kind of the boring point I've been making

1:09:35 > 1:09:37about this whole film.

1:09:37 > 1:09:42You can die for a cause, but you can live for a reason.

1:09:42 > 1:09:45It's only being alive that change happens,

1:09:45 > 1:09:47and that was the route he took.

1:09:50 > 1:09:53The Anglo-Irish Treaty brought about a compromise

1:09:53 > 1:09:54which Yeats supported -

1:09:54 > 1:09:57the Irish Free State.

1:09:57 > 1:10:00He accepted a role as senator in this new government.

1:10:00 > 1:10:04This was no token position, Ireland was now in a civil war.

1:10:04 > 1:10:06Senators were being attacked, houses were being burned.

1:10:06 > 1:10:09His own new home on Merrion Square in Dublin

1:10:09 > 1:10:11was shot at and had armed guards.

1:10:15 > 1:10:18He was going into the Senate

1:10:18 > 1:10:21to ensure that the revolution that he had helped to engender

1:10:21 > 1:10:23and the unique literary revolution

1:10:23 > 1:10:26that he hoped would become the soul of the country,

1:10:26 > 1:10:27which in fact it did,

1:10:27 > 1:10:31should endure, and should be ensured.

1:10:31 > 1:10:33The new conservative Catholic free state,

1:10:33 > 1:10:36despite their declarations, did nothing for the rights of women

1:10:36 > 1:10:39and sidelined important and vocal Protestants into the Senate.

1:10:39 > 1:10:43The plurality which the rebellion had promised

1:10:43 > 1:10:45had been replaced with what, in effect,

1:10:45 > 1:10:47was a Catholic clerical coup d'etat.

1:10:47 > 1:10:50Unbelievably, a later government

1:10:50 > 1:10:52even sent a telegram to the Pope

1:10:52 > 1:10:55desiring to "repose at the feet of your Holiness

1:10:55 > 1:10:57"and our devotion to your August Person."

1:10:57 > 1:11:00But nobody would muzzle WB Yeats.

1:11:00 > 1:11:05He stood up against legislation that he saw not only as unjust

1:11:05 > 1:11:07but that might alienate Protestants

1:11:07 > 1:11:10and rule out any chance of a united Ireland.

1:11:10 > 1:11:15He wrote, "We must become a modern, tolerant, liberal nation."

1:11:15 > 1:11:16He argued unsuccessfully

1:11:16 > 1:11:20against the compulsory use of Irish language, against censorship

1:11:20 > 1:11:23and the Catholic fear of "evil literature"

1:11:23 > 1:11:25like James Joyce's Ulysses.

1:11:29 > 1:11:33Some people see him still, though, as the Englishman, don't they?

1:11:33 > 1:11:36I mean, they're sort of dismissive of him.

1:11:36 > 1:11:38Well, yeah, I think he's seen as somebody

1:11:38 > 1:11:41who's speaking for values

1:11:41 > 1:11:43that are alien to what

1:11:43 > 1:11:46the increasingly pietistic Catholic -

1:11:46 > 1:11:49you know, pledging allegiance to the Pope -

1:11:49 > 1:11:51Free State governments want.

1:11:51 > 1:11:53He believes that the artistic imagination

1:11:53 > 1:11:57is part of the way a country empowers and liberates itself.

1:11:57 > 1:12:00And that is what he's preaching in the Senate as well.

1:12:00 > 1:12:05He talks on issues of art, on issues of education, on issues of culture.

1:12:05 > 1:12:10That's what he thinks an upper house in a modern government should be

1:12:10 > 1:12:13and that's what he thinks is being denigrated

1:12:13 > 1:12:18by the new highly Catholic, very bourgeois,

1:12:18 > 1:12:22very conservative polity that the Free States become.

1:12:22 > 1:12:25Famously, Yeats spoke out in vain

1:12:25 > 1:12:28against the new state's plan to prohibit divorce.

1:12:28 > 1:12:30He felt that it was grossly oppressive

1:12:30 > 1:12:32to the Protestant minority and he said,

1:12:32 > 1:12:36"I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority.

1:12:36 > 1:12:41"We, against whom you have done this thing, are no petty people."

1:12:41 > 1:12:45And he rightly claimed that when the iceberg of Catholic control melted,

1:12:45 > 1:12:48Ireland would become an increasingly tolerant country.

