"Haunted to the Edge of Trance": Performance and Orality in the Early Poems of W. B. Yeats

Performance figures prominently in much of W. B. Yeats's work in which music, dance, and especially the spoken word achieve powerful, almost magical status. Yeats's "Fiddler of Dooney," for example, is admitted to heaven ahead of his priest brother and cousin solely because he is a musician. Many plays—At the Hawk's Well (1916), The Cat and the Moon (1924), or King of the Great Clock Tower (1934)—end with ritualistic music or dance. In Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), when the Old Woman sings honoring the "dead that shall die tomorrow," Michael Gillane slips into a trance and follows her out the door to offer his life for Ireland.¹ In prose, Yeats wrote extensively on the nature and effects of performance. In "By the Roadside," written in 1901 and published in a revised edition of The Celtic Twilight, he recounts a performance of traditional song and dance in western Ireland.

Last night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to some Irish songs. . . . Somebody sang Sa Muirnín Díles, and then somebody else Jimmy Mo Mílestór. . . . Then some of the men stood up and began to dance, while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then somebody sang Eiblín a Rúin. . . . The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four rivers, and followed it under the wall of paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge and of life.²

As the singing and dancing increase and become seemingly spontaneous, the sound of the performance has a hypnotic effect on Yeats. But significantly, it was not the performers nor the stories they told that moved him so much as it was hearing the sound of the words. Much like Michael in Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats describes an almost trance-like state that arose from the sound of spoken language. It should come as no surprise, then, that oral performance was an essential quality in his own verse. Yeats strove to create a rich canon of oral verse, which he called "The Music of Speech."³

Yeats—somewhat at odds with received critical opinion—repeatedly positioned himself as a creator of oral, rather than written verse. We might, therefore, set him in a tradition not usually considered his: that of a writer who uses and even manipulates language largely for its potential as sound. In an essay published in 1901, he claimed to speak his verses in "a kind of chant when making them."⁴ In 1937, two years before his death, he wrote in "An Introduction for My Plays," that "I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung. . . . I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for ear alone" (EI 529). On accepting the Nobel Prize in 1924, Yeats stated that "Perhaps the English committees would never have sent you my name if I had written no plays, no dramatic criticism, if my lyric poetry had not a quality of speech practiced upon the stage."⁵ Yeats suggests here that he would not have received the committee's attention had he not written poetry to be spoken aloud in performance. Clearly, poets write with an ear sensitive to the sound of language, but this aspect of Yeats's work, particularly in his early...