Ancestral Houses

The Exhibition

Meditations in Time of Civil War

Foreword to the exhibition catalogue by Susan O’Keefe, Director of The Yeats Society.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty;

The gift of poetry is its capacity to shake, comfort and question the world in which we live. It has done so since humans discovered a way to make, and make sense of, written marks; messages which endure through the ages.

 William Butler Yeats made a conscious decision to be part of that grand tradition, to be a poet, a man of marks, somehow divining as a teenager that poetry would endure as his medium, able to embrace and examine those mortal challenges, even as they changed during his life. And in 1922, when he wrote Meditations in Time of Civil War it was a time for change, for the poet and for Ireland. He had married five years earlier and now had two children. The horrors of World War I had ended but their shadow remained.  And Ireland’s moving, from colony of the British Empire to a nascent republic, was turbulent and traumatic, raw and real. As only civil war can be.

Of all changes, bloodshed creates a deep mark; the moment between life and death. Yet Yeats never wrote directly about the years of bloodshed he had lived through, never permitting himself to appear to glorify war or sentimentalise death. Instead, this lengthy work, made up of seven pieces, is a challenging distillation, drawn from the changes confronting him, while rooted in the constant questions of human frailty, human error and the unchanging passage of time.

In these seven interlocking poems, the poet passes from the certainty of the world he knew and understood and the certainty he had created for himself, to a new, more fragile, speculative state, where familiar symbols and realities now have no place or resonance. Within this, he weaves his first-hand account of the bridge at his home, the tower, Thoor Ballylee being blown up in the civil war; his kitchen flooded as a result. Yeats also tells of the tower itself, of its sense of permanence and endurance as he climbs the winding stair to the top to see the ‘mist that is like blown snow’ – the immediate reminder once again of the contradicting impermanence of life.

No surprise then that this poem collection has borne such a broad and deep range of interpretation. Each artist has meditated on the work, seeking out the line, the words, a picture or symbol to create a new journey through the complexity of thoughts woven by the master poet. And a new medium in which to express that discernment.

Each work draws out and distils something precious; a fragment, a flash of colour, a new longing, a silence or a vague memory. And together, their collective work is a gift to us the viewers, of new ways of seeking old truths, a new set of marks; hieroglyphs from this age, bearing witness to the marks that went before, all integral to the story of our being.

Susan O’Keeffe, Director, Yeats Society Sligo