Ophelia's Nun

Discuss, compare and illustrate the various conceptions of nationhood or other ideas of belonging reflected in the work of one Indian and one Irish twentieth-century poet.

I choose to begin this essay by stating my understanding of the above question heading. The rubric suggests that a comparison can be made, between Indian and Irish poetry, in that conceptions of nationhood, cultural identity and imagined community are, even in the works of individual poets, similarly complex, ambiguous and various. To base an essay’s argument on the idea of such comparability is not simply to repeat what Homi Bhabha (in Moore-Gilbert, 1997:125) calls the tendency (based on western ideas of “cultural relativism”), among (mainly Eurocentric) post-modern readers of post-colonial literature, to try to conflate the works of writers from different geographical/cultural locations into the dominant by divining their ‘translatability’. I regard the question heading as suggesting that the work of Irish and Indian poets - I choose to discuss examples by WB Yeats (1865- 1939) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941) – are comparable, in that their respective constructions of culture and identity are each internally various and dialogic. I shall compare Yeats and Tagore from a historicist view, in that their poetic and rhetorical constructions of their imagined communities are informed by their ambiguous (and in many ways similar) social positions in their respective “societies”. To illustrate my investigation, I shall engage with Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”(2000:12), and an excerpt from his “A general introduction to my work” (2003: Offprint 21:85), showing how these examples incorporate often conflicting conceptions of nationhood and belonging. I shall follow with a comparative analysis of ambivalent representations of these issues in Tagore’s “Recovery- 10” (1985: 121-3), and “Nationalism in India”(Offprint 22: 86-92).
Edward Said (1990: 36) proposes that the primary stage of decolonisation or reclaiming “the land” from an invading colonial power is only originally possible “through the imagination”. Subtextually, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” could be said to depict a centralized ‘I’ narrator, expressing determination to “go now” (either imaginatively or physically) to build a home (or nation?) in a pastoral-agrarian idyll of western Ireland for himself: this might seem to be a relatively committed assertion of Irish self-determination and nation building. Yet one should recall here Said’s theory, that:

At some stage in the anti-resistance phase of nationalism … many of the nationalist struggles
were led by bourgeoisies that were partly formed and to some degree produced by the
colonial power…These bourgeoisies in effect have often replaced the colonial force with a
new class-based and ultimately exploitative force; instead of liberation after decolonisation
one simply gets the old colonial structures replicated in new national terms (1990: 34-5).

