Coole Park

Staging and the Body of Irish Children: Memory and Childhood in Yeats’s Poems such as “The Stolen Child” and documented in Me & Nu by Lady Gregory’s Granddaughter

The grounds at Coole Park played a significant role in the lives of W.B. Yeats and Anne Gregory, Lady Gregory’s granddaughter. The woods provided stability and a safe haven for creative play for Yeats and Anne. Yeats was nurtured by the estate’s surroundings, as frequent visitor, which helped him to be a prolific writer. Anne and her sister Catherine (‘Nu’) could avoid their verbally abusive mother by escaping into the gardens and wood on Coole Park. The woods, gardens, and lake were all consuming factor in Yeats and Anne’s lives.

Growing up with nature at her doorstep, Anne as an adult does a splendid job capturing her childhood adventures in her widely read book Me & Nu. The success of the book would have at the very least given Anne a sense of independence. She was a woman able to support herself, even if she would be provided for by Lady Gregory. Yeats, as author, playwright, and poet would have relied on his retreats to Coole to produce works that were financially successful.

Anne and Nu observed Yeats in and out of nature at the Coole estate. They found him uncultured in both areas. They agreed he lacked manners, observing this during his many long hiatus at their grandma’s home. Yeats desired to civilized and to fit the role of a poet, as Anne describes him wearing “his pince nez attached to the broad black silk ribbon” and “his habit of running his fingers through the great lock of hair that fell forward over his forehead” (Gregory 29), and wearing his large signet ring on his pinky finger. Anne and Nu were not out of the wood when it came to their social performances. Their mother found just about all their behavior unacceptable and heathen-based. And thus, Yeats and Anne found total solace in Lady Gregory’s environment.

Lady Gregory is considered one of the first great modern folklorists. Her book Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland is seen as a masterpiece of folkloric literature. She and Yeats traveled around Galway and Sligo among other areas of west Ireland to collect local tales and folklore. The benefit of visiting these counties together was that it was easier to record what they heard if there were two people present. She did not have to leave Coole to find Irish gems. In Me & Nu Anne describes two storytellers who came by for conversation, a piper and basket weaver. She writes: “Grandma got a lot of stories from Curly the Piper who came down to Coole at regular intervals, and sat on the seat outside the hall window for hours . . . [Grandma] listened to him talking and playing his pipes [ . . . ] I remember how amused Grandma was at his description” (Gregory 115). The basket maker was a character who, according to Anne talked insistently. She believed that he was the better storyteller of the two who told her Grandma stories. She and Nu were much more engaged in his stories than Curly, since he ‘obviously’ lacked the ability to play his pipes and narrative at the same time. They also favored the basket maker because of the involved stories he told and his basket weaving skill, which he taught them. These stories that Lady Gregory collected at Coole became important to Anne because she wanted to document the way she had observed her Grandma collecting these tale of their homeland. This was also vital to Yeats in his interest in keeping Ireland’s history and heritage recorded.

Yeats was “intent on developing antirealistic dramatic modes . . . based on traditional Irish themes” (Bradford vii) that he and his friend collected. One of these themes is mentioned in Carole Silver’s article, “On the Origin of Fairies: Victorians, Romantics, and Folk Belief,” there was a belief in the Aran Islands “that the fairies have a tenth of all the produce of the islands and store it in the rocks” (136). For this sacrifice, the fairies would then reward the people with food in times of great need. Contemporary artist George Callahan’s paintings, of the two men in bright orange boots stepping on the small, round, grey rocks bringing (or taking out) the boat, and of the fishermen processing the surplus of fish, are two visuals for how this idea continues to be ingrained in the Irish people and how manifests itself today in visual images. Yeats felt it was important and vital for the history of Ireland to keep myths like these alive.

According to Curtis B. Bradford in his book Yeats at Work, Yeats found these stories intriguing and sometimes difficult to replicate in his work; “Writing was always difficult for Yeats” (vii). He went “through many drafts . . . until hammering [of his poem, play, story, or essay] had worked it into shape” (vii). Anne plays lightly with this tells of the time when she and her sister decided to write a play, inspired by a visit to the Abbey Theatre. She writes: “as we were working in a theatre and had lots of paper and two pencils each, it would be a very good idea to write a special play [. . .] Actually apart from the opening scene, which was Sally Allgood standing on a rock, saying ‘Who is that rowing on my lake?’ we didn’t get very far” (106). When they spot Yeats there, she recalls how he would address them with “‘Good morning Anne, Good morning Catherine,’ and move majestically on” (105). This is a great example of a child’s no nonsense perspective on what an adult author sometimes finds to be a torturous profession.