1:12:50 > 1:12:53I walk through the long schoolroom questioning

1:12:53 > 1:12:56A kind old nun in a white hood replies

1:12:56 > 1:13:00The children learn to cypher and to sing

1:13:00 > 1:13:02To study reading books and histories

1:13:02 > 1:13:05To cut and sew, be neat in everything

1:13:05 > 1:13:07In the best modern way

1:13:07 > 1:13:10The children's eyes in momentary wonder

1:13:10 > 1:13:15Stare upon a sixty-year-old smiling public man.

1:13:15 > 1:13:18This film could actually be called

1:13:18 > 1:13:20How The Prods Invented Catholic Ireland.

1:13:20 > 1:13:24You know, so many of the great heroes of this story,

1:13:24 > 1:13:27going way back, the great revolutionaries -

1:13:27 > 1:13:28Emmett, Wolfe Tone -

1:13:28 > 1:13:31never mind the literary figures - Douglas Hyde -

1:13:31 > 1:13:35so critical to the realisation of national self,

1:13:35 > 1:13:39coming to sort of an apotheosis in Yeats' genius,

1:13:39 > 1:13:42were of course Protestants.

1:13:42 > 1:13:44And Yeats wasn't going to let that pass.

1:13:44 > 1:13:48He was deeply proud of his caste and his background

1:13:48 > 1:13:50and his people

1:13:50 > 1:13:53and their rallying call of Nationalism.

1:13:54 > 1:13:57At every turn, Yeats constantly had to fight against

1:13:57 > 1:14:00the narrow-minded worldview of this new young Ireland.

1:14:00 > 1:14:02He chaired the Coinage Committee

1:14:02 > 1:14:06but was attacked for choosing pagan designs by an English Protestant.

1:14:06 > 1:14:08Maud Gonne in particular hated them.

1:14:08 > 1:14:10Less successfully, perhaps,

1:14:10 > 1:14:12he also advised on the design

1:14:12 > 1:14:15for the new robes for the Irish judiciary.

1:14:15 > 1:14:21Unfortunately, this is what he thought Irish judges should wear

1:14:21 > 1:14:25sitting in front of, sort of, gougers and yahoos and corner boys,

1:14:25 > 1:14:26you know, drug dealing

1:14:26 > 1:14:29and, like, beating up people when the pubs came out.

1:14:29 > 1:14:33They would stand in the dock in front of people dressed as this.

1:14:33 > 1:14:34Are you serious?

1:14:34 > 1:14:36"Jeez, what do you got on there, your honour?!" You know?

1:14:36 > 1:14:38And of course, every lawyer who saw this

1:14:38 > 1:14:40thinking they were going to be judges

1:14:40 > 1:14:43in the new independent country were looking at it,

1:14:43 > 1:14:46"You can fuck off if you think I'm ever going to wear that."

1:14:46 > 1:14:48What...?

1:14:53 > 1:14:58Regardless of what some in Ireland thought of WB Yeats' Irishness,

1:14:58 > 1:15:00in 1923, Europe and the world

1:15:00 > 1:15:04were about to recognise the greatness of his poetry.

1:15:07 > 1:15:10The Nobel Prize then, as now, is huge.

1:15:10 > 1:15:14For the country, it's such an honour

1:15:14 > 1:15:19and it's taken as not just an imprimatur of genius

1:15:19 > 1:15:23but that Ireland has been fully accepted now

1:15:23 > 1:15:26into the great states of the world.

1:15:27 > 1:15:29The winning of the Nobel Prize

1:15:29 > 1:15:34showed that there was a world recognition of this...

1:15:34 > 1:15:37of this poet and of the literature that he championed.

1:15:37 > 1:15:41So, you know, we didn't have to feel ashamed of it

1:15:41 > 1:15:43or feel in any way that it was second rate or whatever.

1:15:43 > 1:15:46This had been recognised internationally

1:15:46 > 1:15:48and we could embrace it without any feeling at all

1:15:48 > 1:15:52that we were embracing the colonialists' language.

1:15:52 > 1:15:55He was a more important ambassador for our state

1:15:55 > 1:15:58then any statesman who was Taoiseach,

1:15:58 > 1:15:59or, as it would have been called,

1:15:59 > 1:16:02- President of the Executive Council at the time.- So,

1:16:02 > 1:16:03did the new state fail him?

1:16:03 > 1:16:07Yes. It was...

1:16:07 > 1:16:09It was petty and he wasn't. Ever.

1:16:14 > 1:16:16Witheringly, and insultingly,

1:16:16 > 1:16:21the Catholic press branded Willie and his like "new ascendancy."

1:16:21 > 1:16:25They dismissed him as a neopagan agnostic Freemason pensioner.

