Yeats and the Two Harmonies

YEATS AND THE TWO HARMONIES IN FOUR OF HIS PLAYS, On Baile's Strand, The Hour-Glass, The Shadowy Waters, and The Kin{ts Threshold, Yeats mingled verse and prose. In so doing he was contravening current opinion as well as the judgement of a very eminent authority: I believe that in verse drama prose should be used very sparingly indeed, that we should aim at a form of verse in which everything can be said that has to be said . . . to introduce prose dialogue would only be to distract [the audience's] attention from the play itself to the medium of its expression.1 So far as I know this matter has not been discussed in any detail in relation to Yeats, except by Dr. Denis Donoghue in his chapter on Yeats in The Third Voice (1959). It may, like other questions concerning Yeats's plays, be worth looking at again, though I am of course indebted to Donoghue'S treatment of the subject. The facts, briefly, would seem to be as follows: (1) The first play in which Yeats used both prose and verse was On Baile's Strand, both in the first version (first printed in 1903) and in the second much revised version (first printed in 1906). The only characters who speak in prose are Fintain the Fool and Barach the Blind Man; they appear only at the beginning and end of the play. In the 1906 version the prose at the beginning is very much re-written. at the end hardly at all. (2) Next, conveniently but perhaps not quite accurately, comes The Hour-Glass. This was first printed-a version wholly in prose-in 1903, and it remained a prose play through many printings thereafter including those of 1904 (Plays for an Irish Theatre, Vol. II), 1908 (the Stratford upon Avon Collected Works, Vol. IV) and 1911 (Plays for an Irish Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, in one volume). But in January 1903 Yeats is writing to Lady Gregory: Then (I am afraid you will be sorry to hear) I propose to put certain parts of The Hour-Glass into verse-only the part with the Angels and the soliloquies. I have got to think this necessary to lift the 'Wise man's' part out of a slight element of platitude. And again: I do not agree with you that The Hour-Glass when I have put the verse into it would be out of tune with the rest. It repeats 1 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (1957), p. 74. 238 MODERN DRAMA December practically the Fool and the Blind Man of [On Baile's Strand] and would have something the same proportion of verse and prose.2 It is some indication of Lady Gregory's influence that it was perhaps her disapproval that at the first prevented the 'putting the verse into it'. But the inhibition lasted nearly ten years, and there were graver reasons for it. The play remained resignedly prose, and there is no further word of a poetical version until Gordon Craig and his screens came on the scene for the Abbey revival of the play in 1912. It was apparently for this performance that Yeats now at length put the verse in, about March, 1912.3 The mixed version was first printed in Craig's periodical The Mask in 1913 (followed by a private printing in 19144) and then in Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914, and London, 1916). As Yeats told Bullen in February, 1913, the new version is 'practically a different work of art'5 from the old. The changes amount to far more than the mere 'putting verse into it' that he had proposed to Lady Gregory in 1903. The Wise Man speaks mostly in verse; what little prose is left (that of the Fool, Bridget, the Children and the Pupils-these last also have verse as well) is radically rearranged and re-written. The Wise Man no longer kneels to the Fool at the Faustian end of the play (,Have pity upon me, Fool, and tell mel'S) but says to him: Be silent. May God's will prevail on the instant, Although His will be...