Joyce and Yeats: Easter 1916 and the Great War

Joyce and Yeats both registered in their work the significance of the 1916 insurrection in the context of the Great War of 1914 to 1918. As Parnellites, both writers were disappointed nationalists. The lost opportunity for Home Rule and the shame on Ireland for Parnell's downfall are signature issues in the Christmas and Easter sequences of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for these were issues in Joyce's Triestine journalism during the years of his struggle to rewrite the novel he first composed as Stephen Hero. The Parnellite sympathies of both writers are manifest in the elegies of 1891 "Mourn—And Then Onward!" by Yeats¹ and "Et Tu, Healy" by a nine-year-old Joyce.² Only two fragments of the latter poem now exist but they give evidence of the source from which the eleven stanzas of Mr. Hynes's recitation, "The Death of Parnell," and for the epiphany developed in Joyce's favorite story in Dubliners, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." In connection with a generally younger group of self-sacrificing requiem poets, the "Easter Poets" of the 1916 Rising, Yeats's own poetry matured technically and thematically.

Mirroring in 1914 Yeats's conventional trope on illumination achieved in compensation for a sacrificial "dead king"—"His memory now is a tall pillar, burning / Before us in the gloom!"—the maturing Joyce preferred unconventional idiom in praise of the day that Ireland's spirit was to rise up again. Ejaculating against both the "modern hypocrites" and the "fawning priests," and preferring the metaphor of the phoenix to that of Christ at the harrowing of souls from hell, Joyce defiantly quaffs his pint in libation to an "Uncrowned King" whose family name is invoked with "Joy," the radical stem of his own name placed in apposition:

They had their way: they laid him low.           But Erin, list, his spirit may Rise, like the Phoenix from the flames,           When breaks the dawning of the day,

The day that brings us Freedom's reign.           And on that day may Erin well Pledge in the cup she lifts to Joy           One grief—the memory of Parnell.³

And with that bell note in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," the cork flies out of Mr. Hynes's bottle of stout, marking the story's important epiphany about paralysis, or arrested development, in Irish public life. In Joyce's novels, the agency of the artist is even more pronounced as a political observer and conscientious, if somewhat objectified, player. Turmoil and conflict are primary elements of art as they are of life.

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It might have pained the young Stephen Dedalus not to "know well what politics meant" and "where the universe ended" but Joyce's opinions were well informed in the unpublished paper he decided to translate into a novel in 1904.⁴ Rejected by Dana, A Magazine of Independent Thought and viewed as an outline for the novel, Joyce's essay "A Portrait of the Artist" espoused "urbanity in warfare" (PSW 218). There, "warfare" was only a rhetorical figure of speech. "Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world, already the generous idea had emerged from a thirty years' war in Germany," Joyce said, in other words, since 1870; and, like the annunciating angel, the artist

would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come . . . the competitive order is employed against itself[;] the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.

(PSW 218)

Conceived in "Dublin 1904," A Portrait of the Artist was then christened in "Trieste 1914" and made to bear the dedication of its penultimate sentence: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (Portrait 252–53).

A difference, however, registers between two times, the imagined and real. In a dream sequence initiated by "a heavy bird flying low through the grey light" [End...