In the light of Said’s remarks, and noting Yeats’s Anglo-Irish, landed/mercantile Protestant heritage (see below), the language of Yeats’s poem presents interesting (and perhaps unintended) interpretative possibilities; let us consider that Yeats’s narrator wishes to “go to Innisfree/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made/…And live alone in the bee-loud glade” (lines 1-2,4, my emphasis). One might say that there is what Pierre Macherey would call an involuntary, ideological “silence” here (1990:215-22): that the speaker wants to build an Irish nation for himself, and to his agrarian/pre-modern tastes, but there is no room for the broad-based Catholic Irish peasantry in his ideal, imagined community of one, to which he ‘belongs’: hence, these peoples simply do not exist in his poetic paradigm. Further interpretations surface accordingly, which are, perhaps, viable decodings of the poem. We could even argue, if we chose, that the Chiswick “pavements grey” (line 11) upon which the speaker (in spite of his imaginative flight to Innisfree) is actually grounded, constitute a synecdoche of the urbanity of a bourgeois-mercantile, Anglo-Irish class of inextricable associations with the imperial metropolis, who, although imagining themselves the cultural and socio-economic “heirs” of rural Ireland will always be distant from the peasant-based Catholic Irish, “self-imagined community” of western Connaught.
Yet I am disinclined merely to accept this theoretical basis alone, as a condition of discussing and illustrating my reading of the poem. The poem’s counter-urban pastoral idyll of a rural retreat anticipates Georgian poetry in its imaginative turning away from the city (cf. John Drinkwater’s poem “Of Greatham”, 1991:50-1); also, an intertextual reading of pre-colonial, pre-sectarian Irish verse shows that the ostensible theme of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” - the solitary “exile’s” imaginative reconstruction of a rural Ireland affected only by wildlife and the elements - is, to use one of Heaney’s archaeological metaphors, parallel, in the stratigraphy of poetic “tradition”, with the deep bedrock of the oldest extant examples of Irish verse (cf. 1974:63). Here, in what we might romantically call the text’s “unconscious”, Yeats’s voice is in dialogic “play” with, rather than excluded from, an Irish poetic auditory imagination sounding deeply in the Irish heart’s core, that always spoke of the problematics of dislocation from, and belonging or returning to, an envisaged “Ireland” (ibid.).
Fraser (2003: 46) quotes Declan Kilberd’s (1996) observation about Yeats that he was “estranged from the community, yet anxious to identify… with the new national sentiment.” Nowhere in Yeats’s work do I see so apparent his problematical relationship to Irish nationhood, belonging and language as in Offprint 21. Fraser (2003:56) asks his readers to consider why, in the excerpt, Yeats confesses to be so angry about being asked why he does not write in Gaelic. To try to answer this question, one needs to identify some of the subtexts and assumptions directing Yeats’s statements.
Yeats criticises Wordsworth, for championing the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture whilst ignoring the Dublin (and, interestingly, Protestant) revolutionary Robert Emmet. Emmet, Wolfe Tone and other “rebels” of the 1790s and 1800s were responding to the Penal Laws, which were instituted in by the British in Ireland in 1792, to ensure the widespread destruction of the language, law and customs (including even music) of Irish-speaking communities ([1937] 1968:34-5). So, when Yeats says that “Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue”, is he wearing the “mask” of the Irish nationalist born during British rule, denied his mother tongue by hegemonic imposition? He seems to imply so, when he compares himself to “those Indians” who were forced under colonial rule even to “learn everything, even their own Sanskrit, through the vehicle of English”. However, he does so, not only by conflating the difference between British linguistic imperialism in Ireland and India (1999: 56-62), but by wilfully ignoring the more disturbing implications of the reason why Gaelic could never be his “mother tongue”.
Contemporaneous with the Penal Laws, British-endorsed, ‘ruling’ Protestant garrisons were established all over Ireland. One of Yeats’s maternal ancestors, a “Reverend Thomas” of the Anglican Church of Ireland, was one such bastion of British rule who suppressed a nationalist rising in County Meath in 1793, and paid for his actions with his life (Foster, 1997:xx-xxi). Behind the mask of stated self-identification with the “Indian students, and foreign political refugees” who had been robbed of their “mother tongue”, Yeats the complex man was inextricable from the oppressive, imperial-linguistic legacy of an Ascendancy of extra- Celtic (largely Huguenot) origin : however, here we see what Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity called Yeats’ “strength of vagueness”([1930] 1972: 219-222), of voicing equivocally the viewpoint of the oppressed Gael; the progressive, Protestant nationalist.
The “myriad-minded” Tagore shared with Yeats an ambiguous religious and class relationship to a broad-based peasant, agrarian imagined community. The Tagore family, like the Butlers and Pollexfens of Yeats’s ancestry, had developed a large store of their wealth on (in the Tagore case, international) trade; they had also enjoyed zamindar status in East Bengal and Orissa. Yet, given that the Tagore family had been ejected from the Brahmin caste for espousing a Vedantic, monotheist idea of Hinduism that was simultaneously purist and reformist, and critical of the current sectarian, even racist, caste system, my instinct is to emphasise that it is the Tagores’ long ancestral rootedness in Bengal, which informs Rabindranath’s ability to conceptualise a traditional, Hindu community pre-dating class and caste, that the monoglot Yeats, of non-Celtic and Protestant origin could not comfortably replicate in imagining an homogeneous Ireland.
