Of Hospitality and Hosting: Tracing Colonial Haunting in W. B. Yeats

Abstract

Of Hospitality and Hosting:Tracing Colonial Haunting in W. B. Yeats Sean G. Weidman W. B. Yeats champions what now seems a rather anachronistic ideal of hosting in "Coole Park, 1929," a poem that celebrates hospitality both as a means of welcoming outsiders and as a ritual that structures a space conducive to creative freedom. As a paean to Lady Gregory and the productivity engendered through her hospitality at Coole Park, the poem details the "dance-like glory that those walls begot" as well as the "certainty upon the dreaming air" that many found there.1 Hospitality, seen through the poem, functions as a remarkably generative force in the formation of the individual and their community. But this aesthetic and social idealism of hospitality does not hold in much of Yeats's other work, where the concept is routinely complicated by an awareness that the reality of the hosting ideal is at best fading, and at worst was always an idyllic fantasy. Take, in contrast, Yeats's similarly titled poem, "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931." Both poems, notably, come from the same collection—placed consecutively, in fact, in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)—but their notions of the hospitality of Gregory and Coole Park differ sharply. "Coole Park, 1929," for example, opens with the speaker meditating quietly "upon a swallow's flight," whereas the speaker's first lines of "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" note more urgently that "under my window-ledge the waters race."2 The latter poem's final stanza signals a similar unrest by remarking that "all is changed […] / where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood" (CP, 46, 48). A tranquil space in one time and disturbed in another—for Yeats, the hospitality of Coole Park appears confused. Whether that hospitality is productive or destructive as a social mechanism differs drastically in these two poems, but that variation does not stem from momentary failures of Coole Park or lapses in the generosity of its host. No, the very natures of hospitable places often change in Yeats's work. A poem Yeats composed almost two decades earlier, for example—"The Wild Swans at Coole"—provides a fascinating combination of the two later Coole poems, wherein Yeats links "the still water, / [and] mysterious, beautiful" (25–26) swans with an apprehension that "some day / […] they [End Page 1025] [will] have flown away" (29–30). The penultimate stanza, the poem's flag-bearer of hospitable hope, suggests that Coole provides a welcome respite to an otherwise "sore" history.3 The final stanza, however, then intimates that not even the hospitality of Coole provides a space "unwearied still"; a gyre-like chaos makes its way into the otherwise tranquil swans of Coole, who "scatter wheeling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings," and "all's changed."4 In these poems and throughout his oeuvre, hospitable spaces carry importance for Yeats, but so too does his insistence that hospitable spaces may become contested, troubled, or haunted in a destructive way that curtails otherwise fruitful offerings of hospitality. When Yeats invokes the ceremonial notion of hospitality, he does so always with an eye toward the value of the practice: hearkening back to early Irish custom, the admirable man for Yeats offers everything he has, generously and unconditionally. But Yeats also addresses systems of hospitality with an apprehension that bears the marks of a complicated and troubling history of colonial oppression—if Yeats portrays hospitality as a valuable albeit archaic virtue that merits celebration, that is, then hospitality also appears always in the midst of an apprehension that hospitable hostings may go awry. Situations crop up repeatedly in Yeats's work where guests, invited or unknown, abuse a host's generosity, refuse to leave, and become an invasive force. For Yeats, though, hospitality as virtue and practice is fundamentally concerned with these contested spaces, and when he negotiates the anxieties of those spaces in his writing, he characterizes the potential dangers of hosting in terms of haunting: material or immaterial occupations of otherwise uncontested spaces. More than just recurring themes, hospitality and haunting invariably go hand-in-hand in Yeats's work, despite their absence in Yeats criticism.5 While Yeats...