Intimations of Immortality

It has often been observed that At the Hawk's Well (1917) marks a stylistic turning point in William Butler Yeats's career. But the relationship between the style and the meaning of the play has been largely ignored, perhaps because such influential critics as Richard Ellmann have assumed that the meaning of the play is expressed explicitly in the lines with which the chorus ends the play in the original prose draft: Accursed the life of man-between passion and emptiness what he longs for never comes. All his days are a preparation for what never comes.' The recurrence of this thought in Yeats's other writing supports such an assumption. Yeats had earlier expressed this same thought in his unpublished Diary (1909) and again in his Autobiography (1914).2 Four years after At the Hawk's Well, it appeared again in the original sketch for Among School Children: 'Topic for poem. School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens.'3

Art · Immortality · Literature · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy