nationality, no great nationality without literature.í^9 Heaney writes
that
in the West of the country, at Ballylee, there is the Norman tower occupied by
W.B. Yeats as a deliberate symbol of his poetic effort, which was to restore the
spiritual values and magical world that Spenserís armies and language had
destroyed.^10A starting point therefore is to explore the relation between poetry and
cultural nationalism in Yeatsís poems ëThe Rose Treeí, ëEaster 1916í
and ëTo Ireland in the Coming Timesí.^11 These poems can be
problematized in terms of what Declan Kiberd identifies as the
audacity of Yeatsís project to invent an ideal Ireland and breathe it
into being, and can be compared with the effects of Heaneyís poetry.^12
ëThe Rose Treeí, from the collection Michael Robartes and the
Dancer (1921), with its jaunty rhythms and rhymes is part of the
context and popular language of Irish folklore and song, and it reads
as a traditional celebration of blood sacrifice. In the conversation
between James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, the latter concludes that
since ëall the wellsí of Ireland ëare parched awayí: ëThereís nothing
but our own red blood/ Can make a right Rose Tree.í According to
this story, the rose of Ireland must be restored or ëwateredí by the
blood of those who are willing to fight and die for her, and only in this
way will the rose (Ireland) become green (a nation). Ireland is seduced
by a history of ëwrongsí or colonialism but also by the words of the
poet. David Cairns and Shaun Richards argue that in Joseph Plunkettís
poem ëThe Little Black Rose Shall Be Red At Lastí there is a
comparable meshing of patriotism and the sexual where the poet
9 William Butler Yeats, Uncollected Prose I, ed. J. Fraynes (New York: 1970),
p.104. Also cited by Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (Notre
Dame: University Press, 1986), p.142.
10 Heaney, Frontiers of Writingí, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures,
(London: Faber, 1995), p.199.
11 William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan,
1933, repr.1971). ëThe Rose Treeí, p.206 and ëEaster 1916í, pp.202ñ5 from
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921); ëTo Ireland in the Coming Timesí,
pp.56ñ8 from The Rose (1893).
12 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation,
(London: Cape, 1995), p.202.