1:16:25 > 1:16:30They couldn't handle his utter belief in the integrity of art

1:16:30 > 1:16:34and the artistic, independent revolutionary voice.

1:16:34 > 1:16:36The Catholic Church, of course,

1:16:36 > 1:16:38could never reconcile themselves to it.

1:16:38 > 1:16:40They were spiteful, they were full of hatred

1:16:40 > 1:16:43because he represented everything that they were not -

1:16:43 > 1:16:48openness, pluralism, modernity, the individual, the thoughtful,

1:16:48 > 1:16:52the less than infantile Irish that they insisted we were.

1:16:52 > 1:16:55The patrimony of the Catholic Church.

1:16:55 > 1:16:56"Father. Oh, father."

1:16:56 > 1:16:58Father? You're not my fucking father.

1:16:58 > 1:17:01You know? So he resisted all that.

1:17:03 > 1:17:04Yeats' Abbey Theatre

1:17:04 > 1:17:08had first outraged the narrow-minded patrons in 1907,

1:17:08 > 1:17:12shocked at Synge's new realism and his depiction of the language,

1:17:12 > 1:17:14earthiness and sexual frankness of the Irish

1:17:14 > 1:17:16in Playboy Of The Western World.

1:17:16 > 1:17:19In 1926, he was at it again

1:17:19 > 1:17:22with Sean O'Casey's The Plough And The Stars,

1:17:22 > 1:17:25a less than reverent take on the holy rising

1:17:25 > 1:17:26of just ten years earlier,

1:17:26 > 1:17:30written by a man who, as a committed socialist and revolutionary,

1:17:30 > 1:17:32had every right to his opinion.

1:17:34 > 1:17:37The Plough And The Stars is important

1:17:37 > 1:17:41because it totally fitted in to where Yeats was at that time.

1:17:41 > 1:17:44He was the public man who'd stepped up to the plate.

1:17:44 > 1:17:48He'd been going on and on and on and on and on.

1:17:48 > 1:17:51Really, now, people were fed up of this guy going on

1:17:51 > 1:17:53about the Ireland that should be.

1:17:53 > 1:17:57O'Casey's play dared question the Rising and its leaders

1:17:57 > 1:17:59and Yeats would defend to the death

1:17:59 > 1:18:02any artist's right to do precisely that.

1:18:02 > 1:18:06This is viewed as a national disgrace.

1:18:06 > 1:18:10Already these men have been set in stone on plinths.

1:18:10 > 1:18:15Already, the GPO, 1916 are shibboleths.

1:18:15 > 1:18:17You cannot say anything against them.

1:18:17 > 1:18:23They are utterly totemic and vital to the national sense of self.

1:18:23 > 1:18:25O'Casey is very hardcore about it.

1:18:25 > 1:18:27He's saying, "What was all that for?

1:18:27 > 1:18:30"That didn't really work.

1:18:30 > 1:18:33"Who are we? What is it we wanted to be?"

1:18:33 > 1:18:37All hell breaks loose again.

1:18:37 > 1:18:39And they couldn't handle that.

1:18:39 > 1:18:43In the same way that Playboy had held up the mirror,

1:18:43 > 1:18:46this newer Ireland had a mirror held up to itself

1:18:46 > 1:18:48and they couldn't stand it.

1:18:49 > 1:18:53But this time, he ain't going to debate anything.

1:18:53 > 1:18:56This time, there is a real rage

1:18:56 > 1:18:58cos he genuinely, like Synge, thinks,

1:18:58 > 1:19:01"Here's the new one, here's the new genius."

1:19:01 > 1:19:03So he walks out on the stage,

1:19:03 > 1:19:06and the cartoons would show you that stance here,

1:19:06 > 1:19:10right here at this point, staring at them.

1:19:10 > 1:19:11He shouts at them,

1:19:11 > 1:19:13"You've disgraced yourselves again.

1:19:13 > 1:19:17"You've disgraced yourselves again!"

1:19:17 > 1:19:21It's not a headmaster chastising the class, it's...

1:19:23 > 1:19:24..it's the disappointed leader.

1:19:30 > 1:19:32I'm not sure Willie had it in him any more.

1:19:32 > 1:19:35He was getting old and jaded.

1:19:35 > 1:19:39Perhaps the grubby and pious Ireland he had found himself in

1:19:39 > 1:19:42was not the romantic island he'd dreamed of.

1:19:42 > 1:19:46He retired from his role as senator in 1928, his health failing.

1:19:46 > 1:19:50He said he wished to live his remaining years as a bee

1:19:50 > 1:19:52rather than a wasp.

