A recurring theme in Yeats’s works is fixation with time. In fact, six of his poems incorporate dates into their titles: “September 1913,” “On Those That Hated The Playboy of the Western World, 1907,” “Easter 1916”, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Coole Park, 1929” and “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931.” Especially interesting is “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” the only poem whose entire title is a date and one that was actually composed in 1921 with the end of the Irish War of Independence in sight. Though the worst of the violence is behind him, Yeats sets the poem at the end of the world. Here, Yeats is haunted by a very specific kind of universal tragedy. Through its apocalyptic diction, loose-strung structure, and lack of transitions, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” mirrors Yeats’s troubled thoughts as the threat of civilization’s collapse draws near.
Yeats employs ominous diction to match the impending doomsday. This new world is “dragon-ridden” and infested with unimaginable evil (Yeats 25). Here, murderers run free with impunity and even the personification of entities such as “dream” and “night” find themselves overpowered by “nightmare” and “sweat[ing] with terror” (26, 29). It is worth noting that the very guards who had protected civilization in the past are now killing defenseless mothers. Here, the chaos and senseless violence cross over to the realm of tragedy. The mother represents the death of all society because humanity can no longer give birth to new philosophy, art, or culture. The tragedy is not the fact that all the “ornamental bronze,” “famous ivories,” and “golden grasshoppers” are gone, but the realization that “ingenious lovely things” cannot be created again. It is this realization that makes Yeats’s world collapse in Part VI, starting with the “[v]iolence upon the roads: violence of horses” (105). The apocalypse, which stood suspended for much of the poem, picks up at the end: “All break and vanish, and evil gathers head” (109). Jahan Ramazani writes in his essay, “Tragic Joy and the Sublime,” that with this imagery, Yeats “sets in motion the circle of Coleridgean formalism” in which a whole work cannot be disassembled into pieces and subsequently “breaks it apart” (Ramazani 167).
Yeats is not content with breaking roads and dismantling Coleridgean formalism. He also sets the structure of “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen” on very shaky foundation. David B. McWhirter describes the poem’s form as one that “seems always on the verge of collapsing into a loosely strung-together sequence of short lyrics” (McWhirter 44). This intensifies the experience of reading the poem. The reason why we are caught off guard while trying to follow the sharp turns and sudden leaps in the poem is because there are no bridges connecting its different parts. Nothing, especially not “the guardsmen’s drowsy chargers,” prepares us for the “nightmare [that] rides upon sleep” (Yeats 24-26). With its narrator convinced that there is nothing more to say and that "[m]an is in love and loves what vanishes," the poem itself begins to vanish and retract to an inconclusive state (42). The leap it makes before jumping onto the next section is no more definite, however.
With the lack of transitions, the contrasts between different sections of the poem are even more jarring. With their bridges destroyed, each of the six sections stands apart but stands tall. Part I, written in the ottava rima form with eight 11-syllable lines, laments the loss of antiquity with significant formality and stateliness; Part II employs meter and line lengths as complex as the metaphor of the dancers “enwound[ing] a shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth” (49-50); Part III reads like the quiet contemplations of “a man in his own secret meditation […] lost amid the labyrinth” (65-66). The single quatrain in Part IV destroys the interrupts the 8-line pattern and calmness of this meditation with a violent “shriek of pleasure.” The caustic imperatives in Part V (“Come let us mock at the great […] at the wise […] at the good”) turn to a more passive prophetic observation (“All break and vanish, and evil gathers head […] wind drops, dust settles”) by Part VI (80, 85,90, 111, 117). The lasting effect of this structure and form is disjunctive and unsettling. As we try to find a single identity, we are overwhelmed by an unresolved multiplicity of voices. There is great tragedy in the fact that one cannot decide on a single voice to listen to or speak in even as the world ends. The inner structures that make up our identities are collapsing as well. McWhirter asserts that the “precipitate movement” between the verses “gives us the feeling that the poem is in some way dissociated from itself, at odds with its own intentions” and he concludes that “the poem seems to lack any stable identity behind its constantly shifting form” (McWhirter 46). Curiously enough, many critics have said the same thing about its poet.
