the taste of twilight (2)

Speaking of twilight, I can hardly think of another writer who has inhabited it so painfully and passionately throughout his life, aware as he was that identity - personal, cultural, linguistic, national - entails, not an elusive sense of security, but endless multiplicities, irresolutions, inner conflicts and divisions.

As he acknowledged in one of his final poems, long after the disappearance of the Celtic faery world of his early work and the shattering of his hopes for Ireland:

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul.

W. B. Yeats, 'Under Ben Bulben' [1939], in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990). p. 373.


For Yeats, the 'race' was the Anglo-Irish, and the 'soul' was that of 'ancient Ireland [that] knew it all', as well as that of the English language through which he expressed this knowledge. And has there ever been a poem which so movingly embodies the inevitable pain and, at the same time, the productivity of such inner exile and dissociation?

There are many, many more, of course. In a less poetic tone, and still in an Irish context, another unforgetful expression of the same dissociation, from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In a conversation between the young Stephen Dedalus, aspiring craftsman of the English language despite his Irish Catholic background, and his English Dean of Studies, Stephen ruminates:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 205.

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But, reverting to the 'taste of twilight', I can't resist getting back to the first Yeats and his nostalgic longings, which gave birth to all sorts of eerie twilight worlds, including this one:


Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey,
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.


W. B Yeats, 'Into the Twilight', in The Celtic Twilight [1893], Mythologies (1934; London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 141.