Responsibilities, and other poems

First Child

Foolish people used to say that there was, but you have taught us better.

Wise Man

Go to your mother, go – yet do not go.What can she say? If I am dumb you are lost;And yet, because the sands are running out,I have but a moment to show it all in. Children,The sap would die out of the blades of grassHad they a doubt. They understand it all,Being the fingers of God's certainty,Yet can but make their sign into the air;But could they find their tongues they'd show it all;But what am I to say that am but one,When they are millions and they will not speak —[Children have run out.But they are gone; what made them run away?[The Fool comes in with a dandelion.Look at me, tell me if my face is changed,Is there a notch of the fiend's nail upon itAlready? Is it terrible to sight?Because the moment's near.[Going to glass.I dare not look,I dare not know the moment when they come.No, no, I dare not. (Covers glass.)Will there be a footfall,Or will there be a sort of rending sound,Or else a cracking, as though an iron clawHad gripped the threshold stone?[Fool has begun to blow the dandelion.What are you doing?

Fool

Wait a minute – four – five – six —

Wise Man

What are you doing that for?

Fool

I am blowing the dandelion to find out what hour it is.

Wise Man

You have heard everything, and that is whyYou'd find what hour it is – you'd find that out,That you may look upon a fleet of devilsDragging my soul away. You shall not stop,I will have no one here when they come in,I will have no one sitting there – no one —And yet – and yet – there is something strange about you.I half remember something. What is it?Do you believe in God and in the soul?

Fool

So you ask me now. I thought when you were asking your pupils, 'Will he ask Teigue the Fool? Yes, he will, he will; no, he will not – yes, he will.' But Teigue will say nothing. Teigue will say nothing.

Wise Man

Tell me quickly.

Fool

I said, 'Teigue knows everything, not even the green-eyed cats and the hares that milk the cows have Teigue's wisdom'; but Teigue will not speak, he says nothing.

Wise Man

Speak, speak, for underneath the cover thereThe sand is running from the upper glass,And when the last grain's through, I shall be lost.

Fool

I will not speak. I will not tell you what is in my mind. I will not tell you what is in my bag. You might steal away my thoughts. I met a bodach on the road yesterday, and he said, 'Teigue, tell me how many pennies are in your bag; I will wager three pennies that there are not twenty pennies in your bag; let me put in my hand and count them.' But I gripped the bag the tighter, and when I go to sleep at night I hide the bag where nobody knows.

Wise Man

There's but one pinch of sand, and I am lostIf you are not he I seek.

Fool

O, what a lot the Fool knows, but he says nothing.

Wise Man

Yes, I remember now. You spoke of angels.You said but now that you had seen an angel.You are the one I seek, and I am saved.

Fool

Oh no. How could poor Teigue see angels? Oh, Teigue tells one tale here, another there, and everybody gives him pennies. If Teigue had not his tales he would starve.

[He breaks away and goes out.

Wise Man

The last hope is gone,And now that it's too late I see it all,We perish into God and sink awayInto reality – the rest's a dream.[The Fool comes back.

Fool

There was one there – there by the threshold stone, waiting there; and he said, 'Go in, Teigue, and tell him everything that he asks you. He will give you a penny if you tell him.'

Wise Man

I know enough, that know God's will prevails.

Fool

Waiting till the moment had come – That is what the one out there was saying, but I might tell you what you asked. That is what he was saying.

Wise Man

Be silent. May God's will prevail on the instant,Although His will be my eternal pain.I have no question:It is enough, I know what fixed the stationOf star and cloud.And knowing all, I cryThat what so God has willedOn the instant be fulfilled,Though that be my damnation.The stream of the world has changed its course,And with the stream my thoughts have runInto some cloudy thunderous springThat is its mountain source —Aye, to some frenzy of the mind,For all that we have done's undone,Our speculation but as the wind.[He dies.

Fool

Wise man – Wise man, wake up and I will tell you everything for a penny. It is I, poor Teigue the Fool. Why don't you wake up, and say, 'There is a penny for you, Teigue'? No, no, you will say nothing. You and I, we are the two fools, we know everything, but we will not speak.

[Angel enters holding a casket.

O, look what has come from his mouth! O, look what has come from his mouth – the white butterfly! He is dead, and I have taken his soul in my hands; but I know why you open the lid of that golden box. I must give it to you. There then, (he puts butterfly in casket) he has gone through his pains, and you will open the lid in the Garden of Paradise. (He closes curtain and remains outside it.) He is gone, he is gone, he is gone, but come in, everybody in the world, and look at me.

'I hear the wind a blowI hear the grass a grow,And all that I know, I know.'But I will not speak, I will run away.[He goes out.

NOTES

Prefatory Poem

'Free of the ten and four' is an error I cannot now correct, without more rewriting than I have a mind for. Some merchant in Villon, I forget the reference, was 'free of the ten and four.' Irish merchants exempted from certain duties by the Irish Parliament were, unless memory deceives me again for I am writing away from books, 'free of the eight and six.'

