“Portrait of W.B. Yeats,” English Photographer, ca. 20th century. Photograph: Private Collection. The Bridgeman Art Library.

W.B. Yeats’s Rehabilitation of the Dead

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an “apparition” as, “The action of appearing or becoming visible,” and, “The supernatural appearance of invisible beings.” Setting aside that most would consider an apparition to be a ghost, that is, the spirit of a dead person, it is possible to find an interesting connection between these two definitions offered by the OED. "Apparitions" often appear in literary works produced during the Irish Renaissance, and none more prominently than those of William Butler Yeats, perhaps the most important voice of that cultural and political movement. It helps that Yeats considered himself an avowed spiritualist, holding membership in several occult societies throughout the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. He was also deeply involved in the politics of his day, writing and speaking prolifically on Ireland's independence and the place of its people in the broader world. It is no surprise then that Yeats seemed fond of blending these two passions, spiritualism and politics. In examining two works, the poem "To A Shade" and the play The Words Upon the Window Pane, we can see how Yeats conjures the ghosts of long-gone Irish political figures to redress wrongs he perceives to have been done upon them in life and to champion his own beliefs on the fate of Ireland for the living. This reveals Yeats’s particular use of a literary apparition: Summoning the appearance of a supernatural being to make their true nature visible to an audience.

“To A Shade” was published by Yeats in 1914. The apparition in the poem—or in this case, the “shade”—is that of Charles Parnell, an Irish nationalist politician active in the late-eighteenth century who supported reforming land laws as a necessary step toward Home Rule, a move met with considerable derision from the public. Parnell’s ghost returns to earth in the first stanza, and the speaker ponders the reason for his sudden apparition—perhaps either to look upon his monument or take in the sea. Whatever the reason, the speaker warns Parnell, “Let these content you and be gone again; / For they are at their old tricks yet.” (Yeats). “They,” in this case, are a scornful Irish people, still just as contemptuous in the speaker’s view all these decades later, and “their old tricks” are the public’s continued opposition to reforming the country’s land laws. In the second stanza, we see this theme repeated with the line, “And insult heaped upon him for his pains.”. Again, in the third and final stanza, the speaker urges the ghost, “Go, unquiet wanderer,” before finally warning him in the closing lines that little has changed: “You had enough of sorrow before death – / Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.” By the political commentary offered by “To A Shade,” Yeats views the actions of the Irish public, both then and at the time of his writing, as a betrayal of their own best interests in the fight for independence, and a betrayal of a man willing to fight for it. The best Yeats can do, it seems, is to conjure Parnell’s spirit, as if to reassure him that he was right all along and that "wise" men are still fighting the same battle long after his death.

Whereas “To A Shade” is light on outright occultism, Yeats’s 1930 play, The Words Upon the Window Pane, is unabashedly spooky by comparison, a welcome embrace of the writer’s fascination with the spiritual world and all its unknown facets. The play is set in a seedy Dublin boarding house once owned by Irish political essayist Jonathan Swift and his lover, Esther Johnson, whom he referred to as "Stella," which is to be the venue for a séance conjuring Swift from beyond the grave. The cast are members of the Dublin Spiritualists' Association, except for John Corbet, a Cambridge doctoral student writing on Swift. Of his purpose in studying, Corbet boasts: “I hope to prove that in Swift’s day men of intellect reached the height of their power—the greatest position they ever attained in society and the State, that everything great in Ireland and in our character, in what remains of our architecture, comes from that day; that we have kept its seal longer than England.” (Yeats). This is a shockingly broad and arguably unprovable thesis. However, it is worth wondering if Corbet is meant to serve as a mouthpiece for Yeats's views on politics and “men of intellect” (among which he certainly saw himself) in the present day and how far they had slid since Swift’s time. Corbet speaks on how Swift considered the Roman Senate to be an ideal form of government, telling us that “he foresaw the ruin to come, Democracy, Rousseau, the French Revolution; that is why he hated the common run of men.” Just as Yeats placed his arm around the shoulder of Charles Parnell’s ghost in “To A Shade,” consoling Parnell for how cruelly the Irish public had treated him in life, so too now does Yeats seem to be conjuring the ghost of an Irish political figure whose views were—if we accept Yeats’s argument—far ahead of his age. It was the “common run of men” in Swift’s time who created the chaotic pit of Democracy that enabled the Irish public to scuttle Parnell’s efforts to achieve Home Rule. Later, when the séance reaches its right, Mrs. Henderson serves as a vessel through which Swift’s spirit can speak. She says, in his voice, “O God, hear the prayer of Jonathan Swift, that afflicted man, and grant that he may leave to posterity nothing but his intellect that came to him from Heaven.” Again, like Parnell, Swift is presented as afflicted and aggrieved, a man graced with a mind bestowed from a higher power.

We are left with the question: Is it right that Yeats summons the dead in his work to use them as avatars for his own beliefs? Perhaps it is, if only because Yeats summons only those with whom he agrees. His conjuring of these apparitions is merely a rhetorical literary device to further a political viewpoint. Charles Parnell was scorned for his efforts to reform land laws, an egregious wrong in Yeats's eyes; Jonathan Swift lived in an enlightened age of idealism, an age Yeats admired and strived to emulate in Ireland. Did Yeats see himself as the Swift or Parnell of his day, a man of higher intellect trying to shepherd the common run of Irish men and women to a better, more prosperous future? The evidence suggests it. Yeats seems to view the common Irish as naïve children who cannot govern themselves; they do not know what is good for them. His natural aristocratic bent as a well-connected member of the Anglo-Irish is on full display in these works, and he conjures the apparitions of Anglo-Irish men before him as a crutch to make his argument feel more valid.

Works Cited

"apparition, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2019, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/9527.

Foster, Roy. “Philosophy and a Little Passion: Roy Foster on WB Yeats and Politics.” The Irish Times, 10 June 2015, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/philosophy-and-a-little-passion-roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-politics-1.2241504.

“Historic Figures: Charles Parnell (1846 - 1891).” BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/parnell_charles.shtml.

“Magic, Myth and Secrecy - WB Yeats and the Occult.” Independent.ie, The Irish Independent, 8 May 2015, https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/wb-150/magic-myth-and-secrecy-wb-yeats-and-the-occult-31207213.html.

Yeats, William Butler. “To A Shade.” Selected Poems And Four Plays of William Butler Yeats, edited by M.L. Rosenthal., 2nd ed., Scribner, 1996.

Yeats, William Butler. Words Upon the Windowpane. Selected Poems And Four Plays of William Butler Yeats, edited by M.L. Rosenthal., 2nd ed., Scribner, 1996.