Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín Page B

playwright Synge, Yeats’s uncle George Pollexfen – but since the poem is called “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, we know that these names are being mentioned only because the poem cannot bring itself to mention the real name, the name that is unsayable in the body of the poem. The poet is accustomed to the “lack of breath” of those he has named,
    But not that my dear friend’s dear son
    Our Sidney and our perfect man
    Could share in that discourtesy of death.

    In the last stanza, the poet says that he thought to comment on more of his friends, “but the thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech”. The poem will delay as long as possible coming to its point, just as Lady Gregory in January 1918 on her way to Galway to tellMargaret that Robert was dead desperately wanted to postpone the moment when it would have to be said. (“In the train,” she wrote, “I felt it was cruel to be going so quickly to break Margaret’s heart, I wished the train would go slower … It was agony knowing the journey was at an end.”) Yeats, too, wants the poem to go slower, to hold the telling. But once it’s said, then it is too sad to go on, no other dead friends can be summoned up. Thus he did not merely obey Lady Gregory’s request to put the names ofplaces like Esserkelly or Moneen into the poem; he sought to follow in his poem the shape of her grief.
    In much of Yeats’s poetry, there are two voices: one is public, it is there to persuade; the other is private and whispering , a poetry of the night. Often the same poem comes in these two guises – “September 1913” and “The Fisherman ”, for example, or “Sailing to Byzantium” and “ Byzantium ” – and now too, along with the public poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, a poem to be read aloud to a group, came its whispered counterpart, a sixteen-line poem told in the first person by Robert Gregory, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”. And this, too, after the tactlessness of “Shepherd and Goatherd”, sought to console Lady Gregory, after all she had done for her country , that Robert had died in a war not Ireland’s. The poem rid Robert of imperial will, or English patriotism. It changed the “Major” into “An Irish Airman”. It made him abstractly heroic: his “lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds”. It handed him back to Coole which the war could not touch, the house his mother had guarded for him:
    My country is Kiltartan Cross,
    My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
    No likely end could bring them loss
    Or leave them happier than before.
    The fourth poem, eventually entitled “Reprisals”, is the strangest. As the terrible beauty of the 1916 Rising made its way into guerilla war in 1919 and 1920, Lady Gregory was in Coole and Yeats either in Dublin or in England. Her journals for the period remain one of the best accounts of the daily and nightly terror unleashed by the Black and Tans, whom the British had sent to pacify Ireland. She wrote a number of articles for The Nation in London, making clear what was happening in Ireland. She did not sign the articles, but it was known among the republican leadership that she had written them. This, and her generally good relationship with the locals, meant that Coole was not endangered. She viewed the violence of the rampaging British with horror. She also viewed the poem Yeats sent her from Oxford in November 1920 with horror. He initially entitled it “To Major Robert Gregory, airman”:
    Considering that before you died
    You had brought down some nineteen planes,
    I think that you were satisfied,
    And life at last seemed worth the pains.
    â€˜I have had more happiness in one year
    Than in all the other years,’ you said;
    And battle joy may be so dear
    A memory even to the dead
    It chases common