William Radice’s translation of “Recovery- 10” belies the Eurocentric tendency to read Tagore’s work as espousing a vague universalism (Foster, 1997: 470). The centralised first person narrator in Tagore’s poem is presented, at least in Radice’s translation, as the soul of an imagined Hindu rather than universal community; it is a personal, then local, cross-regional, then trans-historical “I”, radiating in a series of concentric circles from “the home” to “the world”, in accordance with the model of spiritual identity discussed by Fraser (2003:49). In the first, thirty-line stanza or movement of the poem, Tagore’s “I” “Lazily” beholds, and litanises a history of ultimately ineffectual emperors: the Pathan and Moghuls’ “conquering chariots” and “webs of dust” are demonstrated as temporary, and the “sky” – a synecdoche of an Indian cultural/historical continuum “Through the ages” (l. 16) – clears again and again, unaffected, in their passing. The metaphor of the web is referred to again, with reference to the speaker’s prophecy of the inevitable collapse of the British Empire (“I know that time will flow along their road too, / Float off somewhere the land-encircling web of their empire”(ll.26-7).
Yet it is in lines 27-30 that I detect Tagore’s most deliberate decision to hybridise his voice across castes, races, and unjust hierarchies (2003:58), and wear the “mask” of his own peasant-based audience(s): the people with whom he, as a progressive zamindar, an out-caste adherent to Upanishad philosophy yet inextricably a Hindu, seeks to be identified. If we recall that the Tagores of the trading company Carr, Tagore & Co., and the Tagores as zamindars were facilitated by the very “merchandise-bearing soldiers” the poetic speaker dismisses as irrelevant to the spiritual core of Hindu society, we could read these lines as, radically, proposing a renunciation of the very class system that had created Tagore: i.e., Since mercantilism and empire are only artificial, passing trends, then all Hindus, from the zamindar baron to the sannyasi mendicant, should reach out to their God and realise a sense of a broad, Hindu “imagined community”, like radiating circles reaching outward towards a spiritual apprehension of “the world”, irrespective of imposed hierarchical structures.
Still, I have some reservations about emphasising the representative scope of Tagore’s “hybrid” voice. For example, I am tempted to ask, Does Tagore’s poetic speaker unambiguously belong, spiritually, with “a huge concourse/ Of ordinary people/ Led along many paths and in various groups/…Bengal, Bihar, Orissa” (lines 33-5, 52)? By switching to the third person plural (“They work-/ In cities and fields”, lines 42-3), is the speaker suggesting an ideological and socio-economic remove, from his imagined rural peasantry? Although “Recovery- 10” goes someway towards acknowledging the peasant peoples of his “earth” (31), the speaker is, as his choice of pronouns implies, nevertheless a distanced observer of them. Tagore’s speaker, unlike Yeats’s in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, considers the “people”, but he does so as a trans-historical, spiritual body and not as carefully illustrated individuals. A view of Tagore’s tendency perhaps to patronise his imagined peasantry as a collective body, compares with a charge commonly levelled at Yeats when the latter produced his writings on Irish folklore and myth (ed. Welch, 1993), that he “tended to regard peasants less as individuals than as living folklore archives, repositories of ‘ballad and story, rann and song’ (Quinn, 1991:68).
In his essay “Nationalism in India”, Tagore proposes, “India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races (to be ruled by a central, state body)” (2003: 91); he asserts that India’s cultural unity is achievable not by the “great menace” of nationalism but by the spiritual force of Hinduism.
Fraser cites Bassnet and Trivedi’s “translation theory” (Fraser, 2003: 56) in arguing that the Western concept of nationalism was “not just ideologically alien, but linguistically unfamiliar” to Tagore, whose understanding of the State was as an external government, similar to the Mughals, nawabs and rajas (whose “rule”, he argued, had been irrelevant to the working lives and communities of regions across the subcontinent). There is a suggestion that Tagore was a man of his time, struggling to comprehend what was meant by a centralised, State run “nation”, when the term had not been conceptualised by a vast and internally disparate India of diverse cultures and races. However, comparison with Indian nationalist poetries in English of the early nineteenth century, such as those by the polyglottal, Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1996: 191-207), suggests that the concept of a centrally run, Indian nationalist (and some would argue, “chauvinist”) State was – albeit in complex form - part of the social being of some major (and near- aristocratic) writers prior to Tagore’s birth (1841). The Machereyan silence that speaks to me behind Tagore’s concept of nationalism is whether the writer, as a zamindar of the landed aristocracy, refuses to envisage an Indian central state, not because the concept does not translate ideologically or linguistically but because it represents for him the logical but unthinkable consequence of his Vedantic beliefs (a consequence that previous poets were arguably more prepared to address); the redistribution of his mercantile and landed riches to the broad-based, “vast” peasantry.

