Wednesday, January 27, 2021

W.B. Yeats & Van Morrison.




I cannot think of anything new to tell you today because I haven't done anything even remotely interesting, due to this lockdown and the crappy weather. I noticed that it is the anniversary of W.B. Yeats  who died 82 years ago today on January 28th 1939, so I thought I would dust off this old story I wrote a few years ago........
When I moved to Westbury in 1987 I got to know this man called Sean who came from County Sligo. He was a real character and told me lots of interesting and funny stories. He had been in the Irish army in his early days. One night in the pub he told me that in 1948 because of being in the army he had been present at the re-burial of W.B. Yeats. I looked it up and found out that sure enough Yeats had died in France in 1939, but in 1948 he was exhumed and returned to Ireland and according to his wishes buried in Drumcliffe Churchyard in Sligo. The words that are on his headstone appear in Vans song Here Comes The Knight on the No Guru album. 'Cast a cold eye on life, on death'. Van has been influenced very much by W.B. Yeats and his work has been littered with Yeats references, so this might be a good place to look at Yeats's influence on Van. Crazy Jane On God was a Yeats poem that Van set to music and was meant to appear on the A Sense Of Wonder album but the trustees of Yeats estate refused permission. It eventually appeared on The Philosophers Stone album and is quite superb. Before The World Was Made is one of the best tracks on Too Long In Exile and is adapted from Yeats poem ‘A Woman Young And Old’ originally published in 1933.
If I make the lashes dark, And the eyes more bright, And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right, From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed, I'm looking for the face I had, Before the world was made.

Van donated this song to an album called Now And In Time to Be which I heartily recommend in which various artists such as the Waterboys,Christy Moore,Shane McGowan,The Cranberries,Richard Harris and many others recite or sing Yeats poems. In Summertime In England  Van mentions Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponding, corresponding. I have heard it suggested that Rough God Goes Riding was inspired by Yeats poem The Second Coming, but I’m not sure about that. He may have got the idea from Robin Williamson's song For Mr Thomas which Van also covered. When I first got the Avalon Sunset album the cover reminded me of Yeats poem The Wild Swans At Coole. Van’s song When The Leaves Come Falling Down made me think of Yeat's poem The Falling Of The Leaves. In Rave On John Donne there is,
Rave on let a man come out of Ireland, Rave on Mr Yeats, Rave on down through the Holy Rosey Cross, Rave on down through theosophy, and the Golden Dawn, Rave on through the writing of ‘A Vision’.

There are a lot of similarities between Van and William Butler Yeats. Both were very interested in the occult and mysticism, theosophy etc and influenced by Blake and Swedenborg.  Van has  mentioned the mystic church of Swedenborg in Notting Hill in his live concerts. The thing that really, I find interesting is the reference to the writing of 'A Vision'.
‘A Vision’ was privately published in 1925, a book-length study of various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics by Yeats who wrote these works while experimenting with automatic writing with his wife. On the 20th October 1917, three days after her twenty-fifth birthday, George Hyde Lees married the fifty-two-year-old poet. The partnership of Yeats and George Hyde Lees is one of the most creative in the literary world.  Nothing that had happened to him before was more dramatically exciting than the automatic writing of his wife. Georgie died in 1968 the year Astral Weeks was recorded. Was Georgie Hyde-Lees the inspiration for Madame George? I don’t think so because Van left school at age 15 and probably not even aware of Yeats. It was only later when he educated himself with reading that William Butler influenced his work. I think that the identity of Madame George will be an enigma forever shrouded in a mystery.

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