another bloody and disabling myth. On the one hand, ëEaster 1916í
expresses a profound anxiety over how national representation in
poetry can transform political realities and thereby perpetuate more
violence. On the other hand, it is a testimony to how political realities
and the myths of Irish nationalist politics have the power to
overwhelm poetry.
Comparably, an earlier poem entitled ëTo Ireland in the Coming
Timesí from The Rose (1893) ëponders wellí ëthings discovered in the
deep/ Where only bodyís laid asleep.í For inspiration, the poet goes
back to the dead and digs in a crypt of corpses and a subconscious
state of dream. This is a ghostly poem built around death and ëfaeries,
dancing under the mooní. Ireland is commemorated in the poem as a
ëDruid land, a Druid tune!í where the poet ësang to sweeten Irelandís
wrongí. Here, Ireland is part of a dream world or dark unconscious
that is excavated by the poet. ëTo Ireland in the Coming Timesí dwells
on a past ëdreamí of Ireland and ends in the past tense as a tribute to
Ireland in the ëcoming timesí or future. The past must be dug up in
order to create a future since, for Yeats, tradition informs a sense of
the future. In view of an Irish nationalist agenda, the poem invents a
Romantic image of Ireland that stirs the poetís heart to write a song
for the people. Naming Davis, Mangan and Ferguson, the poet calls up
other poets and Protestant figures within Irish nationalism whose use
of political allegory in their work provided a touchstone for
Revivalists.^15 Using the loaded images of rose, blood and Mother
Ireland, these poems problematize the desire to build a national
literature and redefine Irish territory on Yeatsís own terms, whereby
national representation is caught between the past and the future.
The way in which Yeatsís poetry finds itself caught between past
and future can be compared with Heaney. To foreground this a little, it
is worth drawing on work by Hannah Arendt from Between Past and
Future (1958) whence the title of this chapter originates. Arendt
explains how the past
15 Thomas Osborne Davis (1814ñ45) was a Protestant barrister, poet and graduate
of Trinity College Dublin, and one of the founders of The Nation. Sir Samuel
Ferguson was another Protestant poet, while James Clarence Mangan translated
and rewrote ëRÛisÌn Dubhí.