Yeats and the Death of Lady Gregory (Critical Essay‪)‬

W. B. Yeats's friendship with Augusta Gregory was the great enabling relationship of his life. Much as the heroes of Victorian novels experience a 'rescue into love', in 1896 he was rescued into a friendship which sustained him for the next thirty-six years. A good deal has been written about their collaborations on folklore research, their joint theatre work, the poems which he wrote at and about Coole Park, and the elegies he produced for her son Robert; (1) but less attention has been paid to the effect that her fatal illness and death in 1931-2 had on his life and work. In biographical terms, the loss of his oldest and closest friend, and the severance from the house which had been his second home, made him fear that his poetic inspiration had disappeared along with the world of Coole. 'Did the subconscious drama that was my imaginative life', he wondered, 'end with [Coole's] owner?' (2) The shock helped to propel him into strange paths, searching to renew his inspiration. And as regards his work, Gregory's decline and death form the necessary background, not only to the celebrated poems 'Coole Park, 1929' and 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931', but to a series of important prose works evaluating 'Anglo-Ireland'. These culminated in his last autobiographical memoir, Dramatis Personae--originally titled 'Lady Gregory'. Their relationship, as James Pethica has brilliantly demonstrated, had always been transactional--involving intellectual collaboration and emotional interdependence as well as financial loans and much hospitality. (3) As their lives progressed, the balance of exchange had reversed; with Yeats's advance to eminence and (comparative) financial security, he had been able to give succour, and a roof, to the increasingly impoverished Gregory on her visits to Dublin in the 1920s, just as she had done for him in his youth at Coole. But in her final illness, something like the old pattern reasserted itself. From the late summer of 1931, as Gregory's cancer inexorably advanced, Yeats once again made Coole rather than Dublin his home. His letters to his wife form a moving record of his old friends's decline: still reading Trollope aloud in the evenings, indomitably refusing to discuss the great pain she was evidently suffering, and evading medicines that might dull her sharp mind. (4) He was particularly conscious of an extra sadness: she was dying in a house that they both knew was now lost to her family. He had little faith that the Forestry Commission would do anything with it, and cast a very cold eye on the impatience shown by her daughter-in-law, Margaret Gough, to remove items of furniture, and even the library, to decorate her own new house in Celbridge. For the old lady's sake, he and Margaret sustained a formal truce in what he privately called 'our courteous, indirect war [that] has lasted for so many years'. (5) But his feelings about the fate of Coole dictated his pervasive preoccupations with family, continuance, and the eighteenth-century Ascendancy tradition in Irish life--all the themes that find expression in his writings of 1931-2. There was, for instance, his introduction to Joseph Hone's and Mario Rossi's study of Berkeley, which is one of Yeats's most concentrated reflections on Anglo-Irish character and mental culture--or, as he put it, '[an] Irish polemic aimed at fools & bigots at home'. (6) He simultaneously drafted a reflection on Anglo-Ireland, cast in his favourite dialogue form between himself and 'Owen Aherne', where houses and architecture loom large. (7) And above all, in late 1931 at Coole he wrote his long introduction to the published version of The Words Upon the Window Pane.