As Ireland’s most famous poet, dramatist, critic and a Senator under the Free State constitution, Yeats was a man of many identities. It is because his identity and his work are so open to interpretation that Yeats has been “variously claimed by nationalists, occultists, modernists, Romantics, and postcolonialists” (Brewer). Particularly interesting is seeing Yeats’s work through a postcolonialist lens, especially his poems written during the Irish revolutionary period. When the Irish War of Independence began in early 1919, in the middle of other uprisings against colonial powers worldwide, civilization did seem to be falling apart. Edward Said, cultural critic and a founder of contemporary post-colonial studies, argues in “Yeats and Decolonization” for an understanding of Yeats as an “indisputably great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the restorative vision of a people suffering under the domination of an offshore power” (Said 69). Said also views the nostalgic elements in Yeats’s preoccupation with “ideal community” and with history as “the wrong turns, the overlap, the . . . occasionally glorious moment,” as characteristics that “all the poets and men of letters of decolonization” share (73). It makes sense, therefore, that the beginning of “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen” laments over the loss of “ingenious lovely things” that originated in a time before modern imperialism. Yeats’s tone turns bitter realizing the foolishness of thinking “that the worst rogues and rascals had died out” while there was still a “Parliament and king [who] [t]hought that unless a little powder burned, the trumpeters might burst with trumpeting (Yeats 16, 20-22). Putting Yeats’s “sustained anti-British sentiment” and identification with “the struggle for release” following the establishment of an Irish Free State into perspective, it follows that he views colonialism as one of the catalysts to society’s eventual demise (Said 83).
Another interesting postcolonial approach to Yeats is found in Declan Kiberd’s 1995 comparison of modern world literature, Inventing Ireland. Kiberd explores the connection between literature from a “parent country” and that from a “cultural colony” and argues that Yeats, like other authors from colonized nations, performs a “search for a national style.” Furthermore, Kiberd asserts that this search is also a journey for one’s own style, voice, and identity motivated by “self-conquest” (Kiberd 120). Kiberd argues that for Yeats, “the decolonization of the body was a task almost as important as the decolonization of the native culture” (127). Keeping this in mind, it is critical to explore whether the lack of stable identity that comes from the poem’s constantly shifting form is the result of being denied a national and cultural identity over centuries of colonial oppression. This has interesting implications for Yeats’s choice of structure and elimination of transitions. As we read through the poem, we follow the poet’s search for his own style.
The unresolved multiplicity of voices and the disjunctive effect mirror a perpetual internal crisis as the poem repeatedly destroys itself before building itself again. McWrirter notes that the only freedom we have from this conflict is in the transitional voids that provide "a place of silence, a place on which the poet falls back in exhaustion after grappling with an image and from which he gathers strength" (54). This pattern of expansion and contractions is very much intentional, perhaps as a way for Yeats to create "his own kind of self-destructive art" (McWrirter 52). Yeats's search for new forms of expression is motivated by the same catharsis sought out in ancient Greece. The scenes of destruction and the destruction of each part of the poem are a way of purging the emotions and anxieties that plague our narrator. There does not seem to be any escape from this turmoil, but there is respite and renewal in the silent void. Though it may appear through the catastrophic diction and volatile form in “Nineteen Hundred Nineteen” that Yeats is only haunted by the threat of civilization’s collapse, the true tragedy is in the uncertainty of ever truly finding a national and personal identity in the rare, ephemeral moments of silence. Yet, the influence Yeats has had on authors as diverse as Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, and Raja Rao, who have each, in turn, defined identity for indigenous people and people of color in new ways, suggests that “self-conquest” is very much possible in these brief moments of knowledge. There is indeed “comfort to be found,” in how “man is in love” with “what vanishes.”