1:19:54 > 1:19:57Willie's version of Ireland was being smothered.

1:19:57 > 1:20:00But one of his greatest weapons was outrage.

1:20:00 > 1:20:02New stark, sexual poems,

1:20:02 > 1:20:05sometimes written in a woman's voice, Crazy Jane,

1:20:05 > 1:20:07always speaking the unspeakable.

1:20:09 > 1:20:11A sudden blow.

1:20:12 > 1:20:15The great wings beating still above the staggering girl

1:20:15 > 1:20:18Her thighs caressed by the dark webs

1:20:18 > 1:20:20Her nape caught in his bill

1:20:20 > 1:20:24He holds her helpless breast upon his breast

1:20:24 > 1:20:28How can those terrified vague fingers push

1:20:28 > 1:20:31The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

1:20:31 > 1:20:35What lively lad most pleasured me

1:20:35 > 1:20:38Of all that with me lay?

1:20:38 > 1:20:41I answer that I gave my soul

1:20:41 > 1:20:43And loved in misery

1:20:43 > 1:20:45But had great pleasure with a lad

1:20:45 > 1:20:47That I loved bodily.

1:20:47 > 1:20:51No ups and downs, my pretty

1:20:51 > 1:20:53A mermaid, not a punk

1:20:53 > 1:20:56A drunkard is a dead man

1:20:56 > 1:20:58And all dead men are drunk.

1:20:58 > 1:21:01THEY LAUGH

1:21:01 > 1:21:03It's great, isn't it?

1:21:03 > 1:21:05It's like one of yours!

1:21:06 > 1:21:10He started to reminisce about his class, his caste,

1:21:10 > 1:21:11where he came from.

1:21:11 > 1:21:14He had an affinity not just for the West of Ireland

1:21:14 > 1:21:16but for the Protestant ascendancy, the big house.

1:21:16 > 1:21:18He wasn't a natural democrat

1:21:18 > 1:21:21and harboured a lifelong suspicion of the mob.

1:21:21 > 1:21:25He believed in that ancient Homeric view of the aristocracy

1:21:25 > 1:21:28to lead a country, corresponding to his interest in Nietzsche

1:21:28 > 1:21:30and the hierarchy of class.

1:21:30 > 1:21:34He felt great families were wiser than governments.

1:21:36 > 1:21:38He was a bit of a snob.

1:21:38 > 1:21:41He wanted to be here and he got here

1:21:41 > 1:21:44and he got here because he became the famous writer.

1:21:44 > 1:21:47Arise and bid me strike a match

1:21:47 > 1:21:50And strike another till time catch

1:21:50 > 1:21:52Should the conflagration climb

1:21:52 > 1:21:54Run till all the sages know

1:21:54 > 1:21:56We the great gazebo built

1:21:56 > 1:21:58They convicted us of guilt

1:21:58 > 1:22:00Bid me strike a match and blow.

1:22:03 > 1:22:09Part of his insistence that we the great gazebo built,

1:22:09 > 1:22:11the great gazebo of Ireland, it is...

1:22:11 > 1:22:15It's your thing, it is our thing, we cannot be dismissed.

1:22:15 > 1:22:16We are no petty people.

1:22:16 > 1:22:18Of course he was right.

1:22:20 > 1:22:24He predicted an unspecific and terrifying dark era in Europe.

1:22:24 > 1:22:28And his fear of communism led him to a misguided dabble in fascism.

1:22:28 > 1:22:31He wrote silly marching songs for Ireland's Blue Shirts,

1:22:31 > 1:22:34a right wing movement of the early 1930s,

1:22:34 > 1:22:37until he realised they were nothing more than a cabal

1:22:37 > 1:22:39of the conservative Catholics he despised.

1:22:43 > 1:22:45He felt impotent about how the world was going,

1:22:45 > 1:22:48about where Ireland was going,

1:22:48 > 1:22:50about where old age was taking him.

1:22:53 > 1:22:55I ranted to the knave and fool

1:22:55 > 1:22:57But outgrew that school

1:22:57 > 1:22:59Would transform the part

1:22:59 > 1:23:02Fit audience found, but cannot rule

1:23:02 > 1:23:03My fanatic heart.

1:23:05 > 1:23:07I sought my betters

1:23:07 > 1:23:08Though in each

1:23:08 > 1:23:10Fine manners, liberal speech

1:23:10 > 1:23:12Turn hatred into sport

1:23:12 > 1:23:14Nothing said or done can reach

1:23:14 > 1:23:16My fanatic heart

1:23:17 > 1:23:19Out of Ireland have we come

1:23:19 > 1:23:22Great hatred, little room

1:23:22 > 1:23:24Maimed us at the start

1:23:24 > 1:23:26I carry from my mother's womb

1:23:26 > 1:23:27A fanatic heart.

