This Modern Writer: Of Yeats, Ireland, Maud, and Myself by Michael Derby

William Butler Yeats is my Ireland. He is the rocky shores whose froth has yet to kiss my feet. He is the booming Gaelic voice with pint raised high, a hard cheers and the hopps baptizing me in Dionysus’s church. He is the fawn in the dense forests of Irish lore and mysticism. He is Ireland’s lost youth and her strife-battered senses. He is the purest incarnation of all I’ve fucking got — films and fictions, whiskey and dirty limericks, and National Geographic photos of the passion and the wisdom that floats, ethereal, between the blades of grass.

I’ve come upon him later in life than I’d’ve hoped, his poetry giving me histories and prophecies and explaining questions I hadn’t thought to ask. And there are many questions unasked when the best of the last four and a half years can be set to the unspecified tune of “A Drinking Song” — and though I understand the syllabic necessity for using “wine” in the first line, it would have made my memories seem more like poetry had he wrote “whiskey.” Still, only most of half a decade can be spent with drinking. Before and after and during and in the microseconds between, there is the only other thing “we shall know for truth.”

Yeats doesn’t speak to me of Ireland and bold young men and starched old men and art and pain and war. He speaks to me of love and not so that I may see his, but my own. There is a love and a lust in me for all manners of the brave and the noble but Plato can have his Truth in these matters. My truth, the truth of everything I know horrible and beautiful “comes in at the eye,” and the art is not by man’s hand or man’s tongue but by man’s rib and God’s breath.

Yeats poetry creates a multiplicity of Maud Gonne as she becomes not just herself, but Helen of Troy, the Ledean body, and other symbols of femininity and beauty.  The many beauties of Yeats poetry can be condensed to a singular muse but they resonate in me with memories of several Mauds past and dreams of Mauds future. The “truth” has come to me in fractions and has left me for another man or another woman or God or the lack of grandeur in my still budding soul, but most often for the indifference in me which follows the attainment of truth — an indifference with many fathers but none greater than fear. A fear embodied in the closing lines of “Words”: “I might have thrown poor words away/ And been content to live.” It’s contentedness that would’ve killed his verses, that would make subjects of the Irish, and make mediocrity of myself. So perhaps I choose my Mauds for their inaccessibility and curse them when they falter. And perhaps I fear Ireland, whom I call Maud as well, for the grandeur reality could steal from her.

Grandeur grandeur grandeur. It runs along the shore with a t-framed kite, grows watching its father wipe his brow in the field, then wipes its own beside him. It laughs loudly, voice lost in the crowd at the pub. It learns the rifle when the British assault its brother and kisses a fair lass for the first time before saying goodbye. It survives the war to fight another and writes a verse and keeps the parchment in its breast pocket. It dreams at night of a thick, red steak and a potato split open with butter melting atop. It dies one day of being shot in the lung. It dies another day of old age with the fire from the hearth keeping dead toes warm. And with time it is the barley, shaking in the wind.

And every Irish woman is Maud Gonne, with cheeks a rose and heart a lion. And no Irish woman can be. And every Irish man is Major Robert Gregory, “soldier, scholar, horseman, he,” who cannot be a mortal man even with his mortality proven.

All this is Yeats’s fault, resizing Ireland so it will fit in my pocket, redefining a sex so that “she” means only “Maud.” He imbues himself with the authority to put Ireland at the tips of my fingers and has the audacity to use that power. And where am I to leave my prints when fearing the smudges that could be left behind — a notebook filled with thick letters of dark pencil, and as the pages are read and pondered and turned over again the letters rub into each other, out of themselves…. There is ink in Ireland.  In the second drawer on the left side of Maud’s desk, there is ink. In spite of the turmoil and turbulence, the ever-changing political face and political climate, there is a permanence to Ireland and her children that transcends it all — there’s something born into every baby and every blade of grass which goes beyond the pettiness of wars and governments yet still shows glints of itself in the seemingly prosaic. And with a keen eye for minor refractions, Yeats recorded the grandeur grandeur grandeur.



Michael Derby is currently a graduate assistant teaching composition at Southeast Missouri State University. He is formerly the prose editor of Windfall literary magazine out of Truman State University. He also makes damn good curry chicken.