Yeats and the Mythopoeia of Parnell(for the late Professor Daniel Albright)

Abstract

Parnell was a major figure in Yeats’s imaginative scheme of things. His death was a key historical event, his rejection and betrayal by his followers and countrymen a dominant trope, his character of passion masked by coldness some sort of ideal for the poet as illustrated in A Vision. Yet through the poems his shape keeps shifting. At one point in “Mourn and Then Onward!” he is the messianic leader dying within sight of the Promised Land, at another the aristocrat unappreciated by the mob (“To a Shade”); in “Parnell’s Funeral” he is the archtetypal dead king who should have been ritually sacrificed by the eating of his heart, but the Parnell of “Come Gather Round Me Parnellites” is the amorous patriot celebrated by his ageing followers in their men’s club. Finally in “Parnell” he is the prophet who piercingly saw the failure of the revolution to come. Rather than a single icon, defined within a Yeatsian scheme of things, under the poet’s hand Parnell becomes the figure that the poems need him to be.