1:23:31 > 1:23:32That's another great line -

1:23:32 > 1:23:34- we turn hatred into sport.- I know.

1:23:36 > 1:23:40You think it horrible that lust and rage

1:23:40 > 1:23:43Should dance attendance upon my old age?

1:23:44 > 1:23:47They were not such a plague when I was young

1:23:47 > 1:23:50What else have I to spur me into song?

1:23:52 > 1:23:53Yeats had a family,

1:23:53 > 1:23:55a patient and loving wife,

1:23:55 > 1:23:59but also a permanent gaggle of rackety female admirers.

1:23:59 > 1:24:05Sex, like all acts of creativity, happens first and most in the mind.

1:24:05 > 1:24:09And sexual frisson had always been the source of his writing energies,

1:24:09 > 1:24:12yet his impotence left him creatively barren.

1:24:12 > 1:24:17But then, in London, he heard about an unlikely medical procedure.

1:24:17 > 1:24:20What is a Steinach operation?

1:24:20 > 1:24:25Oh, well, there are a whole lot of things going on at this time,

1:24:25 > 1:24:26early 20th-century,

1:24:26 > 1:24:30now that they have discovered the idea of glands and hormones.

1:24:30 > 1:24:33And the idea of sexual glands and hormones

1:24:33 > 1:24:37to, you know, restore people's sexual potency.

1:24:37 > 1:24:41And the Steinach operation was one of the less out there things,

1:24:41 > 1:24:46because it didn't actually involve transplanting monkey glands.

1:24:46 > 1:24:50It was actually a one-sided vasectomy.

1:24:50 > 1:24:55And the idea was that by cutting off the seminal cells

1:24:55 > 1:24:57and causing them to atrophy,

1:24:57 > 1:25:00the other cells in the testes would proliferate

1:25:00 > 1:25:03and recirculate in the bloodstream

1:25:03 > 1:25:09and restore youth and vitality to the man who had it done.

1:25:09 > 1:25:11And this wasn't just about sexual potency,

1:25:11 > 1:25:14it was also about productivity,

1:25:14 > 1:25:18ability to, you know, in the case of Yeats, to write poetry.

1:25:18 > 1:25:22But, you know, in all sorts of other ways to restore men

1:25:22 > 1:25:27- to full, you know, productive and creative vigour.- Did it work?

1:25:27 > 1:25:28No... Well,

1:25:28 > 1:25:30it was said to work

1:25:30 > 1:25:34but I think the placebo effect is a very strong thing.

1:25:35 > 1:25:39How can I, that girl standing there

1:25:39 > 1:25:45My attention fix on Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics

1:25:45 > 1:25:48Yet here's a travelled man that knows what he talks about

1:25:48 > 1:25:49And there's a politician

1:25:49 > 1:25:50That has both read and thought

1:25:50 > 1:25:53And maybe what they say is true

1:25:53 > 1:25:55Of war and war's alarms

1:25:55 > 1:25:58But O that I were young again

1:25:58 > 1:26:00And held her in my arms.

1:26:03 > 1:26:10Part of the keynote of Yeats' last decade, the 1930s, is frustration.

1:26:10 > 1:26:12Frustration on all sorts of levels.

1:26:12 > 1:26:15There is, in a celebrated way, his sexual frustration,

1:26:15 > 1:26:17his declining potency,

1:26:17 > 1:26:19which he attempts to reverse with this operation.

1:26:19 > 1:26:26His obsessive pursuit of usually pretty willing women

1:26:26 > 1:26:32to reignite some sort of sexual excitement in his life.

1:26:32 > 1:26:35with Edith Heald, with Ethel Mannin,

1:26:35 > 1:26:38even with Dorothy Wellesley, though she was a lesbian,

1:26:38 > 1:26:40with Margot Ruddock.

1:26:40 > 1:26:45And all this, I think, links very much to a sense of mortality.

1:26:45 > 1:26:47He has been seriously ill in the late '20s,

1:26:47 > 1:26:49nearly died in the late '20s.

1:26:49 > 1:26:52The wonderful Byzantium poems come out of his recovery

1:26:52 > 1:26:54from a near death experience.

1:26:54 > 1:26:56And I think when you read them in that light,

1:26:56 > 1:26:57they make a special sense.