Poems beginning with that 'To a Wealthy Man' and ending with that 'To a Shade'

During the thirty years or so during which I have been reading Irish newspapers, three public controversies have stirred my imagination. The first was the Parnell controversy. There were reasons to justify a man's joining either party, but there were none to justify, on one side or on the other, lying accusations forgetful of past service, a frenzy of detraction. And another was the dispute over 'The Playboy.' There were reasons for opposing as for supporting that violent, laughing thing, but none for the lies, for the unscrupulous rhetoric spread against it in Ireland, and from Ireland to America. The third prepared for the Corporation's refusal of a building for Sir Hugh Lane's famous collection of pictures.

One could respect the argument that Dublin, with much poverty and many slums, could not afford the £22,000 the building was to cost the city, but not the minds that used it. One frenzied man compared the pictures to Troy horse which 'destroyed a city,' and innumerable correspondents described Sir Hugh Lane and those who had subscribed many thousands to give Dublin paintings by Corot, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir, as 'self-seekers,' 'self-advertisers,' 'picture-dealers,' 'log-rolling cranks and faddists,' and one clerical paper told 'picture-dealer Lane' to take himself and his pictures out of that. A member of the Corporation said there were Irish artists who could paint as good if they had a mind to, and another described a half-hour in the temporary gallery in Harcourt Street as the most dismal of his life. Some one else asked instead of these eccentric pictures to be given pictures 'like those beautiful productions displayed in the windows of our city picture shops.' Another thought that we would all be more patriotic if we devoted our energy to fighting the Insurance Act. Another would not hang them in his kitchen, while yet another described the vogue of French impressionist painting as having gone to such a length among 'log-rolling enthusiasts' that they even admired 'works that were rejected from the Salon forty years ago by the finest critics in the world.'

The first serious opposition began in the Irish Catholic, the chief Dublin clerical paper, and Mr. William Murphy, the organiser of the recent lock-out and Mr. Healy's financial supporter in his attack upon Parnell, a man of great influence, brought to its support a few days later his newspapers The Evening Herald and The Irish Independent, the most popular of Irish daily papers. He replied to my poem 'To a Wealthy Man' (I was thinking of a very different wealthy man) from what he described as 'Paudeen's point of view,' and 'Paudeen's point of view' it was. The enthusiasm for 'Sir Hugh Lane's Corots' – one paper spelled the name repeatedly 'Crot' – being but 'an exotic fashion,' waited 'some satirist like Gilbert' who 'killed the æsthetic craze,' and as for the rest 'there were no greater humbugs in the world than art critics and so-called experts.' As the first avowed reason for opposition, the necessities of the poor got but a few lines, not so many certainly as the objection of various persons to supply Sir Hugh Lane with 'a monument at the city's expense,' and as the gallery was supported by Mr. James Larkin, the chief Labour leader, and important slum workers, I assume that the purpose of the opposition was not exclusively charitable.

These controversies, political, literary, and artistic, have showed that neither religion nor politics can of itself create minds with enough receptivity to become wise, or just and generous enough to make a nation. Other cities have been as stupid – Samuel Butler laughs at shocked Montreal for hiding the Discobolus in a cellar – but Dublin is the capital of a nation, and an ancient race has nowhere else to look for an education. Goethe in Wilhelm Meister describes a saintly and naturally gracious woman, who getting into a quarrel over some trumpery detail of religious observance, grows – she and all her little religious community – angry and vindictive. In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being. Religious Ireland – and the pious Protestants of my childhood were signal examples – thinks of divine things as a round of duties separated from life and not as an element that may be discovered in all circumstance and emotion, while political Ireland sees the good citizen but as a man who holds to certain opinions and not as a man of good will. Against all this we have but a few educated men and the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor. Both were stronger forty years ago, before the rise of our new middle class which showed as its first public event, during the nine years of the Parnellite split, how base at moments of excitement are minds without culture. 1914.

'Romantic Ireland's dead and gone' sounds old-fashioned now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one can say of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism. 'They weighed so lightly what they gave,' and gave too in some cases without hope of success. July 1916.

The Dolls

The fable for this poem came into my head while I was giving some lectures in Dublin. I had noticed once again how all thought among us is frozen into 'something other than human life.' After I had made the poem, I looked up one day into the blue of the sky, and suddenly imagined, as if lost in the blue of the sky, stiff figures in procession. I remembered that they were the habitual image suggested by blue sky, and looking for a second fable called them 'The Magi', complimentary forms to those enraged dolls.

The Hour-Glass

A friend suggested to me the subject of this play, an Irish folk-tale from Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends. I have for years struggled with something which is charming in the naive legend but a platitude on the stage. I did not discover till a year ago that if the wise man humbled himself to the fool and received salvation as his reward, so much more powerful are pictures than words, no explanatory dialogue could set the matter right. I was faintly pleased when I converted a music-hall singer and kept him going to Mass for six weeks, so little responsibility does one feel for those to whom one has never been introduced; but I was always ashamed when I saw any friend of my own in the theatre. Now I have made my philosopher accept God's will, whatever it is, and find his courage again, and helped by the elaboration of verse, have so changed the fable that it is not false to my own thoughts of the world.