When Yeats reads his poem dedicated to Anne she says he read it in his ‘humming voice’. She explains that the house would fill with his voice ‘humming’ for long period of time. This registered as the time it took him to write his verse. His technique involved humming the rhythm of a verse repeatedly and then recording the words. Anne recalls Grandma telling her that because of his strategy his poems were so good to read out loud.

In the National Library of Ireland catalog for their Yeats exhibition, there is a quote from the poet’s A general introduction for my work: “‘I have spent all my life in clearing out poetry of every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for the ear . . . ‘Write for the ear,’ I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience’”. This falls along the path the fairies originated in the Irish tradition. Even in Me & Nu, Anne mentions a place on the way down to one of the Coole gardens where the girls decorate a cave like a room in the house. They decide that their “mansion” must have a fancy entrance, and so they dug up daffodils and replanted them in the spaces they marked. The next morning the flowers were wilted—and they were devastated. They were about to cry when their Grandma came by and said “what a wonderful idea making an avenue like that . . . like a fairy road” (35). For Yeats and Anne, the mystical is always on the surface, even in the everyday events at Coole.

Even though Bernard Shaw was the girl’s favorite visitor to Coole because he played with them, Anne includes many descriptions of Yeats physical presence to give a fascinating reconstruction of an image of Yeats. Of course, Yeats was the most frequent guest at Lady Gregory’s home. One thrilling comparison of Yeats to nature is provided by their mother: “There was a large bed of sedum in the flower garden, by the first vinery; in the summer it was alive with butterflies and I can remember Mamma once saying that sedum flowered all through the summer and while it was in flower Yeats would be at Coole” (31). This firmly tells Yeats strong affiliation with nature: almost as if nature in return needed Yeats to write about her.

Yeats is described as never seeming to leave. When he occupied a room, he would be seen leaning back in his chair while at the table with a rather protruding stomach in the girl’s eyes. On his person he wore a signet ring with what Anne thought to be a gigantic stone in it. The ring was placed on his little finger; and Anne recalls giggling like crazy, saying that the poet acted as if he expected everyone to kiss it, as if he were the Pope. Then the two girls would run off into the woods and imitate Yeats’s performance. One sister would hold out her hand displaying an imaginary ring and say: “This ring; it has been in touch with my holy halo” (32).

Anne and Nu felt that Yeats did not possess manners. In addition to leaning back in his chair at the table he would also have his chair moved to far back from the table. Marian the maid as she passed around him would repeatedly kick the back leg of his chair, “by accident on purpose,” and then apologize for not seeing his chair out like that again. Apparently this routine went on and on. And Yeats never moved his chair an inch toward the table. The sister dared each other to kick his chair when they gathered for tea, but they never had enough courage.

Anne gives the reader clues to Yeats’s personality and temperament. She writes that he did not speak much, at least in her presence. He had a sulky disposition maybe perfected for his poet persona. He was never so much in his far away thoughts, though, to miss any meals. Anne writes that her Grandma never seemed forget to fill up his cup, and he never gave her the opportunity to leave it empty. Without looking up or uttering a word of thanks was her image of him inside the house. The two girls would exchange disapproving looks: “‘did you see? No please or thank you’” (32). Anne and Nu were good it sounds like at emulating their mean mother.

When the family and Yeats had tea outdoors he seemed more communicable to everyone. But he still acted as though the distribution of tea was vastly important to his needs. Anne describes the chairs that Yeats and Grandma occupy in the outside setting. Yeats sat in a chair with “wooden arms and a high back”; while Lady Gregory sat in a green chair with the iron back that curled backwards; and the girls had wicker stools “made by the travelling basket maker” (32). This arrangement sets up the dynamics between the poet, lady patron, and children. The male is still perceived and tries to occupy the strong, high back position. The female in this case is tough (iron), but her green (nature) chair bends backwards, just like she does for Yeats. The children are on their lowly toad stools.