1:26:59 > 1:27:01That is no country for old men

1:27:01 > 1:27:04The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees

1:27:04 > 1:27:07Those dying generations at their song

1:27:07 > 1:27:11The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas

1:27:11 > 1:27:17Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

1:27:17 > 1:27:21Whatever is begotten, born, and dies

1:27:21 > 1:27:24Caught in that sensual music

1:27:24 > 1:27:26All neglect

1:27:26 > 1:27:29Monuments of unaging intellect.

1:27:31 > 1:27:33As Yeats' age increased

1:27:33 > 1:27:40and all the vicissitudes that attend old age dropped down on him,

1:27:40 > 1:27:45he was very aware that life was becoming limiting.

1:27:45 > 1:27:50And he wrote to his great friend Olivia Shakespear, he said,

1:27:50 > 1:27:54"My age increases my change. My need for freedom grows."

1:27:54 > 1:27:57And for Yeats in the later years,

1:27:57 > 1:28:02freedom for him was represented by the Mediterranean.

1:28:02 > 1:28:06"The encouraging presence of palm trees," he called it.

1:28:06 > 1:28:09An aged man is but a paltry thing

1:28:09 > 1:28:13A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

1:28:13 > 1:28:17Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

1:28:17 > 1:28:20For every tatter in its mortal dress.

1:28:25 > 1:28:29He needed to come to the south of France to winter here.

1:28:29 > 1:28:33He'd spend summers in England with his various lady friends,

1:28:33 > 1:28:36but also back at home in Rathfarnham in Dublin

1:28:36 > 1:28:38with his wife and the kids,

1:28:38 > 1:28:43though that was increasingly becoming a sort of...

1:28:44 > 1:28:48..nurse and patient relationship.

1:28:48 > 1:28:50Again, the more you read,

1:28:50 > 1:28:53the more your admiration for his wife increases

1:28:53 > 1:28:55and the more he becomes a sort of...

1:28:55 > 1:28:59a contrary oul' fella, really.

1:28:59 > 1:29:00A Drinking Song.

1:29:00 > 1:29:02Wine comes in at the mouth

1:29:02 > 1:29:04And love comes in at the eye

1:29:04 > 1:29:05That's all we shall know for truth

1:29:05 > 1:29:08Before we grow old and die

1:29:08 > 1:29:09I lift the glass to my mouth

1:29:09 > 1:29:10I look at you, and I sigh.

1:29:12 > 1:29:14- That's it?- That's it.

1:29:14 > 1:29:16- OK.- Not bad.

1:29:16 > 1:29:18I like those short ones!

1:29:24 > 1:29:25I think he was...

1:29:27 > 1:29:30..wilful, self-important,

1:29:30 > 1:29:34self obsessed and involved to the nth -

1:29:34 > 1:29:39and maybe, when you read about other great geniuses,

1:29:39 > 1:29:41maybe that's what is required.

1:29:41 > 1:29:45But sadly, with his children,

1:29:45 > 1:29:51with his wife, with his many, many muses...

1:29:53 > 1:29:54..was he capable of love?

1:29:55 > 1:29:57And that's the great irony.

1:29:57 > 1:30:03The man who wrote some of the greatest love poems

1:30:03 > 1:30:08ever imagined in the English language

1:30:08 > 1:30:12possibly actually never understood what it was.

1:30:14 > 1:30:17A most astonishing thing

1:30:17 > 1:30:19Seventy years have I lived

1:30:20 > 1:30:22Hurrah for the flowers of Spring

1:30:22 > 1:30:24For Spring is here again

1:30:25 > 1:30:27Seventy years have I lived

1:30:27 > 1:30:30No ragged beggar man

1:30:30 > 1:30:33Seventy years have I lived

1:30:33 > 1:30:35Seventy years man and boy

1:30:36 > 1:30:39And never have I danced for joy.

1:30:42 > 1:30:43Yeah.

1:30:43 > 1:30:45- Poor fucker.- Mmm.

1:30:48 > 1:30:51Willie's father had once brilliantly said

1:30:51 > 1:30:55that their family tended to die slowly, like great empires.

1:30:56 > 1:31:02WB Yeats died peacefully on 28th January 1939,

1:31:02 > 1:31:05surrounded by his wife and his female friends.

1:31:08 > 1:31:10He understood he was going.

1:31:10 > 1:31:13Almost the very, very last act

1:31:13 > 1:31:17was to change one of the great final poems

1:31:17 > 1:31:20constructed in the last couple of weeks

1:31:20 > 1:31:23from the title His Convictions

1:31:23 > 1:31:25to Under Ben Bulben.

