Yeats meets the digital age, full of passionate intensitySo here, under airtight, light-shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats’ infatuation across five decades, the muse for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage. The notebook served as their metaphysical marital bed. Yeats used it to keep track of their shared fixation with the occult and each other. One morning in July 1908, Gonne wrote from Paris to report that she had been seized by a vision: “At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.” Yeats taped the letter into the notebook. Now, a century later, that book is on display at the National Library of Ireland. Every syllable—every comma-deprived sentence—is legible. The entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon any entry. The notebook is one of thousands of elements in a dazzling exhibition, “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats”. With audiotapes, short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride into our lives. And thanks to various loans, paintings by Yeats (he was briefly an art student) and by his father John Butler Yeats and brother Jack B. Yeats, are put to excellent use.Also, you can listen to those immortal verses. Yeats once said, “Write for the ear, I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience.” It’s Yeats reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree that comes as a revelation, “rather beelike, like a bee in a glade,” said one visitor.In the four films on show, Yeats (1865-1939) is presented as public man, poet, lover and occultist, a figure of towering achievement, eccentricities and pretensions. Visitors see a manuscript of Sailing to Byzantium. A digital tutorial shows how he kneaded the words and found a streak of lightning to open the poem: “That is no country for old men.” And there is eloquence too in the older media, in the static dignity of oil paintings, or even in an understated line or two on a display card. At the centre is Maud Gonne, whom Yeats met in 1889, when, as he wrote, “the troubling of my life began”. Unknown to Yeats, Gonne had an affair with a French journalist and secretly gave birth to a boy, who died at the age of two; she returned with her lover to the child’s tomb to conceive again, believing that reincarnation would bring back the lost son. Gonne kissed Yeats on the lips for the first time in 1899, then immediately confessed the truth about the affair. Their friendship survived her regular refusals to marry him, but he was devastated after she took another nationalist, Major John MacBride, for her husband. Yeats married Georgina Hyde Lees in 1917; she was 25 and he was 52. They had two children, and he seemed to tame his Maud obsession. He charged ahead with a dizzying series of affairs, and on his death in January 1939, both his wife and his last lover stood vigil at his bed.Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote A Bronze Head about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter”. From the digital pages, one learns from Yeats’ July 26, 1908 entry that he relished the astral meeting that Gonne would chronicle so ecstatically. “Noticed that for the first time for weeks,” he wrote, “physical desire was awakened.” “Material union is but a pale shadow,” she wrote back repressively, “Write to me quickly & tell me if you know anything of this.” Yeats knew it well.-JIM DWYER (NYT)
