The Cutting of an AgateYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
History
The Cutting of an Agate
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism
Nor did he ever understand the people he lived among or the historical
events that were changing all things about him. Lord Grey de Wilton had
been recalled almost immediately, but it was his policy, brought over
ready-made in his ship, that Spenser advocated throughout all his life,
equally in his long prose book _The State of Ireland_ as in the _Faerie
Queene_, where Lord Grey was Artigall and the Iron man the soldiers and
executioners by whose hands he worked. Like an hysterical patient he
drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an
insufficient premise--there was no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth,
and all that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to civilisation, and
to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be put to death. He
made two visits to England, celebrating one of them in _Colin Clouts
come Home againe_, to publish the first three books and the second three
books of the _Faerie Queene_ respectively, and to try for some English
office or pension. By the help of Raleigh, now his neighbour at
Kilcolman, he had been promised a pension, but was kept out of it by
Lord Burleigh, who said, 'All that for a song!' From that day Lord
Burleigh became that 'rugged forehead' of the poems, whose censure of
this or that is complained of. During the last three or four years of
his life in Ireland he married a fair woman of his neighbourhood, and
about her wrote many intolerable artificial sonnets and that most
beautiful passage in the sixth book of the _Faerie Queene_, which tells
of Colin Clout piping to the Graces and to her; and he celebrated his
marriage in the most beautiful of all his poems, the _Epithalamium_. His
genius was pictorial, and these pictures of happiness were more natural
to it than any personal pride, or joy, or sorrow. His new happiness was
very brief, and just as he was rising to something of Milton's grandeur
in the fragment that has been called _Mutabilitie_, 'the wandering
companies that keep the woods,' as he called the Irish armies, drove him
to his death. Ireland, where he saw nothing but work for the Iron man,
was in the midst of the last struggle of the old Celtic order with
England, itself about to turn bottom upward, of the passion of the
Middle Ages with the craft of the Renaissance. Seven years after
Spenser's arrival in Ireland a large merchant ship had carried off from
Loch Swilly, by a very crafty device common in those days, certain
persons of importance. Red Hugh, a boy of fifteen, and the coming head
of Tirconnell, and various heads of clans had been enticed on board the
merchant ship to drink of a fine vintage, and there made prisoners. All
but Red Hugh were released, on finding substitutes among the boys of
their kindred, and the captives were hurried to Dublin and imprisoned in
the Birmingham Tower. After four years of captivity and one attempt
that failed, Red Hugh and certain of his companions escaped into the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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