1:31:25 > 1:31:29Knowing what he was doing at the last moment - Under Ben Bulben,

1:31:29 > 1:31:33he is writing himself into, finally,

1:31:33 > 1:31:37the pantheon of great Irish heroes,

1:31:37 > 1:31:40beyond the literary genius, the word genius.

1:31:40 > 1:31:42No, under the pantheon of great Irish heroes.

1:31:44 > 1:31:46Before he died, he instructed George

1:31:46 > 1:31:48to bury him for a year here in Roquebrune

1:31:48 > 1:31:51until the fuss died down back in Ireland

1:31:51 > 1:31:52and then take him home to Sligo.

1:31:55 > 1:31:59They took a plot of land up here for a brief period of time.

1:31:59 > 1:32:00But war broke out,

1:32:00 > 1:32:03so they couldn't bring him back to Sligo after a year.

1:32:03 > 1:32:05Instead, they dug up bones

1:32:05 > 1:32:07when the lease had run out on the ground

1:32:07 > 1:32:10and put them down in that building there,

1:32:10 > 1:32:11where the terracotta tiles are.

1:32:11 > 1:32:13After the war,

1:32:13 > 1:32:16Ireland wanted their great national poet home.

1:32:18 > 1:32:22So the French returned some bones that some people say aren't Yeats,

1:32:22 > 1:32:24they're another fellow called Alfred Hollis

1:32:24 > 1:32:27who had been buried beside him, or some other geezer.

1:32:27 > 1:32:30I mean, I love the joke.

1:32:30 > 1:32:32I love the absurdity, as the Irish do.

1:32:32 > 1:32:34But it is utterly meaningless.

1:32:34 > 1:32:36The pilgrimages to Drumcliff,

1:32:36 > 1:32:39that small little graveyard under Benbulben,

1:32:39 > 1:32:42continue from all over the world. Why?

1:32:42 > 1:32:44Not because of what bones are there

1:32:44 > 1:32:48but because of this great genius.

1:32:50 > 1:32:53Cast your mind on other days

1:32:53 > 1:32:54That we in coming days may be

1:32:54 > 1:32:57Still the indomitable Irishry

1:32:57 > 1:33:00Under bare Ben Bulben's head

1:33:00 > 1:33:01In Drumcliff churchyard

1:33:01 > 1:33:03Yeats is laid

1:33:03 > 1:33:05An ancestor was rector there

1:33:05 > 1:33:08Long years ago, a church stands near

1:33:08 > 1:33:11By the road an ancient Cross

1:33:11 > 1:33:14No marble, no conventional phrase

1:33:14 > 1:33:16On limestone quarried near the spot

1:33:16 > 1:33:19By his command these words are cut

1:33:20 > 1:33:22Cast a cold eye

1:33:22 > 1:33:24On life, on death

1:33:24 > 1:33:26Horseman, pass by!

1:33:29 > 1:33:34In the end, Roy, how important is Yeats to Ireland?

1:33:34 > 1:33:36I think Yeats is of central importance

1:33:36 > 1:33:39to the Irish sense of identity.

1:33:39 > 1:33:42Partly because he so...

1:33:42 > 1:33:47brilliantly and aggressively flouted it in his own lifetime.

1:33:47 > 1:33:50And you get the sense there that Yeats to the very end was,

1:33:50 > 1:33:51as I think Stephen Gwynn said,

1:33:51 > 1:33:54tearing down idols in the marketplace.

1:33:54 > 1:33:57And I think that's a great thing to do.

1:33:57 > 1:34:01There's been far too many idols in the Irish marketplace.

1:34:01 > 1:34:04Yeats devoted his life to tearing them down

1:34:04 > 1:34:06or to questioning them.

1:34:06 > 1:34:08And I think one of the very interesting things

1:34:08 > 1:34:11is how he is impossible to get away from.

1:34:11 > 1:34:14No matter where you look at Irish identity

1:34:14 > 1:34:15and Irish cultural history from,

1:34:15 > 1:34:17he keeps coming up.

1:34:17 > 1:34:18As George Moore said,

1:34:18 > 1:34:21everything begins in Yeats and everything ends in Yeats.

1:34:24 > 1:34:27Ireland, like everywhere, acknowledges its heroes -

1:34:27 > 1:34:29often the wrong ones -

1:34:29 > 1:34:32its loudmouths and its literary geniuses.

1:34:32 > 1:34:36But WB, he's at the top of the heap.

1:34:36 > 1:34:38He's in our DNA.