I don't think I can identify with Yeats in London, but I can identify with Kavanagh in Dublin.

Originally posted by PastaNazi
what's your favorite yeats piece?

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The unkinged King's dropped looking glass, mid-air
Glimpses Bolingbroke before it shatters,
Reflecting that usurpers will find care,
Care being cruel, when the tongue that flatters
Sweetest in the court spits at his rule.
Glass shards. Two kings. The motley of a fool.

Dat cass

she like

{{{{{{{{riverglimmerdancin seen thru cherry petals an wild honeysuckle}}}}}}}}}}


she like
quickquickquinkedy
quinkedywordflash
happyspringiness-imus
savoured in the fragrance
of good oxlip honey

and she the feelin' that come up through the toes
sayin' yass yass through the dancin' sass of a leggedyjigg
{{{{{{{astralised pogueness!}}}}}}}

Dat cass
she dyaogirl's best friend

Dat cass
she our honeybee
she the queen of squiggley tomato fields of heaven

and we love her

"The finest dinner I ever had
was in a boarding house in South East London."

"What did you have to eat then, Dad?"

"Cats' pricks, shite, boiled leather, nails ... and... and... onions."

A full city moon,
and the stars, unborn babies,
find tonight's lovers.

My Dad Says

"They'll cut yer bleedin' balls off if you keep
Writin' about Bu$h like that, you know.
They'll climb the drainpipe an' when you're asleep
They'll get up in your room, then tippytoe
they'll pull the sheets back, an' they'll cut yer tool
clean off. I'm tellin 'ya. So shut yer gob.
One day you'll want some dosh an' I KNOW! Who'll
Be givin' yer the chance of some nice job
When ye've been callin' their own president a chimp?
He is a chimp. A fughin' a$$. But STILL
Unless you DO like walkin' with a limp
an' don't want children, ye're doin' well
To get it chopped. So watch yer gob an' write
about the spring, an' cut the protest shite."

Another Bloody Sunday

Another Bloody Sunday sees
new orphans and new widows.
The day that Najaf disagrees
with forces in the shadows
of Pentagon bureaucracy,
who close newspapers down
(which call for more democracy
in their Iraqi town
against the threat of empire),
the ordered army push,
Commanded by 'phone wire
by pretzel-eating Bush.
Both sides leave dead the young and strong
Who fought for freedom's ring.
Both sides now see their causes wrong
and blood on everything.
Think about Najaf, now, George,
Next time you're at a dinner,
Before you get that well-known urge
To gloat, all-owning-winner:
Those people whom you said to free
because God loves to save
are grieving for their dead today
beside a new mass grave.

Sleep is broken
Houses are looted
Forms are filled
Trains are weighted
Camps are built
Stars forge flesh
Heads get shaved

Ovens burn
Bodies pile

Sleep is broken
Houses are looted
Forms are filled
Planes are weighted
Camps are built
Love George Bush
The East is saved

Bridges burn
Bodies pile