The Gardener and the Stable-Boy: Yeats, MacNeice, and the Problem of Orangeism

Abstract

W. B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice had much in common. Each had been ‘brought up in an Irish middle-class Protestant family’; each was profoundly affected by family roots in Connaught; both expressed violent and inconsistent responses to Irish political and religious conflicts; both lived mostly in England while preserving their very different Irish identities and accents. Like so many Irish writers adapting to a cosmopolitan world, Yeats and MacNeice found it expedient to conceal or distort certain awkward elements of their background. Being Irish in England was bad enough, without having to overcome liberal repugnance for the arrogance of Yeats’s ‘Anglo-Ireland’ or the bigotry of MacNeice’s ‘Black North’. However eloquently they disowned such stereotypes, neither writer could erase the imprint of a Protestant Irish upbringing. This article explores coded passages in their writings which reveal, when fully contextualized, the importance of Orangeism in their own families (Yeats’s Sligo relatives, MacNeice’s father). Each writer, when alluding to Orangeism, used a surrogate to avoid admitting a family connection (Yeats’s stable-boy in Sligo, MacNeice’s gardener in Carrickfergus). Drawing on unfamiliar biographical and institutional sources, the article indicates what each writer had to hide, and why he wished to hide it. Concealed Orange influences in certain poems by each writer are discussed. For Yeats, Orange ballads provided raw material for his celebration of violence and conflict in later life. For MacNeice, Orangeism took on a more benign aspect as he grew older and became reconciled with the mild puritanism of his once terrifying clergyman-father.