Irish Surprises For Shamrock Week

Last September, when got up the gumption to start this blog, I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a place where I highlighted well know poems, rather contributed to writing again, highlighting a wide variety of poets that would get me excited about writing again. While I take inventory on that, I am happy about the variety of things I’ve been interested in and how in six months, my poet’s ears are back on the ground. For me, that feels pretty good.

That said, this week some people may celebrate St. Patrick’s day and I’m going to get back to my Yeats. Each post this week will highlight a Yeats work (long or short), from obscure to well-known and I’ll offer up my thoughts, something I’ve wanted to do since I last had time to contemplate these things.  And there may be more than one post a day.  Yeats will not be the only one celebrated.

Let us start with a poem in which Yeats talks about frustration in his work as a theatre director. That would be the Abbey Theatre, he founded in 1903 just off the Liffey. The Abbey was little more than a revived shithole when I lived in Dublin and went there several times and I’m quite positive it was even more of a shithole when Yeats founded it. Today, I’m told it’s been revived again as Ireland’s National Theatre. Good on them-- when I go back I hope the bus stop out front isn’t vandalized.  (Judging from it's omission of any sort of current photograph on the website, I think that probably hasn't happened yet.)

This poem transcends professions, and I’m quite certain everyone who has ever had a job or run a household can relate to this sentiment. Sometimes things that appear difficult are complicated by knuckleheads bungling the process or is missing a variable here and there. Here Yeats is able to write about his day’s/week’s frustration in running the Abbey Theatre while making it so personal, it’s no wonder he had problems with his collaborator. First the poem:

The fascination of what's difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

Yeats wrote this during the production of the play “The Unicorn from the Stars,” and it’s presumed that the colt ailing his heart was titular unicorn and contributor Lady Gregory. To what extent we’ll never know, but for everyone out there starting their Monday work week, let us note that the fast pace of information flow and “give it to me now” culture we work in isn’t new to us. Yeats was clearly annoyed and ready to pull the plug. Let’s see if we, in our various professions can make it this one excellent Monday, and move on and reassess where Yeats may be on Tuesday.