The Dream Songs
aren’t presented in chronological order. This one was written in September (as
he says) 1966 before the subsequent committal to Grange Gorman, the hospital
that was so awful he begged his wife to sign the papers that would let him out.
He spent about two weeks there in late January and early February of 1967. But
that was a few months down the road. Early on during his Irish stay he was
drinking and writing nonstop. He arrived in August and by mid-November,
according to Mariani, his biographer, he had written 75 Dream Songs. This one
sets up an intriguing parallel: The Easter Rising of 1916 and “Henry’s war.”
Yeats had written one of his great poems about the Easter Rising, “Easter, 1916,”
about when the Irish took advantage of the chaos of WWI, and possibly even hoping
for German assistance, broke into rebellion. The British came down on it
quickly and crushed it, after heavy fighting and many hundreds of casualties on both sides. A number of the organizers were tried and were executed
in May, as B. notes. He names two of the same men Yeats named in his poem.
Yeats and this poem clearly had to have been on B.’s mind as he was composing
DS 309.
Unlike Yeats, B. doesn’t really have the glory, sacrifice
and honor of Irish patriots foremost in mind. Yeats writes, “Now and in time
to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible
beauty is born.” B. sees their motivation as “dewy with phantastic hope” and
the real point of the poem is that his “war”—his struggle with literary legacy
and The Dream Songs—is just as dewy
and just as phantastic. There’s a subtle pun in the misspelling of “fantastic”
of course, his word a portmanteau of “fantastic” and “phantasm” or “phantasmagoric.”
All three words have the same root, I think, but those ph- words have
connotations of make-believe, fantasy, changeability, and even deception. It’s
his way of inferring that the Easter Rising was a bit too dewy-eyed to ever be
successful. With the horrifying business of WWI unfolding, it’s not at all surprising
that the British dealt with the uprising so quickly and so ruthlessly. They
couldn’t afford to be messing around. Of course, they could have granted the
Irish their independence quickly too, but their outrage over the timing of the
uprising must have been extreme. The figures behind international power
politics don’t often extend empathetic understanding toward revolutionaries,
especially in war time. (There might likely be legions of Irish people getting
bothered with me right now—if legions were ever to read this that is. But I don’t
mean to offend.) We know historically that their pleas were indeed “headed
toward the night.” The real point is that Henry has dewy-eyed dreams for his
Dream Songs too, but he appears to be writing from a mood where his hopes seem
every bit as distant and phantastic as the Easter Rising. The leaders were shot
for their involvement, and Yeats and countless other Irish bards I’m sure have
come to recognize them as martyrs for it. From any kind of historical distance,
their cause seems just. But their timing was not good. Thus, martyrs for Irish independence from the
despised British. B. ends the poem with that powerful word, “martyrs,” and it
doesn’t seem gratuitous in the case of the Irish patriots he and Yeats name.
But B. has arranged things so that the glow of their martyrdom reflects on him as
well. What is he martyred to? Well, his “war,” whatever we might think that to
mean. It’s actually a more positive conception than the Faustian bargain I’ve
noted before. Ultimately it’s more positive—the Irish cause was a right one.
Even if the rising was put down badly, something was gained. It prepared the
way for eventual Irish independence, which was fought for and won as soon as
the Great War on the continent was finally over. The implication is that, while
maybe foolish, ill-timed or doomed, The
Dream Songs were a right cause too. Right causes in this brutish world are
always doomed, and as B. insists, all human
pleas actually are headed for the night. Doesn’t mean you stop making the plea,
because there is honor in that, but more, the very intent is more important
than the result. Such grand, doomed gestures pre-empt results, making a difference
simply by their very existence.
I have nothing to say of value on this DS. Instead, I want a T-shirt that says, "I hate these English cigarettes."
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