Yeats wrote Anne a poem, titled “For Anne Gregory” or “Yellow Hair”. At the time when he wrote it, she was not sure it was appropriate for him to have written it; and she did know how she should react to it, feeling it was “very doggerelly and not as romantic as I would have liked’ (29). But Anne asks Yeats read his poem to her and her reaction was—please read it again, to which he “beamed . . . and read it again” (29). After the second reading she was able to stumble over a wonderful and thank you before “crashed out” (30). Yeats read the poem again on a broadcast from Belfast.

Anne’s nostalgia for nature at Coole is echoed in Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” poem. Bradford argues that the poet’s frame of mind was reflective and sentimental. He had completed “Reveries over Childhood and Youth,” while working on his autobiography. During all of this he was “meditating on his youth” (48). Bradford continues: “This theme [of youth and old age] now moves into the very center of his poetry. In “The Wild Swans at Coole”, a characteristic work, “Yeats uses what is nearest to him and most familiar, a walk along Coole Water, to express a universal state of mind and emotion. As he does this he achieves a diction and a rhetoric that can rightly be called noble” (48). Throughout Anne’s stories the strength of the land is the only solid foundation they have outside of their Grandma.

Anne remembers that they enjoyed the lake splendid qualities, she and Nu preferred the woods, which was “most friendly,” (37) especially the Nut Wood. She describes the bottomless thick moss, nut bushes and trees, and walkways filled with violets and primroses. The water was not so fondly remembered because it was pumped into the house from the lake daily, bringing nature into manmade structure to cleanse its inhabitants. All types of critters used to end up in Anne and Nu’s bath water: small snails, moss, and leaves. One time a tiny animal come through that they were sure was a baby trout. Unfortunately, their Mamma once found a leech in her bath. The girls heard her yelling to Grandma about this with horror, and saying that it might have attached itself to her and taken all the blood from her.

Anne and Nu’s Mamma was an unkind woman to her children. Anne writes that their Mamma said that she “didn’t quite mind if [they] fell off [Anne’s pony Pud and Nu’s donkey Tommy] and were killed cleanly, but she wouldn’t want us to be dragged for miles . . .” (13).

When Anne and Nu had to travel for the first time on a large boat to travel to England, they were frightened and began to feel nauseated, and did not know that it was sea-sickness. Unsympathetic, their Mamma told them fiercely “You are not to be sick. No Gregory was ever sick, and you are not to be. Don’t be so common! We were frightened of Mamma when she was cross that we swallowed manfully, and we weren’t sick . . .” (22). There are numerous incidences where their Mamma is portrayed in this awful manner.

Perrault’s “The Fairies” brought up by Tatar show an example between two sisters, a good girl and bad girl. The heroine gives water to an old lady who is a fairy in disguise. The fairy tells her “You are so pretty and so polite that I am determined to bestow a gift upon you” (56) The present was that every time the good child spoke a flower would emerge from her mouth. The fairy punishes the rude, disagreeable sister by making spit out snakes and frogs because of her behavior. Anne’s mother sees her daughters as children possessing the wrong attitude and disagrees violently with how they act in public. The disturbing disciplining of child in the memories of Anne correlate with the original fairy tales.

When having to deal with their Mamma their only salvation and snippet of happiness was when they received the weekly letter from Grandma. She updated them on everything going on at Coole. In each large parcel she would include moss and small red toadstools attached to twigs that came from Nut Wood. The sisters made dishes out of the moss, and then inhaled the “lovely wet moss smell and imagined that we were back at our beloved Coole” (Gregory 22). Their Mamma was an artist and so was Yeats’s father. Each parent did not seem to be nurturing and encouraging her or his child’s imagination. If they did so it was to conform to society.

Yeats father was strict. He was his teacher early on and was most impatient with his son, one time throwing a book at him. He continued teaching young Yeats until “he had conquered my wandering mind” (Pethica 212). This included reading Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” about the Christian boy who is murdered by the Jews, a way his father instilled influential thoughts into his son’s mind. Yeats recalls his father’s words: “that all contemplative men were in a conspiracy to overrate their state of life, and that all writers were of them, excepting the great poets” (217).

The occupations on the male side of Yeats’s family are interesting. His father was an artist who could only support his family by painting portraiture, unlike his son who had the luxury of escaping to Coole. His grandfather was a churchman, and although Yeats distances himself throughout his life from Christianity that he believes took away the fairies, he is buried where his ancestor resided.