Works Cited
Brewer, Elizabeth. "Yeats, W.B. and Postcolonialism." Postcolonial Studies @ Emory (2012): n. pag. Web. This is a helpful guide from the Postcolonial and Minority Studies Program at Emory University that offers a critical overview of Yeats's work and on various major critical contributors on the question of Yeats and postcolonialism. The bibliography led me to other texts for further reading, ranging from Jahan Ramazani’s “Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet?” to Seamus Deane’s Celtic Revivals.
Doggett, Rob. "Writing out (Of) Chaos: Constructions of History in Yeats's ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ and ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War.’" Twentieth Century Literature 47.2 (Summer, 2001): 137-68. Doggett discusses in his article the problems that arise from viewing Yeats work from a historical standpoint and instead argues that Yeats is "exercising his 'one duty' to rewrite history" (138). Furthermore, Doggett argues that Yeats's work "challenges former and current nationalist narratives of history" that "helped to perpetuate a 'colonialist mentality' even after the establishment of the Free State” (139).
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. 115-30. Print. Here, Kiberd rejects the notion that artists such as Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern “to the extent that they made themselves European" and instead he contends that the Irish experience was a “dramatic instance of experimental modernity.” Kiberd explores the connection between literature from a “parent country” and that from a “cultural colony” and argues that Yeats, like other authors from colonized nations, performs a “search for a national style” for the sake of “self-conquest” and a “decolonization of the body”(120, 127).
McWhirter, David B. "The Rhythm of the Body in Yeats' ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’." College Literature 13.1 (1986): 44-54. McWhirter explores in this essay a central aspect of Yeats' modernity- "the development of a style that increasingly suppresses transitional material," focusing especially on ""The Tower," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "Vacillation," and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." (44). On the latter, he acknowledges the "implications of a strategy that virtually eliminates transitions," and describes how each section of the poem "projects a distinctive tone." He credits these characteristics for creating a poem that "seems to lack any stable identity behind its constantly shifting form" (46).
Ramazani, R. Jahan. "Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime." PMLA 104. 2 (1989): 163-77. This secondary work inspired the focus my paper takes on Yeats's view of tragedy in "Nineteen Hundred Nineteen." Ramazani uses Yeats own term, "tragic joy," to argue that the "sublime transforms the painful spectacle of destruction and death into a joyful assertion of human freedom and transcendence" (163). Also focuses on classifications of Yeats's common "sublime modes -- the curse, the prophecy, and the apocalypse" (164).
Reid, B. L. "Yeats and Tragedy." The Hudson Review 11. 3 (1958): 391-410. Print. This article offers a more general commentary the elements of tragedy in Yeats's poetry. He argues that the poems "draw a design substantially identical to the design of the Dionysus-mystery which is the primitive original of tragedy." Reid then hypothesizes that this is a kind of "ideological configuration" that "ordains the great 'normative' pattern of serious human thought" (392). I find it interesting how he uses this thesis to later conclude how "[u]ltimately Yeats's location of the roots of this emotion in 'generic' tragedy, in one's very sense of life, of 'all men's fate'" (400).
Said, Edward W. "Yeats and Decolonization." Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. By Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Seamus Deane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1990. 69-94. Print. This volume is comprised of three essays("Irony and Commitment," "Modernism and Imperialism," and "Yeats and Decolonization") that were each originally published as individual pamphlets. The third essay, written by Edward Said, explores the question of viewing Yeats as a postcolonialist author. Said asserts that Yeats is not only an an “indisputably great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the restorative vision of a people suffering under the domination of an offshore power” but also a individual whose ideals reflect those of “all the poets and men of letters of decolonization” (69, 73)
Yeats, W. B. "Nineteen Hundred Nineteen." The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956. 206-10. Print. This is the primary work that I am focusing on in this paper. I was drawn to this poem from its very first line: "Many ingenious lovely things are gone." Though its title and its allusions to ancient history evokes the past, lines like "Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?" comment more on an inescapable, everyday kind of tragedy (42-43).