1:34:38 > 1:34:41His childhood playground in Sligo is now officially Yeats Country

1:34:41 > 1:34:45for thousands of tourists every year.

1:34:45 > 1:34:47Under Benbulben, I even found an illustrator

1:34:47 > 1:34:51who created an entire book just about his appalling love life.

1:34:51 > 1:34:53This is a fantastic piece.

1:34:53 > 1:34:56That was one of the first ones I did.

1:34:56 > 1:34:59"Yeats proposes to Maud the first time."

1:34:59 > 1:35:03You can see all womanhood behind the window jeering!

1:35:03 > 1:35:05I know, it's all terribly symbolic.

1:35:05 > 1:35:07"Maud Gonne has said yes!"

1:35:07 > 1:35:10HE LAUGHS

1:35:10 > 1:35:14But you know what, it's true, he wouldn't have written a note.

1:35:14 > 1:35:19WH Auden said of Yeats, "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."

1:35:19 > 1:35:22But he was our mad old eejit -

1:35:22 > 1:35:24a permanent adolescent and, above all,

1:35:24 > 1:35:29an obsessive about love, life, about Ireland.

1:35:29 > 1:35:33Auden also said he was silly, like us.

1:35:33 > 1:35:37But Yeats wasn't silly when he said, "My weapon is my verse

1:35:37 > 1:35:41"and it takes 50 years for a poet's weapons to influence the issue."

1:35:42 > 1:35:4450 years after WB died,

1:35:44 > 1:35:47we elected a woman as president, a human rights lawyer.

1:35:47 > 1:35:51The power and fear of the Catholic Church collapsed.

1:35:51 > 1:35:55We finally started to see an Ireland based on peace, pluralism

1:35:55 > 1:35:56and respect.

1:35:57 > 1:35:59Now that's Yeats country.

1:36:06 > 1:36:10He is a great historical figure, he is a great radical,

1:36:10 > 1:36:13he's a great revolutionary, he's a great nationalist,

1:36:13 > 1:36:15he's a great patriot.

1:36:16 > 1:36:18Did he succeed?

1:36:20 > 1:36:23From that objective here in Sligo, as a kid,

1:36:23 > 1:36:26did he win in the end what he set out to do?

1:36:26 > 1:36:28Absolutely. Did he transform the country?

1:36:28 > 1:36:31Absolutely. Did he transform literature?

1:36:31 > 1:36:33Absolutely.

1:36:33 > 1:36:36And at the end of his life, he sort of said,

1:36:36 > 1:36:38"What's it all about?"

1:36:38 > 1:36:41And he looked back and in another...

1:36:42 > 1:36:47..literally deathless poem, he asked the question 'What Then?'

1:36:48 > 1:36:53His chosen comrades thought at school he must grow a famous man

1:36:53 > 1:36:55He thought the same and lived by rule

1:36:55 > 1:36:58All his twenties crammed with toil

1:36:59 > 1:37:01"What then?" sang Plato's ghost

1:37:01 > 1:37:03"What then?"

1:37:03 > 1:37:05Everything he wrote was read

1:37:05 > 1:37:09After certain years he won sufficient money for his need

1:37:09 > 1:37:11Friends that have been friends indeed

1:37:11 > 1:37:14"What then?" sang Plato's ghost

1:37:14 > 1:37:15"What then?"

1:37:15 > 1:37:18All his happier dreams came true

1:37:18 > 1:37:21A small old house, wife, daughter, son

1:37:21 > 1:37:24Grounds where plum and cabbage grew

1:37:24 > 1:37:26Poets and wits about him drew

1:37:26 > 1:37:29"What then?" sang Plato's ghost

1:37:29 > 1:37:30"What then?"

1:37:31 > 1:37:34The work is done, grown old he thought

1:37:34 > 1:37:36According to my boyish plan

1:37:36 > 1:37:38Let the fools rage

1:37:38 > 1:37:39I swerved in naught

1:37:39 > 1:37:42Something to perfection brought

1:37:42 > 1:37:45But louder sang that ghost

1:37:45 > 1:37:47"What then?"

1:37:47 > 1:37:48Well, the answer is Ireland.

1:37:51 > 1:37:55# I walk beside you

1:37:55 > 1:37:59# Through the world today

1:37:59 > 1:38:02# While dreams and songs

1:38:02 > 1:38:06# And lovers bless your way

1:38:06 > 1:38:09# I look into your eyes

1:38:09 > 1:38:13# And hold your hand

1:38:13 > 1:38:16# I'll walk beside you

1:38:16 > 1:38:21# Through the golden land. #