In one of the poems of this book, “ September 1913”, Yeats looked about him at the country, which he had served with such devotion and found nothing but dissolution. Seeing with sudden bitter clarity the littleness, the greyness, the meanness, the self-glorification, the prudish savagery and false piety gathering – as it seemed, incurably over the face of the land and her people he cried;
“romantic Irelands dead and gone
its with O’Leary in the grave”.
The volume “the green helmet” was carefully constructed. Its title was derived from the first, anonymous epigraph ; “in dreams begins responsibility”.” Allegedly from an “old play”, it echoes the assertion in the 1912 lecture “Apparitions”; “Dreams are irresponsible things and the medium is, therefore, an irresponsible person”. The second epigraph, from Confucius via pound, also referred to the reality of a dream world. But the contents of the book were relentlessly personal, and even formally autobiographical. The first poem, “the Grey Rock”, was both an attack on “the loud host” of the Griffithites in Ireland and a memorial to the Rhymers (or to what wby had decided they represented). Here too he was casting himself as the survivor of a tradition. His adaptation of different poetic modes was seen in several poems (like “the two kings”, “the three beggars”, “The hour before dawn”) combining a narrative form remininiscent of Ferguson with a pared down modern language suggesting pounds editorial pencil. Although himself, chose to dismiss “the two kings” as uselessly Tennysonian when reviewing the volume, it was carefully balanced in apposition to “the grey rock”. Obscure as the result sometimes was, a powerful personal voice expressed itself through laceratingly direct imagery. There were also a group of poems for and about Gonne (“ to a child dancing in the wind”, “a memory of youth”, “fallen majesty”, “friends)
But the collection centered on the public poems provoked by the Gallery dispute. For wby, Lane carried on the essential traditional of nobility and patronage, as parnell represented the nobility in politics; and the two were directly connected in “To a shade”, again deliberately located in September 1913. And the formal repudiation of mean lives and bourgeois values were echoed in the images of beggars and wildness. “running to paradise” expressed this with a rhythm and diction reminiscent of much simpler poems in his first collections, and “the witch” delivered the same message with radical compression;
Toil and grow rich
What’s that but to lie
With a foul witch
And after drained dry,
to be brought
to the chamber where
lies one long sought
with despair.
Responsibilities, especially taken with the green helmet poems, is a strikingly autobiographical collection full of addresses, reconciliation’s, manifestos. It is also extraordinarily rich and dense in texture ; if less coherent than the wind among the reeds , it announced a savage energy as well as phenomenal recent creativity . Moores allegation that wby,s poetic days were over could have received no more ringing contradiction. But it inevitably divided the critics. Clement Shorter in the Sphere saw it as “ a painful example of wbys decay as a poet yet Ford Maddox Hueffer grudingingly admired the harshness and modernity of this new voice. But the most perceptive commentary came from Joseph hone . Hone asserted that the collective works of 1908 had ended a chapter; the importance of that publication was not that wby had said all he had to say, but that what he had to say would now be said differently. This had been hinted in the green helmet and “Synge and the Ireland of his time”; it was proved by responsibilities. Wbys search for a public had produced not only a new political viewpoint but an “individual protesting voice”. It maybe that Synge saved mr Yeats for Ireland when he suggested that poets should use the whole of their personal life for material if again they would be read by strong men. Mr Yeats may not have found an Irish audience; but he is more than ever pre occupied with the thought of one, or he would not be writing these poems in which all his personal experience is bound up with Irish events