Yeats and his sibling grew up with their grandparents too. His clearest memories are of Sligo where they lived. He remembers his great-uncle William Middleton saying “‘we should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end” (Pethica 210). His relative warns Yeats not to talk about the joys of childhood like a grown-up. This attitude caused fear in the young Yeats who became consumed with thoughts of dying. He did not have reason to be afraid with a loving grandmother and others who were kind to him. He describes the house they had as very large, with a garden and dogs to play with on the grounds.

This quality was inspired by Yeats’s involvement in the Celtic revival, where the “belief in fairies was a political and cultural necessity” (Silver 141). Silver also writes that Yeats was frustrated with his inability to speak directly to the Irish fairies (Sidhe), stating that the best he could do was communicate with them in his sleep.

Some of Yeats’s greatest poems start off with a setting that will become the symbolic scenes of the piece. After that is established the narrator becomes present, ready to speak, “and when he does Yeats’s meditative exploration of the scene begins”. The result is that at the onset of these poems the scene itself and the themes it suggests have the reader’s undivided attention. This does not happen when the persona is immediately present, for then we must divide our attention between the contemplator and what is being contemplated . . . the question whether Yeats wants the point of view to be controlling, or the view itself, or both equally” (Bradford 51-2).

“. . . few other great poets of the twentieth century have commented so directly on [Ireland’s] tragic history as it was being made” (Bradford 47).

“Yeats records [in The Celtic Twilight] that in a town in the west of Ireland, ‘a dead old gentleman robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit. A wicked sea captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises.’” (Silver 137-6).

“The similarity between fairyland and the land of the dead; the recognition of lost friends by privileged temporary visitors to fairyland” (Silver 135); it is in customs and beliefs such as these “that fit in with the theory [which Yeats clung to] that fairies were once ancestral spirits” (Silver 135).

For Yeats the wild represented his Irish heritage, which he always kept close like the precious jewel in his signet ring, while Anne sees the wildness as a space that children use for their entertainment. Yeats and Anne returned to their childhood places by writing about them and creating fairy tale worlds. Anne’s story can be interpreted as real and Yeats as mystical, but they are both interpretations of childhood. Anne stories are from her adult memory of her past, like Yeats, it is clouded with myths.

Yeats grew up in the northwest town of Sligo and Anne spent the majority of her upbringing at grandmother’s house Coole Park, south of the western town of Galway. The subject of landscape of Yeats’s childhood reoccurs in his poetry. Anne recollects her most memorable adventures, which occur mainly on the grounds of Coole, in her book Me & Nu.

Yeats appears in Anne’s book. It is this connection between Anne composing the character of Yeats in her book within the space of a beloved landscape and the poet dependence on this same space like Anne for. It is within the space of Coole Park that the two authors are able to contain their remembrances of the nature of their childhoods.

He wrote her a poem that begins: "Never shall a man,/ Thrown into despair/ By those great honey-coloured/ Ramparts at your ear,/ Love you for yourself alone/ And not your yellow hair."

Yeats writing about childhood and spirits of the dead and haunting landscape continued to fascinate throughout his career. This idea of Irish history and landscape connecting the past and present is in his work and the significance of the land at Coole for Anne. Yeats investigates the theme in his collection of stories in Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, and Anne captures her childhood by recounting memories of being in the gardens at Coole, playing in the dirt and going after the local animals.

Coole’s two-story brick house was captured in pastel by Yeats. Today there is only a skeleton of the base of her plantation remaining. There were hunting area, which Anne tromps through with her gun shooting squirrels and rabbits. There was a lake with ducks and swans. Yeats’s poems about the Swans at Coole talks about the “Children of Lear” and their homelessness that is the opposite to Anne’s situation. Yeats’s poem describes the swans as an incomplete pairing, each alone, in solitude. Anne describes Yeats as a solitary figure always in his own thoughts and world; during his internal hunts he only would come up for air and acknowledge the others in Coole for a refill on tea.

He believed there was originally one religion that swept the land before Christianity burst it bubble. It is similar to the fairies that flee from the monks in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. Yeats dreamlike quality in work relates Anne’s memories of the poet. Anne and Yeats’s connection to the wild: stories of garden and images of nature and how it is perceived.

Anne's story is told from her memories so again the child figure is placed in a framed narrative that is reinterpreted by an adult. The adult Anne controls her childhood making the young Anne a body to be manipulated with in order to tell a story.